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readallthenewberys2017-08-31 09:36 am
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2017-08-31 09:36 am
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Newbery Honor: New Land (Sarah Lindsay Schmidt)
I have no idea what this is about, only that it's public domain and available here, which saves me having to wait on interlibrary loan for it. ^_^
* Endpapers show a threshing machine, so probably a frontier story.
* Frontispiece shows a man and woman, captioned "The twins stood in the wide, silent beauty of the half-desert night"; the woman is wearing an aggressively modish 1930s dress, so presumably a contemporary story.
* Dedicated to a "teacher of vocational agriculture", so it's About Farming. This was only about twenty years after the Cooperative Extension Service was established, before family farms practically disappeared, when extension agents teaching the best ways to farm showed up as heroic figures in a lot of rural-set YA.
* "The Rattleshake, the Morgans' Model T Ford, jogged on and on..." -- oh my god. This is the first story we've had since 1922 that's actually set in contemporary USia, isn't it? I'm a bit gobsmacked. :-)
* Our characters are "Dad", seventeen-year-old twins Charley and Sayre (possibly short for Sarah?), and baby Hitty. They're traveling across arid Wyoming to a place where they're going to settle. We see some irrigation ditches around alfalfa fields, and Dad makes a remark about how this whole land will bloom "when Uncle Sam brings water to it". We're in the midst of the Depression, of course, and government-sponsored improvement projects are creating jobs all over the west, hiring unemployed men to build dams and so forth.
* I haven't been to Wyoming, except once when I was ten, which I don't really remember, but the landscape descriptions sound accurate for the Dust-Bowl-era Great Plains -- flat dry gray land, little tarpaper shacks, dry dusty wind, green fields only where the water is.
* We travel through the small town of Upham, which Dad informs us is the "[b]iggest town on the whole Pawaukee Irrigation Project. Nearly a thousand people." I don't find anything west of the Mississippi on Google for "Pawaukee" -- there was a Palwaukee Airport in Chicago (now the Chicago Executive Airport), and there's a town of Pewaukee in Wisconsin, but that's it. Nor does Upham, Wyoming, appear to be a real town. Just checking -- you never know how much fiction versus fact you're going to get in an old Newbery. ^_^
* The town has cottonwood trees planted along its main street, which gives me a great deal of hope that this will be more accurate than The Jumping-Off Place. No castor bean plants! XD
* Dad asks directions from a fellow standing outside a store, who turns out to be one Franklin Hoskins. According to Dad, Sam Parsons (whose claim we're going to take over) described Mr Hoskins as "the community's most prominent citizen, the best and most generous friend the farmers on this part of the Pawaukee Irrigation Project have". Sayre, our POV character so far, doesn't like the way Mr Hoskins looked at Dad "[a]lmost as if he owned him"; I assume this will turn out to be Character Insight. Charley is more interested in the young fellow, built like a football player (American football i.e. "handegg", of course), who was talking with Mr Hoskins; clearly Charley is hoping to find friends who share his interests.
* We arrive at the homestead, on which stands a large tarpaper shack, roughly the shape and size of a freight car. Sayre feels excited and hopeful; in the setting sunlight, the land is beautiful, and the house is larger and nicer than some of the cramped flats and other places the Morgans have lived in. They came most recently from Chicago, specifically from West Van Buren Street, which does exist and is now quite posh, judging by the condo listings I'm seeing; presumably it was more of a slum back in the day. I do wonder whether the Morgans have any farming expertise, though.
* Hitty the toddler has now woken up and is being aggressively cutesy in her observations of their surroundings, saying "I can 'most hear my thinks tick" and other such things. I hope she's not too big a part of the story.
* Charley promptly names the new house "the Crate", which irritates Sayre. It is a fairly scroungy place, but she's sure she can make it all nice and homelike.
* There's an offhand reference to "Aunt Mehitable's money", which they have used to travel here and to have their stuff shipped. Sayre feels ashamed thinking of it; I assume we'll find out why at some point.
* The next morning, watching the sunrise, Sayre considers the situation and gives us some exposition. The house and homestead come from Sam Parsons, who was a friend from Dad's job in a department store back in Chicago; when the Parsons family decided they didn't want to finish proving up on their homestead, they sold it to Dad Morgan "on long, very easy terms". Sayre feels ashamed that she never used to like fussy Mr Parsons, so at least she's not going to have perfect all-the-time character intuition like so many irritating POV characters.
* Mom Morgan died three years ago, and since then Sayre has been in charge of the housekeeping. She goes into town with Dad to get the claim title transferred to the Morgans, and we get some more exposition about their past, how they've always moved from place to place with Dad trying and failing to support them, or having his business partners flake on him, and Aunt Mehitable coming to their rescue. Dad was originally going to be a minister, which Aunt Mehitable thinks would have suited him well, but his eyes "failed so badly" that he couldn't.
* It turns out that they can't file on the claim after all, both because the government has put a hold on new claim filings here in the Pawaukee due to problems with alkali and drainage, and because Dad is not considered a suitable homesteader prospect, having no farming experience nor money nor equipment. The claims agent says they can stay on the claim if they want, but they won't have any legal right to it.
* Sayre overhears some men with spelled-out "foreign" accents -- German-ish or Nordic-ish, maybe? -- discussing a scuffle in the school board. Mr Hoskins wanted the high school not to rehire their Agriculture teacher, Kitchell, who is also the football coach. Kitchell won the day, but only by a single vote.
* Dad Morgan realizes that Sam Parsons must have tricked them into coming out here in order to "prove up" on his land -- have someone living and working there for five years -- without having to homestead it properly himself. Great, we're back to Sayre's instincts about people being infallible. :P Still, it's a clever concept.
* Sayre comes up with "a Plan", capital P, which appears to be "get Mr Kitchell to convince Charley to attend the high school and take his agriculture class", the idea being that Charley will then become invested in the farm and make it a going concern. Then, I presume, Charley will be able to file for a claim of his own as an experienced farmer. Or something? I don't know.
