If you are looking for Silas O’Driscoll, you are staring right at him, the grey-bearded man said, holding out a weathered hand on the muddy wooden platform of the Fort Griffin depot.
Two years later. The spring sun beat down on the Fort Griffin train platform, turning the mud to a cracked, dusty crust. I sat in the driver’s seat of our rusted wagon, the same mended blue silk dress, now even more faded, clinging to me. The O’Driscoll ranch had survived, for now.
But the fight had never ended.
I looked toward the barren cemetery hill overlooking the iron tracks. Fresh wooden crosses, rough-hewn and stark, marked the graves of Silas and other local ranchers. Men who had lost their own battles against the expanding frontier, their land swallowed by progress, or simply by the overwhelming weight of it all.
The iron railway line now sat less than fifty yards from the O’Driscoll property boundary. Noisy steam locomotives, hulking machines of steel and fire, ran day and night, their whistles piercing the prairie silence. They carried goods, passengers, and the relentless march of industry right to our fences. Corporate lawyers, just as Gentry had promised, continued to file endless appeal motions against our farm deed, a paper war that never ceased.
A passenger train screeched to a halt, a cloud of steam hissing into the dry air. I watched as the door opened, and a young, hopeful woman in a tailored eastern coat stepped down onto the muddy platform. She held a stack of sweet, tied-up mail-order letters in her hand, her eyes wide with the promise of a new life.
She reminded me so much of myself, two years ago, stepping off that very same train. The same starry-eyed hope, the same innocence about the harsh realities of this land.
She caught my eye, a faint, polite smile gracing her lips. I nodded, a small, knowing gesture. I saw my own past reflection in her hopeful smile, a ghost of the woman I once was. I knew the struggle for survival in this land never truly ends.
The train brings new promises every morning on the iron rails, but out here on the dry prairie, you quickly learn that the soil only remembers what you fight to keep.
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