Chapter 14

THE PLOW WEDS THE SOD

The next day was a wedding-day--the marriage morning of the plow and the sod. It marked the beginning of the subdual of that wonderful wild prairie of Vandemark Township and the Vandemark farm. No more fruitful espousal ever took place than that--when the polished steel of my new breaking plow was embraced by the black soil with its lovely fell of greenery. Up to that fateful moment, the prairie of the farm and of the township had been virgin sod; but now it bowed its neck to the yoke of wedlock. Nothing like it takes place any more; for the sod of the meadows and pastures is quite a different thing from the untouched skin of the original earth. Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, the most epochal, and most hopeful, and as I look back at it, in one way the most pathetic thing man ever did, for in it, one of the loveliest things ever created began to come to its predestined end.

The plow itself was long, low, and yacht-like in form; a curved blade of polished steel. The plowman walked behind it in a clean new path, sheared as smooth as a concrete pavement, with not a lump of crumbled earth under his feet--a cool, moist, black path of richness. The furrow-slice was a long, almost unbroken ribbon of turf, each one laid smoothly against the former strand, and under it lay crumpled and crushed the layer of grass and flowers. The plow-point was long and tapering, like the prow of a clipper, and ran far out under the beam, and above it was the rolling colter, a circular blade of steel, which cut the edge of the furrow as cleanly as cheese. The lay of the plow, filed sharp at every round, lay flat, and clove the slice neatly from the bosom of earth where it had lain from the beginning of time. As the team steadily pulled the machine along, I heard a curious thrilling sound as the knife went through the roots, a sort of murmuring as of protest at this violation--and once in a while, the whole engine, and the arms of the plowman also, felt a jar, like that of a ship striking a hidden rock, as the share cut through a red-root--a stout root of wood, like red cedar or mahogany, sometimes as large as one's arm, topped with a clump of tough twigs with clusters of pretty whitish blossoms.

As I looked back at the results of my day's work, my spirits rose; for in the East, a man might have worked all summer long to clear as much land as I had prepared for a crop on that first day. This morning it had been wilderness; now it was a field--a field in which Magnus Thorkelson had planted corn, by the simple process of cutting through the sods with an ax, and dropping in each opening thus made three kernels of corn. Surely this was a new world! Surely, this was a world in which a man with the will to do might make something of himself. No waiting for the long processes by which the forests were reclaimed; but a new world with new processes, new neighbors, new ideas, new opportunities, new victories easily gained.

Not so easy, Jacobus! In the first place, we Iowa pioneers so ignorant of our opportunities that we hauled timber a hundred miles with which to build our houses, when that black sod would have made us better ones, were also so foolish as to waste a whole year of the time of that land which panted to produce. To be sure, we grew some sod-corn, and some sod-potatoes, and sowed some turnips and buckwheat on the new breaking; but after my hair was gray, I found out, for the first time as we all did, that a fine crop of flax might have been grown that first year. Dakota taught us that. But the farmer of old was inured to waiting--and so we waited until another spring for the sod to rot, and in the meantime, it grew great crops of tumble-weeds, which in the fall raced over the plain like scurrying scared wolves, piling up in brown mountains against every obstacle, and in every hole. If we had only known these simple things, what would it have saved us! But skill grows slowly. We were the first prairie generation bred of a line of foresters, and were a little like the fools that came to Virginia and Plymouth Colony, who starved in a country filled with food. How many fool things are we doing now, I wonder, to cause posterity to laugh, as foolish as the dying of Sir John Franklin in a land where Stefansson grew fat; many, I guess, as foolish as we did when Magnus Thorkelson and I were Vandemark Township.

The sod grew too mature for breaking after the first of June, and not enough time was left for it to rot during the summer; and my cows left with Mr. Westervelt were on my mind; so I stopped the plow and after Magnus and I had built my house and made a lot of hay in the marsh, I began to think of going back after my live stock. I planned to travel light with one span to Westervelt's, pick up another yoke of cows, go on to Dubuque for a load of freight for Monterey Centre, and come back, bringing the rest of my herd with me on the return. When I went to "the Centre," as we called it, I waited until I saw Grandma Thorndyke go down to the store, and then tapped at their door. I thought they might want me to bring them something. They were living in a little house by the public square, where the great sugar maples stand now. These trees were then little beanpoles with tufts of twigs at the tops.

2

Virginia Royall came to the door, as I sort of suspected she might. At first she started back as if she hardly knew me. Maybe she didn't; for Magnus Thorkelson had got me to shaving, and with all that gosling's down off my face, I suppose I looked older and more man-like than before. So she took a long look at me, and then ran to me and took both my hands in hers and pressed them--pressed them so that I remembered it always.

