The dierks legacy

摘要

According to Don Dierks, Jr., a descendant of the Dierks family that left its landmark imprint on the hilly pine forests in Indian Territory (later to become Oklahoma) and Arkansas, farmer Peter Henry Dierks left Germany with his wife in 1852 and settled near Lyons, (now Clinton) Iowa, not far from the Mississippi River. With them was Hans, the couple's two-year-old son. A booming sawmill industry soon sprang up along the river in the midwest. Mills cut massive white pine logs that had been lashed together in rafts and floated south from origins in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Hans and other Dierks children born into the family were no doubt serenaded daily by mill steam whistles. It's possible that Hans and perhaps his brothers— Herman, Peter, Henry and John— worked part time in those mills and thus developed a love for the whine of saws and the smell of freshly cut lumber.