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titular control of his lands. On the 1910 maps of Cedar, Eagle and Big Creek townships in Black Hawk County a total of 1186.64 acres, valued at between $80 and $125 an acre, is listed in the Mullen name. In addition, the 640 acres of northwest rangeland was worth about $50 an acre at that time. So Patrick and Mary Ann Mullen had reason to be pleased with themselves, and evidence exists that they were.
    Patrick paid to have a photograph of his austere two-story frame house included in the 1910 Atlas of Black Hawk County . The house was painted gray with contrasting white trim edging the corners and the eaves beneath the roof. There were ornate carved lintels over the windows and doors, neat white shutters for every downstairs window and the two windows on the second floor beneath the peak of the roof. The house had two chimneys and a tidy front walk of crushed quarry gravel leading directly to the larger of the two porches. With his proper farmer’s sense of perspective, however, Patrick paid to have two other photographs placed in the Atlas , too. They depicted his Percheron and Hereford breeding stock posed in front of his barns.
    The photographs are small, no more than 2½ by 2 inches, but one can recognize Patrick and Mary Ann Mullen seated stiffly on their porch above their sons and daughters gathered on the porch steps and lawn below. Their faces are no larger than the head of a pin, but with the help of a magnifying glass it is possible to make out five young men and five young women, one of whom appears to be holding a child. The Mullen sons are wearing dark suits and soft derbies; the daughters are in long skirts and high-collared puffed-sleeved blouses, their faces shaded by elaborately fashionable hats. Patrick and Mary Ann, alone, are bareheaded. They are seated on almost opposite sides of the porch from each other, she with her white hair pulled severely back, one hand covering the other in her lap. Patrick is sitting ramrod straight, his feet planted squarely in front of him. Their posture—rigid, proud, formal, all sharp horizontals and verticals—curiously resembles the house.
    Gene Mullen tells of his Grandmother Mullen developing a “felon,” an extremely painful pus-producing infection at the end of her little finger beneath the nail. To rid herself of the agony it caused her, she simply chopped the end of that finger off. It could not have seemed to her a particularly significant act compared to what she had already been through. After all, she had survived the potato famine and pestilence in Ireland, the absence of her father for seventeen years. She had braved the ocean crossing, made the physical and perhaps more difficult emotional adjustment to the new land. She had overcome the terrible isolation of those early years, the loss of two sons in infancy, and had had the strength to rear ten children more. She had helped her young Irish husband “bust” through the thick prairie sod, survive the fierce winters, the prairie fires, tornadoes, floods, blistering heat. She had buried her father and unhesitatingly taken her mother in, and when her mother’s time had come, Mary Ann buried her, too, next to her father in the Eagle Center plot. She had placed her trust in God and seen her faith and devotion rewarded. There is then a strange Biblical sensibility to her act: if thy fingertip offend thee, cast it off.
    Even La Porte City was booming. What did it matter if Main Street was dust-blown in the summer, a mud bog in the spring and icebound in winter? It was wide enough to accommodate the wagon trains that continued to pass through with their loads of lumber, wheat, corn and hogs. The sidewalks were wooden planks placed upon the dirt with boardwalks laid to cross to the corners. Patrick could ride his old black mare, Dolly, into town to purchase his Dan Patch chewing tobacco, fill himself with whiskey and sell his eggs. His youngest boys could get a Coca-Cola at the