Homestead On The Range

In the summer of 1928, at the age of 18, Pearl Rumble boarded a train in Iowa to spend the summer with her sister and niece on their Wyoming homestead. This is her story."As they approached the hills, Pearl noticed how the landscape began to change. The trees and bushes on the hills that looked tiny from a distance slowly grew larger. The rounded hills looked remarkably alike. They were called hogbacks. Some imaginative person had noticed that they resembled a row of gigantic hogs lying head to tail. The red ridges along the summits of the hogbacks, where erosion had washed away the soil, now could be seen as composed of jumbles of broken boulders."They reached the hills and had to follow a tortuous route through a canyon between two hogbacks. Red rocks with pine trees and bushes growing in their fissures were on both sides of them. When they got beyond what appeared from the plain to be a single row of rounded hills, there were hills and more hills, meadows and more meadows."