and hemlock, but chiefly oak and maple, with scatterings of 

 elm, walnut, birch and hickory, and a bit of tamarack in the 

 low wet spots. Here and there were stretches where the 

 forests were thin, even though the soil was fertile "open- 

 ings" the first settlers called them. Generally the glacial 

 clay, gravel and sand subsoils were covered with a layer of 

 rich top-soil and a humus created by the rotting of leaves 

 and branches and fallen trees through many centuries. In 

 the openings and among the bottom lands were areas of rich 

 natural grasses. Game was then abundant; deer, foxes, 

 rabbits and some bears, muskrats, and beaver. The creeks 

 ran full and clear, with many a backwater pool, and were 

 filled with fish. When the surveyors of the Government 

 came to lay out the sections and the quarter-sections they 

 confirmed the reports of earlier explorers and settlers that 

 it was a rich Valley, and soon the word spread to the East. 

 Then came the permanent settlers to clear the land and 

 establish their homes. 



The mode of livelihood which was established by the 

 settlers who soon took up all the land in the Valley was 

 natural and inevitable from the point of view of their genera- 

 tion. The old world as well as the new world needed food 

 and raw materials; and therefore these were crops which 

 provided the ready cash with which the farmer could buy 

 implements and other necessities, hire labor, and pay taxes. 

 The demand for cereals, meat and wool, and for eggs, butter 

 and cheese, created an incentive to clear the land as rapidly 

 as possible; and the demand for lumber with which to build 

 villages, and to construct agricultural implements, wagons, 

 buckboards, and other necessities of a newly settled country, 

 created a more direct incentive. For all of these crops there 

 were competing dealers in the village down at the foot of the 

 Valley there was not then a settlement at the Center 

 many of them proprietors of general stores and agents of im- 

 plement manufacturers, ready to barter with the farmers for 

 every kind of product and to pay hard cash for any balance 

 due. The Valley became a prosperous middle-western farm- 

 ing community, based on mixed agriculture, the backbone 

 of the country half to a quarter century ago. In the presence 



