The new country lay open before me: there were no fences
in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands,
trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the
sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were
introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the
persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to
find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of
the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered
sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of
wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the
sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's
story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains.
Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered
roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.
I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the
damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon
turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like
cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to
visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see
the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a
hawk's nest in its branches.
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