Interesting Passages II

"The migration of the Lincoln family from Kentucky defies all
contemporary expectation, not to say common sense.
Whether you approach it from Chicago, to the northeast,
or from St. Louis, to the Southwest, Central Illinois is
almost unimaginably flat, as through the whole country
had been smoothed out by a rolling pin. Along this meridian
the deciduous forests of the eastern United States thin out
and the grasslands of the west begin...The land in Lincoln's
time sprouted a sea of prairie grass, each shaft of which was
stiff as cardboard and sharp as a handsaw...Back then, in
other words, a prairie was even less attractive and more
forbidding than it is now. If a man could tolerate life here,
he could tolerate anything.

"Yet old Tom Lincoln not only tolerated it, he sought it out.
So did the numberless families who migrated in the same
direction. As my family and I retraced the Lincolns' steps
in reverse, from Illinois prairie to the river valley of Indiana
to the hummocks and dells of Kentucky, the land grew
lovelier. Tom hauled his family the other way, with the
landscape getting more and more unsightly, calculating that
the less inviting the land was, aesthetically, the more potential it held, financially. He must have scanned each new neighborhood and thought: verdant bluffs, meandering creeks dancing with sunligh, hidden hollows and twisting pathways swept by cool breezes---too pretty! We'll never make a buck here! Pack it up! And so on, till he finally found a place ugly enough to earn a living (Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, by Andrew Ferguson; Atlantic Monthly Press: New York, 2007, pp. 208-209)."