The Church on the changing frontier

by Helen Olive Belknap

UP-TO-DATE REAPING ON THE PLAINS

Answering the World’s Prayer for Daily Bread.

Hard Times

In the history of this Range area the last three years have been the most difficult for farmers and ranchers. They have suffered acutely from the sharp drop in prices of stock and farm products. Part of the Range section has had a severe drouth. Beaverhead has had several dry years. Last year (1921), thousands of dollars’ worth of hay had to be shipped into the county as feed, and much livestock had to be sent out of the county to graze. In addition to drouth, grasshoppers, fairly plentiful before, became a scourge in part of Sheridan the summer of 1921. The farmers, helped by the Farm Bureau, worked hard to exterminate them with poisoned oats. Simultaneously with the drouth and grasshopper scourge in certain sections, the decrease in prices has led to hard times and much suffering. Whereas a rancher was “well off” a few years ago, he now considers himself lucky if he is “in the hole” for only a few thousand. The farmers are bitter. They feel that something is wrong with the “system.” One can hardly blame them when crops bring no profit, while taxes seem to be higher than ever. The hard times have made ranchers and farmers do more serious thinking about taxes, farm conditions, and the marketing of farm products than they have ever done before.

E. T. Devine, writing on “Montana Farmers” in The Survey Magazine, gives the farmers’ position:

Montana farmers are much like other American producers, urban and rural, but they are even harder hit than most of their fellow countrymen, except, of course, unemployed town workers. They share in the general calamity of relatively low prices for agricultural products and they have also just passed through several years of unprecedented drouth. Freight rates are high and burdensome, and the things the farmers have to buy are still high in proportion to the prices which they get for their grain and stock. These farmers are therefore in debt, and are borrowing more than they can. They are actually and not merely in a chronically distorted imagination, having difficulty in paying their interest and taxes; and if their equity is small they are losing it.... The farmers are not seeking fundamental or permanent solutions. What concerns them is to get immediate and appreciable relief from taxes.

Hard times, as in Union County, usually strike our best assets. The county first had a County Agent in 1915, a Home Demonstration Agent in 1917, and Assistant County Agent in 1918 and a Club Leader in 1918. Unfortunately, the hard times forced upon the country a program of retrenchment. In 1920 the Assistant County Agent and, early in 1921, the Club Leader were removed. At present, there is a determined effort in some quarters to dispense with the other two workers.

Social Agencies

Country folk keep track of things. County papers as well as outside newspapers are read in all communities. These outside newspapers come from Denver, Kansas City, Butte or Omaha, depending upon location. Four newspapers are published in Beaverhead, two in the county seat, and one in each of the two villages. Rural Sheridan prints but one newspaper, The Tongue River News, at Ranchester. Two dailies are published in Sheridan City. Three communities in Union, and three in Hughes County, publish their own papers. The town of Clayton has the Examiner and the Tribune, as well as a paper printed in Spanish. Grenville and Des Moines, two villages in Union, also have local papers. In Hughes County, Pierre has two papers, and Blunt and Harrold one each. The editors are almost all progressive and up-to-date, and vitally interested in the welfare of their communities.

More and better libraries are an urgent need of all these counties. Sheridan, Pierre and Dillon all have splendid Carnegie libraries. The majority of the schools have small school libraries. But there is only one public library in Beaverhead County, besides that in Dillon, in the community house of Wisdom village. Sheridan has no other library in the whole county. The only libraries in Union County are a collection of books for public use in the office of a village lumber yard and a small travelling library. Hughes County has a town library and three circulating libraries.