Two Classes of Bohemia

It took an ocean for Josef Kudrna to marry Marie Loskota. They came from two different classes in Bohemia, and you know how that goes, they weren't allowed, so in the fall of nineteen oh three they came through Ellis Island, went straight to Milwaukee and married. Josef learned his English at school, and Marie never did learn it well. In nineteen ten he bought out a homestead claim in a small basin on the far side of the Wall, and in May he went out to build. Marie did not want to be there, and you tell me how she'd have left, with no money to do it. So he went off to earn, picking bones one season to sell for fertilizer, working the railroad and building fence, and she raised the children in a sod house, the five of them in that one small space while he was gone, and you've seen the kind of country. Lakota neighbors to the south sold him a milk heifer and his first team, and by the twenties they had the first tractor in the area, and would you believe Josef, not yet fifty, wouldn't drive it? Said his reflexes weren't what they had been, so his sons drove. Then the thirties, with wheat at twenty cents, and the sixteen-foot well they'd drunk from since the start went dry, and in the winter of nineteen thirty-six they hauled water at night from a spring some miles off, and you can ask yourself what she thought about. Josef died about the end of the war and left the ranch to her and their sons. Marie died in nineteen seventy-three, past ninety, and a son of hers was still on the home place in two thousand five. The park's study doesn't say if she ever quit wanting to go. It does have this for you, from nineteen twenty-one, two hundred acres patented under the Desert Land Act in the name of Marie. Desert, the government called it. In the language she'd carried over from Bohemia, she could call it what she liked.