REGION OF DISCONTENT 9 



sold his corn directly, he found plenty of nearby purchasers who were 

 ready to take it off his hands in order to feed it to livestock. Less than 

 20 per cent of the corn crop was shipped beyond the borders of the county 

 in which it was raised. If he himself fed cattle or hogs, he was able to 

 "condense" his freights. Ninety per cent of the corn crop, according to a 

 common view, should never leave the farm on which it is grown. Every 

 steer could conveniently carry a hundred bushels of corn to market, and 

 in the thirty months of its normal life expectancy, it should consume also 

 two or three acres of grass. 7 Livestock growers could always find plenty 

 to complain about, but the packing houses to which they shipped were 

 relatively close at hand, and in spite of the toll taken by the railroads and 

 the commission men, profits were reasonably good. 



Wheat was produced in many parts of the United States, but the greatest 

 concentration of wheat growing was found in two large areas of the west- 

 ern Middle West. What came to be known as the hard spring wheat belt 

 centered in North Dakota, but with a formidable extension in every direc- 

 tion eastward into Minnesota, southward into South Dakota, westward 

 into Montana, and northwest across the American border into the Cana- 

 dian Northwest. Well to the south of this region lay another wheat- 

 growing area, now commonly called the hard winter wheat belt, with 

 Kansas as the center and overflowing into Nebraska, Colorado, western 

 Oklahoma, and northern Texas. The growing of wheat had been a favor- 

 ite frontier occupation, particularly after the thrust of population from 

 the east reached the open prairies. Wheat is a highly concentrated crop, 

 "storable," "haulable," and "salable" even under pioneer conditions. 

 Furthermore, wheat culture thrives best on land plentifully supplied with 

 humus, a condition present in most of the prairie states when the sod was 

 first broken. There, too, the use of large-scale harvesting and threshing 

 machinery was practicable. Pioneer farmers usually grew wheat as long 

 as the soil produced a paying crop, then either moved westward to new 

 prairie lands or gave up wheat growing for other and more complicated 

 types of agriculture. 8 



As the twentieth century opened, the semiarid High Plains were begin- 



7. Wallaces' Farmer, XXXVIII (February 21, 1913), p. 314. 



8. Elliott, Types of Farming, p. 26; Wallaces' Farmer, XXXIII (October 2, 1908), 

 p. 1179. 



