Dakota: The Story of the Northern Plains

6. Prairie Farms and Statehood

chapter six Prairie Farms and Statehood L ike many American farmers, then and today, the Northern Pacific Railroad, after the fall of the house of Cooke, was land rich and cash poor. Although the railroad had reached Bismarck before the Panic of 1873, few farmers had taken up its lands west of the Red River. If the railroad were to pay interest on its bonds, meet operating expenses, and finance future construction, it had to promote settlement and traffic along the line. James B. Power, the railroad’s chief land agent, thought he had a solution. In October 1873, a scant month after Cooke’s bankruptcy triggered the financial panic, Power announced that the company would accept its own bonds from investors at par value in exchange for railroad land. Because of the panic Northern Pacific bonds had dropped to less than forty cents on the dollar. Speculators and bondholders leaped at the chance, and over the next year Power disposed of nearly half a million acres of railroad land, most of it in the Red River Valley. The problem was that most of the purchasers were eastern capitalists, anxious to recover their investment in 134 prairie farms and statehood railroad bonds; few had any intention of taking up farming in the West. In 1875 Power had another idea: highly capitalized, largescale farms operated by local tenants or employees—farms, in short, modeled on the eastern factories. He persuaded George W. Cass, president of the railroad, to exchange some of his semiworthless stocks and bonds (the railroad was by then in receivership) for five thousand acres of land about halfway between Fargo and Jamestown. Benjamin P. Cheney, a member of the board, reached a similar agreement, and the two executives made Power their local agent. Although bringing the land under cultivation was part of the agreement , neither the Cass-Cheney partnership nor Power knew how to bring that about. They considered putting tenants on individual tracts but found no one willing to rent when government land could be had for the price of a land office fee. In 1876 Power had yet another brainstorm. He hired Oliver Dalrymple to manage the Cass and Cheney farms, with the added enticement that Dalrymple could purchase additional lands for his own use. Dalrymple was one of those opportunistic individuals that nineteenth-century Americans idolized. A school administrator and lawyer by turns, he had successfully farmed 2,000 acres of wheat in southern Minnesota and was looking for new worlds to conquer. The challenge of managing a factory-style farming operation in Dakota with ample capital backing appealed to him. In Minnesota he found the men he needed, as well as the livestock and equipment for large-scale farming. He arrived in the newly founded town of Casselton in April, and before spring was out he had plowed and planted 1,280 acres of wheat. While the crop was growing, he built dormitories and equipment sheds on each of the two farms and broke an additional 3,200 acres of prairie sod. The following year prairie farms and statehood 135 he purchased six sections of railroad land in the Casselton area for his own use and made plans to break 5,000 acres a year until he had 30,000 acres in wheat crop. By 1877, after being in operation only a year, Dalrymple was employing fifty men at seed time and nearly a hundred at harvest. The capital investment included eighty horses, twenty-six sodbreaking plows, forty cross plows, sixty harrows, twenty-one seeders, thirty harvesters, five steam-driven threshers, and thirty wagons to carry the grain to the railroad elevators. Dalrymple’s financial success induced other Northern Pacific bondholders and stockholders to exchange their paper for square-mile-sized lands in the West, to be managed by westerners experienced in wheat culture and (ideally ) blessed with leadership skills. The Dalrymple-managed farms thus became a model for the bonanza farms that dominated northern Dakota agriculture between the Red River and the James in the decade after 1876. To promote his concept of industrial farms Power mastered the art of drawing attention to the region to encourage both investors and farmer-employees. In September 1878 President Rutherford B. Hayes, having read Power’s glowing account of bonanza farming, made a special trip to Casselton to view the massproduction harvesting operation. A month later Frank Leslie’s...