Democracy in America

The prairie grass was tall, very tall, as far as the eye could see back then, an immense, shaggy hide over the slowly rising hills of Sioux County, Iowa.  So tall and so wide and so thick that it was a hazard for those white folks who determined to settle the county.  The only way to be sure you knew where you were going, should you want to be neighborly, was to dig trenches between the domiciles, the sod houses.  

So people did--all of them, regardless of their station in life.  And thus, like deer and muskrats and the neighborly Yankton Sioux, pioneers out here went visiting their neighbors, most of which they didn't know.

Two young ladies determined to call on some old friends four or five miles of prairie grass away, ladies who had, well, some standing, you might say, in the old country. With a neighborly visit in mind, the ladies followed the furrows until ushered to another homestead they'd not visited before, where the good wife was just then brewing up pancakes, the stove standing outside the sod house. The good wife was so overjoyed to have visitors, she begged the ladies to stay for a plateful of hot cakes. To their credit, they did.

Such a grouping would not have happened in the old country, of course, but out here the vast wilderness of grass created new rules for neighborliness. When Alexis de Toqueville traveled the country in the 1830s, he liked what he saw, and assumed that the kind of equality he'd witnessed across the length and breadth of this frontier nation was an immense blessing. He titled his travels Democracy in America.

Meanwhile, back to the sod house.

After stirring up the pancake batter, the good wife turned around to take care of something or other, and the moment she did, the family dog, Caleb, a big, happy black lab, started snorting up the pancake mix--and loving it.  When she saw--and heard--what was going on, the good wife pulled that mixing spoon out of the batter and started punishing Caleb, whapping him time and time again with that mixing spoon until he ran off a bit. Then she smiled, grumbled a little about her beloved mutt, and let well enough alone, plopped that spoon back in the mix from whence it came, gave the batter a few more turns, and poured it out on the grate.

Now these young ladies, who, back in Holland, were from a bit higher class than their gracious wilderness hot cake queen, had noted all this whapping sourly, as can be imagined. 

No matter, when the good wife served up those fat pancakes, bedecked with sugar, it was simply impossible for the ladies to refuse them, even though they took not a bite without visions of that black dog's red tongue flopping from his snout.  


Later, when those two young ladies departed along the furrow, the highway, their stomachs were full, but they were still a bit queasy, having learned a lesson in neighborliness, equality, and the American way of life. 

So, I'm thinking right then and there may have been the first use of what became a famous line in a movie about Kansas. "Well, Caleb," one of the ladies might have said as the dog trailed along for a time, "we're not in Holland anymore."