It was a new start, and something in his heart and soul knew it, as the wagon train started on its way west. He hadn’t felt so good for a long time, not since he first came to America. There was a new world out there, opportunity wide as the prairie sky.

There was no reason to stay in Marion County. Available land was more difficult to find, and the contrariness between religions seemed madness to someone who’d came home from bullets and blood—the divisions back home drove him crazy. The government made it easier for him to think about life in an open prairie. There were some blessings lent to vets like himself.

Some people made him a hero, but they knew nothing about slogging through reeds in muck that made fighting Rebs worse than what it was.

But this whole trek west was different: 30 families and kids, 80 head of cattle, a caravan going to rich, treeless land full-up with rich promise.

At night, the whole bunch gathered around the fire to pray and then sing like a heavenly choir, that little girl of Ver Huel leading them on the accordion—then scripture, then more prayer. No fighting, no scrapping.  Sometimes those swampy days at Little Rock were another world all together.

Sjoerd Ritskes Sipma was born in 1842 in Friesland, the Netherlands. He immigrated to America, then skipped off to the Civil War before moving, like so many others, to a beckoning west, where he lived in a soddie on 80-acres of northwest Iowa land. He lived there until he could buy enough lumber in Le Mars to build a frame house, 12 by 30 with two floors, five doors and five windows.

When Sjoerd Sipma left Vicksburg with the 33^rd Iowa Regiment, he had suffered no battle wounds, but was burned when he fell through the floor on a ship they were taking down the Mississippi. He spoke enough English not to get hoodwinked when he bought wood or wheat he’d bring in to grind his own flour.

What he missed in this new land was someone to talk to, someone to share the work with him, a good woman who would know what he knew—that life on the frontier was big with promise. He needed—and he knew it—a wife.

Someone like the girl of Ver Heul, whose father led the whole train. While her father was out looking for the next place to stay, that child handled the team, not like a girl but like a grown woman. She was something, he thought, but too young for him–still, he needed someone like Mary Ver Huel and her accordion.

But she was very young.

So he put in crops and took out bounty. He built a herd of cattle. For three years he built up a fine operation beside that sod house, the frame home, back then, still a dream.

One day Sjoerd Sipma decided he’d try. He’d seen her often enough since her accordion days around the campfire or those long hours driving her father’s team of oxen. To say she blossomed nicely into womanhood was an understatement. Still, when he asked Martin Ver Huel for his daughter’s hand, Ver Huel and wife were reluctant. He clearly was an older man. But he had a start that many others coveted; he was reliable, strong-willed. Everyone trusted him, liked him.

They said yes, and, presumably, so did their Mary. So Mary Ver Heul wed Sjoerd Sipma in 1872. Sjoerd was fourteen years her elder.

By today’s standards, there was good reason to believe it wasn’t starry-eyed love that brought them together or kept them blessedly close. There is no possible way to review the character of their long relationship, although their eight children suggest some warmth and intimacy. Today in a quiet corner of the tiny Nassau Township cemetery, just up the road here, they’re together beneath a pair of stones bearing their names.

Let’s just call it the very first immigrant love story in Sioux County, Iowa.

Think not? Well, it’s September; the beans are mostly in, and the yellowing corn is next. It’s the time when kids return to this college town. When warmth and wind allow it, they walk together or, more likely, jog.

I don’t know them, but I recognize their blessed company. Some hold hands, some just glance at each other.

In spring, a young man lightly turns to fancy. . .well, you know. What’s true then is just as true today, this old man says.

There you have it. First love.