"Why, Teunis," she cried, "is it you? I thought I was never going to see you again!"

"Yes," I said, "it's me--it's me. I came--" and then I stopped, bogged down.

"You came to see me," she said, "and I think you've waited long enough. Only three friends in the world, you, and Mrs. Thorndyke, and Mr. Thorndyke--and you off there on the prairie all these weeks and never came to see me--or us! Tell me about the farm, and the cows, and the new house--I've heard of it--and your foreigner friend, and all about it. Have you any little calves?"

I was able to report that Spot, the heifer that we had such a time driving, had a little calf that was going to look just like its mother; and then I described to her the section of land--all but a little of it down in Hell Slew; and how I hoped to buy a piece across the line so as to have a real farm. Pretty soon we were talking just as we used to talk back there east of Waterloo.

"I came to see you and Elder Thorndyke and his wife," I said, "because I'm going back to Dubuque to get a load of freight, and I thought I might bring something for you."

"Oh," said she, "take me with you, Teunis, take me with you!"

"Could you go?" I asked, my heart in my mouth.

"No, oh, no!" she said. "There's nobody in Kentucky for me to go to; and I haven't any money to pay my way with anyhow. I am alone in the world, Teunis, except for you and my new father and mother--and I'm afraid they are pretty poor, Teunis, to feed and clothe a big girl like me!"

"How much money would it take?" I asked. "I guess I could raise it for you, Virginia."

"You're a nice boy, Teunis," she said, with tears in her eyes, "and I know how well you like money, too; but there's nobody left there. I'm very lonely--but I'm as well off here as anywhere. I'd just like to go with you, though, for when I'm with you I feel so--so safe."

"Safe?" said I. "Why aren't you safe here? Is any one threatening you? Has Buckner Gowdy been around here? Just tell me if he bothers you, and I'll--I'll--"

"Well," said she, "he came here and claimed me from Mr. Thorndyke. He said I was an infant--what do you think of that?--an infant--in law; and that he is my guardian. And a lawyer named Creede, came and talked about his right, not he said by consanguinity, but affinity, whatever that is--"

"I know Mr. Creede," said I. "He rode with me for two or three days. I don't believe he'll wrong any one."

"Mrs. Thorndyke told them to try their affinity plan if they dared, and she'd show them that they couldn't drag a poor orphan away from her friends against her will. And I hung to her, and I cried, and said I'd kill myself before I'd go with him; and that man"--meaning Gowdy--"tried to talk sweet and affectionate and brotherly to me, and I hid my face in Mrs. Thorndyke's bosom--and Mr. Creede looked as if he were sick of his case, and told that man that he would like further consultation with him before proceeding further--and they went away. But every time I see that man he acts as if he wanted to talk with me, and smiles at me--but I won't look at him. Oh, why can't they all be good like you, Teunis?"

Then she told me that I looked a lot better when I shaved--at which I blushed like everything, and this seemed to tickle her very much. Then she asked if I wasn't surprised when she called me Teunis. She had thought a good deal over it, she said, and she couldn't, couldn't like the name of Jacob, or Jake; but Teunis was a quality name. Didn't I think I'd like it if I changed my way of writing my name to J. Teunis Vandemark?

"I like to have you call me Teunis," I said; "but I wouldn't like to have any one else do it. I like to have you have a name to call me by that nobody else uses."

"That's a very gallant speech," she said, blushing--and I vow, I didn't know what gallant meant, and was a little flustered for fear her blushes were called out by something shady.

"Besides," I said, "I have always heard that nobody but a dandy ever parts his name or his hair in the middle!"

"Rubbish!" said she. "My father's name was A. Fletcher Royall, and he was a big strong man, every inch of him. I reckon, though, that the customs are different in the North. Then you won't take me with you, and go back by way of our grove, and--"

And just then Elder Thorndyke came in, and we wished that Mrs. Thorndyke would come to tell what I should bring from Dubuque. He told me in the meantime, about his plans for building a church, and how he was teaching Virginia, so that she could be a teacher herself when she was old enough.

"We'll be filling this country with schools, soon," he said, "and they'll want nice teachers like Virginia."

"Won't that be fine?" asked Virginia. "I just love children. I play with dolls now--a little. And then I can do something to repay my new father and mother for all they are doing for me. And you must come to church, Teunis."

"Virginia says," said the elder, "that you have a good voice. I wish you'd come and help out with the singing."

"Oh, I can't sing," I demurred; "but I'd like to come. I will come, when I get back."

