“Money is a trifle tight just now,” said an Iowa banker. This was last September. “You see, at this time of year, the farm labourers cause a drain on the currency by keeping their wages in their pockets.” This surprising fact did not seem surprising to the banker. He was himself bred on the soil—the son of a farm-hand who had become a rich farmer. But to the financiers of Europe, what an incredible thing is this—that the wages of the farm-labourers should sway the money market up and down.
The pride of Iowa is Des Moines, a city of farm-bred people. It is so young that some of its old men remember when wolf-hunting was good where its one skyscraper stands to-day. It has no ancient history and no souvenirs. A little while ago a lot of industrious people came here poor, and now they are prosperous and still busy—that is the story of Des Moines in a sentence.
In the main hall of the five-domed Capitol at Des Moines is a life-sized painting of a prairie wagon, hauled by oxen. In such a rude conveyance as this most of the early settlers rolled into Iowa, at a gait of two miles an hour. But there are no prairie wagons now, nor oxen. Ten thousand miles of railway criss-cross the State, and make more profit in three months than all the railways of ancient India made last year.
Instead of being tax-ridden serfs, these Iowans pay the total self-governing cost of their Commonwealth by handing over the price of the summer’s hay. Instead of being the prey of money-lenders, they have made Des Moines the Hartford of the West, in which forty-two insurance companies carry a risk of half a billion. And so, in each one of its details, the story of these Corn Kings is staggering to a mere city-dweller, especially to anyone who has cold storage ideas about farmers.
Big Men, too, as well as big corn, are grown in Iowa. Here is a sample group—half educators and half statesmen—John B. Grinnell, Henry Smith Williams, Albert Shaw, Newell Dwight Hillis, Carl Snyder, Emerson Hough, Hamlin Garland, Senators Allison and Dolliver, Leslie M. Shaw, John A. Kasson, Horace Boies, Governor Albert B. Cummins and our Official Farmer—James Wilson. There are now fifteen hundred newspaper men in Iowa. (One of them ships seven carloads of magazines a month.) There are three hundred and fifty architects, two thousand engineers, five thousand doctors, three thousand bankers and brokers, and thirty thousand teachers.
These amazing changes have taken place within the memory of men and women who are now alive.
“I can remember when the first mowing-machine was made in our county,” said Governor Cummins, who is still far from being a man of years.
“I walked eight miles through the forest and sold eggs for three cents a dozen and butter for four cents a pound,” said John Cownie—a well-known figure at the Des Moines Capitol.
One short half-century, and here is the whole paraphernalia of a high civilisation—a fruitage which has usually required the long cultivation of a thousand years.
And Iowa is not a freak State. A traveller hears the same story—from ox-cart to automobile, in almost every region of the prairie West. The various States are only patches of one vast grassy plain where