The Dakota Boom and the Bonanza Farms
North Dakota
In eighteen seventy-three, a young Philadelphian named Oliver Dalrymple leased eighteen thousand acres in the Red River Valley from the Northern Pacific Railroad, hired a small army of seasonal workers, bought the latest steam-powered machinery, and demonstrated to the world that wheat farming could be run like a factory. The bonanza farms were the first industrialized agriculture in American history. By the early eighteen eighties, some individual operations exceeded sixty thousand acres.
Crews of up to eight hundred men worked a single farm during harvest. The yields were spectacular and the Red River Valley soil, that ancient Lake Agassiz lakebed, was essentially free fertilizer accumulated over nine thousand years. Word spread east and across the Atlantic.
Between eighteen seventy-eight and eighteen eighty-six, a period boosters called the Great Dakota Boom, the population of Dakota Territory multiplied roughly ten times. Land speculators platted new towns faster than settlers could occupy them. Railroads, the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern, drove west across the territory, each mile of track opening another township to sale.
Norwegian immigrants came in particularly large numbers, drawn by cheap land and a climate that felt at least recognizable. German-Russian communities, Mennonites and Catholics who had come to the United States after Catherine the Great's promises of autonomy collapsed in Russia, settled the south-central counties and brought their hard winter wheat varieties with them, seeds that proved better adapted to the continental climate than anything American companies were selling. By eighteen eighty-nine, when North Dakota achieved statehood on November second alongside South Dakota, the state had filled in faster than almost any territory in American history.
The boom would not hold. Drought in eighteen eighty-six and the collapse of wheat prices would send thousands back east. But the infrastructure, the railroads, the county seats, the elevator towns, those stayed.
