THIRTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART XII 617 



lived upon the past six years, that the prior owner made no attempt to 

 farm other than the high land. He used what was known all over this 

 locality as the big slough for a pasture and it was very wet. 



If I remember rightly, I have been told that at one time forty-five or 

 fifty head of cattle were drowned in this pasture. You people remember 

 how day after day and month after month, for two long years, my teams 

 passed you upon the roads with load after load of tile from this town. 

 200 wagon loads of tile each year. Now if you should be traveling near 

 Center Point you would meet my teams hauling 200 wagon loads of grain 

 from this same frog pond slough to market and we are having lots of 

 fun doing so. I think I have a right to say that I am a successful farm- 

 er. I am raising two ears of corn where three years ago only sour slough 

 grass grew before which did not make even good rabbit pasture. 



Last spring was a very peculiar season. There was a super-abundance 

 of moisture in the soil and the land was exceedingly slow in drying out. 

 Several of my neighbors had their horses down trying to mud in their 

 oats upon untiled land. I had no such experience in seeding my oats. 



My men had plowed 140 acres for corn before Neighbor Smith on the 

 Wynan's farm could get into his fields and there is only the line fence 

 between our farms. I was discing before Mr. Kubic had turned a furrow 

 and our farms corner, and Joe Dvorak had one field eighty rods away 

 from my field that he never plowed at all and it grew up to weeds. 



Yes, I believe tiling pays. 



We have been educated to believe the Indian lived in a tepee of skins 

 and poles and roamed half naked through the forests in search of game 

 and scalps. 



But I read that at no time did more than one-half the red men of any 

 tribe take to the war path. These Indians whom we call savages, lived 

 in villages and towns, in houses made of logs and had tables and stools 

 and farmed after a fashion, the adjacent lands. 



After more than 100 years of national life we have scattered all through 

 our community farmers who have not advanced one whit more than the 

 Indian has, if they have kept pace with him, and the question is, what 

 shall we do with them? Shall we shoot them? We cannot legally do that 

 but we can eliminate them by supplanting them. 



We can do nothing with the suspicious, ignorant, hard-headed man that 

 has advanced but little in civilization. Our only hope is that we may 

 get hold of his children and inspire them so that when the old man has 

 been taken home to be with the angels, and out of the way of his children, 

 they may have a chance to improve. 



Our duty towards these children can be, in part, discharged by elimin- 

 ating from our schools much effete matter and substituting subjects in 

 which they can be interested, and this leads me to say, that while our 

 schools are good in a way, they are so far behind those of Germany, that 

 the Germans have us skinned a mile. 



In Germany a child starts to school at six years of age and goes for 

 eight years of twelve months each until he is fourteen years old, then 

 while he is yet young he commences to learn a trade, and when he is 

 grown he is ready for the duties of a man. 



