Pick up any community history at random and you'll usually find the same kind of stories - no matter what town. The stories tell of a hard life with few luxuries. Take these for example: "There was no indoor plumbing in those days so behind every home was a privy or biffy and were most inconvenient and uncomfortable on cold wintry days when everyone made a run for it and never lingered any longer than was necessary" ... "This house had two rooms, one was to live in for the family and the other was for the ox team and the cow" ... "The ocean voyage took 16 days on very rough seas" ... "Peter used a walking plow and plowed strips of sod which were so rooted that they made good building blocks" ... "The first lights were rags burned in a dish of tallow which soon gave way to tallow candles and then to kerosene lamps" ...
"Because John didn't have a horse, he walked 12 miles to town to get groceries. When he got there he bought a wheelbarrow, loaded a 100 lb. sack of flour in it along with some sugar, coffee and maybe a few other items and proceeded to walk back pushing the wheelbarrow all the twelve miles back home" ... "They had some big prairie fires in those days with large open stretches of prairie and no graded roads to where they would stop" ... "I cut Charles' hair one night as he wanted to go to a dance, and he looked so wooly" ... "In the spring of 1908 he bought a team of oxen and on Sundays they would hitch them to the wagon and drive over to preacher Johnsons to church" ...
"The horses were driven around in a circle moving the gears that turned the shaft that run the threshing machine" ... "One fall a prairie fire came through and burned up all of Dad's hay stacks. He had to go some where else and put up some more hay so he could winter his livestock" ... "They lived in a sod house and when it rained hard it also rained inside. So to keep flour dry as there were no cupboards yet, they set it in the doorway between a room where the rain didn't drip down so much and sat on it" ... "To them it seemed the wind would never stop blowing. The only change was that some days it blew harder"
Each of the above quotations came from a different family. Tough living!
