"Why, of course," said I, "I'm for freedom. That's why I'm going out on the prairies."
"Prairies!" said old Evans. "Prairies! What do you expect to do on the prairies?"
"Farm," I answered.
"All these folks that are rushing to the prairies," said the old man, "will starve out and come back. God makes trees grow to show men where the good land is. I read history, and there's no country that's good for anything, except where men have cut the trees, niggered off the logs, grubbed out the stumps, and made fields of it--and if there are stones, it's all the better. 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,' said God to Adam, and when you go to the prairies where it's all ready for the plow, you are trying to dodge God's curse on our first parents. You won't prosper. It stands to reason that any land that is good will grow trees."
"Some of this farm was prairie," put in Preston, "and I don't see but it's just as good as the rest."
"It was all openings," replied Evans. "The trees was here once, and got killed by the fires, or somehow. It was all woods once."
"You cut down trees to make land grow grass," said Thatcher. "I should think that God must have meant grass to be the sign of good ground."
"Isn't the sweat of your face just as plenty when you delve in the prairies?" asked Dunlap.
"You fly in the face of God's decree, and run against His manifest warning when you try to make a prairie into a farm," said Evans. "You'll see!"
"Sold again, and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!" was the ditty that ran through my head as I heard this. Old man Evans' way of looking at the matter seemed reasonable to my cautious mind; and, anyhow, when a man has grown old he knows many things that he can give no good reason for. I have always found that the well-educated fellow with a deep-sounding and plausible philosophy that runs against the teachings of experience, is likely, especially in farming, to make a failure when he might have saved himself by doing as the old settlers do, who won't answer his arguments but make a good living just the same, while the new-fangled practises send their followers to the poor-house. At that moment, I would have traded my Iowa farm for any good piece of land covered with trees. But Dunlap and Thatcher had something else to talk to me about. They were for the prairies, especially the prairies of Kansas.