We Move Again
One day there came into our home a strange man who spoke in a fashion new to me. He was a middle-aged rather formal individual, dressed in a rough gray suit, and father alluded to him privately as "that English duke." I didn't know exactly what he meant by this, but our visitor's talk gave me a vague notion of "the old country."
"My home," he said, "is near Manchester. I have come to try farming in the American wilderness."
He was kindly, and did his best to be democratic, but we children stood away from him, wondering what he was doing in our house. My mother disliked him from the start for as he took his seat at our dinner table, he drew from his pocket a case in which he carried a silver fork and spoon and a silver-handled knife. Our cutlery was not good enough for him!
Every family that we knew at that time used three-tined steel forks and my mother naturally resented the implied criticism of her table ware. I heard her say to my father, "If our ways don't suit your English friend he'd better go somewhere else for his meals."
This fastidious pioneer also carried a revolver, for he believed that having penetrated far into a dangerous country, he was in danger, and I am not at all sure but that he was right, for the Minnesota woods at this time were filled with horse-thieves and counterfeiters, and it was known that many of these landhunting Englishmen carried large sums of gold on their persons.
We resented our guest still more when we found that he was trying to buy our lovely farm and that father was already half-persuaded. We loved this farm. We loved the log house, and the oaks which sheltered it, and we especially valued the glorious spring and the plum trees which stood near it, but father was still dreaming of the free lands of the farther west, and early in March he sold to the Englishman and moved us all to a rented place some six miles directly west, in the township of Burr Oak.
This was but a temporary lodging, a kind of camping place, for no sooner were his fields seeded than he set forth once again with a covered wagon, eager to explore the open country to the north and west of us. The wood and prairie land of Winnesheik County did not satisfy him, although it seemed to me then, as it does now, the fulfillment of his vision, the realization of our song.
For several weeks he travelled through southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, always in search of the perfect farm, and when he returned, just before harvest, he was able to report that he had purchased a quarter section of "the best land in Mitchell County" and that after harvest we would all move again.
If my mother resented this third removal she made no comment which I can now recall. I suspect that she went rather willingly this time, for her brother David wrote that he had also located in Mitchell County, not two miles from the place my father had decided upon for our future home, and Samantha, her younger sister, had settled in Minnesota. The circle in Neshonoc seemed about to break up. A mighty spreading and shifting was going on all over the west, and no doubt my mother accepted her part in it without especial protest.