

HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE IN MINNESOTA. 279 



same time, as I did not want anything to go wrong, I decided 

 that a single horse would be safe with one sweep. I tried it 

 with one horse upon the horse-power the 'evening before I was 

 to commence work, and I got it moving all right and oiled it 

 up and looked brave. There is a great deal in having some 

 nerve. I connected with the little spur wheel and a band on 

 the cylinder, and before dark had the whole thing moving to my 

 own satisfaction, and told them to bring on their men in the 

 morning. I got up and tried the threshing machine all right, 

 and had a man cutting bands and pushing the sheaves through. 

 I was careful not to feed too fast, and I remember how success- 

 ful I was. I gave the man satisfaction, but told him to be 

 careful not to crowd anything that was hard through it, not 

 to put any stones into it. The old gentleman who bought the 

 machine was named Burns, and he told me, with a good accent, 

 "Thruly its the mosht wonderful invintion." About three days 

 afterwards he came down to tell me that somebody had 

 dropped the monkey-wrench into the cylinder and broken out 

 the concave. They had to get a new concave, and that opened 

 his account for repairs. Some of you gentlemen know what 

 repairs of agricultural implements mean. 



I remember the first wheat that came from north of the 

 Minnesota river was from St. Cloud, raised in the neighborhood 

 of St. Joe. It brought the farmer 35 cents a bushel, and was 

 carried by steamboat to Minneapolis and was hauled from there 

 on wagons to the levee in St. Paul. That was about the year 

 1864. Now we are getting down to more recent dates. I re- 

 member going up to St. Cloud, to see that it was carefully 

 stored. There w r ere something like 150 bags of this wheat, and 

 it was stored in Henry Burbank's warehouse, at w r hat was 

 known as the Upper Landing. I do not kow w r hether you can 

 find the Upper Landing in St. Cloud now, unless you have 

 some old settler to point it out to you. A great many people 

 do not know that there ever was a landing there, but they were 

 very pretentious boats which then ran between Minneapolis 

 and St. Cloud. 



The agricultural history of this state is practically the his- 

 tory of the state. We have to look always for our wealth either 

 to the field, the forest, the mine, or the sea. These are the 

 four sources from which all the material wealth of the world 





