PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  While living out of the wagon, near a spring just above the creek, Gabriel built a two-story log house of walnut and oak (furniture woods today) with a fieldstone fireplace, and he built animal pens and broke the ground and sowed corn, cane, and buckwheat, and Elizabeth planted vegetables. The crops did indeed prosper the first two years, and then there was nothing you could call rain for a year and a half, and, in the autumn of 1860, old Gabriel fell ill, and in October he died, done in by the long drought. His sons built a walnut coffin from a tree on his farm and fastened it with wooden pins, and then, since his death was the first in the settlement, they had to set out a cemetery. He died intestate, and William Holsinger, another Dunkard preacher and the administrator of Gabriel’s estate, filed an inventory of Jacobs’ possessions.

  I’ve seen the movies and paintings, and I’ve looked closely at those portrayals of prairie schooners making their cumbrous way into the West, and I’ve always wondered just what the hell really was in those things, what precisely it was that broke their hickory axletrees. Then and now, when people travel through unknown territory, their baggage is a packing up, an assembly, of their fears as much as of their expectations. Gabriel Jacobs died only forty-two months after riding behind his oxen into the nearly uninhabited land, so it would seem his estate inventory is very much a listing of the burden in that wagon and of several things he must have made soon after arrival, and it is also, with some dreaming, a tour of the Jacobs farmstead: the things hung, shelved, stacked, and set in some order in the kitchen, the bedroom, the barn.

  The inventory, kept in a third-floor room of the courthouse, is a tidy, inked script on six sheets of narrow paper glued end to end like a scroll. I give it exactly, adding only a few clarifications:

