The Henson Journals

[62]

Tuesday, June 8th, 1909.

Fargo: I spent the morning in writing letters to Fedarb, Knox, Wilberforce, & the Agent of the C.P.R. at New York.

We lunched with a pleasant neighbour & his wife; and then were motored over the prarie some 20 miles to the largest farm in the State, held by Mr Dalrymple. He told me that he held 21000 acres: that he did his ploughing with his own horses, of which he owned some 500, and with hired labourers. The cutting, binding, & threshing were done by machinery. I was interested in the labourers. They are mostly Scandinavians, and unmarried. They are fed & housed, & receive about 6 dollars a week. Their employment on the farm extends for about 7 months, in the winter they labour in the lumber trade. They are shiftless & dissipated when their work is over: but where they can get no drink or excitement are fairly good workmen. They have no recreations & read no books. When they come from their work they mostly eat & sleep. This seems rather a poor sort of citizen's life. Mr Dalrymple took us to see the ploughing. Nine teams, each with 5 horses, followed one another down the sides of a field which covered an entire square mile! Each team made two furrows: so [63] that 18 furrows were being made at once. No less than seven other fields were being similarly ploughed at the same time. The different parts of this great farm were connected by telephone: the wheat was stored in immense elevators: then carried by train to Duluth, where it was placed on the Great Lakes, & so brought to Europe, & mainly to England. Mr Dalrymple was a fine up–standing man about 30 years old, managing himself the whole of his great property. He told me that he had noted 22 different kinds of birds nesting about his house. We had supper at the farm, & then motored home. The prarie is very impressive in its vast flatness, only broken by the homesteads, every one of which is surrounded by a plantation of trees. The roads were extremely bad, indeed no more than mud tracks lined with telegraph poles, & churned by waggons. They are supposed to be kept in condition by the land holders, who "do the work themselves", and do it badly.

The rain which threatened all day, was falling steadily when we reached home shortly after 9.30 p.m. We found some newspapers from England awaiting us.

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