ton, staked out holdings in a strip of territory sixtyfive miles from the land office at Iowa City. The new town soon took his name. By the Fourth of July the process of colonization had gone so far that they were able to raise on a liberty pole the big church bell which they had brought along with them. Between Tuesday morning and Saturday night they had reared a little church building and from that time on Grinnell became one of the banner towns of the Union. No one was allowed to purchase land unless he would agree not to sell any liquor on the premises. This was one of the secrets of its attractiveness to law-abiding people, who were glad to cast in their lot with the first settlers and to build up first the town and then the college that have acquired such an enviable distinction in the eyes of the nation. Iowa won distinction because of its courageous stand for the prohibition of the liquor traffic long before most of its fellow commonwealths, East and West, had banished the saloon by law. If some of the earlier enactments were later modified, it stands today solidly in the column of the states that believe in the complete ostracism of the public drinking saloon. When the Civil War plunged the nation into strife there was an instant political and moral uprising throughout the state which put it solidly behind Abraham Lincoln. Its leading citizens were then so comparatively young and had grown up in an atmosphere so charged with the spirit of freedom that no other attitude was possible. Fifty-six years later the state responded no less quietly to the summons from Washington to put its men and material resources into the war against Germany. Patriotism of this type was the normal fruitage of the seed which the prospectors, pioneers and patriarchs of New England ancestry planted so many years ago. Iowa, then, is the child of New England faith and enterprise. It has outstripped its mother in the productivity of its fields and farms. It needs no longer any material or spiritual aid from without its borders, but it never can and never will forget the debt it owes to old New England. No pause, nor rest, save where the streams That feed the Kansas run, Save where our Pilgrim gonfalon Shall flout the setting sun! J. G. WHITTIER. CHAPTER X NEW ENGLAND AND KANSAS Scene 1: Boston, Mass., the old station of the Boston & Albany Railroad on Lincoln St. Time, July 17, 1854. Immense crowds are thronging the barn-like structure and extending out along the line of the train track. They are saying good-bye to twenty-nine resolute men bound for Kansas. As the train moves out of the shed, loud cheers and cordial farewells ring from the throats of thousands. The scene shifts to Worcester, where the emigrants spend the first night of their long journey westward. There, too, a popular ovation is accorded them, and further pledges of remembrance and assistance are given. The next evening they are at Albany, where a similar reception awaited the travelers. At Rochester the group is presented with a large Bible by the president of the Monroe County Bible Society. At Buffalo they board the steamer and not many days later they are in. St. Louis and Kansas City, whence they are led up the Kaw River through the Shawnee reservation to a location that subsequently became the city of Lawrence. Scene 2: New Haven, Ct. Time, the spring of 1856. |