southwestward to Marion, and on to the Mormon trail, and northwestward
toward Elkader and West Union; but I had to follow the Old Ridge Road
west through Dubuque, Delaware, Buchanan and Blackhawk Counties, and
westward. It was called the Ridge Road because it followed the knolls
and hog-backs, and thus, as far as might be, kept out of the slews.

The last bit of it so far as I know was plowed up in 1877 in the
northeastern part of Grundy County. I saw this last mile of the old road
on a trip I made to Waterloo, and remember it. This part of it had been
established by a couple of Hardin County pioneers who got lost in the
forty-mile prairie between the Iowa and Cedar Rivers about three years
before I came in and showed their fitness for citizenship by filling
their wagon with stakes on the way back and driving them on every
sightly place as guides for others--an Iowa Llano Estacado was
Grundy Prairie.

This last bit of it ran across a school section that had been left in
prairie sod till then. The past came rolling back upon me as I stopped
my horses and looked at it, a wonderful road, that never was a highway
in law, curving about the side of a knoll, the comb between the tracks
carrying its plume of tall spear grass, its barbed shafts just ripe for
boys to play Indian with, which bent over the two tracks, washed deep by
the rains, and blown out by the winds; and where the trail had crossed a
wet place, the grass and weeds still showed the effects of the plowing
and puddling of the thousands of wheels and hoofs which had poached up
the black soil into bubbly mud as the road spread out into a bulb of
traffic where the pioneering drivers sought for tough sod which would
bear up their wheels. A plow had already begun its work on this last
piece of the Old Ridge Road, and as I stood there, the farmer who was
breaking it up came by with his big plow and four horses, and stopped to