* Hoskins and Kitchell are bickering as Sayre approaches Kitchell's office; Kitchell holds that the farmers need to diversify their crops rather than just growing alfalfa which they sell to Hoskins as hay.
* Well! Sayre also asks Kitchell if she herself might take the agriculture class. He's startled at first, this being the era when girls take Home Ec, and he argues that the work is too physically heavy for a girl, but eventually he says he would have no objection if Sayre can get the school board to agree. He suggests she talk with Mr Nels Hansen, one of the foreign-accented gentlemen she overheard chatting earlier.
* Charley has picked up a pair of jobs, one at the local automotive mechanic's -- apparently the town is near enough to Yellowstone Park to get a fair amount of tourist traffic -- and one clerking at Hoskins' store, which latter he figures he'll pass on to Dad. Sayre is angry because Charley has not gotten a job working a farm as she had planned he should do, but she doesn't tell him so.
* Mr Hansen comes to call, and among other things, points out that Charley's garage job will only last the summer, since tourists will not come to Yellowstone in the wintertime. He also offers to loan a milk cow to the Morgans in exchange for their feeding it from the alfalfa field Sam Parsons left. Hansen is on Kitchell's side of the alfalfa squabble, and believes feeding it to livestock or plowing it under as fertilizer is better than selling it as hay. I don't know enough about farming to follow this debate at all.
* Mr Hansen offers Dad a farmhand job in the mornings, which will pay in farm goods to tide the Morgans over the winter. Dad also works afternoons at Hoskins' store, earning store credit for things like kerosene and sugar. Sayre babysits for the Hansens a few days while Mrs Hansen has a new baby, and is paid in pullet hens, which will lay eggs.
* When fall comes, Charley does go back to school and does join the agriculture class. Sayre's class doesn't start until November, it being a class planned for the big boys who have to stay home during harvest and planting to help out, but when it does start, Charley has gotten a job driving the school "bus", a refitted old touring car big enough to hold everyone.
* Charley is sulky about Sayre's trying to get into the agriculture class, and insists they won't let her join. She does get in, but apparently there are issues of social standing going on, with the "part-time" class Sayre's in being looked down upon by the "regular" students whose families can afford to let them go to school.
* During football practice on Sayre's first day at school, Frank Hoskins -- the football-playing son of Mr Hoskins, who is of course just as unpleasant as his dad -- kicks Charley in the ribs after a tackle, thinking no one can see him. Mr Kitchell catches him and wants to kick him off the team, but Charley argues in his favor, pointing out that the team needs Frank in order to win their upcoming game. Sayre is of course angry. Sayre has a lot of opinions about how other people ought to live their lives.
* By way of undermining Mr Kitchell's influence among the agriculture students, Mr Hoskins has offered a prize of $150 for the student who earns the most money from selling a five-acre planting of alfalfa in either the fall or the spring. (His plan is of course for Frank to win, as everyone at the school knows.) Charley and Sayre have been openly rejecting the idea of entering the contest, by way of supporting Mr Kitchell's side, but Dad warns them to "not be too independent", because he works for Hoskins. I'm not sure what that means; Sayre speculates that Hoskins has been pushing Dad to get them to enter the contest.
* At the end of the football season, Charley is elected next year's captain. Frank Hoskins makes a speech congratulating him, but Sayre hears from Frank's girlfriend that he's actually angry.
* Dad Morgan buys a pig on credit from Mr Hoskins. It's implied that this is how Mr Hoskins controls most of the farmers around here, by loaning them money or letting them buy things on credit from his store, and then threatening to call their loans due if they do anything he doesn't like.
* Sayre plans to raise chickens and turkeys (on Mr Hansen's advice), as well as growing potatoes. Charley brings home a broken-down manure spreader to fix up, but will have to borrow money from Mr Hoskins for the parts, which seems liable to cause a lot of trouble, since Hoskins currently has the only manure spreader in the area and refuses to lend it out.
* However, Sayre has borrowed money from Aunt Mehitable for her own farming projects, and offers Charley the money he needs.
* When the manure spreader is finished, Charley is offered $170 for it, but refuses to sell, because if he owns it he can loan it out in trade for whatever else he needs, or hire out a day's labor with it.
* Mr Kitchell arranges an exhibition of the agriculture students' projects, including the manure spreader. A man from Washington DC who manages the vocational agriculture programs for the whole USian West comes to see it and is very impressed, but wants to see a "before" photo, since Mr Hoskins is claiming the spreader was already in fine shape and Charley didn't do much. There was only one "before" photo, which was hung up next to the spreader and has now Mysteriously Disappeared; of course the Hoskinses have stolen it, and of course they haven't the sense to burn it, so it will turn up later at a Dramatic Moment, I'll bet.
* Yeah, Mr Kitchell is explaining how the photographic negatives have also Mysteriously Disappeared.
* ...wait, another student took a photo of the manure spreader when Charley first brought it in, and produces the film once he learns they need it. That's... far more sensible than I had expected. *head-tilty*
* Charley's manure spreader becomes known in various publications by the state and federal agriculture education departments, then in other magazines. How long is this all taking? If Sayre's class started in November, it should be well into wintertime by now.
* Huh. It's spring, just like that, not even a mention of snow. I am perplexed. But Charley is planting peas on land he's plowed alfalfa into, and he brings home ten orphaned lambs to bottle-feed since he picked them up cheap; I feel like that'll be a lot of work?
* Charley's manure spreader makes it into an agricultural college textbook. Dad says Mr Hoskins is thankful to Charley for how interested in farming Frank has gotten all of a sudden; Charley and Sayre, of course, believe he's lying for some purpose of his own. I'm really fucking bored of all these 100% evil villains we keep on getting, who can't ever have any purpose in life but to oppose the hero.
