Success was never guaranteed. One year it was the "black blizzards" of dust; the next, a plague of locusts that ate the handles off his tools.
The prairie wasn't just grass; it was a woven mat of roots centuries old. Elias’s old wooden plow snapped like a twig against the "iron" sod. He spent his last coins on a John Deere steel plow —the "sodbuster"—which sliced through the earth with a scream of metal. sodbuster
Elias had to string barbed wire to protect his wheat from the cattlemen, who believed the range should remain open and unfenced. The Legacy Success was never guaranteed