"Yes, you can sing," said Virginia. "Here's a song he taught me back on the prairie:

"'Down the river, O down the river, O down the river we go-o-o; Down the river, O down the river, O down the Ohio-o-o!

"'The river was up, the channel was deep, the wind was steady and strong, The waves they dashed from shore to shore as we went sailing along--

"'Down the river, O down the river, O down the river we go-o-o; Down the river, O down the river, O down the Ohio-o-o!'"

"I think you learned a good deal--for one day," said Mrs. Thorndyke, coming in. "How do you do, Jacob? I'm glad to see you."

Thus she again put forth her theory that Virginia and I had been together only one day. It is what N.V. Creede called, when I told him of it years afterward, "a legal fiction which for purposes of pleading was incontrovertible."

The river of immigration was still flowing west over the Ridge Road, quite as strong as earlier in the season, and swollen by the stream of traffic setting to and from the settlements for freight. People I met told me that the railroad was building into Dubuque--or at least to the river at Dunlieth. I met loads of lumber which were going out for Buck Gowdy's big house away out in the middle of his great estate; and other loads for Lithopolis, where Judge Stone was making his struggle to build up a rival to Monterey Centre. I reached Dubuque on the seventeenth of July, and put up at a tavern down near the river, where they had room for my stock; and learned that the next day the first train would arrive at Dunlieth, and there was to be a great celebration.

It was the greatest day Dubuque had ever seen, they told me, with cannon fired from the bluff at sunrise, a long parade, much speech-making, and a lot of wild drunkenness. The boatmen from the river boats started in to lick every railroad man they met, and as far as I could see, did so in ninety per cent. of the cases; but in the midst of a fight in which all my canal experiences were in a fair way to be outdone, a woman came into the crowd leading four little crying children. She asked our attention while she explained that their father had had his hand blown off when the salute was fired in the morning, and asked us if we felt like giving something to him to enable him to keep a roof over these little ones. The fight stopped, and we all threw money on the ground in the ring.

There were bridges connecting the main island with the business part of the city, and lines of hacks and carts running from the main part of the town to deep water. There were from four to six boats a day on the river. Lead was the main item of freight, although the first tricklings of the great flood of Iowa and Illinois wheat were beginning to run the metal a close second. To show what an event it was, I need only say that there were delegates at the celebration from as far east as Cleveland; and folks said that a ferry was to be built to bring the railway trains into Dubuque. And the best of all these dreams was, that they came true; and we were before many years freed of the great burden of coming so far to market.

During the next winter the word came to us that the railroad--another one--had crept as far out into the state as Iowa City, and when the freighting season of 1856 opened up, we swung off to the railhead there. Soon, however, the road was at Manchester, then at Waterloo, then at Cedar Falls, and before many years the Iowa Central came up from the south clear to Mason City, and the days of long-distance freighting were over for most of the state; which is now better provided with railways, I suppose, than any other agricultural region in the world.

I couldn't then foresee any such thing, however. They talk of the far-sighted pioneers; but as far as I was concerned I didn't know B from a bull's foot in this business of the progress of the country. I whoa-hawed and gee-upped my way back to Monterey Centre, thinking how great a disadvantage it would be always to have to wagon it back and forth to the river--with the building of the railway into Dunlieth that year right before my face and eyes.

3

I found Magnus Thorkelson surrounded by a group of people arguing with him about something; and Magnus in a dreadful pucker to know what to do. In one group were Judge Horace Stone, N.V. Creede and Forrest Bushyager, then a middle-aged man, and an active young fellow of twenty-five or so named Dick McGill, afterward for many years the editor of the Monterey Centre _Journal_. These had a petition asking that the county-seat be located at Lithopolis, Judge Stone's new town, and they wanted Magnus to sign it. I suppose he would have done so, if it had not been for the other delegation, consisting of Henderson L. Burns and Doctor Bliven, who had another petition asking for the establishment of the county-seat permanently "at its present site," Monterey Centre. They took me into the confabulation as soon as I weighed anchor in front of the house; and just as they had begun to pour their arguments into me they were joined by another man, who drove up in a two-seated democrat wagon drawn by a fine team of black horses, and in the back seat I saw a man and woman sitting. I thought the man looked like Elder Thorndyke; but the woman's face was turned away from me, and I did not recognize her at first. She had on a new calico dress that I hadn't seen before. It was Virginia.

