I will take for one type a man whom we met last summer in the country. We had driven for miles along the country roads in search of a certain little glen where the maiden-hair ferns grew waist-high and as broad across as the fronds of palms, and having found it and filled our spring-wagon with the treasures, we set out to return home by another road. We lost our way, but did not regret it, as this mischance made known to us the most stately and graceful tree we had ever seen—one that was certainly worth half a day's ride to see. The road left the treeless uplands, where the sunshine reflected from the bright yellow stubble of the newly-cut wheat-fields beat against our faces with a steady glare, and dipped into a cool, green, shady hollow where cows cropped the rich grass or stood knee-deep in the water of a little stream. Well they might stand in quiet contentment: a king might have envied them their surroundings. Overhead rose a dozen or more of the tallest and finest elms we had ever seen, stretching their thick branches till they met and formed a canopy so dense that only a stray sunbeam or two pierced through and fell upon the smooth green sward. Peerless among them stood an elm of mighty girth and lofty height, its widely-stretching branches as large around, where they left the trunk, as a common tree, and clothed to the farthest twig with luxuriant foliage. And all up and down the mossy trunk and around the branches grew young twigs from a few inches to a foot or two in length, half hiding the shaggy bark with their tender green leaves. It was a combination of tree-majesty and grace that is rarely seen. In a tropical forest I have beheld a lofty tree covered thickly all over its trunk and branches with ferns and parasitic plants, but the sight, though beautiful, was suggestive of morbid, unnatural growth. This royal elm out of its own sap had clothed its trunk as with a thickly-twining vine. When, after gazing our fill, we drove reluctantly out of the shady green hollow into the sunshine, and began to climb a hill, we saw at the top a small house surrounded by fruit trees and shaded in front by a grape-arbor. On reaching it we stopped to ask our way of a man who sat in his shirt-sleeves near the front door, fanning himself with his straw hat. He seemed frank and inclined to talk, and asked us to stop and rest a while in the shade. We did so, and his wife brought us some fresh buttermilk to drink, the children gathering about to look at us as if our advent was the incident of the month. In conversation we learned that he was the owner of forty acres, which he devoted largely to the cultivation of small fruits. The land was paid for, with the exception of a mortgage of three hundred dollars, which he hoped to lift in a season or two if the yield was good.
"We're doing well now," he said, "but when we started, eight years ago, it was truly discouraging. There was no house on the place when we came here. We put up the room we now use as a kitchen, and lived in it for two years and a half. It was so small that it only held a bed, a table, a cook-stove and two or three chairs, and when the table was drawn out for meals my wife had to set the rocking-chair on the bed, because there wasn't room for it on the floor. She helped me on the farm the first year or two. We moved here late in the spring, and I only had time to get the sod broken before corn-planting time. My wife had a lame foot that spring, but I made her a sort of crutch-stilt, and with this she walked over the ground as I ploughed it, making holes in the earth by means of it and dropping in the corn. She also rode the reaper when our wheat was ripe the next year, and I followed, binding and stacking. She has helped me in many other ways on the farm, for she is as ambitious as I am to have a place free from debt which we can call our own. We added these two other rooms in the third year, and when we are out of debt and have money ahead we shall put up another addition: we shall need it as the children grow up. I have a nice lot of small fruit—strawberries, raspberries, currants, gooseberries—and besides these I sell every spring a great many early vegetables. The small fruits pay me more to the acre than anything else I could raise. There is a good market for them in the neighboring towns, and I seldom have to hire any help. My children do most of the picking."
It is only a bit of personal history, to be sure, but it affords an insight into the life of one who, like many others in this State, began with only his bare hands and habits of industry and economy for capital.
Another typical illustration is supplied by a man whose home we visited in the winter. His comfortable farm-house was overflowing with the good things of life: a piano and an organ stood in the parlor, and a well-filled bookcase in the sitting-room; a large bay-window was bright with flowering plants; and base-burner coal-stoves and double-paned windows mocked at the efforts of the wintry winds and kept perpetual summer within. In the large barn were farm-wagons, a carriage, a buggy, a sleigh—a vehicle for every purpose. The farmer invited us one morning to step into a large sled which stood at the door, and took us half a mile to his stock-yards. There we saw fat, sleek cattle by the dozen and fat hogs by the score, great cribs bursting with corn, a windmill pump and other conveniences for watering stock. Besides all these possessions this man owns two or three other good farms, and has money loaned on mortgages; in short, is worth about fifty thousand dollars, every cent of which he has gained by his own exertions in the last twenty years. He said: "When my father died and his estate was divided among his children, each of us received eighty-three dollars as his share. I resolved then that if thrift and energy could avail anything I would have more than that to leave to each of my children when I died. It has required constant hard work and shrewd planning, but I have gained my stake, and am not a very old man yet," passing his hand over his hair, which was thinly sprinkled with gray.