  one large yoke of Oxen one red and one red with white face

  one small yoke of Oxen one black and white and one roan

  one cow & Calf cow red & white

  one cow & Calf cow roan with red calf

  one Spotted 3 year old heifer & Calf

  one red cow

  one Black & white yearling Heifer

  one Red & white yearling Heifer

  one Red heifer 1 year old

  one Stack of Hay

  one Stack of Hay and Corn fodder

  one crib full of fodder

  4 log chains

  1 Mall & Wedge

  2 Sledge hammers

  2 Hoes

  One mare

  2 set of harness

  1 Saddle & Bridle

  1 Curry comb

  1 pair of Stirups

  1 Horse Brush

  1 Waggon Doubletrees & neckyoke

  1 pair Breast chains

  1 hay Rack

  1 log Sled

  1 Manure fork

  1 old waggon lock

  1 lot of lumber

  1 Harrow

  2 Shovel Plows

  1 Stiring Plow [stirring]

  1 Breaking Plow

  1 Kiln of Lime

  1 Feed Trough

  1 Manville [planting device]

  2 Pothooks

  1 Keetle

  2 Corn Cutters

  1 crosscut Saw

  1 Tenant Saw [tenon]

  1 Half Bushel

  1 pair Match Plains

  1 pair of small Match Plains

  1 pair of Steelyards

  1 Brace & Bitts

  2 Hatchets 4 Chisels

  1 Monkey Wrentch

  1 Gague [gauge]

  7 Augers

  3 Gouges

  4 Wash Tubs

  1 Shovel

  1 Keg of Vinegar

  1 Tar Barrel & Tar

  1 Keg of Lard

  1 Pickle tub & Pickles

  1 Keg of Molasses

  1 Tar bucket

  2 Ox Bows

  1 Box old iron

  3 Planes

  1 Frow

  1 Tenant Saw

  2 hand Saws

  1 Pair Compasses

  1 Pair Blacksmith Tongs

  1 Rope

  1 Mowing Sythe & Snath [scythe handle]

  1 Butter Keg

  1 Sausage Tub

  1 Bunch of Flax

  3 whet Stones

  2 Axes

  1 Pair Pincers

  1 Cole Chisle

  1 Trough and meal

  1 Box

  1 Work Bench and Skrew

  1 Drawing Knife & Shaving horse

  1 Hammer

  1 Gringing Stone [grinding]

  1 Sled and water Barrel

  1 Streacher Chain [stretcher chain for yoking oxen]

  1 Buck Saw

  4 Big Hogs and 11 Shoats

  9 Acres of Wheat in the ground

  1 Basket

  1 square

  1 Brass Keetle

  4 Wooden Pails

  1 Pair Candle Moles [molds]

  2 Milk Strainers

  1 Cooking Stove & Utensils

  2 Beds and Bedding

  1 Chest

  4 Coverlids [coverlets]

  3 Bed quilts

  1 Lounge and Tick

  1 Spining Wheel

  1 Shot Gun

  2 Sacks

  1 Vinegar Barrl and Vinegar

  1 Box and Sweet Potatoes

  1 Barrel

  2 Bushels Seed Com

  3 Bushels of Wheat

  100 pounds Flour

  150 pounds Meal

  3 Bushels Corn

  1 Clock

  1 Bed & Bedding

  1 Stand

  1 Table

  1 Cupboard

  1 Chest

  7 Chairs

  2 Milk Pans

  3 Milk Crocks

  4 Milk Buckets 6 Tin Cups

  1 lot of dishes and Crockery

  2 Smoothing Irons

  In addition to the animals, there are nearly two hundred items here, a complete household except for Gabriel’s personal effects. But I wonder about the absence of chickens and chamber pots; and, from the spellings, repeated on the more carefully written appraisement, I wonder, did they pronounce kettle as “keetle” and coverlet as “coverlid”? Not a single object is superfluous, nothing an amenity or luxury. I’ve seen little else in the county that so quietly speaks of austerity and the fight to survive and the interminable toil in a small nineteenth-century prairie household where there is not one thing to ease a long winter day, fill a quiet hour, not a single book (other than the presumed Bible), not a fiddle, not so much as a jew’s-harp. Of course, a bucket can suggest the drudgery of milking or a fine afternoon of berry picking, a bridle plowing or a Sunday ride. About the Jacobs place was no frippery or frillery, and of their possessions, by my reckoning, there are only a half dozen you wouldn’t commonly find on a Chase County farm today if you consider descendants of the older tools and implements.

  The appraisement valued these chattels at $515.65; the sixty-five cents is important because it represents a half-dozen items. The hammer was valued the lowest at a nickel and the two yokes of oxen the highest at sixty-five dollars each. Elizabeth apparently kept all of the food and kitchen items and two beds and coverlets and the spinning wheel and four washtubs and two cows and calves, but she sold the log house and went to live with her children up on the creek, where she disappeared into the anonymity of plain life.

  V

  BAZAAR

  From the Commonplace Book:

  Bazaar

  Beyond all the self-conscious lamentation over the passing of rural America, beyond the shallow romancing over a time that never was, lies a real awareness of some unique values of small-town life—certain relationships among people, between man and the land. These values are not better than those of city or suburb, they are simply different. They are values worthy of respect and preservation—values that some people would like to share today. The villages and small towns of America are not dwindling and disappearing because their values are no longer meaningful, but because they no longer work economically, no longer provide the level of services and amenities t
hat most of us demand. No dramatic violence is being done to rural America. It is withering away because it has little function in modern life. The question of whether it can be brought back to health is at base a question of whether it can once again be brought into the mainstream of American life, of whether it can be given a meaningful function. And if it can, there still remains the question of whether the cost would be worthwhile.

  —Robert B. Riley,

  “New Mexico Villages in a Future Landscape” (1969)

  Perhaps the blurring of provincial lines and the need for everyone to identify with the human condition in general will have positive results for the future, but preservation and promotion of local, state, and regional traditions will continue to make life more meaningful.

  —Leo E. Oliva,

  “Kansas: A Hard Land in the Heartland” (1988)

  Love a place like Kansas and you can be content in a garden of raked sand.

  —Earl Thompson,

  Garden of Sand (1970)

  The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the reach of one’s love for the place one is working in, and for the things and creatures one is working with and among, then destruction inevitably results.

  —Wendell Berry,

  “Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse” (1991)

  Q. There are about 1.3 billion cattle on the earth. The caloric equivalent of the food they consume would feed approximately how many human beings?

  A. Nine billion people.

  —Bill Adler, Jr.,

  The Whole Earth Quiz Book (1991)

  A fundamental characteristic of Kansas individualism is the tendency to conform; it is an individualism of conformity, not of revolt.

  —Carl Becker,

  “Kansas” (1910)

  And of each one the core of life, namely happiness, is full of the rotten excrement of maggots.

  —Walt Whitman,

  “Thought” (1871)

  When I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,

  Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.

  —Walt Whitman,

  “This Compost” (1881)

  In its original state, the tallgrass prairie—also known as the true prairie—was probably the most dramatic of all American grasslands, [yet] the designation “true prairie” is ironic, because the tallgrass prairie has a tenuous hold on being prairie at all.

  —Lauren Brown,

  Grasslands (1985)

  I think the prairies will die without grass finding a voice. Its democracy may be against it.

  Prairie grass never seems to know anybody.

  —William A. Quayle,

  The Prairie and the Sea (1905)

  Compared to trees, shrubs, or forbs, grasses seem unfathomably plain. They fail to inspire interest or stir the imagination. We look at prairie and we see a great emptiness, a void that staggers the psyche and leaves much too much room for a mind to wander.

  —Randy Winter,

  “Nature Notes” (1987)

  Every American has the right as part of his cultural heritage to stand in grass as high as his head in order to feel some small measure of history coursing his veins and personally establish an aesthetic bond with the past.

