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brick-fronted Norris Drug Company where there existed even a fair selection of cigars. It was possible to buy Paine’s Celery Compound which was 21 percent alcohol or, for sore muscles, Barker’s Liniment, whose slogan was “Joy to the World, Relief has Come!” La Porte’s population had reached 1,400, and “As a business location and place of residence,” crowed the 1910 Black Hawk County Atlas , “La Porte City cannot be excelled in Iowa.”
    Unfortunately, neither La Porte nor the Mullens would have it quite so good again.

Chapter Three
    Mary Ann Dobshire Mullen died in 1914; she was seventy-six. Patrick J. Mullen died eleven years later on March 26, 1925, just nine days after his ninety-first birthday. Gene Mullen was nine years old at the time.
    By then “The Old Eagle Tree” had fallen, and there were no eagles in Black Hawk County anymore. There were no wild turkey, no prairie wolves, no buffalo and few—if any—deer. The last passenger pigeon had died in captivity eleven years before. The rich prairie earth once held fast by the thick roots of the vast fields of shoulder-high grass now lay exposed by the plow. And the chill winter winds were stripping the topsoil. Miller’s Creek was slowly silting in.
    There is a photograph of Gene Mullen and his sister, Mary Lois, sitting with their grandfather before a little grove of cottonwood trees. Patrick is wearing thick black woolen pants and a vest over a white shirt and tie. A wide, pleated, broad-visored tweed cap shades his stern face, and although his thin, straight mouth is unsmiling, there is considerable humor in his eyes. Gene and his sister—Gene must have been about five years old here—are seated in the grass on either side of Patrick Mullen. This is no photograph of a maudlin old man hugging his grandchildren; it is a photograph of a pioneer . And the grandchildren, as if aware of the legend, seemed too cowed to sit close.
    Patrick J. Mullen died while the rural Midwest was suffering from an agricultural depression. Almost his entire estate was locked up in land and each of his children demanded an equal share. None of the daughters wanted to farm and by the time the estate was settled Gene’s father’s share was reduced to the original Dobshire holdings: the land grant 40 acres and the 80 acres purchased from the Walker brothers. Gene’s Uncle Edward was the only other Mullen to want to hold onto the land. The other brothers, the bank, taxes, lawyers’ fees, insurance and sisters liquidated all the rest. Although the quarry remains in operation, its current owners have blasted through the stone upon which Patrick’s original homestead stood. However, the austere two-story frame house he later built remains, but it, too, has passed out of the family’s hands.
    Still, even though John Dobshire’s house was torn down in 1960 when Gene and Peg built their modern ranch-style house, an indelible mark of that old man’s spirit too exists: almost the only break in the regular checkerboard pattern of Black Hawk County’s section line boundary roads is the dirt road passing Gene Mullen’s farm. Dobshire, instead of following the boundary, wore down his own road about a quarter mile south of the section line. He did it for no better reason than that was the direction his house faced, and the path provided him the most direct route to Forbes’ post office by the Cedar River and, later, the main La Porte to Waterloo road.
    Although Gene’s father, Oscar, liked the land, he never really wanted to work it. Whenever he had a chance he would escape to play baseball. During the Depression, while Gene was working his way through Marquette University in Milwaukee, his father was managing the semiprofessional Waterloo Cardinals. Between 1929 and 1931, under his management, the Cardinals lost but four games those entire three years. Gene’s mother, Margaret McDermott