talk with me.

"What made that old road?" I asked.

"Vell," said he, "dot's more as I know. Somebody, I dank."

And yet, the history of Vandemark Township was in that old road that he
complained of because he couldn't do a good job of breaking across
it--he was one of those German settlers, or the son of one, who invaded
the state after the rest of us had opened it up.

The Old Ridge Road went through Dyersville, Manchester, Independence,
Waterloo, and on to Fort Dodge--but beyond there both the road and--so
far as I know--the country itself, was a vague and undefined thing. So
also was the road itself beyond the Iowa River, and for that matter it
got to be less and less a beaten track all the way as the wagons spread
out fanwise to the various fords and ferries and as the movers stopped
and settled like nesting cranes. Of course there was a fringe of
well-established settlements a hundred miles or so beyond Fort Dodge, of
people who, most of them, came up the Missouri River.

Our Iowa wilderness did not settle up in any uniform way, but was
inundated as a field is overspread by a flood; only it was a flood which
set up-stream. First the Mississippi had its old town, away off south of
Iowa, near its mouth; then the people worked up to the mouth of the
Missouri and made another town; then the human flood crept up the
Mississippi and the Missouri, and Iowa was reached; then the Iowa
valleys were occupied by the river immigration, and the tide of
settlement rose until it broke over the hills on such routes as the Old
Ridge Road; but these cross-country streams here and there met other