Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/580

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The area of the United States (omitting Alaska), a little less than 3,000,000 square miles, is represented by the outer square. The proportion of land cultivated in all the principal crops that count for much in acreage is indicated by the smaller areas computed on the same scale. The total area in the above crops in the year 1900 numbered 353,275 square miles, or about twelve per cent, of the total area.

The proportion of land in the twelve Mississippi Valley States listed which is devoted to wheat is five and a half per cent, of their land area.

The change which has come over this section can be put before the imagination in no better way than for the writer to state that he himself witnessed and clearly remembers the war dance of the Blackhawk Indians on Boston Common, when the chiefs were sent around the country by the Government after they had been subdued in the last great Indian war, which occurred in central Illinois, at the very heart of the section with which we are dealing, and very near the present center of population of the country.

The question arises: What is the basis or fundamental principle underlying the change from occupation by the wild or ’blanket’