FARMER OF TO-MORROW 



CHAPTER I 

 THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 



JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, writing in 

 1827, marveled that in his own lifetime he 

 had seen frontiersmen, lovers of the wild, 

 driven from the forests of the upper Hudson 

 across the prairies of the Middle West, finally 

 to take refuge amid the arid plateaus and 

 mountain wildernesses of the Great American 

 Desert, before the advancing tide of settle- 

 ments. The backwoodsmen of Kentucky and 

 Tennessee had begun to move on into the un- 

 known regions beyond the Mississippi as early 

 as 1804, almost before the actual transfer of 

 the territory of Louisiana had become a 

 fact. Lewis and Clark, in their historic march 

 from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia 

 River, begun in 1804, found white men before 



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