This man gave us a description of a tornado which passed over that portion of the State a number of years ago. It was shortly after he was married and while he was staying at his father-in-law's house. The whole family were away from home that day, and when they returned they found only the cellar. The house had been lifted from its foundation, and carried so far on the mighty wings of the hurricane that nothing pertaining to it was ever found except the rolling-pin and a few boards of the yellow-painted kitchen-floor. Of a new farm-wagon nothing remained but one tire, and that was flattened out straight. The trees that stood in the yard had been broken off at the surface of the ground. The grass lay stretched in the direction of the hurricane as if a flood of water had passed over it. Horses, cattle and human beings had been lifted and carried several rods through the air, then cast violently to earth again. Those who witnessed the course of the tornado said that it seemed to strike the ground, then go up in the air, passing harmlessly over a mile or two of country, then strike again, all the time whirling over and over, and occasionally casting out fragments of the spoils it had gathered up. After passing east to a point beyond the Mississippi it disappeared.
This part of Iowa has rich deposits of coal, and mining is a regular and important business. The coal-mines lying a few miles south of this place are the largest west of the Mississippi River. A thriving little town has grown up around them, composed chiefly of miners' cottages, stores and superintendents' dwellings. A creek winds through it whose banks are shaded by elms and carpeted in spring and early summer with prairie-flowers; and a range of wooded hills in whose depths the richest coal-deposits lie lends a picturesque aspect to the scene, and partly compensates for the dreary look of the town itself, the comfortless appearance of many of the miners' houses and the great heaps of slag and refuse coal at the mouth of the mines. Mules hitched to little cars serve to draw the coal out of several of the mines, but the largest one is provided with an engine, which, by means of an endless rope of twisted wire, pulls long trains of loaded cars out of the depths of the mine and up to a high platform above the railroad, whence the coal is pitched into the waiting cars beneath. Sixty-five railroad cars are sometimes loaded in one day from this single mine. The coal is soft coal, and is sold by retail at from six to seven cents a bushel.
One April day, when the woods were white and pink with the bloom of the wild plum and crab trees and the ground was blue with violets, we rode over to this place, and, hitching our horses to some trees growing over the principal mine, we descended to the entrance. A miner, an intelligent middle-aged man who was off work just then, volunteered to be our guide, and after providing each of us with a little oil lamp like the one he wore in his hat-brim, he led us into the dark opening that yawned in the hillside. The passage was six or seven feet wide, and so low that we could not stand erect. Under our feet was the narrow track, the space between the ties being slippery with mud: over our heads and on either hand were walls of rock, with a thick vein of coal running through them, braced every few feet with heavy timbers. The track began to descend, and soon we lost sight of the daylight and had to depend entirely on the feeble glimmer of our lamps. We occasionally came to smooth-plastered spaces in the walls, the closed-up mouths of old side-tunnels, and placing our hands upon them felt that they were warm. Fires were raging in the abandoned galleries, but, being shut away from the air and from access to the main tunnel, they were not dangerous. The dangers usually dreaded by the miners are the falling of heavy masses of earth and rock from the roof of the gallery and the sudden flow of water into the mine from some of the secret sources in the hillside. After penetrating about a quarter of a mile into the mine and descending one hundred and twenty feet, we reached the end of the main tunnel and saw the great wheel, fixed in the solid rock, on which the endless steel rope turned. A train of loaded cars had passed out just before we entered the mine, and on a switch near the end of the track stood another train of empty cars. The air thus far on our dark journey had been cool and good, for the main tunnel was ventilated by means of air-shafts that pierced the hillside to the daylight above; but now our guide opened the door of what seemed a subterranean dungeon, closed it behind us when we had passed through, lifted a heavy curtain that hung before us, and ushered us into a branch-tunnel where the air was hot and stifling and heavy with the fumes of powder. At the farther end we saw tiny specks of light moving about. As we neared them we found that they were lamps fastened in the hat-bands of the miners at work in this distant tunnel—literally, "the bowels of the earth." Some were using picks and shovels, others were drilling holes in the solid coal and putting in blasts of gunpowder. When these blasts were fired a subterranean thunder shook the place: it seemed as if the hill were falling in upon us. Little cars stood upon the track partly filled with coal, and mules were hitched to them. The forms of these animals loomed large and dark in the dim light: they seemed like some monsters of a previous geologic age. The men themselves, blackened with coal and grimy with powder-smoke, might have seemed like gnomes or trolls had we not seen their homes in the plain, familiar sunlight above, and known that they were working for daily bread for themselves and families. They are paid according to the amount of coal they dig. Some have earned as high as one hundred and thirty dollars a month, but half that sum would be nearer the average.
As we left this shaft and came back into the main tunnel we saw a miner sitting by the track with his small tin bucket open. It was noon and he was eating his dinner. It might just as well have been midnight, so dense was the darkness. We seemed to have been an uncomputable time in the depths, yet, glancing at the bunch of wild flowers in my belt, I saw that they were only beginning to wilt. Did poor Proserpine have the same feeling when she was ravished from the sunshine and the green and flowery earth and carried into the dark underground kingdom of Pluto? Remembering her fate, I whispered to my companion, "We will not eat anything while here—no, not so much as one pomegranate-seed."
There are many smaller coal-mines in this vicinity—hardly a hillside but has a dark doorway leading into it—but they are not all worked regularly or by more than a few hands.
On the road leading from town to the Skunk River one has glimpses of another industry. Limekilns, with uncouth signs announcing lime for sale at twenty-five cents a bushel, thrust themselves almost into the road, and the cabins or neatly-whitewashed board huts of the lime-burners border the way. Some have grass-plots and mounds of flowers around them: others are without ornament, if we except the children with blue eyes, red cheeks and hair like corn-silk that hang on the fence and watch us ride by.