If I could have seen what that something might have been,
I should probably have gone back; but I could not think just where I
came into the play here.
So I went on-toward the goal of all my ambitions, my square mile of Iowa
land, steered by Henderson L. Burns, who, between shooting prairie
chickens, upland plover and sickle-billed curlew, guided me toward my
goal by pointing out lone boulders, and the mounds in front of the dens
of prairie wolves and badgers. We went on for six miles, and finally
came to a place where the land slopes down in what is a pretty steep
hill for Iowa, to a level bottom more than a mile across, at the farther
side of which the land again rises to the general level of the country
in another slope, matching the one on the brow of which we halted. The
general course of the two hills is easterly and westerly, and we stood
on the southern side of the broad flat valley.
3
As I write, I can look out over it. The drainage of the flat now runs
off through a great open ditch which I combined with my neighbors to
have dredged through by a floating dredge in 1897. The barge set in two
miles above me, and after it had dug itself down so as to get water in
which to float, it worked its way down to the river eight miles away.
The line of this ditch is now marked by a fringe of trees; but in 1855,
nothing broke the surface of the sea of grass except a few clumps of
plum trees and willows at the foot of the opposite slope, and here and
there along the line of the present ditch, there were ponds of open
water, patches of cattails, and the tent-like roofs of muskrat-houses.
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