* Then Sam Parsons arrives and announces he's going to stay the summer, so as to keep his title on the claim while the Morgans work the farm. "How had this lady-like man ever come to think he could make a farmer, Sayre wondered", using "lady-like" as an insult to Mr Parsons' virility.
* Parsons will allow the Morgans five acres of the plowed land to grow what they like -- peas, potatoes, etc -- but requires the other fifteen acres be replanted with alfalfa, which of course Sayre takes as a personal affront. I don't like Sayre. Perhaps I would if I understood more about the science behind the alfalfa squabble, but you'd think it would be the author's job to make me understand! :S
* Charley is discouraged at first, but then he talks to the Mr Cowan who offered $170 for his manure spreader, and he gets a job as a farmhand for which part of his pay will be ten acres of Mr Cowan's land to farm as he pleases. So he's happy.
* Ah, Mr Cowan is a man of some means, an ex-engineer and friend of Mr Kitchell's who doesn't need the ten acres for his own farming.
* Sayre is convinced that Mr Parsons will require the Morgans to work his alfalfa crop in exchange for staying on the claim, but in fact he does the work himself, though "in a dispirited, half-competent way".
* Groups of Sayre's chickens and turkeys mysteriously disappear without trace on late moonlight nights a few months in a row. One assumes Frank Hoskins and his friends have been stealing them somehow.
* Hail in May and June ruins the alfalfa crop. The farmers call a meeting to see what can be done; I'm not even halfway through the book, so this can't be the climax, but everybody attends.
* Apparently the richer farmers of the area, Hoskins and his friends, want to petition the government to forgive their annual payment on the dam and irrigation system -- there are forty annual payments, sharing out the cost of the project among all the farms it waters, but Hoskins' people have been constantly not paying. Mr Hansen gets up and gives a little speech in his phonetic accent about how he always pays his part, and how hard work and dedication will get you everywhere, which I think is a bit disingenuous of the writer since many of the alfalfa-growing farmers have also worked hard, just on the Wrong crop.
* Hansen asks Kitchell to speak, and Kitchell introduces an irrigation engineer from D.C., a Mr Hexall. Mr Hexall explains that the government has recently changed the rules about how the irrigation project will work. Some settlers will be transferred to better claims, some land will have drainage work done, and the people with the best land (who thus make more money) will pay a higher percentage of the cost of the irrigation project than those with worse land.
* Also, would-be homesteaders must have $2500 capital as well as two years of successful farm experience, so there go the Morgans' hopes -- although it says "in money, equipment, or stock", so my guess is that at the end of the book we'll find out Charley and Sayre's farming projects have had enough increase to let Charley file a claim.
* Finally, the farmers cannot put in a group request for postponement, because that benefits people like Hoskins who just want to evade paying, more than it does the poorer farmers. Each homestead must file individually to prove they can't pay this year,
* (The way he says this stuff is clearly supposed to be a Good Person style, but it creeps me the fuck out. "At the same time, Uncle Sam is just, even fatherly...")
* Frank comes up after the meeting and swears he will "finish" Charley, and Sayre too.
* Sam Parsons gives up and leaves, since he can't get an individual postponement without the government investigating and realizing his family doesn't live on his claim. He also mentions that the whole stunt to get the Morgans out here in his stead was Mr Hoskins' idea, Hoskins hoping to make Parsons pay his debts in alfalfa hay as the other farmers do, or even get his land on a foreclosed mortgage if Parsons should manage to prove up.
* Sayre overhears Hoskins yelling one day about how Frank's poultry are low quality and how embarrassing it is that Sayre's are better. Presumably Frank has been stealing her poultry to pass off as his own?
* Wow, it's September already when Charley and Sayre go out to watch for the poultry-thief. They chase him, and Frank gets away, but they find the fishing-pole he was using to steal the turkeys, which conveniently has Mr Hoskins' initials on it.
* Then at school there's a fistfight between Charley and Frank, which Charley wins, and then Mr Hansen brings in a dead turkey that was Sayre's. Apparently Frank has been stealing her poultry just for spite. Whatever. Can't anybody ever have any other motivation than to be evil? o_O
* Now that Frank has been beaten, all the boys at school are bullying him and calling him "Lumpy", a name he hates. Only his girlfriend, Rene (short for Irene) Hoskins, stands by him.
* Charley has been bragging around town about how the practice of plowing alfalfa under to enrich the soil has helped him grow a good crop of peas. One day, though, he comes home despondent, because Mr Cowan's old hired hand is back and has been hired again in his stead -- Charley knew this was a possibility but didn't really believe it'd happen.
* Then Mr Hoskins offers Charley a job working on his hay-baling crew, but on Saturdays so he can't play football, and Charley takes the job and resigns from the football team. Dad Morgan says this is terribly generous of Mr Hoskins with jobs so scarce, but Mr Hansen says that Hoskins did it to get in good with Mr Cowan, who felt bad about having to let Charley go. Hoskins needs good political supporters, because the government has filed three lawsuits against him for the unpaid irrigation improvement fees on his land.
* When the hay-baling crew come to bale the Morgans' alfalfa, Frank and Charley have a series of quarrels. Sayre knows there's something fishy going on, since Mr Hansen is with the baling crew as well, but she has to cook lunch for the baling crew so she doesn't have time to find out what.
* Apparently Mr Hoskins demanded the alfalfa he's owed from Sam Parsons' debts right away, to fill a rush order to Kansas City. But there's something else too, because Mr Hansen asks Sayre to drive a truck and haul the hay-bales to the warehouse.
* Based on this aggressive foreshadowing, I think Mr Hoskins has taken all the hay the Morgans grew for themselves as well as the lot Sam Parsons owed him?
* Yes -- apparently there's a lawyer's contract that all the alfalfa grown on this claim belongs to Mr Hoskins. And Frank said that Charley would burn the Morgans' two acres that night for spite, presumably meaning that Frank planned to come back and burn it and frame Charley. But all the hay has been baled, and Charley and Mr Hansen are trying to get it all off the property before sundown, so that the Morgans won't be responsible for it.
