Cimarron by Edna Ferber

Long before the end of that first nightmarish day in Osage, Sabra had confronted her husband with blazing eyes. "I won't bring up my boy in a town like this!"

It had been a night and a day fantastic with untoward happenings. Their wagons had rumbled wearily down the broad main street of the settlement -- a raw gash in the prairie. All about, on either side, were wooden shacks, and Indians and dried mud and hitching posts and dogs and crude wagons like their own. It looked like pictures Sabra had seen of California in '49. They had supped on ham and eggs, fried potatoes, and muddy coffee in a place labeled Ice Cream and Oyster Parlor. They spent that first night in a rooming house above one of the score of saloons that enlivened the main street -- Pawhuska Avenue, it was called. It was a longish street, for the Osage town settlers seemed to have felt the need of huddling together for company in this wilderness. The street stopped abruptly at either end and became suddenly prairie.