The Conquest: The Story of a Negro PioneerMicheaux, Oscar
General
The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer
Micheaux, Oscar
African American pioneers -- Fiction; Autobiographical fiction; South Dakota -- Fiction; Western stories
Before the hotel building had fairly left the town, other traction
engines were brought to the town. The snow was a great hindrance and to
get coal hauled from Calias cost seventy-five cents a hundred. Labor and
board was high, and in fact all prices for everything were very high. It
was in the middle of one of the cold winters of the plains, but money
had been made in Amro and was offered freely in payment for moving to
the new town. It was bitter cold and the snow was light and drifting,
the ground frozen under the snow two feet deep, but the frozen ground
would hold up the buildings better than it would when the warm weather
came and started a thaw. The soil being underlaid with sand it would be
impossible to move buildings over it, if rain should come, as it would
be likely to do in the spring, and with the melted snow to hinder, it
would then be very difficult to move the buildings. It was small wonder
that they were anxious to get away from the disrupted town at this time,
and the road between Amro and Victor became a much used thoroughfare.
The traction engines pounding from early morning until late at night
filled the air with a noise as of railroad yards, while the happy faces
of the owners of the buildings arriving in Victor, and the anxious ones
waiting to be moved, gave material for interesting study of human
nature.
George Roane had built a new barn in Victor and was much pleased over
having sold the old one in Amro before the town went to pieces, thereby
saving the expense of removal and getting a refund of fifty per cent of
the purchase price of the lots he purchased in Victor. Many buildings
continued to arrive from Amro, and new ones being erected did credit to
the name of the new town by growing faster than any of the towns on the
reservation, including Calias or Megory.
CHAPTER XXXIV
EAST OF STATE STREET
I had in due time heard from Orlean saying she and Mrs. Ewis had arrived
safely home. She wrote: "When I came into the house mama grabbed me and
held me for a long time as though she was afraid I was not real. She had
been so worried while I was away and was so glad I had returned before
father came." They had received a telegram from her father saying that
he had again been appointed presiding elder of the Cairo district and
would be home within a few days.
I judged from what Mrs. Ewis had told me that the Reverend was not much
of a business man and a hard one to make understand a business
proposition or to reason with. He had only two children, and Orlean, as
Mrs. Ewis informed me, was his favorite. She had always been an obedient
girl, was graduated from the Chicago high school and spent two years at
a colored boarding school in Ohio that was kept up by the African M.E.
Church, had taught two years, but had not secured a school that year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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