* There is a crop of low-quality, alkali-poisoned alfalfa in the south ditch on the edge of the farm, which Hoskins "generously" offered to leave to the Morgans, but Charley refused to take it and had the balers pack it up with the rest. When they finish getting all the hay into town, Hoskins is pleased that there's so much, but afterward Charley mentions that he hasn't told Mr Hoskins how the south ditch crop made up the volume. He says he'll leave that to Frank to tell. I speculate Hoskins will be in some kind of trouble for selling shitty hay later on, possibly, although this book isn't being massively predictable.
* Of course Frank's girlfriend Rene is the town's nasty lying gossip. There's some sort of continuing squabble with Charley and Frank, but what it is isn't specified, because today Sayre decides it's a good time to stop listening to Rene like she usually does and chew her out.
* Everyone is snubbing Sayre and going quiet when she approaches, so she can't find out by overhearing what's been going on, either. Hoskins lays off Dad Morgan at the store, too, presumably in retribution for whatever the hell it is Charley's done this time. We're getting to downright feuding levels of tit-for-tat.
* Ah, here we are. The state of Missouri has placed an embargo of hay from the Pawaukee Irrigation Project, because the batch from the south ditch had alfalfa weevils in it. Hoskins has spread it about town that Charley did this on purpose in revenge for Frank's stealing and killing Sayre's poultry.
* Then there's a long passage which is just Sayre going over all their situation, and how they have to save their money for more livestock and so forth, but they also need things like food and kerosene for the winter... they've paid off the pig Dad bought, at least, so that's something.
* Eventually, Sayre asks Mr Kitchell's opinion, and he speaks to Mr Cowan, who winds up hiring the Morgans to do odd jobs around his farm. Sayre feels ashamed because it's "made work", things Cowan wouldn't have wanted done if he wasn't looking for things to have the Morgans do so he could pay them, but they really do need the money.
* Charley gets interested in entomology and asks Sayre questions about what kinds of bugs she saw in the south ditch when the alfalfa was growing. From her answers, it seems that the alfalfa weevils didn't come from the Morgans' alfalfa at all, which means they'd be from Frank Hoskins' field. Of course. Blah de blah. At least I'm getting toward the end of the book, maybe a quarter of the way left to go. Farming really doesn't need human villains... :P
* Charley and Frank are both on the "agricultural judging team" at the school, which is a team of five boys that have been going round all winter and learning to judge livestock in preparation for a big spring competition. Again, I don't actually understand the situation, but it's been a fierce rivalry between them, though without any more fistfights.
* The spring contest is held in Laramie, at the state university. The judging team will go down there in two cars and stay for the three-day contest. On Friday evening, Kitchell will phone the results of the contest to Hoskins' store, where Hoskins will write the news on the windows. Presumably there will be some cheating, because EVILLY EVIL EVIL. o_O I'm bored.
* The team wins, of course; in individual points, Frank is reported to have beaten Charley by a single point. Mr Hansen says he hopes Frank and Charley will get on better now that they've both contributed to the big win. (Hah.)
* The next morning, there's a blizzard in the middle of April, and Sayre worries about her poultry and about the livestock. She and Dad get all the livestock under cover, somehow not getting turned around and lost or frozen to death in the meantime; Hitty, now kindergarten-age, helps by keeping the fire going indoors. They're worried that Charley and the rest of the judging team may have gotten stranded in the bus on the way back from Laramie, but there's nothing they can do about that.
* When the blizzard is over, Sayre and Mr Hansen go into town. Mr Kitchell and the other boys got home safe, but Frank's car broke down, and Mr Kitchell left Charley there with Frank to fix it, Charley being the best mechanic of the lot. The rest had to hurry on home because one of the other boys had the flu, which of course was pretty terrifying when this book was written.
* Mr Hoskins has gone to Casper, Wyoming, to chivvy along the searchers. Mr Hansen mentions that he might also stop by the federal courthouse in Casper, since it is almost the time when the Hoskins lawsuits must be settled or Hoskins' land forfeited to the government.
* Sayre and Frank's girlfriend Rene wind up hanging out together while they wait for news, and Rene explains that Frank won because he'd gone to Laramie with his father a couple times and studied the exact animals he'd be judging for the contest; there's no rule against it, but it's unofficially considered cheating. She also verifies that Frank had weevils in his alfalfa field and must have mixed that alfalfa in with the Morgans' bales to frame Charley.
* And now they've found the car but without the boys in it! This drawing-out of suspense is getting really absurd, since we know they'll both be found safe and everything will be okay. This isn't Rachel Field; fluff will stay fluff. ;-)
* Sayre stays in town with Rene that night, and Rene, feeling guilty, explains that it was she, not Frank, who stole the poultry.
* In the morning, Mr Kitchell brings news that the alfalfa embargo has been lifted; the weevils in the shipment came from some old hay that had been in the freight car before and not properly cleaned out. Frank's crop had a lookalike bug and not weevils at all.
* Then the news comes that the boys have been found alive, and that Charley insists Frank saved Charley's life, which is... not the direction I expected it to go. I expected Charley would save Frank's life to end the feud, not the other way round.
* Mr Hoskins is aggressively grateful and appears to turn over a new leaf -- pays Charley's hospital bills, gives Dad Morgan his job back, and offers Charley a half-share in a new dairy farm he plans to make. Mr Hansen is very cheerful that everything has turned out so well. Sayre, of course, is miserable for reasons I can't comprehend, saying to herself that she's been "beaten" by the Hoskinses. O_O
* Charley turns down the dairy-farm offer, which apparently is what Sayre wanted. They figure out that when the claim is drained and revalued, they'll be old enough to file a claim on it and will have earned enough through their farming, so they decide to do that, la la happy ending.
