Naturally the industrial life of these Northwestern communities is based solidly upon agriculture. There is, perhaps, hardly any other agricultural region of equal extent upon the face of the earth that is so fertile and so well adapted for the production of the most necessary articles of human food. During the past decade the world's markets have been notably disturbed and affected, and profound social changes and political agitations have occurred in various remote parts of the earth. It is within bounds to assert that the most potent and far-reaching factor in the altered conditions of the industrial world during these recent years has been the sudden invasion and utilization of this great new farming region. Most parts of the world which are fairly prosperous do not produce staple food supplies in appreciable surplus quantities. Several regions which are not highly prosperous sell surplus food products out of their poverty rather than out of their abundance. That is to say, the people of India and the people of Russia have often been obliged, in order to obtain money to pay their taxes and other necessary expenses, to sell and send away to prosperous England the wheat which they have needed for hungry mouths at home. They have managed to subsist upon coarser and cheaper food. But in our Northwestern States the application of ingenious machinery to the cultivation of fertile and virgin soils has within the past twenty-five years precipitated upon the world a stupendous new supply of cereals and of meats, produced in quantities enormously greater than the people of the Northwestern States could consume. These foodstuffs have powerfully affected agriculture in Ireland, England, France, and Germany, and, in fact, in every other part of the accessible and cultivated globe.
THE NORTHWESTERN FARMER.
BARREL-HOIST AND TUNNEL
THROUGH THE WASHBURN MILL.
So much has been written of late about the condition of the farmer in these regions that it is pertinent to inquire who the Western farmer is. In the old States the representative farmer is a man of long training in the difficult and honorable art of diversified agriculture. He knows much of soils, of crops and their wise rotation, of domestic animals and their breeding, and of a hundred distinct phases of the production, the life, and the household economics that belong to the traditions and methods of Anglo-Saxon farming. If he is a wise man, owning his land and avoiding extravagance, he can defy any condition of the markets, and can survive any known succession of adverse seasons. There are also many such farmers in the West. But there are thousands of wheat-raisers or corn-growers who have followed in the wake of the railway and taken up government or railroad land, and who are not yet farmers in the truest and best sense of the word. They are unskilled laborers who have become speculators. They obtain their land for nothing, or for a price ranging from one dollar and fifty cents to five dollars per acre. They borrow on mortgage the money to build a small house and to procure horses and implements and seed-grain. Then they proceed to put as large an acreage as they can manage into a single crop—wheat in the Dakotas, wheat or corn in Nebraska and Kansas. They speculate upon the chances of a favorable season and a good crop safely harvested; and they speculate upon the chances of a profitable market. They hope that the first two crops may render them the possessor of an unincumbered estate, supplied with modest buildings, and with a reasonable quantity of machinery and live stock. Sometimes they succeed beyond their anticipations. In many instances the chances go against them. They live on the land, and the title is invested in them; but they are using borrowed capital, use it unskillfully, meet an adverse season or two, lose through foreclosure that which has cost them nothing except a year or two of energy spent in what is more nearly akin to gambling than to farming, and finally help to swell the great chorus that calls the world to witness the distress of Western agriculture. It cannot be said too emphatically that real agriculture in the West is safe and prosperous, and that the unfortunates are the inexperienced persons, usually without capital, who attempt to raise a single crop on new land. For many of them it would be about as wise to take borrowed money and speculate in wheat in the Chicago bucket-shops.
MOSSBRÆ.
The great majority, however, of these inexperienced and capital-less wheat and corn producers gradually become farmers. It is inevitable, at first, that a country opened by the railroads for the express purpose of obtaining the largest possible freightage of cereals should for a few seasons be a "single-crop country." Often the seed-grain is supplied on loan by the roads themselves. They charge "what the traffic will bear." The grain is all, or nearly all, marketed through long series of elevators following the tracks, at intervals of a few miles, and owned by some central company that bears a close relation to the railroad. Thus the corporations which control the transportation and handling of the grain in effect maintain for their own advantage an exploitation of the entire regions that they traverse, through the first years of settlement. Year by year the margin of cultivation extends further West, and the single-crop sort of farming tends to recede. The wheat growers produce more barley and oats and flax, try corn successfully, introduce live stock and dairying, and thus begin to emerge as real farmers.