PKIMARY COTTON MARKET CONDITIONS IN OKLAHOMA. 7 



The entries in this table are made in order of date, and it will 

 be noted that some towns appear more than once. This occurs when 

 the samplings on different dates each happened to include 4 or 

 more bales of middling. In each case it will be noted that the 

 difference between the average price of the bales sampled by us and 

 the Galveston price is by no means similar on different dates. Thus 

 the difference between the average price of 7 middling bales sampled 

 in Norman on October 25 and the closing Galveston price for October 

 24 is $1.05 per bale. On October 30 the average price of 9 middling 

 bales sampled at Norman is found to be $2.19 less than the corre- 

 sponding Galveston price. On November 4 the average of 11 mid- 

 dling bales was $3.10 below. On the same day 5 middling bales 

 sampled in Terral were found to average within 69 cents of the 

 Galveston quotations, but 5 days later, on November 9, the average 

 price of 7 middling bales dropped to $3.18 below the Galveston value. 

 At the end of another 5-day period, on November 14, the average of 

 4 middling bales taken at random was within $1.17 per bale of the 

 same port price. 



The most striking fact brought out by this table, however, is the 

 extremely wide range in prices paid for bales of identical grade in 

 the same markets on the same days. The fact should be borne in 

 mind that there is every reason to believe that actual variations in 

 price were much more pronounced than those here shown. In two 

 cases only have we sampled more than 10 middling bales, and in 

 most cases only 4 or 5. In many of these markets there were 

 probably sold from 20 to 200 bales of middling cotton in a single 

 day, and the chances are very remote that we happened in any 

 particular case to secure data upon either the highest or the lowest 

 price paid. It is with the utmost confidence, then, that we state that 

 the range in price here shown is very much less than that which 

 actually occurs for the same grade of cotton on the same day in 

 most of the primary markets in Oklahoma. 



A glance at the table shows that this condition of widely varying 

 prices paid for middling cotton is not localized, but occurs in every 

 part of the State. The extreme variations shown in column 5, Table 

 I, are : A difference of $6 between bale 1 and bale 4 at Erick', in Beck- 

 ham County, on November 6, and a similar variation at Mountain 

 Park, in Kiowa County, on November 18 ; these towns are both in 

 the western section of the State ; but the difference of $5.60 between 

 bale 1 and bale 4 at Bennington, in Bryan County, on November 13, 

 and a variation of $4.38 between the price of 2 bales of middling in 

 Caddo, also in Bryan County, on November 5, and of $4 at Arcadia, 

 Oklahoma County, on November 11, show conclusively that similar 

 conditions exist in the southeastern and central portions of the State. 

 It will be observed that while 4 or more middling bales were sampled 

 at Mountain Park on three different days, in no case was the range 



