What the farmers ought to do is raise less corn and more hell
Mary Elizabeth Lease

The dark storm-clouds, (to my mind's eye,) are gathering in our
horizon, and even now they flap their cold, but-like wings about my
head, causing my heart to tremble with fear. I am so impressed some
nights with this feeling, that I sit up in bed for hours, and fairly cringe
from some unknown terror.

I tell my husband, "We are a doomed ship; unless we go away, some
great calamity will come upon us; and it is on me that the storm will
burst with all its dark fury." Sometimes a voice speaks to me in thunder
tones, saying, "Rise, rise! flee to the mountains, -- narry not in all the
plain. Haste away! Destruction's before thee, and sorrow behind;" and,
"you never will be a happy family again.". . .

My husband says, " Miriam, don't feel so; I am afraid you will go
crazy. I think it is your imaginings, caused by our disappointments and
discomforts."

Miriam Davis Colt and her husband came to Kansas in 1856 from
their home in Potsdam, New York, where Colt had first tried teaching
and then farming. They were ill-prepared for life on the Great Plains,
that broad, harsh flatland stretching from Kansas to eastern Colorado.
Having come west to join a planned colony of vegetarians that failed to
materialize, the Colts found themselves on their own without adequate
experience or resources to cope with life on the plains frontier.

Miriam's diary entries give a vivid picture of their dismal situation:
"We are 100 miles from a grist-mill, and 50 from a post office . . .
The one plough is broken. Father started off this morning to go
twenty-five miles, down to the Catholic Mission where is the nearest

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