*sigh* I don't know. It just feels so bloody... contrived. That nothing bad can ever happen just cause bad shit happens, that everything has to be malicious actions by bad people who never ever happen to do anything that isn't directed straight against our heroes. That everything good people do has to turn out to be the right choice and save them from the misfortunes that hit other people. Fucking politics. :P
* Endpapers show a threshing machine, so probably a frontier story.
* Frontispiece shows a man and woman, captioned "The twins stood in the wide, silent beauty of the half-desert night"; the woman is wearing an aggressively modish 1930s dress, so presumably a contemporary story.
* Dedicated to a "teacher of vocational agriculture", so it's About Farming. This was only about twenty years after the Cooperative Extension Service was established, before family farms practically disappeared, when extension agents teaching the best ways to farm showed up as heroic figures in a lot of rural-set YA.
* "The Rattleshake, the Morgans' Model T Ford, jogged on and on..." -- oh my god. This is the first story we've had since 1922 that's actually set in contemporary USia, isn't it? I'm a bit gobsmacked. :-)
* Our characters are "Dad", seventeen-year-old twins Charley and Sayre (possibly short for Sarah?), and baby Hitty. They're traveling across arid Wyoming to a place where they're going to settle. We see some irrigation ditches around alfalfa fields, and Dad makes a remark about how this whole land will bloom "when Uncle Sam brings water to it". We're in the midst of the Depression, of course, and government-sponsored improvement projects are creating jobs all over the west, hiring unemployed men to build dams and so forth.
* I haven't been to Wyoming, except once when I was ten, which I don't really remember, but the landscape descriptions sound accurate for the Dust-Bowl-era Great Plains -- flat dry gray land, little tarpaper shacks, dry dusty wind, green fields only where the water is.
* We travel through the small town of Upham, which Dad informs us is the "[b]iggest town on the whole Pawaukee Irrigation Project. Nearly a thousand people." I don't find anything west of the Mississippi on Google for "Pawaukee" -- there was a Palwaukee Airport in Chicago (now the Chicago Executive Airport), and there's a town of Pewaukee in Wisconsin, but that's it. Nor does Upham, Wyoming, appear to be a real town. Just checking -- you never know how much fiction versus fact you're going to get in an old Newbery. ^_^
* The town has cottonwood trees planted along its main street, which gives me a great deal of hope that this will be more accurate than The Jumping-Off Place. No castor bean plants! XD
* Dad asks directions from a fellow standing outside a store, who turns out to be one Franklin Hoskins. According to Dad, Sam Parsons (whose claim we're going to take over) described Mr Hoskins as "the community's most prominent citizen, the best and most generous friend the farmers on this part of the Pawaukee Irrigation Project have". Sayre, our POV character so far, doesn't like the way Mr Hoskins looked at Dad "[a]lmost as if he owned him"; I assume this will turn out to be Character Insight. Charley is more interested in the young fellow, built like a football player (American football i.e. "handegg", of course), who was talking with Mr Hoskins; clearly Charley is hoping to find friends who share his interests.
* We arrive at the homestead, on which stands a large tarpaper shack, roughly the shape and size of a freight car. Sayre feels excited and hopeful; in the setting sunlight, the land is beautiful, and the house is larger and nicer than some of the cramped flats and other places the Morgans have lived in. They came most recently from Chicago, specifically from West Van Buren Street, which does exist and is now quite posh, judging by the condo listings I'm seeing; presumably it was more of a slum back in the day. I do wonder whether the Morgans have any farming expertise, though.
* Hitty the toddler has now woken up and is being aggressively cutesy in her observations of their surroundings, saying "I can 'most hear my thinks tick" and other such things. I hope she's not too big a part of the story.
* Charley promptly names the new house "the Crate", which irritates Sayre. It is a fairly scroungy place, but she's sure she can make it all nice and homelike.
* There's an offhand reference to "Aunt Mehitable's money", which they have used to travel here and to have their stuff shipped. Sayre feels ashamed thinking of it; I assume we'll find out why at some point.
* The next morning, watching the sunrise, Sayre considers the situation and gives us some exposition. The house and homestead come from Sam Parsons, who was a friend from Dad's job in a department store back in Chicago; when the Parsons family decided they didn't want to finish proving up on their homestead, they sold it to Dad Morgan "on long, very easy terms". Sayre feels ashamed that she never used to like fussy Mr Parsons, so at least she's not going to have perfect all-the-time character intuition like so many irritating POV characters.
* Mom Morgan died three years ago, and since then Sayre has been in charge of the housekeeping. She goes into town with Dad to get the claim title transferred to the Morgans, and we get some more exposition about their past, how they've always moved from place to place with Dad trying and failing to support them, or having his business partners flake on him, and Aunt Mehitable coming to their rescue. Dad was originally going to be a minister, which Aunt Mehitable thinks would have suited him well, but his eyes "failed so badly" that he couldn't.
* It turns out that they can't file on the claim after all, both because the government has put a hold on new claim filings here in the Pawaukee due to problems with alkali and drainage, and because Dad is not considered a suitable homesteader prospect, having no farming experience nor money nor equipment. The claims agent says they can stay on the claim if they want, but they won't have any legal right to it.
* Sayre overhears some men with spelled-out "foreign" accents -- German-ish or Nordic-ish, maybe? -- discussing a scuffle in the school board. Mr Hoskins wanted the high school not to rehire their Agriculture teacher, Kitchell, who is also the football coach. Kitchell won the day, but only by a single vote.
* Dad Morgan realizes that Sam Parsons must have tricked them into coming out here in order to "prove up" on his land -- have someone living and working there for five years -- without having to homestead it properly himself. Great, we're back to Sayre's instincts about people being infallible. :P Still, it's a clever concept.
* Sayre comes up with "a Plan", capital P, which appears to be "get Mr Kitchell to convince Charley to attend the high school and take his agriculture class", the idea being that Charley will then become invested in the farm and make it a going concern. Then, I presume, Charley will be able to file for a claim of his own as an experienced farmer. Or something? I don't know.
