around her car, trying to stay warm from the car's engine's heat on a cold winter day. One farm wife Hickok met had 10 children and was pregnant with her 11th child, saying she wished she had some contraceptives as she and her husband could not afford such a large family. Hickok wrote: "The plight of the livestock is pitiable...Half-starved horses have dropped in the harness right on the road job...They've even harvested Russian thistle to feed to their horses and cattle. Russian thistle, for your information, is a thistle plant with shallow roots that dries up in the fall and is blown across the plains like rolls of barbed wire. The effect on the digestive apparatus of an animal...would be, I should imagine, much the same as though it had eaten barbed wire". She called South Dakota "the Siberia of the United States. A more hopeless place I never saw. Half the people—particularly the farmers—are scared to death...The rest of the people are apathetic". In South Dakota, she found several farm wives serving Russian thistle soup to their children. Out on the South Dakota plains, she visited "...what had once been a house. No repairs have made in years. The kitchen floor was all patched up with pieces of tin...Great patches of plaster had fallen from the walls. Newspapers had been stuffed in the cracks about the windows. And in that house two small boys...were running about without a stitch on save some ragged overalls. No shoes or stockings. Their feet were purple with cold". She reported some of the normally conservative farmers of South Dakota were blaming capitalism for their plight and were turning towards Communism as Communist meetings on the Great Plains were well attended. Hickok also noted the Farm Holiday Association that called for the end of banks foreclosing on farms was growing popular on the Great Plains. When one bank foreclosed on a South Dakota farm and asked the county sheriff to evict the farmer and his family, she saw the "Family Holiday crowd" disarm the sheriff's deputies at gunpoint and "ended up tearing off the sheriff's clothes and beating him quite badly". But at the same time, she noted that for all the fury and violence of the Farm Holiday movement that the prevailing mood was still apathy, writing: "I was told in Bismarck that in the country I visited this afternoon I would