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Minnesota. We have persevered, following the Great River through all its winding way. We have hugged now this shore and now that, seeking the tortuous channel. We have circled our last island, swept around our last curve, and now the prow points to land. There are no wharves. The bank glides gently down to take us, the Damsel thrusts her uncanny nose gently into the gravel, and we step ashore. Good by, Damsel.
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May you sink a thousand fathoms deep or ever I set foot on your horrid deck again! May forty snags crash your timbers and drag you down into the turbid depths! May you blow up with kerosene when no passengers are on board!--as to officers and crew I make no stipulations. May you run aground and stick fast, and snap every pole that you try to push off with! May you be overthrown by wild winds on the eastern short of Lake Pepin, and never heard of more! May every raft butt you, and every big steamer run you down, and every little steamer outstrip you! May water drown you, and fire burn you, and your sky rain thick disasters, till you cease to be a pestilent speck on the bosom of the River of Greatness!
River of Greatness! Country of Greatness! The thirty-one-hundred-mile-stretching stream kindles the land to emulation, and everything in Minnesota is on the magnificent scale. Standing at a cottage door the country reaches away like the sea. The horizon is regular and far. Broad sweep of field rises to meet broad sweep of sky. The earth rounds up under the heavens palpably, and as you drive across the broken prairies it is
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like driving across a brown, billowy ocean, rolling as far as the eye can see. A snarl of roads intersects the prairie, every man making a highway whithersoever he will. To the strange eye it is a labyrinth in which one might be ensnared forever. But a certain instinct seems to guide the natives, and we constantly meet them driving along as quietly as if a stone wall on each side, after the New England fashion, kept them where they belong. Yet it hardly seems possible that they can know where they are going. Where we are going is to a Minnesota farm,--a Minnesota farm, where tradition says they look askance at bread and milk, counting nothing less than bread and cream a dish to set before the king. Now, Minnesota farming, I have discovered, is something altogether different from Massachusetts farming,--as much as the Mississippi is a different thing from the Merrimack. It is large, it is comprehensive, it is--well, it is rather sublime! It hardly comes within the scope of possibility that a man who had broadened to the wastes of Minnesota could ever come back and be content with the little pocket farms of New England. There are also, I judge, more of
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what are called "book-farmers." They do not go on there in the old ways in which their fathers trod, for the very good reason that they had neither ways nor fathers. They have broken ground for themselves, and they strike out independently. They make experiments, for they must make them. Indeed, their farming is itself an experiment. Their broad lands necessitate broad vision. They farm with their brains as well as with their hands. Rather, they bring their brains to bear on their hands, and piece them out with iron and steel to clasp their widening farms. If I might appropriate and alter a rustic phrase, I should say they substitute wheel-grease for elbow-grease. Instead of taking his hoe and going to work, the Minnesota farmer harnesses his horse and takes a drive; but his drive does a great deal more hoeing than the Massachusetts man's hoe.
Let us make believe now that we are so delighted with Minnesota, that we are going there to live,--and to get a living. We are young and strong, with muscles in our bodies, and skill in our fingers, and brains in our skulls,--and, let us say, with money in our pockets. For
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without money of what use is it to go anywhere? And yet every one says,--and it seems to be proved by observation and experience,--that the West is pre-eminently the place for poor men. There is plenty of land at government price, which is almost nominal, and there is also plenty of time to pay it in. Many who came with money are now poorer than those who had nothing when they arrived. We will therefore give away our money, that we may have no drawbacks to our prosperity, and buy a farm.
