Where The Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie

8. Grandfather Country

8 Grandfather Country IF THE EXPRESSION "Land of Beginning Again" seems folkish and trite today it is through no fault of its own, for there is still no better way of saying what it meant. But it expresses something that has no real contemporary meaning, and with which we can no longer identify -the ineffable spell cast by new lands on a people weary of the old. It was the main chance of which men had always dreamed; more than just hope, it was hope susceptible of attainment. It blew in on the west wind from empty lands that they had never seen, fanning their youth and awakening old dreams and plans that had slumbered among the forested hills of eastern farm valleys. Ole Rolvaag spoke of it in his Giants in the Earth: And it was as if nothing affected people in those days. They threw themselvesblindly into the Impossible, and accomplished the Unbelievable. If anyone succumbed in the struggle-and that happened often-another would come and take his place. Youth was in the race; the unknown, the untried,the unheard-of, was in the air; people caught it, were intoxicated by it, threw themselves away, and laughed at the cost. Of course it was possible -everything was possible out there. There was no such thing as the Impossible any more. The human race has not 198 THE PEOPLE known such faith and self-confidencesince history began ...And so had been the Spirit since the day the first settlers landed on the eastern shores; it would rise and fall at intervals,would swell and surge on again with every new wave o f settlers that rolled westward into the unbroken solitude. Romanticized, of course. But in spite of costs that no sane man or woman would laugh at, and however their first exuberance would gray with later reality, there is no gainsaying the hope and excitement that drew the people up the west wind. Rolvaag knew only one broad cultural category of prairie people. There were essentially two, as unlike as trees and grass: the pioneers who sought permanence on the land, seeking to put down roots in rich soils of their own choosing, and the frontiersmen whose goals were as ephemeral as the frontiers that would always fade off before them. One group sought new lands because they held the main chance; the other sought newness alone, and as the newness wore away so did the land's attraction. The early thrusts of midwestern pioneers originated in the piedmonts of Virginia and the Carolinas, moving over the Appalachians into Kentucky and Tennessee and then into southern Illinois. It was a fiercely independent breed that customarilymoved ahead of the main waves of settlement perhaps driven by a desire for cheap land or the wish to live in nonslave territory. But more than anything else, they sought to escape the pressures and disciplines of established communities. They were hunters first and farmers a long second. One early writer who had been "sent to the Illinois" commented that many of the first settlers on the fringes of the Illinois prairies were "idle fellows that are too lazy to cultivate lands, & invited by the plenty of game they found, have employed themselves in hunting, in which they interfere much more with the Indians than if they pursued agriculture alone ..." Grandfather County 199 In his Letters from an American Farmer, Crhecoeur wrote: 'Thus are our first steps trod, thus are our first trees felled, in general, by the most vicious of our people." The irascible Dr. Timothy Dwight expanded on this in 1821: A considerablepart of all those who begin the cultivation of the wilderness may be denominated foresters ...These men cannot live in regular society. They are too idle; too talkative; too passionate ; too prodigal; and are too shiftless; to acquire either property or character. They are impatient of the restraints of law, religion and morality; grumble about taxes, by which Rulers, Ministers and School-masters are supported. After displaying their own talents, and worth; after censuring the weakness , the wickedness, of their superiors; after exposing the injustice of the community in neglecting to invest persons of such merit with public offices ...they become at length discouraged; and under the pressure of poverty, the fear of a gaol, and the consciousness of public contempt, leave their native places and betake themselvesto the wilderness. Such men were often called "Pikes...