  —William H. Elder,

  “Needs and Problems of Grassland

  Preservation” (1961)

  Grass is the most widely distributed of all vegetable beings and is at once the type of our life and the emblem of our mortality . . . the carpet of the infant becomes the blanket of the dead.

  —John James Ingalls,

  “In Praise of Blue Grass” (1872)

  Grasses are the greatest single source of wealth in the world.

  —Agnes Chase,

  First Book of Grasses (1959)

  Grasses are the overseers of the soil.

  In the battle which we call agriculture, grass is the first line of defence.

  Of all things the most common, grasses are the least known.

  —J. C. Mohler,

  Grasses in Kansas (1937)

  Every recorded, primitive civilization in the world was built directly on wild grasses supplemented by their cultivated kin.

  —Leo Edward Melchers,

  Grasses in Kansas (1937)

  Grass is the only soil builder of any consequence among the natural vegetation that originally covered this continent.

  Grass is that indispensable form of plant life without which civilization, as we know it, would not exist.

  —Sellers Archer and Clarence Bunch,

  The American Grass Book (1953)

  The basis of human proliferation is not our own seed but the seed of grasses.

  —Evan Eisenberg,

  “Back to Eden” (1989)

  The voice said, Cry. And he said. What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.

  —Isaiah,

  40:6–7 (eighth century B.C.)

  Climb this immense knotted cord, take one fact after another, and you will progress from the vibrio to the constellation. The immanent marvel has its own cohesion. Nothing is wasted; no effort is lost. The useless does not exist. The universe has what is necessary and only what is necessary.

  —Victor Hugo,

  The Toilers of the Sea (1866)

  Most of the evidence, such as it is, reveals that the Plains repelled the women as they attracted the men. There was too much of the unknown, too few of the things they loved. If we could get at the truth we should doubtless find that many a family was stopped on the edge of the timber by women who refused to go farther.

  If one may judge by fiction, one must conclude that the Plains exerted a peculiarly appalling effect on women.

  The plain gives man new and novel sensations of elation, of vastness, of romance, of awe, and often nauseating loneliness.

  —Walter Prescott Webb,

  The Great Plains (1931)

  For these [Kansas pioneer] women, life was far from easy. The endless hours of back-breaking toil left little time for rest and leisure. Day in and day out, they worked in the house and in the fields to produce the basic necessities of life and to build a future for their children. At first, the heavy work load seemed almost unbearable; it was physically exhausting and emotionally draining. Over the years, however, most women learned to abide the drudgery and monotony which filled their lives.

  —Joanna L. Stratton,

  Pioneer Women (1981)

  In reading [pioneer women’s] diaries we come closer to understanding how historical drama translates into human experience. Through the eyes of women we begin to see history as the stuff of daily struggle.

  —Lillian Schlissel,

  Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (1982)

  Loneliness, thy other name, thy one true synonym, is prairie.

  —William A. Quayle,

  The Prairie and the Sea (1905)

  By listening to a particularly individual pattern of words, catching a tell-tale emphasis, or recognizing that something is being said which the speaker may not ever have been able to say before, there is a recognition of the infinite possibilities and experiences lying just under the surface of things.

  —Ronald Blythe,

  Characters and Their Landscapes (1981)

  Living in Kansas is a contradiction.

  —Graffito noted by James Shortridge,

  University of Kansas, Watson Library (1970)

  In the Quadrangle:

  Bazaar

  The tracks: slicked with mist and starting to freeze, and the train coming on and passing, and I bending to feel a rail warmed and dried by the heavy freight heading toward California, and then I cross the line running along her backyard, and just behind me, where the depot once stood, there is still the Santa Fe sign: bazar, an old spelling, and its brevity odd in a county where v
illage names can have more letters than people, although here the hamlet has double its characters. I walk up to her house—white frame, two stories. On the grass in the cool of the October morning under the big and broken tree, windfall pears lie decaying, sweetening the air until it seems sticky, and edging the circumference of the pears is a fairy ring come up overnight, its yearly reappearance as regular as the arrival of the herons (later she will comment on it and the annual joy it brings her, and she means, Things like this hold me here.) West down the street are weed-grown, bleached, falling wooden buildings and houses, these once the cattle town, and now not even half a dozen of them occupied, and due south, just a gray looming in the mist, is Roniger Hill. With the sweet corruption in my nostrils I remember for a moment how I came down off that hill with a shape in my head, and: she is at the door and saying, Pleased to see you again. She is eighty-five, reaches a small hand of agate translucence to wipe the mist from my sleeve, and she looks a bit wan, and I am asking would another time, and she says, No, it’s Friday. I call Thursday my day, when the papers and magazines arrive. Tomorrow is house-cleaning and personal-grooming day. Then we are in the dim room: gray linoleum, plastic-webbed aluminum chairs, a desk stacked up, the soft exhalation of her Warm Morning bottled-gas stove and atop it a kettle sending up a vaporous arm as if beckoning.