What they found when they got here then—and I don’t believe Ada ever got over the shock of it—was a flat, treeless, dry place that had once belonged to Indians.
It was a hell of a big piece of sandy country, with a horizon that in every direction must have seemed then— to someone who didn’t know how to look at this country and before Henry Ford and paved highways diminished it just a little—to reach forever away under a sky in summer that didn’t give much of a good goddamn whether or not the bags of corn seed Roy was going to plant in some of that sand ever amounted to a piddling thing, and a sky in winter that, even if it was as blue as picture books said it should be and as high and bright as anybody could hope for, still didn’t care whether or not the frame house Roy was going to build ever managed to keep the snow from blowing in on Ada’s sewing machine. There just wasn’t a thing in the world concerned enough to care whether Roy’s corn did anything more than shrivel, and there wasn’t a thing tall enough or wide enough anywhere between Canada and Mexico to stop the snow from blowing.
No, Ada never got over the shock of this country. There was too much of it, and none of it looked like Iowa.
But Ada wouldn’t have left Iowa at all if this had still been Indian country. She wasn’t the kind of woman to dare that much. Somehow she would have blocked Roy’s homestead plans, and she would either have found a way to endure Roy’s cold feet or she would have gone home to her mother, like I’ve already suggested. But whatever, she would have stayed in Iowa, which was established country by that time, and feeling at home she would have gone on attending church circles and making little forays to town to buy thread for doilies and gimcracks for the house, and if that had happened, if she had stayed in Iowa, that dark lost look, which pictures of her show, might never have taken root in her eyes. But the Indians were gone. She didn’t have that ready excuse nor good reason not to come. She had to follow her husband, if what he proposed to do seemed even remotely reasonable, and after all, by the beginning of the last decade of the last century, this country was already starting to fill up with homesteaders; there wasn’t much homestead land left. So Ada came.
But Roy now, I suppose Roy would have come anyway, even if Indians were still here. He was about enough of a fox terrier to trot into a territory that belonged to somebody else, and once he got there, raise his hind leg to it, claim it for his own, without thinking twice about prior claims or possible consequences. But Roy never got the chance to prove that either. Colorado had already been a state for twenty years by the time he got here; the Indians had been gone for at least that long; and the little piece of land he claimed was signed over to him in a local government office.