The ranch near Hinsdale was the last place that the Haverfields lived together as a family. While Percy and Pluma lived there, their older daughters Ruth and Edna Fern married and left home to establish households of their own, and their sons Lyman and Bob graduated high school and moved away to find their own life paths.

By 1937, Percy and Pluma had given up their dream of making a future on their Rock Creek farm. They left Hinsdale and went back to Saskatchewan to find a buyer for it. Lela remembered that they drove up to Regina to get passports so they could do the paperwork to move back to the United States. Her childhood friend and neighbor Lila (Dolly) Anderson remembered her first trip to a city was when she drove north with them on that errand. Dolly told Lela’s daughters Karen and Judy this story eighty years later when they met her in La Fleche, Saskatchewan.

Percy and Pluma had no firm plans but would follow Percy’s brother Burton to Emmett, Idaho, to see if they might find farm work there. Ruth was now settled in Fort Peck with Nathan Goodrich and their baby son Ronnie; Edna Fern was married to Ernest Anderson and living in Aylsham, Saskatchewan; Lyman was off to Western Montana College (now the University of Montana Western) in Dillon on a scholarship; Bob had joined the U.S. army after high school graduation in 1936. Only Lela was now with them as they ventured west to find a new home. They were victims of the drought and Depression of the 1930s as were thousands of others.

As a footnote, their neighbor Leonard Anderson bought their farm and later traded it to their son Boyd, Bob’s childhood friend. Both Leonard and Boyd ran sheep on the property and were able to make it sustainable that way, as sheep were able to get by on whatever scanty pasture the drought-stricken fields could provide.