The Mills Become Towns 191 



mechanical reaper. Men who watched the clumsy machine 

 move across the fields cutting swathes of the standing grain 

 saw that this, with the plow, would make them conquerors of 

 the prairies. 



True, there were no mills as yet in those miles of unbroken 

 grasslands. But flour-milling no longer depended on water 

 power. For there was steam. With steam at his command, man 

 could build mills wherever he grew wheat and corn. He could 

 plow the prairie in the tracks of the buffalo; he could reap the 

 harvest; and he could turn the golden wheat into flour in the 

 mills he would build. 



The plow and the reaper and the steam-driven mills con- 

 quered the midwest. They carried America to the foot of the 

 Rockies. In 1849, Minnesota could count five thousand white 

 inhabitants. Seven years later she was a state with a popula- 

 tion of one hundred thousand. On the river bank, where Pig- 

 Eye had his saloon, and where the Indians brought their furs 

 to trade, men built mills to grind the harvests reaped from 

 those generous fields. Twin cities grew up around the mills. 

 The boats lying in the river basin were loaded with sacks of 

 wheat flour and of corn meal which they carried down stream 

 to the Gulf, and to all the ports of all the world. 



"Some day," men said, "we won't have to ship flour by 

 the river. Some day the railroads will come." 



Chiefly it was wheat which the big, steam-turned mills 

 ground. The demand for corn meal came largely from the 

 rural districts, and there the old-fashioned, water-driven grist 

 mills continued to make better corn meal than the steam- 

 power mills could turn out. 



True, packaged corn meal, made by the big commercial 

 millers who had driven most of the local millers in the country 

 out of business, kept better than the water-ground meal did. 

 But Americans who had grown up on yellow bread wanted 

 something more than mere economy. They wanted flavor. In 

 the South the Negroes sang: 



