A Tribute to Pioneer Mothers

As an ending to his "A History of the People of Iowa," Cyrenus Cole
added a chapter which he called "A Postscript Personal," which in the
name of his own mother was a tribute to all the pioneer mothers of
Pella, and also of the whole state of Iowa. This chapter has attracted
literary attention, the editor and reviewer of the Des Moines "Register"
saying of it that if all other literature were lost, the future
historian might reconstruct from this chapter a description of pioneer
life in Iowa, especially as it affected women in their aims and
aspirations for their children. With the author's permission, we are
reprinting that chapter here because in the history of Pella it has an
appropriate place.

A POSTSCRIPT PERSONAL

By Cyrenus Cole

I have gathered the materials for this history from many sources; from
newspapers yellow with age; from musty pamphlets; from books of decayed
bindings, and from lips that quivered when they spoke of the things of
long ago. But most of all, I must acknowledge the indebtedness to my own
mother. She told me so much about early Iowa that even as a school boy I
thought of writing a history of the state--her story of Iowa.

She came to Iowa in 1847, before the state was a year old, and while she
herself was still a girl. Sitting by the side of her father on the front
seat of a mover's wagon, she first saw the wonderland of the prairies in
the waning summertime of that year. To her eyes it was like the
unfolding of a dream of some fairyland. Blashfield's picture in the
State House at Des Moines, with the winged spirits hovering over the
pioneer's wagon, might have been painted from her visionings. Her
father, Mathias de Booy, grandson of Cyrenus de Booy, of ancient name,
was a man already burdened with years, but he was permitted to live in
the land of his adoption until he had increased the psalmist's limit by
more than a score. I can just remember him--a man who had participated
in the wars of Napoleon in Europe, and who might have witnessed the
inauguration of Washington, had he been an American citizen. It takes
only three generations to encompass all of the marvelous history of
America.

They journeyed from Keokuk up the valley of the Des Moines river,
following, perhaps, in part of the route of the Dragoons in 1835. There
were scattered settlements, but the country generally was still an open
prairie. It must have been a hard journey, but my mother always spoke of
it as a beautiful one. In her old age she seemed to think of it as
something that she had dreamed when she was a girl. She was young and
she was impressionable, and all the things of earth and sky were lovely
in her sight. The skies were so vast and so blue, and the flowers were
so many and so fair. Doubtless she added to them something of her own
loveliness, and sweetened them in her remembrance. But I have tried to
write of the prairies as she saw them, and as she remembered them
afterwards. Nor have I found her personal impressions of them at
variance with the testimonies of any of the earlier writers, whether
French or American. George Catlin, the artist, said over and over that
he could find no words to describe the beauties of the prairies, and so
did Albert Lea, the soldier and engineer.

I have written not only of the prairies, but I have written of savages
who paddled canoes on unmapped rivers; of explorers and adventurers and
missionaries; of men who felled the forests and subdued the land; of
those who toiled and fought and died; of the sturdy and the strong; of
the determined and the valiant