Page:Bohemians in Central Kansas.pdf/14

 top side down in June. If I tried to cut a slice deeper, I had to go four inches to make the plow stay in the ground at all, and that was too hard a pull on my pair of old mares. Besides, the ground turned up in nothing but clods—like so many rocks. I made a harrow of oak timber with thirty-six big teeth three-quarters of an inch square, twelve inches long, set one foot apart each way. But it was like harrowing rocks; clods rolled over and over and lost nothing in size. Finally I gave up and sowed the seed on the ground just as it yas broken in June, trying to cover by harrowing. I put an old railroad tie on the harrow for weight. There was no grain drill in the country then, none could be found on farms or in the towns, so I sowed the seed by hand, just as grandfather used to do in the old country long ago. When I went over the sod with that big weighted harrow, it barely scratched it, it was baked so hard. I could scarcely tell where the harrow had been dragged, and repeated harrowings would not cover all the seed. It was like harrowing a road in a dry time. Then the big flocks of birds, English sparrows, were a pest; they picked up the seed before it could get even one dragging. Of course the crop was according to the work.

That autumn, November 22, 1874, was born Frank Swehla, the first child of Bohemian parents born in central Kansas, and our fourth child. When this boy became a man he married, on August 16, 1897, Miss Anna Martinek,