Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/582

572 lands granted to private individuals have been, since 1860, usually in small tracts, varying from eighty (80) to one thousand (1,000) acres, the greater share being in tracts known as quarter sections of one hundred and sixty (160) acres. This is the one always required under the Homestead and preemption laws. The lands of railroads were originally granted to them in large tracts. Some of it has been disposed of by them in large tracts to wealthy corporations and individuals and by them converted to vast farms, known usually as 'bonanza' farms. The balance has been sold or is in the process of sale, in smaller tracts on long-time credit to poor settlers. The usual method of sale is one tenth cash and the balance in nine annual payments with interest. The ordinary sale of this railroad land is a tract of one hundred and sixty (160) acres, the one on which the poor settler, as a rule, begins his career on the frontier.

The first settlement of the frontier, as now described, is accompanied with many transfers of land title, owing to the facilities of such transfer and by reason of the benefits that all parties can find in the same. Many who have acquired land under the Homestead law sell it to their neighbors or to a newcomer with ready money. They then take up a new farm under the preemption law, and use the money received for the sale of the first farm to improve the second. The divisions of the bonanza farm, the land of which is usually purchased from the railroads, combined with the results of those transferred among the original settlers, give to the farmer on the frontier an average size of from two hundred and forty (240) to three hundred and twenty (320) acres, the largest containing thousands of acres and the smallest from twenty (20) to forty (40) acres.

When first settled, these large and small farms in the grain-growing sections are always cultivated on an extensive system, largely in grain. The original occupants, whether of large or small farms, turned over the sod and planted their grain with the application of very hard labor and without fertilizers and, as a rule, without any very general comprehension of the art of agriculture. This was the necessity of the case, and it has been and is still a success under the conditions of the frontier. Under these conditions a vast body of pioneers have become prosperous, some of them attaining large wealth, and with their wealth buying out their less successful neighbors and adding to the area of the great farms. That phase has nearly passed by in the great Mississippi Valley and in the States named. With the passage of years, in every part of these twelve States, this extensive system of cultivation comes to an end and the intensive system of working the land in various crops takes its place. With this change the large bonanza farms are broken up and the smaller farm becomes the rule. This change is a progressive one,