The man who got out and joined the group was a red-faced, hard-visaged man of about fifty, dressed in black broadcloth, and wearing a beaver hat. He had a black silk cravat tied about a standing collar, with high points that rolled out in front, and he looked rich and domineering. He was ever afterward a big man in Monterey County, and always went by the name of Governor Wade, because he was a candidate for governor two or three times. He was the owner of a big tract of land over to the southwest, next to the Gowdy farm the largest in the county. He came striding over to us as if whatever he said was the end of the law. With him and Henderson L. and N.V. Creede pitching into a leatherhead like me, no wonder I did not recognize Virginia in her new dress; I was in such a stew that I hardly knew which end my head was on.

Each side seemed to want to impress me with the fact that in signing one or the other of those petitions I had come to the parting of the ways. They did not say much about what was best for the county, but bore down on the fact that the way I lined up on that great question would make all the difference in the world with me. Each tried to make me think that I should always be an outsider and a maverick if I didn't stand with his crowd.

"Why," said N.V., "I feel sure that it won't take you long to make up your mind. This little group of men we have here," pointing to Henderson L. and Governor Wade, "are the County Ring that's trying to get this new county in their clutches--the County Ring!"

This made a little grain of an impression on me; and it was the first time I had ever heard the expression so common in local history "the County Ring." I looked at Governor Wade to see what he would say to it. His face grew redder, and he laughed as if Creede were not worth noticing; but he noticed him for all that.

"Young man," said he, "or young men, I should say, both of you want to be somebody in this new community. Monterey Centre represents already, the brains--"

"Like a dollar sign," said Dick McGill, "it represents it, but it hasn't any."

"--the brains," went on Governor Wade, glaring at him, "the culture, the progress and the wealth--"

"That they hope to steal," put in Dick McGill.

"--the wealth," went on the Governor, who hated to be interrupted, "of this Gem of the Prairies, Monterey County. Don't make the mistake, which you can never correct, of taking sides with this little gang of town-site sharks led by my good friend Judge Stone."

Here was another word which I was to hear pretty often in county politics--Gang. One crowd was called a Ring; the other a Gang, I looked at N.V. to see how wrathy he must be, but he only smiled sarcastically, as I have often seen him do in court; and shaking his head at me waved his hand as if putting Governor Wade quite off the map. Just then my team began acting up--they had not been unhitched and were thirsty and hungry; and I went over to straighten them out, leaving the Ring and the Gang laboring with Magnus, who was sweating freely--and then I went over to speak with the elder.

"How do you do, Teunis?" said Virginia very sweetly. "You'll sign our petition, won't you?"

"We don't want to influence your judgment," said the elder, "but I wanted to say to you that if the county-seat remains at Monterey Centre, it will be a great thing for the religious work which under God I hope to do. It will give me a parish. I should like to urge that upon you."

"Do you want me to sign it?" I asked him, looking at Virginia.

"Yes," said he, "if you have no objection."

"Please do!" said Virginia. "I know you can't have any objection."

I turned on my heel, went back to Governor Wade, and signed the petition for Monterey Centre; and then Magnus Thorkelson did the same. Then we both signed another petition carried by both parties, asking that an election be called by the judge of the county south which had jurisdiction over us, for the election of officers. And just as I had expected one side to begin crowing over the other, and I had decided that there would be a fight, both crowds jumped into their rigs and went off over the prairie, very good naturedly it seemed to me, after the next settler.

"Jake," said N.V., as they turned their buggy around, "you'll make some woman a damned good husband, some day!" and he took off his hat very politely to Virginia, who blushed as red as the reddest rose then blooming on the prairie.

That was the way counties were organized in Iowa. It is worth remembering because it was the birth of self-government. The people made their counties and their villages and their townships as they made their farms and houses and granaries. Everybody was invited to take part--and it was not until long afterward that I confessed to Magnus that I had never once thought when I signed those petitions that I was not yet a voter; and then he was frightened to realize that he was not either. He had not yet been naturalized. The only man in the county known to me who took no interest in the contest was Buck Gowdy. When Judge Stone asked him why, he said he didn't give a damn. There was too much government for him there already, he said.

We did get the election called, and after we had elected our officers there was no county-seat for them to dwell in; so that county judge off to the south appointed a commission to locate the county-seat, which after driving over the country a good deal and drinking a lot of whisky, according to Dick McGill, made Monterey Centre the county town, which it still remains. The Lithopolis people gained one victory--they elected Judge Horace Stone County Treasurer. Within a month N.V. Creede had opened a law office in Monterey Centre, Dick McGill had begun the publication of the Monterey Centre _Journal_ of fragrant memory, Lithopolis began to advertise its stone quarries, and Grizzly Reed, an old California prospector, who had had his ear torn off by a bear out in the mountains, began prospecting for gold along the creek, and talking mysteriously. The sale of lots in Lithopolis went on faster than ever.