IN DAKOTA, 83 
are now in comfortable houses on their own well-im- 
proved farms. But I don’t advise a man to begin in 
a dug.out if he can help it.” 
ABOUT BIG CROPS. 
‘Well, what about those big crops out there— 
forty-five bushels of wheat to the acre, a hundred 
bushels and more of oats, five hundred bushels of 
potatoes, and so on ?” 
‘‘ As arule you want to take those stories with a 
degree of allowance, just as you do the wild stories 
about blizzards and the mercury getting down to 
fifty and sixty below zero. Such crops have been 
raised, there is no doubt about that, but they are ex- 
ceptional. A man may get forty-five bushels of 
wheat to the acre from a few acres of his ground in 
a very favorable season, and with everything else fa- 
vorable. And I have seen a hundred and five bush- 
els of oats taken from an acre. But if any man has 
secured any such averages from any considerable 
number of acres, I have never seen it or heard of it. 
Now last year I took all possible pains in putting in 
my crops, the season was a tolerably good one, and 
from 90 acres of wheat I got an average of 28 bush- 
els per acre, and from 90 acres of oats 71 bushels per. 
acre. I think I had a few acres of wheat that might 
have turned out forty bushels, and an acre or two of 
oats that would have gone very nearly a hundred. 
But the right thing is to take the averages.” 
. 
