Creative Books

" More commonly in the west the logs were
wasted by burning, except such as were split into rails, which, laid
one above another, made the zig-zag "worm-fences" for the protection
of the fields of the pioneer.
When a clearing was sold to a later comer, fifty or sixty dollars,
in addition to the government price of land, was commonly charged
for forty acres, enclosed and partly cleared. [Footnote: Kingdom,
America, 10, 54.] It was estimated that the cost of a farm of three
hundred and twenty acres at the edge of the prairie in Illinois, at
this time, would be divided as follows: for one hundred and sixty
acres of prairie, two hundred dollars; for fencing it into four
forty-acre fields with rail-fences, one hundred and sixty dollars;
for breaking it up with a plough, two dollars per acre, or three
hundred and twenty dollars; eighty acres of timber land and eighty
acres of pasture prairie, two hundred dollars. Thus, with cabins,
stables, etc., it cost a little over a thousand dollars to secure an
improved farm of three hundred and twenty acres.


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