Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/200



“After you get forty or fifty miles west of the Mississippi the arid plains set in. The country is uninhabitable except upon the borders of the rivers and creeks. The Grand Prairie, a plain without wood or water, which extends to the northwest farther than hunters or travelers have ever yet gone, comes down to within a few miles of St. Charles *  and so completely occupies the fork of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers that the woodland for three hundred miles of each forms a skirt from five to twenty miles wide, and above that distance the prairie actually reaches the rivers in many places.”

When it is seen that a statesman and editor so intelligent and eminent as Thomas H. Benton, as late as 1819, regarded the northwestern prairies covering a large portion of Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas as uninhabitable except along the borders of the rivers and creeks, it is not strange that the early pioneers, hunters and trappers entertained a similar opinion. For many years settlements were confined exclusively to the borders of streams where timber grew and to the forest regions. The first farms were hewn out of the forests; but as the fields were gradually extended out onto the prairies and they were found to be productive, yielding immense crops, the fertility of the prairies had to be recognized and a new value placed upon them.

But as the woods covered but an insignificant fraction of the surface of the prairie regions, it was generally believed many years later, that the prairies remote from woods could never become thickly settled or valuable for farms. Fuel and fencing, it was supposed, could never be supplied to make farms on the great prairies habitable. So for generations after the prairie regions were known, the hardy pioneers toiled in the dense forests of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Michigan, hewing out farms among the sturdy trees which covered a large portion of the country. No more slavish toil can be found than that which the first settlers in these states patiently wrought to subdue the forests and remove the obstructing stumps from the rich soil. The natural meadows, unobstructed by

*A town on the Missouri River about twenty-five miles from St. Louis.