"Farm," I answered.

"All these folks that are rushing to the prairies," said the old man,
"will starve out and come back. God makes trees grow to show men where
the good land is. I read history, and there's no country that's good for
anything, except where men have cut the trees, niggered off the logs,
grubbed out the stumps, and made fields of it--and if there are stones,
it's all the better. 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,'
said God to Adam, and when you go to the prairies where it's all ready
for the plow, you are trying to dodge God's curse on our first parents.
You won't prosper. It stands to reason that any land that is good will
grow trees."

"Some of this farm was prairie," put in Preston, "and I don't see but
it's just as good as the rest."

"It was all openings," replied Evans. "The trees was here once, and got
killed by the fires, or somehow. It was all woods once."

"You cut down trees to make land grow grass," said Thatcher. "I should
think that God must have meant grass to be the sign of good ground."

"Isn't the sweat of your face just as plenty when you delve in the
prairies?" asked Dunlap.

"You fly in the face of God's decree, and run against His manifest
warning when you try to make a prairie into a farm," said Evans.
"You'll see!"