thick walls were blocks of matted prairie
turf, its roof also being of sods supported upon some poles brought from
the scanty timber-growth along the margin of a prairie river. To-day
these poor pioneers are enjoying their reward. Their valley is traversed
by several railroads; prosperous villages have sprung up; their lands
are of considerable value; they all live in well-built farm-houses;
their shade trees have grown to a height of fifty or sixty feet; a
bustling and ambitious city, with fine churches, opera-houses, electric
illumination, and the most advanced public educational system, is only a
few miles away from them. Such transformations have occurred, not alone
in a few spots in Iowa and South Dakota, but are common throughout a
region that extends from the British dominions to the Indian Territory,
and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains--a region
comprising more than a half-million square miles.

THE GRANARY OF THE WORLD.

[Illustration: BETWEEN THE MILLS.]

Naturally the industrial life of these Northwestern communities is based
solidly upon agriculture. There is, perhaps, hardly any other
agricultural region of equal extent upon the face of the earth that is
so fertile and so well adapted for the production of the most necessary
articles of human food. During the past decade the world's markets have
been notably disturbed and affected, and profound social changes and
political agitations have occurred in various remote parts of the earth.
It is within bounds to assert that the most potent and far-reaching
factor in the altered conditions of the industrial world during these
recent years has been the sudden invasion and utilization of this great
new farming region. Most parts of the world which are fairly prosperous
do not produce staple food supplies in appreciable surplus quantities.
Several regions which are not highly prosperous sell surplus food
products out of their poverty rather than out of their abundance. That
is to say, the people of India and the people of Russia have often been
obliged, in order to obtain money to pay their taxes and other necessary
expenses, to sell and send away to prosperous England the wheat which
they have needed for hungry mouths at home. They have managed to subsist
upon coarser and cheaper food. But in our Northwestern States the
application of ingenious machinery to the cultivation of fertile and
virgin soils has within the past twenty-five years prec