Which of the following statements best shows how people changed their physical environment in indiana in the 1800s?

The wind with the rain blew a great deel of my corn down which caused it with so mutch rain to damage very mutch. I am now trying to gether it as fast as I can & I should have been dun but hands cant be hired here at no price at all hardly & I swoped work with one of my neighbours, helped him cut Broom Corn for him to help me gether Corn, every body seams to be behind with their work owing to their having been so mutch wet wether here this Summer & fall & So mutch sickness a part of the latter part of Aug & the first of Sep that they was not anoughf of well persons hardly in the neighborhood to wait on the Sick.1

This passage from Decatur County farmer William Tyner's December, 1855, letter to his sister and brother-in-law is an appropriate prologue for an essay on the history of rural life in Indiana. With eloquent simplicity these lines disclose some pivotal characteristics of Tyner's life as an Indiana farmer: the impact of environmental factors and consequent uncertainties of the harvest, labor shortages that necessitated carefully calculated work sharing, and extended ordeals of sickness.2 The experiences recounted in Tyner's letters illuminate rural life in nineteenth-century Decatur County, Indiana, but must be placed within a broader context of Indiana and midwestern rural history from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century.

Extensive scholarship exists on midwestern land disposition policies, settlement and land ownership patterns, crop production, technology of farming, commercialization of agriculture, and government agricultural programs.3 In addition, in the past twenty years practitioners of the "new" rural history have enhanced the study of rural life by expanding their focus beyond these topics. Influenced by social history models, which examine everyday lives of ordinary people in connection with large-scale socioeconomic developments, and using social science methodology, including quantitative analysis, the new rural historians have developed ambitious agendas that call for investigating the "lifestyle and activities of farmers and villagers, their family patterns, farming

they are best known for the cliff pueblos found throughout arizona, new mexico, colorado and utah. and for their development of desert farming.

hope i

-lavira: )