Trotwood can vouch for every word of the following letter. He visited the great Dakota prairies last fall. Such vastness, such fertility, such lands!
Fargo, N. D., August 15.
Editor Trotwood’s Monthly:
When I was a resident of your country I thought then that there was only one God’s country, and that was the Central Basin of Tennessee. My reason for arriving at such a conclusion was the land in the Central Basin, but more particularly in and around Maury County, had maintained its fertility and wonderful productive power for a hundred years with only the ordinary American style of farming. That is, taking all out of the land and putting nothing back again. But since that time a discovery has been made which accounts for the land in your section of country maintaining its wonderful endurance for raising such an excellent quality of wheat over a period of seventy years, without rotation of crops, and that is the almost inexhaustible deposit of phosphate rock that underlies so much of your lands. But I have found another God’s country. While it cannot boast of being underlaid with phosphate rock like your lands in and around Maury County, but when this country was opened up for settlement in the ’70’s it was as rich in all the constituent elements of fertility as the lands in the Central Basin of Tennessee. This Red River Valley is a wonderful country, and Fargo, N. D., is the center of this granary of the great Northwest. Although Fargo is not a very large city, the population is about twelve or thirteen thousand inhabitants, it is a live town, and full of enterprising business men.
This town is the third largest farm implement distributing point in the world. That’s saying a good deal. Moscow, Russia, comes first; Kansas City second, and Fargo third. According to the Bureau of Statistics, United States Department of Agriculture, for 1904, the State of North Dakota produced some fifty-four million bushels of wheat and the set counties in the Red River Valley raised of the above amount nearly twelve million bushels. This is not counting the Minnesota side of the Red River Valley. The farmers in the Red River Valley seem to be pretty well fixed. The great Dalrymple farm is in this county of Cass. These gentlemen farm about 30,000 acres of wheat land. The soil in this valley is a rich, black, glacial drift, and though it is not corn country, not being warm enough, yet all other farm products do fine (there is an immense crop this year), as wheat, oats, barley, rye, buckwheat, flaxseed, hay and the most excellent Irish potatoes are raised here, and 200 bushels per acre is a fair crop. But the farmers in the Red River Valley have been raising wheat almost exclusively for the past twenty-five years, and wheat of fine quality. But if they want to maintain the reputation of this land as a wheat-growing country, the farmers will have to put on their considering caps and ask you Maury Countians to send them up some acid phosphate to put and keep their land in balance, so that they can go on and again raise No. 1 hard wheat.
WM. DENNISON.
TO MY FRIENDS:
Pardon this final word as the magazine goes to press, but Trotwood is gratified to see that subscriptions are pouring in from every corner of the United States, from Canada and from Mexico. Far away Halifax, N. S., sends a good list in the same mail with New Braunsfels, Southern Texas.
I am indeed proud of this, for it is the work of my personal friends, whose loyalty and friendship have no measure; who in the past have sent me words of comfort and cheer, in my fight through the columns of that great turf journal, “The Horse Review,” for what I conceived to be clean living, clean thinking, clean racing and clean and hopeful literature.