316 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



a valuable market. There was, of course, the desire to find a new 

 market to take the place of the lost Southern trade, but in this 

 search the transportation lines would not have been so eager as 

 they were to reach out to the West if the West had not been 

 prosperous. 



To this survey there is but one possible conclusion. In the 

 middle and last part of the war Western farmers enjoyed vigorous 

 prosperity ; there was steady progress in the size of the crops, in 

 the extent of the cultivated area, and in population ; profits were 

 normal in the middle of the struggle, and in the last part of it 

 extraordinarily high. The Westerners themselves claimed pros- 

 perity for their section, and the business interests of the East, 

 in their endeavors to expand, recorded their belief in the same 

 prosperity. 



[Great credit must be given to the national government for its wise and far- 

 seeing legislation in favor of Western interests. In 1862 the Department of 

 Agriculture was taken away from the jurisdiction of the Patent Office, where 

 it was pinched and inefficient, and set up as an independent bureau. There 

 were the Homestead Act and the Agricultural Land Grant Act, and an act in 

 encouragement of immigration. Colorado, Arizona, Dakota, Nevada, Idaho, 

 and Montana were organized as territories, and Kansas and Nevada were set 

 up as states. Colorado and Nebraska refused statehood. Rich government 

 subsidies were guaranteed to the Union Pacific Railroad, with its branches in 

 Kansas and Nebraska, and also to the Northern Pacific. In every year of the 

 war armed forces gave protection from the Indians. 



Mitchell, in "History of the Greenbacks " (p. 388), says, " It is safe to con- 

 clude from these figures that the farmers of the loyal states were among the un- 

 fortunate producers whose products rose in price less than the majority of other 

 articles, and that from this standpoint they were losers rather than gainers by 

 the paper currency." " It seems very doubtful whether farmers, as a whole, 

 did not lose more than they gained because of the price disturbances." This 

 view is based on a study of but a single factor, and certainly must be changed 

 by study of the other factors bearing on the situation. 



