356 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



will deny. Industrial life in all its channels is throbbing with the 

 instinct of progressiveness. 



A great noticeable and effective improvement has been made 

 in the handling of live stock, grain and cotton and kindred com- 

 modities, bringing them to a basis that is in accord with the busi- 

 ness methods of the present century, while wool, and wool alone, 

 the most important commodity of the great west, a leading staple 

 and one which requires the utmost care, exactness and technical 

 knowledge in handling, has drifted along in the same old rut with- 

 out change from methods inaugurated through necessity and acci- 

 dent, tied down by tradition and usages which it is hard to over- 

 come, and never will be if left to the dealers for revision, or in 

 other words, wool is the only leading commodity that has been 

 denied the benefits and privileges of an open market. 



It is a well established fact that any method for the improve- 

 ment of our condition must be worked out by the growers, and 

 this can be done only in co-operation on a scale large and strong 

 enough to wield a potent influence. It must be of such a nature 

 that no doubt can be raised as to its purpose and permanency. 

 That the producers can handle and dispose of their clips through 

 an agency established and operated by themselves is no longer an 

 experiment. Last spring, at the beginning of the shearing season, 

 the growers of Wyoming were visited by the usual bevy of eastern 

 buyers and solicitors. They confronted the grower with their 

 usual hard luck story, of the great losses their houses had sus- 

 tained the previous season, the stringency of the money market, 

 the demoralized condition of the wool market, the dread of tariff 

 revision, and an enormous amount of surplus wool on hand. They 

 rarely offered to buy, and when they did make an offer, it ranged 

 from eight to twelve cents per pound, thereby thinking to force 

 the producer to consign his wool at an advance of eight cents per 

 pound. 



The executive staff of The Wyoming Wool Growers Associa- 

 tion had foreseen the situation, and in anticipation of this atti- 

 tude of the solicitors, had arranged during the early part of the 

 year with Omaha banking institutions to accept warehouse cer- 

 tificates as collateral, with the railroad to grant a sale-in-transit 

 rate, and with the Omaha Commercial club to erect a warehouse. 

 The house opened for business about June first, and without any 

 apparent change in conditions on the range the buyers advanced 

 their offers about three per cents per pound, or in other words, this 

 avenue of escape, opened by the Omaha warehouse, apparently 



