276 MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLLECTIONS. 



and accompanying it a history of the first exposition in New 

 York, written by Horace Greeley. Mr. Greeley, through his 

 newspaper, the New York Weekly Tribune (which in its day 

 was a good agricultural authority), had satisfied himself, and 

 tried to satisfy its readers, that Minnesota was not an agricul- 

 tural territory, that it had not the soil nor the climate requisite, 

 that everything was too near where the late Sir John Franklin 

 met with his great trouble. 'Gen. Le Due, to demonstrate that 

 Minnesota was to be an agricultural state, was able to get a 

 few ears of corn from Cottage Grove, possibly a dozen others 

 from the Hon. David Gilman (raised by him, I think, at Sauk 

 Eapids), and a few from the Fort garden at Ft. Ripley. Every- 

 thing west of the Mississippi at that time was Indian country. 

 As late as 1856, when I came here a boy, it was still considered 

 that Minnesota might be a good country for lumber; we had a 

 few cranberries to sell (probably 150 or 200 barrels a year), and 

 beyond that the fur trade. The dates of payment were made 

 when the logs came down, or at the Indian payment; and a 

 man felt that if he could not pay at that time he could not at 

 any other. 



The first wheat that I know to have been shipped from 

 Minnesota was in 1857, and was raised on the Le Sueur prairie. 

 There may have been some small fields of wheat elsewhere in 

 the state, but I have not been able to locate any of them. In 

 1859 there were a few thousand bushels of wheat raised, prin- 

 cipally about Le Sueur and St. Peter. It was shipped to St. 

 Louis by boat ; I remember that W. L. Ewing & Co. were the 

 purchasers. There was not enough to fully load a barge, and, 

 to save the cost of transfer, the barge was taken up the Minne- 

 sota river and loaded there. The wheat was placed forward, 

 and the balance of the load was made up of hickory hoop-poles 

 from Chaska, so as to fill out the cargo. 



In 1859 and 1860, all the grain was handled in seamless 

 sacks; at first they started at 125 bags to a carload; then they 

 got up to 140, and, as long as it moved in sacks, 140 sacks was 

 the limit, a little over eight tons to the carload. Later they 

 did without the sacks by building bulk barges, lined on the 

 inside and with cargo boxes with covers over them to keep 

 the grain dry; and in that way it was transported in bulk. 

 Milwaukee was practically the market for all our grain. 



