So I went on-toward the goal of all my ambitions, my square mile of Iowa land, steered by Henderson L. Burns, who, between shooting prairie chickens, upland plover and sickle-billed curlew, guided me toward my goal by pointing out lone boulders, and the mounds in front of the dens of prairie wolves and badgers.  We went on for six miles, and finally came to a place where the land slopes down in what is a pretty steep hill for Iowa, to a level bottom more than a mile across, at the farther side of which the land again rises to the general level of the country in another slope, matching the one on the brow of which we halted.  The general course of the two hills is easterly and westerly, and we stood on the southern side of the broad flat valley.

3

As I write, I can look out over it.  The drainage of the flat now runs off through a great open ditch which I combined with my neighbors to have dredged through by a floating dredge in 1897.  The barge set in two miles above me, and after it had dug itself down so as to get water in which to float, it worked its way down to the river eight miles away.  The line of this ditch is now marked by a fringe of trees; but in 1855, nothing broke the surface of the sea of grass except a few clumps of plum trees and willows at the foot of the opposite slope, and here and there along the line of the present ditch, there were ponds of open water, patches of cattails, and the tent-like roofs of muskrat-houses.  I had learned enough of the prairies to see that this would be a miry place to cross, if a crossing had to be made; so I waited for Henderson L. to come up and tell me how to steer my course.

“This is Hell Slew,” said he as he came up.  “But I guess we won’t have to cross.  Le’s see; le’s see!  Yes, here we are.”

He looked at his memorandum of the description of my land, looked about him, drove off a mile south and came back, finally put his horse down the hill to the base of it, and out a hundred yards in the waving grass that made early hay for the town for fifteen years, he found the corner stake driven by the government surveyors, and beckoned for me to come down.

“This is the southeast corner of your land,” said he.  “Looks like a mighty good place for a man with as good a shotgun as that—­ducks and geese the year round!”

“Where are the other corners?” I asked.

“That’s to be determined,” he answered.

To determine it, he tied his handkerchief about the felly of his buggy wheel, held a pocket compass in his left hand to drive by, picked out a tall rosin-weed to mark the course for me, and counted the times the handkerchief went round as the buggy traveled on.  He knew how many turns made a mile.  The horse’s hoofs sucked in the wet sod as we got farther out into the marsh, and then the ground rose a little and we went up over a headland that juts out into the marsh; then we went down into the slew again, and finally stopped in a miry place where there was a flowing spring with tall yellow lady’s-slippers and catkined willows growing around it.  After a few minutes of looking about, Burns found my southwest corner.  We made back to the edge of the slope, and Henderson L. looked off to the north in despair.