Minnesota, fortunately for us, is made on purpose for farms. It is cut up into sections, each containing a square mile; only, as the earth is round and grows smaller of girth from the equator to the poles, and as all measurements must mind the meridians whatever becomes of farmers, every now and then must be a man who loses a foot or two from his acres; but he has so much left that he does not mind it. Every sixteenth of these sections is appropriated--God bless our native land!--to the school-fund. By looking into Greenleaf's Arithmetic you will find that a square mile contains six hundred and forty acres,--a very pretty plat
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to be master of. Let us therefore imagine ourselves masters of it. Many farmers in Minnesota devote themselves to the raising of a single crop,--principally wheat. Others think this not the best way. One crop will run farms out, they say. They believe all land is improved by a rotation of crops, and they approve of raising a little corn, a little hay, a few hogs, a few sheep, a few apples. We believe also in a rotation of crops, especially sheep. We will select a farm well adapted to sheep-grazing. It has fine low level lands, and gentle hills, and a stream of clear, cold water running through it. On the southern slope our house shall be set square to the sun. It is for comfort, for present use, not for show; but it is a mistake to suppose that one can be comfortable without the decencies of life. Civilization is not so deeply rooted in any of us, that we can afford to dispense with outside helps. And because we are going out upoon the prairies, we need not live in a shanty or between bare walls. Moreover, it is cheaper in the long run to cultivate ourselves as well as our farms, and not very much costlier in the short run. Besides, our
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benevolent predecessor has left us a house ready to hand. It has four rooms in the lower floor, a sitting-room, perhaps fourteen feet by fourteen, facing the south; on the other side of the front door a bedroom, behind these two front rooms, another bedroom, and a kitchen. Every room has at least two windows on two sides, for sunshine is an eminent adornment. Our sitting-room has light, cheerful paper, hung by its owners, and a stout, woollen carpet which their own hands made and nailed down. A few engravings give outlooks through the walls. A bracket in the corner holds a vase, and the vase holds an abundance of wild flowers and grasses. There is a writing-desk, book-shelf, or what-not by the window, and you shall find in a Minnesota book-case on the prairie such books as Household Friends, Imitation of Christ, Memoir of Margaret Fuller, Somerville's Physical Geography, Parker's Philosophy, Swedenborg's Christian Religion, Snow-Bound, Longfellow's Poems, Our Old Home, Christina Rosetti, and so on,--good company on prairie or in city. The bedrooms are large and airy. The kitchen has a pump in the sink. Opening from the sit-
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ting-room, and close to the kitchen, is a pantry, or store-room. It contains a dish cupboard, a crockery cupboard, one also for glass and silver, a shelf for the box of knives and forks, shelves for all sorts of cooking utensils, compartments with tight covers for rye-meal, wheat-flour, corn-meal, Graham meal, and bran, a closet for cold meats, milk shelves, a shelf for the water-pail, one also for dish-washing, and a hanging shelf before the window. So, dear Lady Una, you can stand in this store-room and prepare your meats, bread, pies, and other edibles for cooking, without leaving your place. You have only to turn around and you can lay your hand upon everything you want. Moreover, as your sitting-room is warmed by an air-tight, with an oven and a teakettle aperture, in the winter you can do nearly all your daily cooking here, and live as our homely dear old grandmothers used to say,--
"As snug As a bug In a rug."
When our dinner is cooked it is of the nicest. Bread light and white, made of flour ground from wheat, which our own soil fattened; chicken-pie
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made of a prairie chicken, that came swooping down from the sky into our own yard; custards milked from our own cows and laid by our own hens,--at one or two removes; jellies that hung quivering on our own wild plum-trees;--everything cooked delicately. The table is set with fine white linen, with napkins and silver forks and spoons, and pretty, plain ware; really one might do worse than dine at a prairie farm-house. A building like this, erected when lumber was nine or ten dollars a thousand, say three years ago, cost not quite two hundred and fifty dollars. But then a great deal of ingenuity was built into it. For blinds, the owner obtains a model, and then makes them and paints them himself. He also washes or stains the outside of the house to some harmonious tint. He papers the rooms. He stains all the interior wood-work with a home-made preparation. Many of the doors and some of the window-frames are the work of his own hands. He lays the floor, and lathes the walls. He makes the little porch over the front door. All the cunning workmanship of the store-room is his. The dining-table, and the brackets, and scores of little contrivances,
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and even elegances, are the product of his mind, and hand,--aided by another mind as fertile, and other hands only less strong, not less skilful. From these other hands come the rustic frames for the engravings, the warm-looking curtains, and many a nameless but useful and pretty device. From both pair of hands come the large and comfortable lounge, with its piled-up cushions; it is not the work of a day or a week, but of many winter evenings and many rainy mornings,--the gathered fragments of odd hours; and so first and best we have a home in the wilderness, and home that will be constantly growing more home-like.
