Summary Of John Wendell's Kansas

Kansas
John Wendell brought his wagon to a stop, gazing out over a vast, lush, prairie, envisioning waves of golden wheat taking the place of the endless, muted prairie grasses. This, he said, was the glorious life of American fame, of which all who had ever lived in the crowded, smoggy cities of the Eastern Seaboard had dreamed. “Just think!” he said to his wife, “Here we will never have any want or need! The land is all that a man needs—Mother Nature will provide everything we require.” As his wife gazed around, she responded, “Yes. I think we will be happy here, once we have cultivated the land and established our homestead.” The Wendell’s looked around at their newly purchased property, seeing no longer the rocks embedded in the soil,

E. Jacob, he turned toward home in the fading evening light, relieved from finishing the ordeal. He carried three, fifty-pound bags of corn kernels. He had agreed, after a swift bargaining, to paying one hundred dollars for the corn after John had sold that fall’s harvest, either in cash or in crop. Arriving home, though, he slumped in his wagon’s seat as he realized the work left to do—the entire property needed to be sowed with seeds, and he owned several acres. Though he balked to undertake so Herculean a task, he was startled by the lateness of the season, and began planting that very evening. It took him a week of intense, often sloppy, work from sun-up to sundown to finish planting his farm. After that, John took little care for his farm; he worked as a man in no hurry, and took breaks often, stopping to eat, or rest, or simply to stare into the distance, lost in thought, except for to apprehend the necessity of renewing his halfhearted efforts once more. More often than not, however, he spent hours idly resting in the shade of their cabin, or leisurely watching clouds drift through the cerulean

He instead went to town often, sitting and drinking in the tavern, listening to tales old and new, or hearing the news brought back from the East. As the fall began to pass in earnest, he told his wife, “We needn’t harvest now. The corn is yet growing, and in a few weeks, it will have matured completely!” She replied, “I may not be a farmer, but I do feel we ought to harvest soon, and sell our yields at market. I don’t like having a debt to Mr. Benson above our heads—it is unsettling and unfitting of a Christian man.” He discounted her words as words of a mistaken woman affecting a man’s role. Sooner than he had thought it would be came the first frost of the season, damaging and killing his crops. Upon seeing this, and hearing tell of the older men that a harsh winter was foretold by the early frost, he rushed to harvest the corn. He worked as quickly as he could, but it was mainly to no avail, and half of his crop was lost to the early bite of winter. By-and-by it became colder and colder. Remembering suddenly the debt that he owed, he sold as much corn as he could spare, and only gained twenty dollars out of the hundred needed. As he raced to earn enough capital to fend of the demands of Mr. Benson, he neglected other duties, and essentials such as purchasing a fireplace for the cabin, or building up a supply of wood for the winter were forgotten or