This Hallowed Ground Read Online Free Page A

fitted in marble and plate glass, and in Chicago it had just built the largest railroad station in the world. (Too large by far, said eastern railroaders, and here on the edge of nowhere not half of the station would ever be used. Within a decade it would be outgrown, needing enlargement.) In two years the railroad had sold more than eight hundred thousand acres of land to settlers, and its elevators on the river were already stacked with wheat brought down by steamer from Minnesota, where newcomers in this one year would take up a million acres of new farm land.
    Wheat was the word, along with iron. America was beginning to feed Europe, and the price of grain had gone up and up. Farmers weredriving a hundred miles or more, in Illinois and Wisconsin, to reach railroad stations and lake ports with wagonloads of grain, and there were long lines at the elevators; often enough a man had to wait twenty-four hours before he could discharge his load. On the lakes a grain schooner could earn her cost in a single season. With new mechanical reapers and with steel moldboard plows, men could till more land and reap bigger harvests than ever before, and the lake and river states were drawing people in by the thousand, from the East and from the South and from faraway Europe. 3
    For here was something new in the world, a great land promising everything men had hoped for, the very air and sunlight seeming keener and brighter than the air and the light in other places. On the docks at New York were crowds of immigrants, many of them knowing no single word of English except for some place name like Milwaukee or Chicago; somehow they found their way to the comfortless trains that would take them West, and at Buffalo they boarded the creaking side-wheelers, barrels of bedding and crockery and crates of furniture on the decks, wagon wheels lashed in the rigging, to finish the journey to something that they could find nowhere else on earth.
    In addition to wheat and iron, there were people. Not all of them came from overseas. In America there was a continual surging and shifting, with New Englanders going to Ohio, Kentuckians to Illinois, Hoosiers to the black-soil country west of the Mississippi. They were looking for the same thing the immigrants were looking for — a chance to make life a little better for themselves — and they saw their destiny in this great western land tied by natural law to the destiny of the whole country.
    In this year 1856 there was a typical family opening a new farm in Iowa, and this family’s story expresses the whole of it.
    For a quarter of a century this family had lived in Indiana, settling there when a good farm could be bought from the government for two dollars an acre, building in the wilderness a home that was almost entirely self-sufficient; one man recalled that “we could have built a Chinese wall around our home and lived comfortably, asking favors of no man.” This was sturdy frontier independence, romantic enough when seen from a distance, but nobody wanted to put up with it any longer than he really had to. For there were no markets — “no demand and no price.” A drove of hogs might be chivvied 150 miles through the woods to Cincinnati, to be sold there for $1.50 per hundred pounds; what could be bought with the money thus obtained was costly, with calico selling for 40 cents a yard and muslin for 75 cents, and with tea costing $1.50 a pound. 4
    As the western country opened, this isolation ended. As roads werebuilt and people moved in and cities and towns sprang up, with steamboat and railroad lines handy, new markets were opened; crops could be sold for a decent sum, necessities and luxuries could be bought; and the mere fact that there were people all around brought prosperity, so that this particular family at last sold its Indiana farm for $100 an acre and moved on to Iowa, to do the whole thing over again.
    As they went west they saw thousands of others doing the same, and a young man