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was settled by Europeans. But it seems to me now that those earlier settlers merely won a skirmish or two. The people who would have farmed our land at one time surely endured an ongoing struggle against all the natural elements that make this land rather inhospitable for farming. Rocks the size of bears, every predator that ever thought of eating a chicken, clay-like soil and a host of other challenges must have made this a very tough place to farm.
My home in Minnesota on the other hand almost seemed as if it was made for farming! Long stretches of relatively flat land with plentiful water and rich, black earth didn’t mean that fanning was ever an easy way to earn a living. But it certainly had to be easier than what local farmers here dealt with.
In the Midwest it seems as if you could leave the land alone for 100 years, come back, and find that the land was, in fact, even better suited for farming than when you’d left. In our small acreage here it feels like the wild honeysuckle vines can’t wait for me to leave the place for a week so they can take over! If you left this land alone for 100 years you would surely find it completely inhospitable for farming purposes.
I was reminded this week of
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