teaching on the American frontier
fiction
Edward w Pritchard
A couple times a month on payday one of the board members will stop by to tell me there is no money to pay me at this time. Then several families will bring me a chicken, or a skinned raccoon, or two dozen rotten apples.
Teaching on the American frontier here in Kansas in 1851; I should have packed up last year and went to the California gold rush. Hit or miss I would have been away from here.
Everyone in Kansas fights and fusses over slavery. Hell, we are the slaves. Everyone in the territory works from sun-up to sun down and still the soil is broiled brick.
A well heeled Kansas citizen has a house built of sod. It stinks of cow manure and the walls dissolve in an infrequent rain before your eyes as you cower in fear of dust storms and tornados.
These farmers hit their children and the boys come in with black eyes and the girls won't look anyone in the eye.
Someday Kansas will be a great State and someday teaching will be a respected and well paying profession I hear. Me, for now, I should have went on to California and stole land from the Spanish or dug for Gold.
Any where but Kansas territory for me.
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