Millions in Tassel 139 



The roots of the corn did what their tools would not do. 

 They broke the tenacious prairie sod. Next year it was pos- 

 sible to put a plowshare into the ground and to drive a long 

 straight furrow. The earth that rippled away from the blade 

 was dark and rich and sweet to smell. 



Soon there were a sod hut and a cornfield where there had 

 been only prairie grass. Some day there would be a cluster of 

 farm buildings, a silo, a mill. Then a village with a school and 

 a church. Years later there was a railroad station and a post 

 office. And after that, many houses, gas-filling stations, a movie 

 theatre, Coca-Cola signs in Neon lights, beauty shoppes a 

 city. 



"It is not to our interest," cautious Thomas Jefferson had 

 said, "to cross the Mississippi for ages." Not even the Missis- 

 sippi could hold back the pressure of thousands of eager land 

 seekers. The Pembina caravans made the five-hundred-mile 

 trip up into the Missouri country for furs. The traders brought 

 back word of rich lands beyond Pig-Eye's the hut-saloon of a 

 one-eyed Irishman where Minneapolis now stands and the 

 corn-growers began to dream of a new domain. 



One day a man loaded oxen and a plow on a raft and 

 crossed the Mississippi close to where Davenport now stands. 

 On the western shore he harnessed his beasts to the plow and 

 shouted to them. He felt the plow pull at his armpits. Behind 

 him a furrow darkly streaked the sod. The man bent, took up 

 a handful of earth, and smelled of it. He smiled. Still smiling, 

 he urged the oxen on toward the horizon. They did not stop 

 until they came to the bank of the Missouri. 



So the first corn grew in Iowa. 



The land which the Indians gave up so sullenly was not won 

 without labor. In September 1832, a young man, lacking one 

 month of being twenty-one, journeyed by canal from Albany 

 to Buffalo. Thence he went by steamboat to Detroit, and 

 from Detroit to the fort at Chicago. Young Conant "located" 

 in Indiana, twenty miles outside of Chicago. He was a me- 



