In the 1850s, a massive campaign to recruit settlers to the prairies was underway. Land speculators bought up land to resell at a profit. Soldiers from the Mexican-American war were granted land warrants for 160 acres of land, which many sold for cash. Thousands of farmers and their families from Pennsylvania, Ohio and other eastern states, flooded into Iowa at this time. One such was Jesse Reeves. Jesse bought the land that would contain Owl Acres directly from the Federal Government for $1.25 an acre.
Jesse may well have farmed back east in Ohio or Indiana. He might have sold his farm to raise the $200 for the land and an additional $500 to $1000 he would need for travel expenses, equipment, livestock and supplies to start farming in his new home. He would have needed to buy or bring along a scythe, a harrow, a corn knife, a cradle, a grist mill, a flail, an axe, a husking pin, and a sorting screen to start with. Also he would have needed at least two yoke of oxen with their equipment.
The land that Jesse bought was rolling prairie about two miles from a river. It was covered in tallgrass prairie. If Jesse came from Ohio, he would have been used to farm fields grubbed out of the forest. Here there were no fields, and no trees–only very tall grasses, some as high as the shoulder of a man on horseback. Jesse’s first glimpse of this promised land would have been daunting. Tall grasses, few if any roads, and no shelter. The grasses wave and ripple in the wind, reminding many of a vast, trackless ocean. Willa Cather described it like this in her book My Antonia:
“I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh easy blowing wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping…”
The prairieland that Jesse bought at the land office was alive with millions of insects, hundreds of species of birds, mammals, and invertebrates. Wolves and mountain lions stood at the top of the terrestrial food chain. Bison, elk, deer, and smaller animals converted grass to meat for their benefit. The topsoil, the rich black loam that Jesse hoped to plow and farm, was a dense tangle of ancient roots and a complex and vibrant ecosystem of insects, spiders, worms, beetles, and all manner of other things that Jesse would never have seen since he didn’t have a microscope.
What Jesse did have if he was lucky, wealthy enough, and thoughtful, was one of those new-fangled John Deere plows made of steel. His father or grandfather, back in Ohio or Pennsylvania, would have used a wood and cast iron plow to break ground after clearing out the stumps. But the plow made poor progress on the prairie. The loam was sticky, and fouled the plowshare regularly. And the cutting edge wouldn’t have been sharp very long. John Deere’s 1837 invention, a steel plowshare with a particular geometry that reminded me of a somewhat concave diamond, was self-scouring so it didn’t end up full of sticky dirt. It stayed shiny clean because of its material and geometry. And the steel cutting edge would cut into that dense mass of roots and sod, digging a furrow and turning over the sod. It is reported that breaking the sod this way made a sound like fabric ripping. One man guided the plow, one drove the four oxen needed to pull the plow, and a third person followed along planting seeds in the new furrow. It was backbreaking work. With three people, four oxen and this steel plow, the team could break about one acre per day. All this had to be done before the crops could be put in, and Jesse and his neighbors would have been working ceaselessly so they would have a harvest to feed their families in the coming year. The first crops would likely have been wheat, corn and potatoes. The corn would feed a few hogs, the wheat could be sold for cash, and the potatoes graced every meal.
Meanwhile, Jesse needed to build a place to live for his family. The house they left back east would have had several rooms including a parlor. On the open prairie, the first house on Owl Acres was likely a one-room log cabin built of logs and chinked with mud and sticks. There would have been trees along the nearby river to use for building the cabin. In time, once established, he may have built a new house of sawn lumber, like the house they left back east. It would have been several years before the cabin was replaced though. (My great-great grandfather also arrived in Iowa in 1854. It took him over twenty years to build a multi-room frame house for his family.)
Although Jesse bought 160 acres, he most likely planned to break only 40 acres to farm. With oxen and hand tools, he would not have been able to do much more than 25 to 40 acres in a given year.
At some time between 1854 and 1871, Jesse sold the land to a neighbor. The rest of his story is lost to history. Perhaps, discouraged, he returned to his home back East. Or perhaps he sold the land he had improved and moved on west where more prairie waited to be plowed.
Photo by Author