It would take little more than a couple of hours to chase all the way across the country if you were visiting the Netherlands these days, distances being so short-circuited. Used the be stories circulated about relatives from the old country getting here to northwest Iowa and then asking nutty questions like "We go maybe to Niagara Falls tomorrow, you think? --and then the mountain with all those Presidents?" --travel agendas beyond the imagination. The size of things in this country is what they couldn't figure or imagine, that it would take them most of the day just to get east to Dubuque.
When the pioneer Luxembourgers' wagon trains crossed the state in 1870, travel time was two to three weeks, including over-night-ers to rest their trusty oxen. One can only imagine how spellbinding endless prairie must have seemed to them, how mysterious the eternal horizon must have seemed. One pioneer liked to say that when he arrived at this far corner, there was only one tree where eventually there would be a village named Orange City.
All of which makes a single story more memorable than it might seem at first-telling. A man named Jacob Koster put down roots in a place to be called Sioux Center--right there in what is Central Park today. Koster came from southeast Minnesota to land they believed available--as long as you weren't Yankton Sioux.
A mammoth cottonwood in Central Park ranks as one of the biggest--and likely oldest--in the entire state. I like to believe Jacob Koster planted it, but cottonwoods don't need us to plant them. That particular monster, however, marks the spot where the Koster decided to homestead.
Koster himself, or so the story goes, spotted somewhere south a column of smoke one wind-still morning, then saw it again and again days later, all of which fired his curiosity. Neighbors? Indians? One morning his curiosity got the best of him, and he decided to have a look, make it an adventure--took the whole family with him.
Must have been a hovel like the one his family lived in, chunks of sod set against a bit of a hill, a refuge from wind and rain maybe, but a refuge for all manner of critters as well. The Kosters spotted it maybe five miles from their own sod house.
There they sat, some distance away in the wagon, when suddenly a woman stepped out and drew back the blanket that served as a front door. She was alone.
Cautiously, Koster brought his wagon closer until she heard a foreign sound, someone nearby, and looked up, frightened.
Both of them fell into dead silence. There they stood, Jacob and family on the wagon, the woman dropping the pail she carried into the prairie grass.
"Jacob?" she stammered, still as stone.
Silence spread out like the open prairie.
"And you are Yentje?" Koster said.
Maybe he stepped down from the wagon. We don't know. I don't think he hugged her, both of them non-huggers of stolid Dutch stock. But they knew each other. Miracle of miracles, they knew each other.
The history book says the two of them had immigrated to the States at different times in different groups, Yentje and her family going to southern Iowa before coming farther northwest. Jacob, who we might just call an old boyfriend of hers, had arrived in America and moved west with another group of Hollanders, where--out in the middle of endless grassland--they stumbled into each other, both of them with families of their own trying to make do in this huge new world.
True story? It's one of those that, if it isn't true, should be. Two old friends, close friends, meet serendipitously--but blessedly--on endless Siouxland grasslands.
I don't know if the Luxembourgers have their own similar story, but if they'd like to borrow this one, they should feel free. Out here on the edge of the plains, it makes everyone smile.
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