Frontier Agriculture in Northern Minnesota 5 
FRONTIER AGRICULTURE IN 
NORTHERN MINNESOTA* 
In spite of the oft-repeated laments of historians and 
economists for America's 'Vanished frontier," the United States 
still has many areas of pioneer settlement, as Bowman has 
pomted out.^ One of these present-day frontiers extends across 
northern Minnesota. It is a broad zone of experimental settle- 
ment, lying near the edge of the cut-over coniferous forest. To 
the west and south are the well-populated farm lands of the 
Red River valley and southern Minnesota; to the northeast set- 
tlement frays out into the almost unpopulated wilderness \vhich 
stretches northward from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay. 
M 
the Brainerd Community, the section with w^hich this paper will 
deal (Fig. 1). This nearly rectangular area, of some 2,500 
square miles, is not a "natural" or cultural region; instead its 
boundaries follow economic divides, the shopping area tributary 
to Brainerd, a city of 12,000 population, from which the area 
takes its name. So- far as agriculture is concerned, these bound- 
aries are arbitrary, but the area is a convenient unit for the 
examination of farming in the cut-over lands, since it includes 
both fairly well peopled districts, and sections of unpopulated 
wilderness, as well as the gradations between these two extremes. 
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Agricultural settlement in this part of Minnesota is, by 
ddle Western standards, recent. As early as 1850 lumbermen 
had begun to invade the forests, and in 1870, when the Northern 
* This paper is based, in part, upon work done while the writer 
held a Field Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council, 
in 1939-1940. 
1 Isaiah Bowman, "Jordan Country/' Geog, Rev,, vol. 21, pp. 22-55, 
1931. 
