Some 35 years ago, a young man born and reared in Putnam County,
near Greencastle, decided to seek his fortune elsewhere. Of
uncompromising Republican political stock, he ignored Horace
Greeley's admonition, "Young man go West," and took a different
direction.
He had already arranged to buy on contract a modest acreage in
the Mississippi Delta where the silt of countless overflows of
the River had produced a soil more than 60 feet in depth--the
deepest and richest soil on Earth other than the valley of the
Nile. . .
And so, one typically bleak March day, he assembled his dog, a
span or two of mules, his scanty farming tools and himself into a
box car headed south.
In later years, when speaking of that momentous occasion, he
said, "I think the most lonesome, homesick and desperate moment
of all my ups and downs was the time I closed that box car door
on familiar scenes I might never see again--and the wheels began
to turn. It was so cold I made a sort of bunk, wrapped my dog and
myself in the same blankets to help keep one another warm, and
tried to go to sleep."
The trip took over a week. They all ate some days. Some days just
the mules and the dog; and one day, just the mules.
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