Every year we broke some prairie, and our cultivated land increased.  By the fall of 1857, my little cottonwood trees showed up in a pretty grove of green for a distance of two or three miles, and were ten to fifteen feet high:  so I could lie in the shade of the trees I had planted.

But if the trees flourished, the community did not.  The panic of 1857 came on in the summer and fall; but we knew nothing, out in our little cabins, of the excitement in the cities, the throngs on Wall Street and in Philadelphia, the closing banks, the almost universal bankruptcy of the country.  It all came from land speculation.  According to what they said, there was more land then laid out in town-sites in Kansas than in all the cities and towns of the settled parts of the country.  In Iowa there were town-sites along all the streams and scattered all over the prairies.  Everybody was in debt, in the business world, and when land stopped growing in value, sales stopped, and then the day of reckoning came.  All financial panics come from land speculation.  Show me a way to keep land from advancing in value, and I will tell you how to prevent financial panics[14].

[14] The author, when his attention is called to the Mississippi Bubble, insists that it was nothing more nor less than betting on the land development of a great new region.  As to the “Tulipomania” which once created a small panic in Holland, he insists that such a fool notion can not often occur, and never can have wide-spread results like a genuine financial panic.  In which the editor is inclined to believe the best economists will agree with, him.—­G.v.d.M.

But, though we knew nothing about this general wreck and ruin back east, we knew that we were miserably poor.  In the winter of 1857-8 Magnus and I were beggarly ragged and so short of fuel and bedding that he came over and stayed with me, so that we could get along with one bed and one fire.  My buffalo robes were the things that kept us warm, those howling nights, or when it was so still that we could hear the ice crack in the creek eighty rods off.  My wife has always said that Magnus and I holed up in our den like wild animals, and sometimes like a certain domestic one.  But what with Magnus and the fiddle and his stories of Norway and mine of the canal we amused ourselves pretty well and got along without baths.  My cows, and the chickens, and our vegetables and potatoes, and our white and buckwheat flour and the corn-meal mush and johnny-cake kept us fat, and I entirely outgrew my best suit, so that I put it on for every day, and burst it at most of the seams in a week.

2

I was sorry for the people in the towns, and sold most of my eggs, fowls, butter, cream and milk on credit:  and though Virginia and I were not on good terms and I never went to see her any more; and though Grandma Thorndyke was, I felt sure, trying to get Virginia’s mind fixed on a better match, like Bob Wade or Paul Holbrook, I used to take eggs, butter, milk or flour to the elder’s family almost every time I went to town:  and when the weather was warm enough so that they would not freeze, I took potatoes, turnips, and sometimes some cabbage for a boiled dinner, with a piece of pork to go with it.