The Earth Had Given Forth
Her Increase So Abundantly That The Lap Of Created Humanity Could
Not Stretch Itself To Hold It.
At Dixon, in 1861, corn cost four
pence a bushel.
In Ireland, in 1848, it was sold for a penny a
pound, a pound being accounted sufficient to sustain life for a
day; and we all felt that at that price food was brought into the
country cheaper than it had ever been brought before.
Dixon is not a town of much apparent prosperity. It is one of
those places at which great beginnings have been made, but as to
which the deities presiding over new towns have not been
propitious. Much of it has been burned down, and more of it has
never been built up. It had a straggling, ill-conditioned,
uncommercial aspect, very different from the look of Detroit,
Milwaukee, or St. Paul. There was, however, a great hotel there,
as usual, and a grand bridge over the Rock River, a tributary of
the Mississippi, which runs by or through the town. I found that
life might be maintained on very cheap terms at Dixon. To me, as a
passing traveler, the charges at the hotel were, I take it, the
same as elsewhere. But I learned from an inmate there that he,
with his wife and horse, were fed and cared for and attended, for
two dollars (or eight shillings and four pence) a day. This
included a private sitting-room, coals, light, and all the wants of
life - as my informant told me - except tobacco and whisky. Feeding
at such a house means a succession of promiscuous hot meals, as
often as the digestion of the patient can face them. Now I do not
know any locality where a man can keep himself and his wife, with
all material comforts and the luxury of a horse and carriage, on
cheaper terms than that. Whether or no it might be worth a man's
while to live at all at such a place as Dixon, is altogether
another question.
We went there because it is surrounded by the prairie, and out into
the prairie we had ourselves driven. We found some difficulty in
getting away from the corn, though we had selected this spot as one
at which the open rolling prairie was specially attainable. As
long as I could see a corn-field or a tree I was not satisfied.
Nor, indeed, was I satisfied at last. To have been thoroughly on
the prairie, and in the prairie, I should have been a day's journey
from tilled land. But I doubt whether that could now be done in
the State of Illinois. I got out into various patches and brought
away specimens of corn - ears bearing sixteen rows of grain, with
forty grains in each row, each ear bearing a meal for a hungry man.
At last we did find ourselves on the prairie, amid the waving
grass, with the land rolling on before us in a succession of gentle
sweeps, never rising so as to impede the view, or apparently
changing in its general level, but yet without the monotony of
flatness.
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