Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/148

 fifths to one-half, or cash, from three to five and six dollars per acre. And with the prices in these states ranging from ninety to one hundred and fifty dollars per acre, which meant from fifteen to twenty-five thousand dollars to buy a quarter section, which the renters felt was too high to ever be paid for by farming it. Therefore, western lands held an attraction, where with a few thousand dollars, some stock, and machinery a man could establish a good home. As this land in southern South Dakota is in the Corn Belt, the erstwhile investor and homeseeker found a haven.

There is always more or less gossip as regards insufficient moisture in a new country. The only thing to kill this bogy is to have plenty of rain, and plenty of rain had fallen on the Little Crow, too much at times. Large crops of everything had been harvested, but if the first three years had been wet, this fourth was one of almost continual rainfall.

In the eastern states the corn crop had been badly drowned out on the low lands, and rust had cut the yield of small grain considerably, while on the rolling land of the Little Crow the season was just right and that it gave the country, a raw prairie until less than four years before, the appearance of an old settled country. It looked good to the buyers and they bought. Farms were sold as soon as they were listed. The price at the beginning of the year had been from twenty-five to forty dollars per acre, some places more, but after the first six months of the year it began to climb to forty-five and then to fifty dollars per acre. Those who owned Little Crow farms