LUTHER BURBANK 
These were the days when Chicago was a far 
western city, and when the great territory beyond 
was the home of the pioneer. 
The potato is a vegetable designed peculiarly 
for the pioneer. 
It requires no great preparation either for 
planting or harvesting. It grows rapidly on the 
rich new soil turned over by the settler; a little 
cultivation insures its growth; when ripened it 
may lie in the ground and be used as needed; 
when the fall frosts come it can easily be banked 
in a pit for winter use. 
Little care; small outlay; easy preparation for 
food; these make the potato the first crop to be 
grown when the settler locates his new home. 
Trace now the influence which this one success 
had upon a growing nation. It wasin 1871. It was 
a time when the line between success and failure— 
between starvation and comfortable plenty—was 
drawn so finely for the pioneer that even the 
slightest help was of a value out of proportion to 
its intrinsic worth. 
A crop failure or shortage, in those reconstruc- 
tion days after the war, meant a set-back that 
would take years to overcome, for the pioneer’s 
only source of supply, usually, was his own crop. 
Any increase, therefore, in Nature’s products— 
such as the potato—in the days of the pioneer, 
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