The lands of the early settlers, with whom these chronicles have to deal, had been surrounded, as soon as possible after occupancy, with substantial rail fences, laid in zigzag fashion along dividing lines, marking the boundaries between neighbors who lived at peace with each other and with all the world. These fences, built to a sufficient height to discourage all attempts at trespass by man or beast, were securely staked at the corners, and weighted with heavy top rails, or "riders," so stanchly placed that many miles of such enclosures remain to this day, long surviving the brawny hands that felled the trees and split the rails. In their mute eloquence they reveal the lasting qualities of the hardwood timber that abounded in the many and beautiful groves which flourished in the prairie States in the early part of the nineteenth century, when Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri comprised all that was generally known as the West.
Much of the primitive glory of these diversified landscapes departed long ago with the trees. The "Hookand-Eye Dutch," as the thrifty followers of ancient Ohm are called by their American neighbors (with whom they do not assimilate), are rapidly replacing the old-time maple and black walnut fences with the modern barbedwire horror; they are selling off the historical rails, stakes and riders and all, to the equally thrifty and not a whit more sentimental timber-dealers of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Grand Rapids, to be manufactured into highgrade lumber, which is destined to find lodgment as costly furniture in the palatial homes, gilded churches, great club-houses, and mammoth modern hostelries that abound on the shores of Lake Michigan, Massachusetts Bay, Manhattan Island, and Long Island Sound. But no vandalism yet invented by man can wholly despoil the rolling lands of the middle West of their beauty, nor rob Mother Nature of her power to rehabilitate them with the living green of cultivated loveliness.
Original settlers of the border-lands had little time and
