Old man Evans' way of
looking at the matter seemed reasonable to my cautious mind; and,
anyhow, when a man has grown old he knows many things that he can give
no good reason for. I have always found that the well-educated fellow
with a deep-sounding and plausible philosophy that runs against the
teachings of experience, is likely, especially in farming, to make a
failure when he might have saved himself by doing as the old settlers
do, who won't answer his arguments but make a good living just the same,
while the new-fangled practises send their followers to the poor-house.
At that moment, I would have traded my Iowa farm for any good piece of
land covered with trees. But Dunlap and Thatcher had something else to
talk to me about. They were for the prairies, especially the prairies
of Kansas.
"Kansas," said Dunlap, "will be one of the great states of the Union,
one of these days. Come with us, and help make it a free state. We need
a hundred thousand young farmers, who believe in liberty, and will fight
for it. Come with us, take up a farm, and carry a Sharp's rifle against
the Border Ruffians!"
This sounded convincing to me, but of course I couldn't make up my mind
to anything of this sort without days and days of consideration; but I
listened to what they said. They told me of an army of free-state
emigrants that was gathering along the border to win Kansas for freedom.
They, Dunlap and Thatcher, were going to Marion, Iowa, and from there by
the Mormon Trail across to a place called Tabor, and from there to
Lawrence, Kansas.
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