220 DRY FARMING CONGRESS. 



good cattle land; there is no water on it." He found out that the average 

 rainfall was about 19 inches. Sometimes it was more, but the average for 

 ten or twelve years was about 19 inches. He went to the company and 

 said, "What will you take for 50,000 acres of this land and give me a year 

 to pay for it?" They said, "$1.25 per acre" — thought they had struck 

 something easy. He went back to Chicago and got together some men 

 who had experience in the Panhandle of Texas, who thought they would 

 try it, and in six months they had sold every acre of that land to dry 

 farmers from the east, or men that came out to undertake to do the dry 

 farming. The first thing they did they got Professor Kellerman there 

 and he said, "Yes, you can farm here." They gave him three thousand 

 acres and he put a crop in there and raised wheat six feet high, and the 

 second year they raised oats, the like of which I never saw anywhere in 

 the west, and then they raised corn. They started in asking six dollars 

 an acre for it, and it was-scooped right up. They used to run a car in 

 there every week, a private car, with 25 or 30 in the car, take them out 

 on that prairie in autos, whirled them over the land, and they came back 

 and signed up for anything they wished — twenty acres or a thousand 

 acres. After that was gone he went and said he would take 100,000 if they 

 would let him have it and they offered — . I believe, though, he had an 

 option on it. They sold that land inside of two years. They experimented 

 first because they wanted to have something to show the people the}^ 

 brought out there. Today every acre of that land is going at the rate 

 of all the way from eight to fifteen and sixteen dollars an acre. When 

 these people first came out to see the land, I asked them, "What in the 

 world do you come way out here for? Do you suppose our people living 

 here all of theii* lives would let this land lay idle if it was good for any- 

 thing at all?" He says, "It looks as if you had." We tried to find out 

 the incentive. They were mostly people who came from the east. One 

 man said, "I am living on land in Ohio that is worth $125 an acre and the 

 climate is kind of hard on me; I don't enjoy very good health there and this 

 is fine climate." "Yes," I said, "we have got lots of climate." (Laughter.) 

 He says, "This land is worth only ten dollars an acre, and I can sell out 

 and buy all I need out here." He says, "My brother came out here last 

 year and he has done just as well as I did in Ohio." 



There is no use talking about it, these people made good. In the 

 southeastern part of New Mexico, the Staked Plains, they have practically 

 driven out Ithe cattle men and sheep men from that whole country. I 

 know fifty cattle men and sheep men who have sold their outfits in the 

 last few years simply because the increased number of settlers is so 

 great that the range is practically closed up. Last year there were 480,- 

 000 acres taken up all in 160 and 320 acre tracts, and it is simply astonishing 

 the number of settlers there are. in that country- Take the San Jose valley; 

 ten years ago it was a sheep range, growing nothing but sagebrush — 

 a rolling country which had been held by the sheep men from time im- 

 memorial. When they got in there everybody said, "There is where you 

 will die sure — you will starve to death." I went down three -years ago 



