LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE 49 



farming and the reclamation of waste land 

 enter as factors in the process of develop- 

 ment of our national industry of agriculture. 



But that is another story. 



***** 



It is interesting to trace the last step of the 

 American farmer in his expansion over cheap 

 land. During the last decade, the East and 

 the South Atlantic States actually retreated, 

 abandoned farm areas, giving up more than 

 one million acres for one cause or another 

 principally because vast areas in these states, 

 reclaimed by early settlers, were permitted to 

 revert to forest from which they never should 

 have been cleared. 



The Middle West, the land of milk and 

 honey, lying, roughly speaking, between the 

 valleys of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers, and 

 south of the forty-fifth parallel of latitude, 

 practically stood still. In other words, the 

 cream of the land, that yielding the largest 

 returns with the smallest amount of labor, had 

 disappeared entirely even before the beginning 

 of the new century. We can except from this 

 territory only a portion of the new State of 

 Oklahoma, which was given over to white set- 

 tlers during the closing years of the old cen- 



