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    Winter brought gale-force Arctic winds, blizzards, weeks of twenty-below-zero cold. Monstrous snowdrifts crushed in roofs, buried wagons, livestock, woodpiles. Settlers sickened in the iciness and could not survive the fifteen-mile lung-searing journey to the nearest doctor. Hailstorms killed hogs, chickens; cabins caught fire, and their inhabitants froze to death going for help.
    In the spring torrential rains washed the earth from the hillsides, gullied the ditches into streams that overflowed the homesteads, drowned the freshly seeded fields, flooded the rivers which fed the Mississippi and swept the topsoil out to sea. Oxen and wagons mired down in the mud, and John Deere’s newly invented sodbuster iron plows had to be abandoned in midfield.
    Then suddenly it would be summer and thunderstorms would savage the air; wind-whipped prairie fires would race across the shoulder-high grasses with frightening speed. Thick, gargantuan, kettle-black clouds would explode with lightning, and tornadoes would visit Armageddon upon tiny, unsuspecting religious settlements. The Dobshires learned to sense a tornado’s coming, smell it, feel its heavy breath on the darkening air. And always there would be that heat, that incandescent whiteness that bubbled the pitch in raw wood or left the air so webbed and close the birds would not even bother to fly. Then the evening sky flashed and flickered with summer lightning; moths beat themselves to ashes against the kerosene lamps. The moon would rise huge and full, and the prairie wolves would howl with summer madness beneath the canopy of stars.
    In the fall the winds would come and cool the cornstalks. The months of jarring and preserving, of grinding flour and tanning hides would be upon them. John Dobshire, out gathering wood along the banks of the Cedar River, would look up at the great skeins of duck and geese, watch them form their august Vs and beat their way south. The corn would be harvested, the wheat gathered and threshed. The grouse would call, the incredible swarms of passenger pigeons (whose numbers then could be measured only by square miles) would whirl and scatter like an old lady’s handwriting, gather again, then flash away. The buffalo would pass, fewer and fewer with each succeeding year. The first snow would fall, and at night, looking out their cabin window, the Dobshires might see the lantern of a far-off wagon glowing as brightly as a distant boat across a glaze of frozen water, like some ephemeral voyager upon a tideless sea.
    Since John Dobshire could neither read nor write, no record exists of what homesteading meant to him. The Mullens do know that the Dobshires spent their first winter, the winter of 1852, in their prairie schooner and three times fled their homestead when Indians, coming up the Cedar River from Tama to hunt and fish, scared the family away. John Dobshire took his wife and daughter for refuge to Sturgis Falls, where there was a sawmill and a gristmill and a couple of cabins. (Sturgis Falls would later grow into the City of Cedar Falls.) There was a closer settlement at Waterloo—called Prairie Rapids then—containing six cabins and a post office. But Dobshire chose Sturgis Falls because of the sawmill, and when he built his house the following spring, it was made of cut boards, not logs like those of the Black Hawk County homesteaders around him. John Dobshire’s small house, completed in 1853, sheltered his descendants off and on for the next 100 years. It was the house to which Peg and Gene Mullen returned with their infant son, Michael, following Gene’s service in the Second World War.
    In 1855 Dobshire had occupied his homestead for three years and was qualified to receive his forty-acre site free for his service during the Mexican War. The land grant is “for the North West quarter of the North West quarter of Section Nine, in Township Eighty-Seven, North of Range Twelve, West,” and the document