Dirty Digs

After recalling a sod house he’d seen at one of the stage stations between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Carson City, Nevada, in 1861, Mark Twain wrote in Roughing It, “It was the first time we had ever seen a man’s front yard on top of his house.” Livestock often grazed atop sod houses, and women sometimes seeded flowers on the roofs to make their dirt homes prettier, but the romance ended there. Sod roofs leaked during rainstorms and occasionally caved in, while rats and snakes frequen