For our door-yard we have thousands of acres. A few trees are growing on the sheltered slope in front, and the sheltered slope behind is our garden. Here our tomatoes, our sweet-corn, our beans and peas, our pie-plant, which remains fresh and tender and fit for cooking all summer long, our trellis-work for vines, our lilacs, and whatever we can coax to take root. And on fine summer days we throw wide open the front door and the back door, and the door between living-room and kitchen, the three doors
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being in one line, and prairie and garden catch pleasant looks at each other, and fling many a fragrant whisper through the house. But the garden is an aftergrowth. There are other things to be looked to. Especially is it a first requisite to get the farm well fenced in. A barn does not seem to be so indispensable to a farm as we have been accustomed to consider it. Few good barns are to be seen, though they are now coming more into use, as farmers have money and time to build them. The stable must come first. A very rude and primitive one gives shelter to the horses, who are nearly as important to the farm as the farmer himself. Crotched posts are set in the ground, the sides boarded, poles and rails laid across the top, the threshing-machine driven up alongside, and the straw-carrier heaps up the straw on them to form the roof. Sheds are made for the sheep in a similar manner, and are about four feet high. They open on the south. On the north side stacks of straw and hay are ranged so as to shelter the yard, and they give a very cosey look to the out-door establishment. As we have time, we join house and barn with
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a shed for the farm-wagons and machines, a wood-house, and a carpenter's shop. Then we are well protected against the north winds, and well open on the sunny southern side.
For our farming work: we begin by breaking ground in the spring, just as the green grass starts. The ploughing will be easier if we first burn off the dead grass. We can begin by the middle of May, and keep at it till the last of July. Then the field lies till the next spring. The native sod is so tough that we cannot do much with it the first year. The next spring having come, as soon as the frost gets out enough to let us cover the grain well, we sow it. The earlier the better. The crop is surer, and the grain of a better quality. If frost comes afterwards, or even snow, there is no harm done. The hardy little kernels have the inside track, and laugh at the feeble efforts of an effete winter. We do not sow by hand, as they do in picture-books, but with a broadcast sower. With two horses we go over from ten to fifteen acres a day. An ingenious little arrangement tells how much grain we put into the acre, and how many acres we go over, with as much accuracy
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as a time-clock tells the hours and minutes. If we find we are putting in too much or too little, we can adjust the machine to a different quantity, as readily as a clock is regulated. Three bushels of oats or one bushel and a half of wheat is the ordinary allowance to an acre. The machine sows and partially covers the grain. When it is new ground, we go over it two or three times with a harrow, and then we give it in charge to sunshine and rain and dew and air till the harvest-time.
We have also what we call sod corn and sod potatoes. We simply thrust an axe and a spade in between the sods, drop the corn, and cover it with the heel; but it does not yield the best crop. For sod potatoes we plough one furrow, and plant the potatoes in it about eighteen inches apart, and close to the land side, then plough another furrow which covers them. The potatoes come up between the sods. Then we plough three furrows and drop another row of potatoes. In this manner we get our best crop of potatoes. They need no hoeing. The land is necessarily free from weeds, for there are no seeds for the weeds to spring from. In break-
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ing this ground, the shallower we plough the better. We want our furrow only two and a half or three inches deep. In harvest-time we plough as at planting. That turns the sod over and throws up the potatoes. We have three or four men or boys to follow and gather the potatoes which we have unearthed. We have now not only an excellent crop of potatoes, but we have had the land in a better condition for next year's wheat crop than if we had not planted the potatoes. Now then, my statistician, what is the net gain on our potatoes?
