Martha Garrison lives in a typical suburban ranch-style home -- with trees and a lawn -- in the Columbia village of Wilde Lake; it is a sharp contrast from the little house on the prairie in South Dakota where she was born.
"Desolate. Spare. Treeless." That's how Mrs. Garrison, in "Martha, Child of the Prairie, 1917-1934," a book she published herself, described the homestead that bordered the Badlands of South Dakota where she lived as a child.
The 77-year-old mother of five wanted her eight grandchildren, ages 3 to 26, to know about another way of life -- before televisions and videocassette recorders -- when times weren't always "smooth and silky."
"I wanted them to know there was another way that people grew up," said Mrs. Garrison. "I think today's kids may have missed out on their resourcefulness."
The writer is the second of four children, three of whom were born in the four-room house that sat on 480 acres in Pennington County.
After collecting memories from her mother's journal and from her own diaries -- begun at age 11 -- and a 3-inch-thick scrapbook containing such memorabilia as Eskimo Pie wrappers and pieces of gingham dresses, Mrs. Garrison began to write her autobiography in 1983. At the time, she was taking a creative writing class in Laurel.
"Since I had to convert my writing into print, I wanted it to look worthy," said Mrs. Garrison who considers writing a hobby and did not try to sell her manuscript.
Parents were homesteaders
The book is dedicated to Mrs. Garrison's parents -- Elbert L. Lee and E. Pearl Keefer -- homesteaders who left Michigan for a new life in South Dakota.
"My father was the first-born, and I always wanted to know more about why he went on this wild expedition," Mrs. Garrison said.
Her parents were studying to be teachers when they met in 1900 at a teachers institute in Michigan. In 1907, they each acquired a parcel of land in South Dakota, paying $1.25 an acre. They married the next year and combined the properties. By the time Mrs. Garrison was born, her parents were raising several flocks of sheep.
Mrs. Garrison recalls that her mother saved old sheets and percale dresses, which were later cut into strips and woven into rag rugs.
"We were resourceful," she said. "For play, I rode a stick horse, and I had a rag doll of stuffed muslin that was my constant companion."
Other playtime activities included romps beneath the tentlike sheets that were frequently hanging on the clothesline, summer splashes in washtub water warmed by the sun, and rides in the coaster wagon in which the siblings "hauled each other around."
Often, their play was really work. They picked berries, gathered eggs from the chicken coop and cut up chickens. "Old laying hens were killed for eating, and at a very young age, I was capable of cutting them up; my mother thought that perhaps someday I would be a good doctor," said Mrs. Garrison.
The lessons she learned as a child have stayed with her as an adult.
" 'Waste not; want not.' 'Take care of the pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves.' I'm full of that stuff," Mrs. Garrison said.
A frugal life
Frugality was "part of the culture." She recalled Saturday night baths in a 30-inch-diameter galvanized steel washtub. Starting with the youngest member of the family, each person bathed in turn in the same water, occasionally replenishing it from the heated reservoir on the stove. The same tub was used on Mondays to launder clothes.
Mrs. Garrison's father cobbled his family's well-worn shoes. From a mail order catalog, he purchased large pieces of leather that were used to replace the old soles.
With no plumbing, an outdoor privy was a necessity. Mrs. Garrison recalls a "claustrophobic" wooden structure that was a habitat for spiders and bees.
When the writer was 6 1/2 years old, her older sister, Margaret, was in her last year of grade school. "My father wanted her to go to high school, but the closest one was located nine miles away, too far for her to ride on a horse," Mrs. Garrison said.
Since education was a high priority (Mrs. Garrison has a master's degree in home economics), her parents decided to move to New Underwood 60 miles away. Her father got a job teaching grades five through eight, and Margaret was able to attend high school there.
The ranch was rented to neighbors, and their sheep were moved to a ranch in the Badlands. Her father never returned to farming.
Mrs. Garrison's mother described the trek in her journal: "People never forgot the parade we formed when we moved to New Underwood. Lee [her husband] drove the wagon with the hayrack full of furniture. I followed with the heavy buggy, and Margaret came last with the single buggy.
"When we got nearly to New Underwood, we camped for the night and slept outdoors on the prairie. All we had to do was put our bedsprings on the ground and make up the beds. Fortunately, it was a clear night. We could scarcely have made such a trip in stormy weather. Cross- country roads were mostly on the order of gumbo in places."
When she looks back today, Mrs. Garrison said, she finds it hard to believe that she lived such a simple life.
"I've been around the world and traveled to Alaska three times; it just doesn't seem possible," she said.
Copies of the book are available at county libraries and at the Cover to Cover bookstore in Owen Brown.