You can see it taking shape in pages of cursive in the letterpress copybooks of J. B. Power, Land Commissioner of the Northern Pacific Railway Company. Following the financial panic of 1873, he had to find some way to revive interest in land investment; he had all those land-grant sections on his hands, and no one was buying. The success of some modest homesteaders raising wheat, and the existence of a lot of discontented bondholders of the railway, gave Power an idea: let the holders redeem their bonds with railroad lands, jump-start big-time wheat farming on them, and initiate farming on a grand scale, bonanza farming, in the Red River Valley of the North.
It was Power—all this is in his letterpress copybooks, passed on to his heirs, and brought into NDSU’s Institute for Regional Studies by Professor Sackett in 1955—Power who pulled together the first combination of landholders to make a bonanza farm in 1874, Power who recruited Oliver Dalrymple to manage the 13,000-acre operation. Dalrymple’s success, heralded by Power, inspired others. Power is rightly remembered as the father of bonanza farming.
He was proud of his work to develop the country. Still, while he preached wheat, wheat, wheat to his bonanza farmer friends, he himself quietly acquired six thousand acres of land, not in level, prime wheat country, but down on the northern edge of the sandy Sheyenne delta, there to develop a stock-raising operation. You discover the logic of this not in his letters but on the land, just south of the town of Leonard; look it over, see how it sits on the edge of two environments, comprising lands for grazing, lands for grain-growing, and lands for forage. He called the place Helendale, named for his wife. Power was prescient enough to know that wheat monoculture would have problems in future.
Power, too, was an early president of North Dakota Agricultural College, where, as an old-fashioned Republican, he tangled first with the Populists and then with the Mackenzie machine, which deposed him. Still, he remained active in college affairs, traveling with the college’s farmer institutes that toured the state in dedicated railroad coaches to preach better farming. It is interesting to see what he had to say, and how he placed himself into the land’s history. In the first decade of the twentieth century, although across the country people enjoyed farm prosperity, wheat farming in the valley was having an agronomic identity crisis. Soil depletion, weed infestation, and the end of the bonanza boom were concerns.
Having done mixed farming, crops and livestock, for a generation, Power offered an answer to the malaise: discard the “one-crop system,” make wheat a rotational crop; buy cattle, some hogs and chickens, too; raise a garden; seed some acreage down to forages; rediscover the ideal of mixed farming.
No wonder we went astray for a generation, Power explained. “It was an easy thing,” he recounted, “to break and seed the raw prairie, the new ground was rich, wheat was in demand, quick and profitable returns were the rule. . . . This was the “Land of the Golden Grain.” His remarks, preserved as lecture notes for the ag trains, are downright confessional. In fact, he says outright, “confession is good for the soil” [s-o-i-l, get it?]. Yes, I started bonanza farming; “the glitter of anticipation caught the suckers;” but now I’m here to show you a way out of it.
I live in the land whereof Power speaks. It is inhabited by the ghosts of the bonanza farmers. It is, again, a bonanza farming landscape. What say you, Mr. Power?
