He was a good enough American for Jacobus
Teunis Vandemark.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PLOW WEDS THE SOD
The next day was a wedding-day--the marriage morning of the plow and the
sod. It marked the beginning of the subdual of that wonderful wild
prairie of Vandemark Township and the Vandemark farm. No more fruitful
espousal ever took place than that--when the polished steel of my new
breaking plow was embraced by the black soil with its lovely fell of
greenery. Up to that fateful moment, the prairie of the farm and of the
township had been virgin sod; but now it bowed its neck to the yoke of
wedlock. Nothing like it takes place any more; for the sod of the
meadows and pastures is quite a different thing from the untouched skin
of the original earth. Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, the most
epochal, and most hopeful, and as I look back at it, in one way the most
pathetic thing man ever did, for in it, one of the loveliest things ever
created began to come to its predestined end.
The plow itself was long, low, and yacht-like in form; a curved blade of
polished steel. The plowman walked behind it in a clean new path,
sheared as smooth as a concrete pavement, with not a lump of crumbled
earth under his feet--a cool, moist, black path of richness. The
furrow-slice was a long, almost unbroken ribbon of turf, each one laid
smoothly against the former strand, and under it lay crumpled and
crushed the layer of grass and flowers.
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