Bonanza Country
Near Fargo, North Dakota
In the mid-eighteen seventies, the Northern Pacific Railroad was in financial trouble, and its directors hit on a solution that was really a publicity campaign: they would demonstrate that the Red River Valley could grow wheat in quantities that would stagger the imagination. They would turn the flatlands into a spectacle.
George Cass, the railroad's president, and Benjamin Cheney, a director, took out a land grant parcel near the town of Casselton, not far from Fargo, and hired a man named Oliver Dalrymple to run it. Dalrymple had graduated from Yale Law School. He had almost no farming experience. What he had was organizational genius and access to new mechanized equipment. He put both to use on a scale the country had never seen.
The first bonanza harvest came in August of eighteen seventy-six. Dalrymple's operation brought in thirty-two thousand bushels of wheat, at about twenty-three bushels per acre, which he sold for ninety-five cents per bushel. That was enough to turn heads. By eighteen seventy-nine, Dalrymple was hiring one hundred sixty men to plant and four hundred men to harvest. By eighteen eighty, his total workforce reached eight hundred men. The largest of his operations, the Cass-Cheney-Dalrymple farm, eventually spread across seventy thousand acres.
These were not farms in any traditional sense. They were agricultural factories, industrial operations applied to land. Gangs of binders, threshers, and steam-powered equipment moved across the flat plain in formations that travelers compared to military maneuvers. Journalists came from the East and wrote about them in astonishment.
The bonanza boom was short. By nineteen hundred, most of the great farms were being broken up and sold as smaller tracts. Drought, declining wheat prices, and the sheer cost of maintaining operations at such scale made the model unsustainable. But for two decades, the Red River Valley had shown the country what industrialized agriculture could look like. What that meant for the land and for those who eventually settled it is a longer story.