* Hoskins and Kitchell are bickering as Sayre approaches Kitchell's office; Kitchell holds that the farmers need to diversify their crops rather than just growing alfalfa which they sell to Hoskins as hay.
* Well! Sayre also asks Kitchell if she herself might take the agriculture class. He's startled at first, this being the era when girls take Home Ec, and he argues that the work is too physically heavy for a girl, but eventually he says he would have no objection if Sayre can get the school board to agree. He suggests she talk with Mr Nels Hansen, one of the foreign-accented gentlemen she overheard chatting earlier.
* Charley has picked up a pair of jobs, one at the local automotive mechanic's -- apparently the town is near enough to Yellowstone Park to get a fair amount of tourist traffic -- and one clerking at Hoskins' store, which latter he figures he'll pass on to Dad. Sayre is angry because Charley has not gotten a job working a farm as she had planned he should do, but she doesn't tell him so.
* Mr Hansen comes to call, and among other things, points out that Charley's garage job will only last the summer, since tourists will not come to Yellowstone in the wintertime. He also offers to loan a milk cow to the Morgans in exchange for their feeding it from the alfalfa field Sam Parsons left. Hansen is on Kitchell's side of the alfalfa squabble, and believes feeding it to livestock or plowing it under as fertilizer is better than selling it as hay. I don't know enough about farming to follow this debate at all.
* Mr Hansen offers Dad a farmhand job in the mornings, which will pay in farm goods to tide the Morgans over the winter. Dad also works afternoons at Hoskins' store, earning store credit for things like kerosene and sugar. Sayre babysits for the Hansens a few days while Mrs Hansen has a new baby, and is paid in pullet hens, which will lay eggs.
* When fall comes, Charley does go back to school and does join the agriculture class. Sayre's class doesn't start until November, it being a class planned for the big boys who have to stay home during harvest and planting to help out, but when it does start, Charley has gotten a job driving the school "bus", a refitted old touring car big enough to hold everyone.
* Charley is sulky about Sayre's trying to get into the agriculture class, and insists they won't let her join. She does get in, but apparently there are issues of social standing going on, with the "part-time" class Sayre's in being looked down upon by the "regular" students whose families can afford to let them go to school.
* During football practice on Sayre's first day at school, Frank Hoskins -- the football-playing son of Mr Hoskins, who is of course just as unpleasant as his dad -- kicks Charley in the ribs after a tackle, thinking no one can see him. Mr Kitchell catches him and wants to kick him off the team, but Charley argues in his favor, pointing out that the team needs Frank in order to win their upcoming game. Sayre is of course angry. Sayre has a lot of opinions about how other people ought to live their lives.
* By way of undermining Mr Kitchell's influence among the agriculture students, Mr Hoskins has offered a prize of $150 for the student who earns the most money from selling a five-acre planting of alfalfa in either the fall or the spring. (His plan is of course for Frank to win, as everyone at the school knows.) Charley and Sayre have been openly rejecting the idea of entering the contest, by way of supporting Mr Kitchell's side, but Dad warns them to "not be too independent", because he works for Hoskins. I'm not sure what that means; Sayre speculates that Hoskins has been pushing Dad to get them to enter the contest.
* At the end of the football season, Charley is elected next year's captain. Frank Hoskins makes a speech congratulating him, but Sayre hears from Frank's girlfriend that he's actually angry.
* Dad Morgan buys a pig on credit from Mr Hoskins. It's implied that this is how Mr Hoskins controls most of the farmers around here, by loaning them money or letting them buy things on credit from his store, and then threatening to call their loans due if they do anything he doesn't like.
* Sayre plans to raise chickens and turkeys (on Mr Hansen's advice), as well as growing potatoes. Charley brings home a broken-down manure spreader to fix up, but will have to borrow money from Mr Hoskins for the parts, which seems liable to cause a lot of trouble, since Hoskins currently has the only manure spreader in the area and refuses to lend it out.
* However, Sayre has borrowed money from Aunt Mehitable for her own farming projects, and offers Charley the money he needs.
* When the manure spreader is finished, Charley is offered $170 for it, but refuses to sell, because if he owns it he can loan it out in trade for whatever else he needs, or hire out a day's labor with it.
* Mr Kitchell arranges an exhibition of the agriculture students' projects, including the manure spreader. A man from Washington DC who manages the vocational agriculture programs for the whole USian West comes to see it and is very impressed, but wants to see a "before" photo, since Mr Hoskins is claiming the spreader was already in fine shape and Charley didn't do much. There was only one "before" photo, which was hung up next to the spreader and has now Mysteriously Disappeared; of course the Hoskinses have stolen it, and of course they haven't the sense to burn it, so it will turn up later at a Dramatic Moment, I'll bet.
* Yeah, Mr Kitchell is explaining how the photographic negatives have also Mysteriously Disappeared.
* ...wait, another student took a photo of the manure spreader when Charley first brought it in, and produces the film once he learns they need it. That's... far more sensible than I had expected. *head-tilty*
* Charley's manure spreader becomes known in various publications by the state and federal agriculture education departments, then in other magazines. How long is this all taking? If Sayre's class started in November, it should be well into wintertime by now.
* Huh. It's spring, just like that, not even a mention of snow. I am perplexed. But Charley is planting peas on land he's plowed alfalfa into, and he brings home ten orphaned lambs to bottle-feed since he picked them up cheap; I feel like that'll be a lot of work?
* Charley's manure spreader makes it into an agricultural college textbook. Dad says Mr Hoskins is thankful to Charley for how interested in farming Frank has gotten all of a sudden; Charley and Sayre, of course, believe he's lying for some purpose of his own. I'm really fucking bored of all these 100% evil villains we keep on getting, who can't ever have any purpose in life but to oppose the hero.
* Then Sam Parsons arrives and announces he's going to stay the summer, so as to keep his title on the claim while the Morgans work the farm. "How had this lady-like man ever come to think he could make a farmer, Sayre wondered", using "lady-like" as an insult to Mr Parsons' virility.
