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A diary kept by a Swiss farmer from the Ozark Mountains allows us to attempt an analysis of what a farmer’s life was around 1840 in this region of Missouri. Célestin Guyenet lived inside three circles: a rural lead industry from which he hoped for individual profit as a farmer-miner inserted in market relations, a complex neighborhood made up of community solidarity and heavy social constraints and the anthropozoological community that constituted his farm, made of working and emotional relationships between humans and animals. An individual case like this, which reveals at least what was possible, even if it was not generally lived, opens up the debate on the nature of the American rural world of the first nineteenth century.