If we first settlers in Iowa had possessed the sense the Lord gives to most, we could have built better and warmer, and prettier houses than the ones we put up, of the prairie sod which we ripped up in long black ribbons of earth; but we all were from lands of forests, and it took a generation to teach our prairie pioneers that a sod house is a good house. I never saw any until the last of Iowa was settling up, out in the northwestern part of the state, in Lyon, Sioux and Clay Counties.
All that summer, every wagon and draught animal in Monterey County was engaged in hauling lumber--some of it such poor stuff as basswood sawed in little sawmills along the rivers; and it was not until in the 'eighties that the popular song, The Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim proved two things--that the American pioneer had learned to build with something besides timber, and that the Homestead Law had come into effect. What Magnus and I were doing, all the settlers on the Monterey County farms were doing--raising sod corn and potatoes and buckwheat and turnips, preparing shelter for the winter, and wondering what they would do for fuel. Magnus helped me and I helped him.
A lot is said nowadays about the Americanization of the foreigner; but the only thing that will do the thing is to work with the foreigner, as I worked with Magnus--let him help me, and be active in helping him. The Americanization motto is, "Look upon the foreigner as an equal. Help him. Let him help you. Make each other's problems mutual problems--and then he is no longer a foreigner." When Magnus Thorkelson came back on foot across the prairie from Monterey Centre, to lay his hand on the head of that weeping boy alone on the prairie, and to offer to live with him and help him, his English was good enough for me, and to me he was as fully naturalized as if all the judges in the world had made him lift his hand while he swore to support the Constitution of the United States and of the State of Iowa. He was a good enough American for Jacobus Teunis Vandemark.
CHAPTER XIII
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.