Another source of alfalfa

I recently read “The Art and Science of Hay” (EQUUS 450), which states, “In 1859, immigrants Wendelin and Juliana Grimm settled in Minnesota and planted alfalfa seed they had brought with them from Germany.… Virtually all the alfalfa currently grown in the United States can be traced to the seed the Grimms carried with them to America.”

Several newspaper accounts dating to the 1920s and earlier state that Wilhelm David Huelle also brought alfalfa seed from Germany. Huelle originally settled in Illinois in 1867, then began cultivating alfalfa in earnest after he moved to his farm near Emerson, Iowa, in 1873. One account published in The Iowa Recorder of Greene, Iowa, on November 3, 1926, states “many pioneers in southwestern Iowa recall that [Huelle] was the first grower of alfalfa in Iowa and in 1881 he sold seed to Mr. Grimm.”

William Huelle was my great-greatgrandfather, and I think he deserves some of the credit for introducing alfalfa seed into the United States. Marian Bond Ankeny, Iowa

I thoroughly enjoyed “Ponies of the Southern Sky.” I had the incredible opportunity to visit Robert F. Scott’s Terra Nova hut at Cape Evans in Antarctica in 2010, when I was part of a research team measuring sea ice. The hut and its contents seem “just as they left them,” with even the canisters of food literally frozen in time. I’ve attached a photo where you can see the bales of pony fodder still leaning against the back wall of the stable. Inside the stable, several rough patches still hold the hair of the ponies where they rubbed and scratched, and bits of frozen manure cling to the floor.

Inside the hut are some of the pony snowshoes that were “fatefully” left behind on the trek over the ice. (Similar snowshoes have been used in other areas, such as for the mule trains that carried mail over the Sierra Nevadas.)