Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/567



no doctor was within reach, neighborly help and kindness were never lacking, good-will and sympathy were the substitutes for skilled physicians. When death cast its shadow over the home, willing hands and warm hearts ministered to the stricken family and tenderly performed the last sad offices for the dead. A rude box inclosed the lifeless form borne by neighbors to the lonely grave. Often there was no minister, music or flowers. No carved marble or granite shaft told the name of the dead; the sturdy oak or lofty elm cast a grateful shadow over the grassy mound that alone marked the last resting place of the departed pioneer.

This period in northwestern Iowa lingered along well into the “60s,” as that portion of the State was the last to be settled, owing to the general absence of forests. The prairies were vast in extent, generally inclined to be level and in many places defective in surface drainage, with frequent ponds and marshes, the home of the muskrat. It was not until the homestead law was enacted by Congress that people began to venture out upon the great bleak prairies of northwestern Iowa to make homes. Mostly destitute of timber for cabins and fencing, with few deep ravines for shelter from the fierce blizzards that swept over them in winter, they long remained unoccupied after other portions of the State were fairly well settled. But when the time came in which the head of the family could secure a hundred and sixty acres of government land, as a home, for fourteen dollars, the hardy pioneers began to venture out upon the treeless plains and devise ways to live without timber. Then it was that sod houses and stables were invented. They were made by running a broad-shire breaking-plow over the wet prairie where the tough fiber of the sod of generations had accumulated, cutting it into long strips and turning them over. These strips of sod were then cut up with the spades into lengths suitable to handle and laid up like brick into walls for houses and stables. A few poles