hay storm: Homer, Iowa, 1860
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storm
A number of fortune seekers, shoots frosted in shrouds of rime, are going to storm the “Peak” this spring. From our prairie shores a line of hay-capped wagons extend past the dead burr oak. Hair swirls around necks like anklets of chaff. Prairie fires all around. There is a brilliant one in the East now. Black-legs, Thieves, and Land Pirates fan the flame.
A few with capital energy and Iron constitution may make it but they will lose money, health and character. The sudden wealth of one in a hundred or a thousand, masses of folks to beg bread. The oxen meander. The hopeful seek not to follow in the footsteps of the people of old. They seek what they sought.
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trivialities
I turned the spyglass on our farm. To see it from Pemberton’s is like looking back on a life we once knew. When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down.
The boys John and Parker saw a bird fly off the fence. Toward Webster City they look, wishing to sack it for treasures and carry off the holy. Pa gave them a gun and they came home with six prairie hens. James joined the 21st Alabama. The neck tie he sent John is a great invention. Why did we not think of it?
A family headed for Pikes Peak sold their song, a mahogany Melodeon. On the Sabbath our hay-maid, Bella, plays “The Willow Song” and the “Fisher’s Hornpipe” upon its swollen keys. Pa and John cut trees for firewood down by the sleepless creek, dried up by summer.
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harvest
A party of Indians – three squaws, the chief, eleven male followers – passed, intelligent looking, and reasonably clean and neat. They had been up above Fort Dodge putting up hay and preparing to spend the winter.
One hundred and twenty tons of hay. The children get tired from outdoor work; Bella looks forward to grammar school.
A dry snow commenced falling. It keltered on the frozen hills. There was some lightening indicating heavy rain south of us and were it not for the drifting, I prefer the snow decidedly. I doubt whether it is possible for the earth to be so productive where the winters are short. The Gold must be tried in the fire before it is pronounced virgin.
Numbers returning from Pikes Peak disappointed, sick, some left sleeping in the snow hay-bearded, huddled under sows, stormed, groveled in sties. No manna, only stones. A sigh can break a man in two.
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hey-time
The best way of commemorating the dead is by finding some amusement and ceasing your grieving. During hey-time we dance a country dervish to a harvest moon,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that a life was but, a flower.In the night sun, a fatted cow bleeds along a hedge row.
A poem that uses source material, namely This State of Wonders: Letters of an Iowa Frontier Family, 1858-1861. Also inserted are quotes from “The Rustic Gate” by Matsuo Basho, Adol Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, the Talmud, Letters of Hideyoshi and William Shakespeare’s “It was a lover and his lass.” The map of Iowa above is from Colton’s rail-road and military map of the United States, Mexico, the West Indies, &c. (1860). With the Sioux, Pottawatomi and Fox and Sac already dispossessed of their lands through “treaties,” in the next ten to twenty years all of Iowa would be settled, including by my own Westphalian ancestor who had worked farms in eastern Iowa during the Civil War. After the war, the railroads passed Homer by, and so it disappeared, unlike Halbur, Iowa, which was born with a mail link and station. It should be noted that while James joins the Confederate military in the poem, from the 1830s through 1850s parts of that revolutionary railroad, the Underground Railroad ran through and south of the Homer region, very much at the crossroads of American history.