But while we have been talking about the potatoes, May and June and July have been busy in our fields, and the wheat has ripened. We know neither sickle nor cradle here, but we bring up the horses and the header. The header aims straight at the heads of the wheat, designing to get only as much straw as is necessary in order to secure all the heads. It leaves the stubble from one and a half to two feet high. A man steers the machine with a rudder, as you steer a boat. The rudder is a castor wheel. The horses are harnessed in behind the header, and move it like a wheel-
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barrow, and cannot go wrong. They have simply to go wherever the header is steered. A header has four horses abreast, two on each side of the tongue. It often cuts twenty-two acres a day, sometimes thirty; the average is about eighteen. The slightest rain stops work. The machine clogs, and grain must not be stacked while damp. The header is accompanied by three racks, and each rack has two horses and a driver. The header-rack is a floor or platform on wheels,w ith sides of canvas, to catch the grain thrown from the header. We begin our harvesting in July. We first find the centre of our big lot, then steer our header straight for that centre, cutting a swath as we go ten feet wide. Our rack is on the left of the header, and when we first enter, of course we have to trample the grain sadly. But why, O extravagant Western Farmer, do you not send a man in beforehand to cut down a swath with his own right arm, and so save all the trampling? "Oh!" says my lord, "when we are working with fourteen men and ten horses, it won't do to bother about a handful of wheat." So they laugh to scorn our contracted New England ideas of
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economy. Having gained the centre, the header, and its devoted wife, the rack, go round in as small a circle as possible, say two or three rods in circumference, and then begin to stack. The grain when cut by the header is thrown by an endless apron, revolving like a belt, into the header rack on its left. This apron is about thirty feet long. It is made of stout canvas cloth, with strips of wood affixed crosswise to carry up the straw. The header rack must keep close up under the spout of the header. When one rack is full, it deposits its load in the centre of the field, while another rack drives up immediately and takes its place on the left of the header. One man stands on the rack to load, jumping from rack to rack as each fresh one comes up. There is one man to stack, and another to trim up the stacks. The stacks are made twenty-five or thirty feet long, and nine or ten feet wide, and symmetrically curved and shaped. They are generally arranged in groups of four, each group containing two or three hundred bushels of wheat. They are often made on a knoll or the poorest part of the field, and the straw lies there till it rots or is burnt, and so enriches the soil.
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The four stacks are so placed that the threshing-machine
can stand either way, thus, borrowing the pencil of Turner,
T means the threshing-machine, and the little oblong figures, that do not
look in the least like wheat-stacks, are nevertheless wheat-stacks.
If the wind changes, everything must be changed, and to change everything
requires half an hour. But these threshing-machines are curiously
interesting. They seem to have almost a vitality of their own. You are
never tired of watching them. Sometimes they are worked by steam, sometimes
by horses. Steam-power does nearly twice as much in a day as the
horse-power, and a steam-engine has to be fed only when it works, while
horses must eat whether they work or not. If you are driving across country
and see the smoke-stack looming up in the middle of a big field, you leave
the road and drive into the field. There stands the monster machine,
destroying huge haystacks, but giving in return a steady stream of fine
clean wheat, and shuddering all the while with the earnestness of his
effort. Two half-bushel measures are arranged in a trough, placed under
the
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stream, and when one is full it can be removed and the other pushed up directly, so that there is no waste. The wheat is at once poured into bags, and is thus made ready for market on the spot. When one group of stacks is disposed of, the engine is driven round to another, till he has ravaged the whole country,--a most friendly foe. Almost any evening in harvest-time, you can hear from your window his plaintive hum, and you can very easily grow melancholy over it. Well may the good-hearted monster be plaintive, foreseeing that the sweet rich wheat he pours out with such painstaking, is doomed to go to the lower States, be mixed in and adulterated with their inferior wheat, and the product called by the name of Minnesota flour to all other. At least that is what the Minnesota people say. The "lower States" men might sing a different song, but I know that I heard an uninterested New England farmer, and a deacon too, say, the other day, that since he had two barrels of Hastings flour, he never wanted any other!
When we have threshed our wheat and burned
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our stacks, we plough up our ground for next year's crop, and let it stand till spring. The land is so rich that it scarcely needs manure. It is put on more to get it out of the way than to enrich the land. Little live stock has hitherto been kept, but the farmers are beginning to increase it.
The wild hay-crop is in some parts of Minnesota of the best quality. The prairie grass looks coarse and rank, but is, I believe, universally acknowledged to be the best of all to fatten stock and produce milk. Hungarian grass is sowed a good deal, and Timothy is now getting to be somewhat common. With Hungarian, the land has to be ploughed and sown every year. It will mature in sixty days, and yields two or three tons to the acre. Tame grasses have not generally been very successful.
