Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/535



the straw rusted and the grain was shriveled, chaffy and nearly worthless. Thousands of acres of grain were never harvested. The wheat that was cut and threshed was unfit for bread but many tried to use the chocolate-colored stuff which was tasteless and destitute of nutriment. The best of it served for seed of a very poor quality the next spring in the general inability of the farmers to raise money to import good seed. More than half of the corn which had been planted late, owing to the continuous cold rains, had failed to germinate; water and weeds everywhere smothered the growth of the scattering stalks that survived. Thousands of fields were plowed up and sowed with buckwheat. To crown the general misfortunes a heavy frost came unusually early and ruined the buckwheat and left the corn soft and unripe, so that it rotted in the cribs. The hay crop was badly damaged by continuous rains. All farm crops were so poor as to be unsalable for shipping and such as were sold for home use brought very low prices.

This crop failure extended over two-thirds of the area of the State, being most disastrous in the southeastern portion. The currency was of doubtful value, much of it being utterly worthless. The distress and destitution which prevailed among the farmers during this period can never be realized by those who were not among the sufferers.

The armed resistance of the Free State men of Kansas against the brutal attempts of the Border Ruffians of Missouri to force slavery into that Territory and make it a slave State—and the attempt to abolish the slave trade at the National Capital—had so intensified the conflict that no further compromises seemed possible that could restore harmonious relations between the North and the South. In the South, all parties were being rapidly absorbed by the Democrats, while in the North the Republican party was growing into formidable proportions. Slavery [Vol 1]