Of the 13,635 persons who were following some occupation in Illinois in 1820, nearly 91 per cent (12,395) were engaged in agriculture.(437) To this pursuit the state was naturally well adapted. One of the most observant of German travelers in America wrote that the meaning of “fertile land” was very different in this region from its meaning in Germany. In America fertile land of the first class required no fertilizer for the first century and was too rich for wheat during the first decade, while fertile land of the second class needed no fertilizer during the first twelve to twenty years of its cultivation. Bottom-lands belonged to the first class.(438) The prairies remained unappreciated by the Americans, although some foreign farmers preferred to settle in Illinois, because there they could avoid having to clear land, and could raise a crop the first year, while coal could serve as fuel,(439) and a ditch and bank fence, requiring little wood, could be constructed, or a hedge could be grown.(440) A traveler of 1819 speaks of one of the largest prairies as not well adapted to cultivation, because of the scarcity of wood, and in the fall of 1825 there was but one house on the way from Paris to Springfield, leading across eighty miles of a prairie ninety miles in length.(441) It was easy to obtain land. After 1820 it could be bought from the government of the United States at $1.25 per acre, it could be rented—sometimes for one peck of corn per acre per year(442)—, or the claim of a squatter could be purchased. When Peter Cartwright moved from Kentucky to Illinois in 1824, he gave as reasons for moving the fact that he had six children and but one hundred and fifty acres of land, and that Kentucky land was high and rising in value; the increase of a disposition in the South to justify slavery; the distinction in Kentucky between young people reared without working and those who worked; the danger that his four daughters might marry into slave families; and the need of preachers in the new country.(443) The land being obtained, the first cultivation was difficult. Writers often give the idea that after a year or two the land which had been heavily timbered was left free from trees, stumps, or roots, but many a pioneer plowed for twenty years among the stumps. Stump fields are today no novelty in Illinois, and farming has not retrograded. Usually the settler’s first need was a crop, and in order to hasten its production the trees were girdled, a process which might either precede or follow the planting, according to the time of year in which the immigrant arrived. If prairie land was plowed six horses, or their equivalent of power in oxen, were required for the first breaking, and a summer’s fallow usually followed in order to allow the roots to decay. In 1819 five dollars per acre was paid for the first plowing of the prairie, and three or four dollars for the second.(444)