I've ssh'd into my EC2 instance and have the python script and .txt files I'm using on my local system.  What I'm trying to figure out is how to transfer the .py and .txt files to my instance and then run them there?  I've not even been able to install python on the instance yet
If your EC2 instance is running a linux OS, you can use the following command to install python:
sudo apt-get install python*.*
Where the * represents the version you want to install, such as 2.7 or 3.4. Then use the python command with the first argument as the location of the python file to run it.
How can I run a python script on an EC2 instance?