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states:
    the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in consideration of the premises, and in conformity with the several acts of Congress in such case, made and provided, HAVE GIVEN AND GRANTED, and by these premises DO GIVE AND GRANT unto the said JOHN DOBSHIRE and to his heirs, the said tract above described, TO HAVE AND TO HOLD the same, together with all the rights and appurtenances of whatsoever nature belonging unto the said JOHN DOBSHIRE and to his heirs and assigns forever.
    There is a special quality to that document’s language, a self-portrait of America at that time: a slight swagger, an unconscious arrogance, a need to impose man’s orderly straight-lined numerical boundaries upon nature’s abundant chaos, a sense that all that open space must be filled. But most of all, there must have seemed to John Dobshire, when the land grant was read to him, a boundlessly optimistic promise, an absolute certainty in all that goodness to be his family’s … forever!
    The year Dobshire received his land grant, the Geographical & Historical Society Building in Burlington, Iowa, was consumed by fire. Among those display cases totally destroyed was the one containing Black Hawk’s bones.
    That same year also the Illinois Central Railroad reached the east bank of the Mississippi opposite Dubuque. Among the section hands laying track was young Patrick J. Mullen, Michael’s paternal great-grandfather-to-be. Patrick, who had emigrated from Ireland five years before, was then twenty-one, stood about five feet eight inches, was thin but hard and broad-shouldered. He had thick black hair, a narrow face with prominent cheekbones and dark eyes that appeared deepset and somewhat close together because of his nose, which projected out from above his wide, straight mouth like a hatchet blade. Patrick Mullen quit the railroad at its river terminus and crossed the Mississippi to Dubuque.
    Dubuque, by then, had already become a thriving river port, a lumber and milling center and a major supply and jumping-off place for settlers heading west. Patrick probably stayed in one of the two-story brick-front and wood-sidinged hotels—they were more like boardinghouses, really, with gaslit parlors and kerosene lamps in the rooms. He might have shared the front parlor with the ebullient salesmen, the dour merchants, grizzled soldiers, adventurers and small-time gamblers looking for a stake. He would certainly have shared a meal with other young settlers and discussed their hopes in the future or seen in their faces their despair at what the past had failed to provide. Patrick J. Mullen, like all the others, must have suffered the disorientation and anxiety of waiting. They were all alike in these frontier towns, stalled on their journeys from some place to some where . And so they sat around those gaslit parlors, eagerly scanning the newest issue of the Du Buque Visitor with its advertisements for land, the latest business opportunities, the most recent settlers’ reports, searching for some sign, some indication, some hint of what to expect when next they moved on.
    Late in 1855 Patrick continued west and met John and Ellen Dobshires’ daughter, Mary Ann. He courted her through the harsh winter, and she consented to be his bride that spring. They were wed by a French missionary priest in a little log cabin church across the Cedar River at Gilbertville. About this time John Dobshire bought out the two German Walker boys and took title to their eighty acres northwest of his land grant forty, the same eighty-acre piece that Michael Mullen worked his last night of leave. After their marriage Patrick and Mary Ann moved to Waterloo.
    That summer Calvin W. Eighmey built a small log house about two miles west of John Dobshire’s homestead site. Eighmey’s younger brother recalled:
    One day Calvin and his wife were afforded a peculiar spectacle. A wagon pulled by a yoke of oxen, driven by a man and woman, was seen approaching