HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE IN MINNESOTA. 285 



has been done or what is being done. That is what I found. 

 There was a time when the State, in its early and poorer days, 

 struggling along, could and did afford a State Statistician, I 

 think for four or five years, and we had the foundation laid of 

 an excellent system of state statistics. But to-day the system 

 has gone to the four winds. 



Now to go back, I will give you some figures from the north- 

 ern part of the State that will niark the comparative growth of 

 the agricultural interests of northern Minnesota. We keep 

 close statistics as to what we carry, and we report them an- 

 nually to the Railway and Warehouse Commission. But what 

 we carry comes from other states as well as Minnesota, and it 

 is not divided. When I took the reorganized St. Paul & Pa- 

 cific Eailroad in the midsummer of 1879, the road had just 

 about closed its fiscal year, and it carried 2,000,000 bushels of 

 wheat in 1879. Of the crop of 1895 it carried 67,000,000 bush- 

 els of wheat, thirty-three and a half times as much as six- 

 teen years before. 



In 1878, from a few miles beyond Fergus Falls (six or eight 

 miles) we went out just think, eighteen years ago we went 

 out of all settlement. Up to that limit, there were a few little 

 houses dotted over the prairie; you might see one house where 

 now you would count fifty. I remember that in the fall of 

 1878, north of Crookston, a station that will usually ship seven 

 or eight hundred thousand or a million bushels of wheat in a 

 good crop, there was but one house ; and that house was a hole 

 in the bank of a stream, dug out, with some poles and marsh 

 hay thrown over the poles. It contained a cook-stove at the 

 back end, board seats supported by little limbs of trees driven 

 into the ground, and a man cooking. You can imagine what 

 opportunities he had to prepare a good meal, and you can 

 imagine what kind of a meal we had after he got it ready. 



I remember that in 1878, on the Fourth of July, I crossed 

 the internationl boundary between Manitoba and North Da- 

 kota, coming south toward Grand Forks, driving down over the 

 country, locating the line of railway that strikes the boundary 

 at Neche, on the west side of the Red river of the North. I 

 drove forty-two miles from the international boundary, to 

 what is now the town of Graf ton. There was not one solitary 

 house in that entire distance, and about four o'clock in the 



