t 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.

[Illustration: MOSSBRAE.]

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.

Unless this method of Western settlement is comprehended, it is not
possible to understand the old Granger movement and the more recent
legislative conflicts between the farmers of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas,
Minnesota, and the Dakotas, on the one hand, and the great
transportation and grain-handling corporations on the other. It was
fundamentally a question of the division of profits. The railroads had
"made" the country: were they entitled to allow the farmers simply a
return about equal to the cost of production, keeping for themselves the
difference between the cost and the price in the central markets, or
were they to base their charges upon the cost of their service, and
leave the farmers to enjoy whatever profits might arise from the
production of wh