Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 January 1910 — Finding Lodgings. [ARTICLE]

Finding Lodgings.

His blanket the soldier takes along on the march, but usually not his tent. Usage soon makes the ground as soft a bed as he wants. The case is pretty nearly the same with the prospector and the frontiersman. In writing of the “Highways and Byways of the Pacific Coast,” Clifton Johnson tells of the practice on the ranches ot the West. He was the guest of an early Bettler. While we were chatting -a laborer passed, shouldering a roll of blankets. The butcher had come to the door, and he pointed to the passer and said, “You see that feller, don’t you? Well, when I first reached here from the East I thought a man with a bed on his back was the funniest thing I’d ever come across. “A rancher in this country won't take his hired man into the house. They’ve got to furnish their own blankets and usually sleep on the hay In the barn. “I know a fellow who, when he’d Just arrived and didn’t understand the ways they manage, got a Job harvesting on a big wheat raheh. The help usually sleep in the straw stacks then, and it’s, precious little time they get to sleep anywhere; but he didn’t know anything about that, and he was aitting around la the evening, and finally said to the rancher, ‘Where am I to sleep to-night?’ “ 'Why, I don’t care where you sleep,’ said the rancher. ’l’ve got nine hundred and sixty acres of land around here, and if you can’t find a place to sleep on that I’ll get my next neighbor to lend me a piece of his.’ ” - -