Northwestern Iowa Its History and Traditions 1804-1926 Vol. I Chicago: S.J. Clarke Publishing Co 1927 Chapter VI-Pioneer Life and Customs ...[Benjamin F. Gue in his "History of Iowa,"]...says for example: " The hard times beginning with 1857 were passing away, and a steady and heavy immigration was annually coming into the state in search of cheap homes. Thousands of eastern men of wealth were sending money where the legal rate of interest was ten per cent and the security as fertile lands as any in the world. "The reports of the discovery of rich gold deposits in the eastern range of the Rocky Mountains, near Pike's Peak, in 1859, attracted thousands of Iowa people to that region, and it is likely that these departures in search of gold nearly equaled the immigration from eastern states into Iowa. But the tide soon turned back and most of the gold seekers returned to the prairies of Iowa, better content to rely upon the steady gains derived with certainty from the fertile soil of well-tilled farms. "Barbed wire fences had not then come into use and the farmers were experimenting with hedge plants of osage orange, hawthorne, willow and honey locust. Others were making fences by ditching. But the common fence was of rails or boards and was the great expense in making farms, costing more than all other improvements combined." THE CIVIL WAR AND RAILROADS CLOSE THE ERA The Civil war intervened to retard even the scattered settlements of Northwestern Iowa and this fact was in no way more manifest than in the complete cessation of railroad building. None of the four railroads across the state for which land grants had been made in 1856 had been completed and noe was much extended when the Civil war closed; but by 1870, the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, the Chicago & Northwestern and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy had all reached the Missouri River, and a few years later, the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul completed its line so as to give Northwestern Iowa another outlet and inlet. In 1865 and for several years thereafter, Boone, in Central Iowa on the Des Moines River, was a frontier railroad station on the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, and was called Montana. While the line was being constructed to Council Bluffs, Carroll County was a favorite hunting ground. Many trains were stopped and all on board, from engineers to passengers, would tramp over the prairies to shoot chickens, and few returned empty-handed. That trains were delayed mattered little to these pioneer travelers, until the officials made drastic rules against hunting on the way. The engines and cattle cars of that day were not large and a train of ten or a dozen cars was heavily loaded. It required two nights and a day to pull a stock train from the Missouri Valley country to Chicago, after the line reached Council Bluffs in 1867. When trains were caught in snow drifts and blizzards the fatalities were multiplied. There were no snow fences to protect the cuts and no snow plows to clear the tracks. Traffic was thus frequently tied up, sometimes for weeks at a time. The building of the railroads marked the transition period from the old to the new order of things, and the Civil war may be said to have definitely closed the times when the primitive life of the pioneer had been little changed by "improvements."