[CHAPTER IV]
Iowa and Her People
"In all that is good Iowa affords the best."
Thus a few years ago wrote one of our state's most distinguished citizens.[C]
And his utterance found a ready response in the hearts of the men and women of our fair land, so that today the expression is an axiom. Every Iowan believes firmly in its truth.
There is no fairer land under the benevolent sun. Here plenty reigns, and prosperity has her home. Cheerful industry has redeemed the land that once was the home of wild animals and untamed savages. Iowa's waving corn fields; her meadows of luxuriant grass; her hills dotted with magnificent houses and barns; her landscape made more picturesque by the presence of fattening herds; her school houses and higher centers of learning on almost every hill; the smoke from the busy industries of her thriving cities and villages; her soil the most fertile of any known; her waste land less than that of any other equal area; her percentage of illiteracy the lowest; her mineral resources abundant; her numerous streams affording water power inferior to none—all these things and more rightly tend to make Iowans proud of their State.
Now, as a half century ago, Iowa offers "to the lawloving and the temperate; to the enterprising, the vigorous, the ambitious, a home and a field worthy of their noblest efforts."[D] She throws open to the world her exhaustless stores of wealth, her golden opportunities, and says: "Behold your reward."
N. H. Parker, writing more than a half century ago, drew this glowing picture of the future Iowa: