When, finally, they reached their destination, they found not the thriving towns the railroad literature described, but a boundless prairie that offered no obvious building material. Compelled either to dig out a hollow in the side of a bluff for shelter or to build a house of sod bricks, settlers found themselves living in dirt and marooned in a sea of grass, their closest neighbors miles away. They fought constantly to hold their fields against the buffalo and cattle that roamed the plains.73
