here. They ruin a country. It
is a pathetic spectacle to see parts of the Old West in which sheep
steadily have been ranged. They utterly destroy all the game; they even
drive the fish out of the streams and cut the grasses and weeds down
to the surface of the earth. The denuded soil crumbles under their
countless hoofs, becomes dust, and blows away. They leave a waste, a
desert, an abomination.

There were yet other phases of change which followed hard upon the heels
of our soldiers after they had completed their task of subjugating the
tribes of the buffalo Indians. After the homesteads had been proved up
in some of the Northwestern States, such as Montana and the Dakotas,
large bodies of land were acquired by certain capitalistic farmers. All
this new land had been proved to be exceedingly prolific of wheat, the
great new-land crop. The farmers of the Northwest had not yet learned
that no country long can thrive which depends upon a single crop. But
the once familiar figures of the bonanza farms of the Northwest--the
pictures of their long lines of reapers or selfbinders, twenty, thirty,
forty, or fifty machines, one after the other, advancing through the
golden grain--the pictures of their innumerable stacks of wheat--the
figures of the vast mileage of their fencing--the yet more stupendous
figures of the outlay required to operate these farms, and the splendid
totals of the receipts from such operations--these at one time were
familiar and proudly presented features of boom advertising in the upper
portions of our black land belt, which day just at the eastern edge of
the old Plains.

There was to be repeated in this country something of the history of
California. In the great valleys, such as the San Joaquin, the first
interests were pastoral, and the cowmen found a vast realm which seemed
to be theirs forever. There came to them, however, the bonanza wheat
farmers, who flourished there about 1875 and through the next decade.
Their highly specialized industry boasted that it could bake a loaf of
bread out of a wheat field between the hours of sunrise and sunset. The
outlay in stock and machinery on some of these bonanza ranches ran
into enormous figures. But here, as in all new wheat countries, the
productive power of the soil soon began to decrease. Little by little
the number of bushels per acre lessened, until the bonanza farmer found
himself with not half the product to sell which he had owned the first
few