1870 visions of what's underfoot -- Josephine Donovan

Josephine Donovan was born at the turn of the century a mile north of Granville, east of here, an area settled by German and Luxembourgian Roman Catholics. Sullivan’s Black Soil is a novel she wrote based on her father’s memories of breaking Sioux County soil, one of just a few Irish-American immigrants to attempt to set down roots on the good black soil of northwest Iowa.

Donovan also worked hard to create a portrait of the original prairie as beautiful as the land must have appeared to her pioneer father. Here's how she describes the land in her novel, Black Soil.

It was summer again, and the Iowa prairie was a study in green and gold and pink. Patches of ripened barley, oats and wheat were diminutive islands in the green sea of grass. Corn waved green fronds and nodded golden tassels. Sweet Williams vied with the wild roses in flooding the unbroken lands. And the summer sunlight, tempered by the ever-blowing south breeze, cast a sheen over the whole which dazzled the eye and gladdened the heart.”

A little later, little Margaret sits in the prairie grasses. “Margaret arose from where she had been lying in a patch of flowers. She had been listening to the murmur of the flowers as the wind blew through their petals. Her freckled face was flush with ecstasy, her blue eyes round with wonder. . .” “Bird songs; wind whispering to the flowers; insects on the wing; subdued murmurs of moving grass: voices of children—a prairie hymn.”

There is beauty in perfect rows of corn and whole sections of golden beans this time of year, but the native splendor is unimaginable. Just think of looking over endless fields of wild flowers dancing in the prairie winds on a swaying emerald floor.