4 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



It seems clear, however, that a distinction should be made between the 

 eastern and the western Middle West. Exactly where the line of cleavage 

 should be drawn to separate the two might well occasion considerable 

 debate, but most observers would agree that the western Middle West lies 

 wholly to the west of Chicago. One can even mark out a certain geographic 

 unity here. While originally heavily timbered to the north and consider- 

 ably less so to the south, this territory contains practically all the rich 

 but treeless prairies, land at first spurned by the pioneers but later recog- 

 nized as ideal for agriculture. Geologists eventually described this great 

 expanse of prairie soils, which widens out westward like a wedge from the 

 northern Indiana-Illinois border, as being among the richest in the world ; 

 furthermore, at about the ninety-sixth meridian the prairie soils shaded 

 off into a still richer north-south zone, with a type of soil the chernozem 

 so rich that it has been regarded as the ideal against which all others 

 are measured. 2 The breaking plows have done their work, and these 

 great flat or rolling stretches, for hundreds of miles westward from Chi- 

 cago, offer a minimum of resistance to the farmers' will. On the north- 

 ern and southern and far western borders of the western Middle West, 

 however, nature has not been quite so kind. In northern Wisconsin and 

 Minnesota the cut-over tracts left by the lumbermen are often sandy 

 and barren. West of the one-hundredth meridian the rainfall is usually 

 inadequate to insure crops without resort to irrigation. Down in southern 

 Missouri the Ozarks have set expansive limits to what the farmer can do. 

 Thus the political and geographic borders of the region do not precisely 

 coincide, but the unity is there nonetheless. 



The manner in which most of this western Middle West was opened 

 to settlement offers yet another reason for its separateness. Except for the 

 relatively small areas immediately bordering on the rivers or the lakes, its 

 population grew as its railroad network grew. Most of the eastern Middle 

 West was fairly well settled before the railroads appeared, but in the west- 

 ern Middle West, the exact reverse was true. To be sure, parts of Illinois, 

 southern Wisconsin, eastern and central Missouri, and southeastern Iowa 

 had a considerable population in advance of the railroads, but the era of 

 really rapid settlement set in first during the 1850*5 as the Illinois Central, 

 the Chicago and North Western, the Chicago and Rock Island, the Bur- 



2. Fred A. Shannon, The Farmers' Last Frontier (New York, 1945), pp. 12-14. 



