No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 427 



invention, ■which dragged slowly across a field, cuts the standing 

 grain, threshes it as it moves, and drops the filled and tied sacks to 

 be gathered up by the wagons that follow. Some of these great ma- 

 chines are drawn by steam engines; others by teams of twenty-five 

 to thirtv horses and mules. A single machine with four men will 

 gather and thresh from seventeen hundred to three thousand bushels 

 of wheat in a day. 



But how are these great crops of wheat cared for after they leave 

 the field? This is almost as great a business as raising the wheat. 

 At some of the railroad stations and at all the large grain ports, there 

 are large elevators, or granaries, for storing grain until it is wanted 

 for sale. There are such granaries at New York and New Orleans, 

 and at all the large cities upon the Great Lakes. There are many 

 of them at Minneapolis, and a single one has storage room for more 

 than a million bushels of grain. The elevators at Minneapolis alone 

 can hold almost thirty million bushels at one time. 



Elevators are usually built along the wharf and by the railroad 

 siding. Some of them are built as high as a six-story house. The 

 grain is moved to the upper part of the mill by an endless chain of 

 little buckets of tin or zinc, there it is weighed and poured into 

 the deep bins. When it is taken out it flows through pipes into 

 the cars or the ships which are to carry it to the markets. 



There are elevators of this kind at the ports at the head of Lake 

 Superior, into Avhich the grain is taken from the cars, and later 

 poured into the steamers which are to take it down the Great Lakes 

 to Buffalo, whence it is carried through the Erie Canal to New York, 

 to be shipped to Europe. 



Minneapolis is a magnificent city of more than a quarter of a 

 million inhabitants. It is situated on the Mississippi, at the falls of 

 St. Anthony. These falls furnish a water power as great as could 

 be given by forty thousand horses pulling at once, and their situation 

 so near our wheat lands has made Minneapolis one of the milling 

 centers of the world. There are numbers of big flour mills here which 

 are grinding away day and night. One single mill can grind twenty 

 thousand barrels of flour in a day. 



HOW THE GREAT LAKES BENEFIT THE FARMERS OF THE GREAT 

 WHEAT FARMS OF THE NORTHWEST AND EQUALIZE THE PRICES 

 OP CEREALS IN OUR COUNTRY 



Duluth and Superior City, built at the western end of Lake Su- 

 perior, are at the head of navigation on the Great Lakes. They have 

 fine harbors and great docks and grain elevators axe built there. 

 Duluth is at the eastern end of the Northern I'acific Railroad, and 

 receives immense quantities of wheat from the large farms of the 

 valley of the Bed Biver, which is probably the most perfect wheat 

 farming region in the world. 



Let us now listen to how the grain is taken from the great ele^ 

 vators and carried to the eastern and foreign markets. We may see 

 the famous whaleback steamships which carry immense quantities of 

 iron ore and grain, lying under the shadows of huge wheat eleva- 

 tors at the wharves of Duluth. They are more like enormous barrels 

 than like steamships, and as they lie there in the water they make 