Minnesota is a good State for sheep. It is high and dry, and the sheep are seldom troubled with foot-rot, while the cold weather gives good fleeces, as I have the best of reasons for knowing. Flocks of five hundred sheep are not uncommon. Some farmers own a thousand.
Now, suppose we reckon up our gains. An
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acre of wheat yields on an average about twenty-two bushels. The market price for this ranges from a dollar to a dollar and eighty cents a bushel. With the return of peace the average price has diminished. An acre of oats gives forty bushels, at forty cents a bushel. An acre of corn gives--but the Minnesota farmer is a little sensitive on the subject of corn. "It is not a brag crop," he says, and if a Western man will admit even so much as that any one Western product is not a proper subject of "brag," let us by all means make the most of it. It is quite common in Minnesota to leave the corn in the field till winter, and then haul it in on sleds. We do not top the stalks as in Massachusetts, but cut up corn and all as soon as it is ripe, and leave it in large shocks, and when convenient husk it in the field. In no way will corn keep better than in these shocks, when they are well put up. In Illinois, where they have hundreds of acres of corn, farmers are husking all winter. We feed corn to sheep without being husked at all, and we count it the best of all feed. So do the sheep. They eagerly pick out the ears of corn, and eat them first.
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When that is gone, they apply themselves to the stalk, and make clean work of it. There is not a shred of waste.
Three pounds of wool a head is a low average for sheep. The market price may be forty-five cents a pound.
Now for the outsets and offsets which must not be lost sight of. We plant out corn; and just as the blade begins to show itself in rows, the cut-worms begin their harvesting with such success that they leave us scarcely one third. Some of our neighbors lose their corn entirely. Another neighbor who planted a week earlier than we gets a good crop. So then we have lost our corn, but we have learned a lesson,--that early planting is likely to insure a good crop, because the cut-worm is an epicure, and likes his corn tender, ceasing to relish it beyond a certain stage of growth. The dainty little fellows dig down to the kernel and take out the chit. You can see them crawling on the ground, six at work on one kernel. This is a big story I know, but that is why I tell it. You do not suppose I am going half across the continent for the sake of saying that several worms are some-
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times found in one hill. Not at all! Six tugging at one kernel, or no story!
Corn is also destroyed by squirrels or striped gophers. If not closely watched, they sometimes make havoc of whole fields, and are a worse pest than the worms, which usually take the corn at the surface of the ground. They have this advantage over the worms, that they are very pretty.
Sometimes we have a dry spring, and the wheat will lie in the ground two or three weeks before sprouting. Then the crop is backward and liable to various ills, and will perhaps yield but six bushels to the acre, instead of the average yield of twenty bushels. To cut and stack wheat costs somewhat more than two dollars an acre; to thresh it, nearly three dollars. The threshers cannot always be had when they are wanted. A company of them, I think it is called a gang, go about from farm to farm, and a combination of untoward and uncommon circumstances, among which I should place first the scarcity of labor, may cause that your wheat is not threshed until the price has declined from eight to twenty-five cents on the bushel.
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When our oats are at their best, a storm beats them down, so that of our expected forty bushels we get barely twenty-five.
Then an untimely frost nips the tomatoes before they are ripe, and cuts off the supply of sweet-corn prematurely.
Then we hear that eggs are forty cents a dozen, and, lured into dreams of wealth, we carry all our eggs to market, sell them for fifteen cents a dozen, and come home. Our hens get wind of it, are justly indignant at being turned into merchandise, and for several weeks refuse to lay any more eggs.
Then the Indians threaten to scalp us, and we unyoke our oxen, unharness our horses, and run for the nearest fort,--which is inconvenient.
Then the ducks all jump into the cistern, and are drowned.
Then we arrange to burn our stubble preparatory to ploughing. The Irishman first ploughs six furrows around the wheat-stacks to protect them; but the stubble is dry and the wind is high, and the flame leaps across the too narrow barrier, and consumes the whole summer's crop. But it is a very pleasant and social sight, on a
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warm night, to see the horizon lit up in all directions by the fires of the blazing straw-stacks. Wheat does not burn so well as straw, and there are other reasons why the spectacle is a less agreeable one.
But the worst thing about Minnesota is, that it is fifteen hundred miles from Boston!