Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 3.djvu/133

 HE earliest settlements in Iowa were universally made in groves or along rivers or smaller streams, in the timber belts which lined their banks. The native trees were indispensable in those days for building the cabin to shelter the family, for fencing the new farm for fuel and a score of other uses for which at that period there was no substitute. The first consideration with the early settler was to secure a large body of good timber and as much prairie adjoining as would make a farm. As the prairie in the vicinity of timber was usually more or less rolling, sometimes quite rough, the first settlers as a rule did not secure the richest or most productive farms.

In the early years there was little or no pine fencing lumber and little money with which to purchase such costly fencing had it been within reach. The first generation of pioneers was almost universally inured to hard labor and considered it no hardship to handle the axe and maul day after day through the winter months, making rails for fencing their farms. It was slow and tedious labor to fell the forest trees, chop them into rail-cuts and split them into rails, to fence a forty or eighty acre field. Nearly all of the pioneer farms were thus fenced in. But in later years when thousands of immigrants poured into the new State, attracted by the great fertile prairies, where a hundred and sixty acre farm, all cleared for the breaking plow could be secured for two hundred dollars, timber land was held by the early settlers at high prices and the newcomers were compelled to find some substitute for the old worm fences from seven to nine rails high. In order to reduce expense various devices were invented—posts with three rails nailed on, osage orange