* Parsons will allow the Morgans five acres of the plowed land to grow what they like -- peas, potatoes, etc -- but requires the other fifteen acres be replanted with alfalfa, which of course Sayre takes as a personal affront. I don't like Sayre. Perhaps I would if I understood more about the science behind the alfalfa squabble, but you'd think it would be the author's job to make me understand! :S
* Charley is discouraged at first, but then he talks to the Mr Cowan who offered $170 for his manure spreader, and he gets a job as a farmhand for which part of his pay will be ten acres of Mr Cowan's land to farm as he pleases. So he's happy.
* Ah, Mr Cowan is a man of some means, an ex-engineer and friend of Mr Kitchell's who doesn't need the ten acres for his own farming.
* Sayre is convinced that Mr Parsons will require the Morgans to work his alfalfa crop in exchange for staying on the claim, but in fact he does the work himself, though "in a dispirited, half-competent way".
* Groups of Sayre's chickens and turkeys mysteriously disappear without trace on late moonlight nights a few months in a row. One assumes Frank Hoskins and his friends have been stealing them somehow.
* Hail in May and June ruins the alfalfa crop. The farmers call a meeting to see what can be done; I'm not even halfway through the book, so this can't be the climax, but everybody attends.
* Apparently the richer farmers of the area, Hoskins and his friends, want to petition the government to forgive their annual payment on the dam and irrigation system -- there are forty annual payments, sharing out the cost of the project among all the farms it waters, but Hoskins' people have been constantly not paying. Mr Hansen gets up and gives a little speech in his phonetic accent about how he always pays his part, and how hard work and dedication will get you everywhere, which I think is a bit disingenuous of the writer since many of the alfalfa-growing farmers have also worked hard, just on the Wrong crop.
* Hansen asks Kitchell to speak, and Kitchell introduces an irrigation engineer from D.C., a Mr Hexall. Mr Hexall explains that the government has recently changed the rules about how the irrigation project will work. Some settlers will be transferred to better claims, some land will have drainage work done, and the people with the best land (who thus make more money) will pay a higher percentage of the cost of the irrigation project than those with worse land.
* Also, would-be homesteaders must have $2500 capital as well as two years of successful farm experience, so there go the Morgans' hopes -- although it says "in money, equipment, or stock", so my guess is that at the end of the book we'll find out Charley and Sayre's farming projects have had enough increase to let Charley file a claim.
* Finally, the farmers cannot put in a group request for postponement, because that benefits people like Hoskins who just want to evade paying, more than it does the poorer farmers. Each homestead must file individually to prove they can't pay this year,
* (The way he says this stuff is clearly supposed to be a Good Person style, but it creeps me the fuck out. "At the same time, Uncle Sam is just, even fatherly...")
* Frank comes up after the meeting and swears he will "finish" Charley, and Sayre too.
* Sam Parsons gives up and leaves, since he can't get an individual postponement without the government investigating and realizing his family doesn't live on his claim. He also mentions that the whole stunt to get the Morgans out here in his stead was Mr Hoskins' idea, Hoskins hoping to make Parsons pay his debts in alfalfa hay as the other farmers do, or even get his land on a foreclosed mortgage if Parsons should manage to prove up.
* Sayre overhears Hoskins yelling one day about how Frank's poultry are low quality and how embarrassing it is that Sayre's are better. Presumably Frank has been stealing her poultry to pass off as his own?
* Wow, it's September already when Charley and Sayre go out to watch for the poultry-thief. They chase him, and Frank gets away, but they find the fishing-pole he was using to steal the turkeys, which conveniently has Mr Hoskins' initials on it.
* Then at school there's a fistfight between Charley and Frank, which Charley wins, and then Mr Hansen brings in a dead turkey that was Sayre's. Apparently Frank has been stealing her poultry just for spite. Whatever. Can't anybody ever have any other motivation than to be evil? o_O
* Now that Frank has been beaten, all the boys at school are bullying him and calling him "Lumpy", a name he hates. Only his girlfriend, Rene (short for Irene) Hoskins, stands by him.
* Charley has been bragging around town about how the practice of plowing alfalfa under to enrich the soil has helped him grow a good crop of peas. One day, though, he comes home despondent, because Mr Cowan's old hired hand is back and has been hired again in his stead -- Charley knew this was a possibility but didn't really believe it'd happen.
* Then Mr Hoskins offers Charley a job working on his hay-baling crew, but on Saturdays so he can't play football, and Charley takes the job and resigns from the football team. Dad Morgan says this is terribly generous of Mr Hoskins with jobs so scarce, but Mr Hansen says that Hoskins did it to get in good with Mr Cowan, who felt bad about having to let Charley go. Hoskins needs good political supporters, because the government has filed three lawsuits against him for the unpaid irrigation improvement fees on his land.
* When the hay-baling crew come to bale the Morgans' alfalfa, Frank and Charley have a series of quarrels. Sayre knows there's something fishy going on, since Mr Hansen is with the baling crew as well, but she has to cook lunch for the baling crew so she doesn't have time to find out what.
* Apparently Mr Hoskins demanded the alfalfa he's owed from Sam Parsons' debts right away, to fill a rush order to Kansas City. But there's something else too, because Mr Hansen asks Sayre to drive a truck and haul the hay-bales to the warehouse.
* Based on this aggressive foreshadowing, I think Mr Hoskins has taken all the hay the Morgans grew for themselves as well as the lot Sam Parsons owed him?
* Yes -- apparently there's a lawyer's contract that all the alfalfa grown on this claim belongs to Mr Hoskins. And Frank said that Charley would burn the Morgans' two acres that night for spite, presumably meaning that Frank planned to come back and burn it and frame Charley. But all the hay has been baled, and Charley and Mr Hansen are trying to get it all off the property before sundown, so that the Morgans won't be responsible for it.
