Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 November 1883 — The Very Odd “Pioneers” of Dakota. [ARTICLE]

The Very Odd “Pioneers” of Dakota.

It is not strange that the dwellers in Dakota should be somewhat different from common folks. Nowhere else beneath the sun was there ever gathered such a pioneer population. No hickory shirts and hobnailed rawhide boots; no log cabins and coonskin caps; no lumbering ox-wagons, full of tow-headed brats, with a half-dozen brindle dogs trotting along between the wheels; no coarse home-spun and hog-and-hominy; no toil-swollen hands and smell of sour sweat and manure piles; no, no. Our pioneers come in palace-cars, reading the latest novel, or Longfellow’s rhythmical twaddle about ‘The Land of the Dacotahs.” which always reminded me of a two-tailed dog with a tin can tied to each. Their costumes tell of jaunts to Newport and Saratoga, and their wives and daughters are up in all the mysteries of Worth, Demorest and Butterick, and familiar with the newest agonies in opera arias and dance steps. All farm work is done by machinery. The ground is broken with sulky plows, the sowing is done with buggy seeders, the golden grain is harvested with selfbinding reapers and threshed by steam, while the engine feeds itself with straw for fuel. Our Grangers farm in city tailor-made suits, with kid gloves on their hands and diamonds blazing in their shirt-fronts, while the dainty cambric handkerchief, with which they carry on gentle flirtations with toil, give forth the soft fragrance of new-mown hay, wild rose or jockey club. — Cor. St Louis Globe-Democrat.