Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty window - Holcomb bank. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. ![]() After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. Not that there's much to see - simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. The land is fla t, and th e vie ws are awe som ely extensive horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. ![]() ![]() The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch- hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and hig h-h eel ed boo ts wit h poi nte d toe s. The Last To See Them Alive The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West.
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