* There is a crop of low-quality, alkali-poisoned alfalfa in the south ditch on the edge of the farm, which Hoskins "generously" offered to leave to the Morgans, but Charley refused to take it and had the balers pack it up with the rest. When they finish getting all the hay into town, Hoskins is pleased that there's so much, but afterward Charley mentions that he hasn't told Mr Hoskins how the south ditch crop made up the volume. He says he'll leave that to Frank to tell. I speculate Hoskins will be in some kind of trouble for selling shitty hay later on, possibly, although this book isn't being massively predictable.
* Of course Frank's girlfriend Rene is the town's nasty lying gossip. There's some sort of continuing squabble with Charley and Frank, but what it is isn't specified, because today Sayre decides it's a good time to stop listening to Rene like she usually does and chew her out.
* Everyone is snubbing Sayre and going quiet when she approaches, so she can't find out by overhearing what's been going on, either. Hoskins lays off Dad Morgan at the store, too, presumably in retribution for whatever the hell it is Charley's done this time. We're getting to downright feuding levels of tit-for-tat.
* Ah, here we are. The state of Missouri has placed an embargo of hay from the Pawaukee Irrigation Project, because the batch from the south ditch had alfalfa weevils in it. Hoskins has spread it about town that Charley did this on purpose in revenge for Frank's stealing and killing Sayre's poultry.
* Then there's a long passage which is just Sayre going over all their situation, and how they have to save their money for more livestock and so forth, but they also need things like food and kerosene for the winter... they've paid off the pig Dad bought, at least, so that's something.
* Eventually, Sayre asks Mr Kitchell's opinion, and he speaks to Mr Cowan, who winds up hiring the Morgans to do odd jobs around his farm. Sayre feels ashamed because it's "made work", things Cowan wouldn't have wanted done if he wasn't looking for things to have the Morgans do so he could pay them, but they really do need the money.
* Charley gets interested in entomology and asks Sayre questions about what kinds of bugs she saw in the south ditch when the alfalfa was growing. From her answers, it seems that the alfalfa weevils didn't come from the Morgans' alfalfa at all, which means they'd be from Frank Hoskins' field. Of course. Blah de blah. At least I'm getting toward the end of the book, maybe a quarter of the way left to go. Farming really doesn't need human villains... :P
* Charley and Frank are both on the "agricultural judging team" at the school, which is a team of five boys that have been going round all winter and learning to judge livestock in preparation for a big spring competition. Again, I don't actually understand the situation, but it's been a fierce rivalry between them, though without any more fistfights.
* The spring contest is held in Laramie, at the state university. The judging team will go down there in two cars and stay for the three-day contest. On Friday evening, Kitchell will phone the results of the contest to Hoskins' store, where Hoskins will write the news on the windows. Presumably there will be some cheating, because EVILLY EVIL EVIL. o_O I'm bored.
* The team wins, of course; in individual points, Frank is reported to have beaten Charley by a single point. Mr Hansen says he hopes Frank and Charley will get on better now that they've both contributed to the big win. (Hah.)
* The next morning, there's a blizzard in the middle of April, and Sayre worries about her poultry and about the livestock. She and Dad get all the livestock under cover, somehow not getting turned around and lost or frozen to death in the meantime; Hitty, now kindergarten-age, helps by keeping the fire going indoors. They're worried that Charley and the rest of the judging team may have gotten stranded in the bus on the way back from Laramie, but there's nothing they can do about that.
* When the blizzard is over, Sayre and Mr Hansen go into town. Mr Kitchell and the other boys got home safe, but Frank's car broke down, and Mr Kitchell left Charley there with Frank to fix it, Charley being the best mechanic of the lot. The rest had to hurry on home because one of the other boys had the flu, which of course was pretty terrifying when this book was written.
* Mr Hoskins has gone to Casper, Wyoming, to chivvy along the searchers. Mr Hansen mentions that he might also stop by the federal courthouse in Casper, since it is almost the time when the Hoskins lawsuits must be settled or Hoskins' land forfeited to the government.
* Sayre and Frank's girlfriend Rene wind up hanging out together while they wait for news, and Rene explains that Frank won because he'd gone to Laramie with his father a couple times and studied the exact animals he'd be judging for the contest; there's no rule against it, but it's unofficially considered cheating. She also verifies that Frank had weevils in his alfalfa field and must have mixed that alfalfa in with the Morgans' bales to frame Charley.
* And now they've found the car but without the boys in it! This drawing-out of suspense is getting really absurd, since we know they'll both be found safe and everything will be okay. This isn't Rachel Field; fluff will stay fluff. ;-)
* Sayre stays in town with Rene that night, and Rene, feeling guilty, explains that it was she, not Frank, who stole the poultry.
* In the morning, Mr Kitchell brings news that the alfalfa embargo has been lifted; the weevils in the shipment came from some old hay that had been in the freight car before and not properly cleaned out. Frank's crop had a lookalike bug and not weevils at all.
* Then the news comes that the boys have been found alive, and that Charley insists Frank saved Charley's life, which is... not the direction I expected it to go. I expected Charley would save Frank's life to end the feud, not the other way round.
* Mr Hoskins is aggressively grateful and appears to turn over a new leaf -- pays Charley's hospital bills, gives Dad Morgan his job back, and offers Charley a half-share in a new dairy farm he plans to make. Mr Hansen is very cheerful that everything has turned out so well. Sayre, of course, is miserable for reasons I can't comprehend, saying to herself that she's been "beaten" by the Hoskinses. O_O
* Charley turns down the dairy-farm offer, which apparently is what Sayre wanted. They figure out that when the claim is drained and revalued, they'll be old enough to file a claim on it and will have earned enough through their farming, so they decide to do that, la la happy ending.
*sigh* I don't know. It just feels so bloody... contrived. That nothing bad can ever happen just cause bad shit happens, that everything has to be malicious actions by bad people who never ever happen to do anything that isn't directed straight against our heroes. That everything good people do has to turn out to be the right choice and save them from the misfortunes that hit other people. Fucking politics. :P