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.

The sod grew too mature for breaking after the first of June, and not enough time was left for it to rot during the summer; and my cows left with Mr. Westervelt were on my mind; so I stopped the plow and after Magnus and I had built my house and made a lot of hay in the marsh, I began to think of going back after my live stock.  I planned to travel light with one span to Westervelt’s, pick up another yoke of cows, go on to Dubuque for a load of freight for Monterey Centre, and come back, bringing the rest of my herd with me on the return.  When I went to “the Centre,” as we called it, I waited until I saw Grandma Thorndyke go down to the store, and then tapped at their door.  I thought they might want me to bring them something.  They were living in a little house by the public square, where the great sugar maples stand now.  These trees were then little beanpoles with tufts of twigs at the tops.