Seward County, Nebraska - Chapter 8, 1916

The matter of agriculture and the markets in pioneer days in Seward county could scarcely be depicted more accurately than is illustrated in R. G. Ingersoll's portray of when he was a farmer. Mr. Ingersoll was not a Seward county homesteader and knew nothing of the trials of pioneer farm life in Nebraska, but his story is a true representation of the way things were done in those days of long ago. Here it is- - old homesteader- - read it and see if there is anything left out:

"When I was a farmer they used to haul wheat two hundred miles in a wagon and sell it for thirty-five cents a bushel. They would bring home about three hundred feet of lumber, two bunches of shingles, a barrel of salt, and a cook stove that never would draw and never did bake.

"In those blessed days the people lived on corn and bacon. Cooking was an unknown art. Eating was a necessity, not a pleasure. It was hard work for the cook to keep on good terms even with hunger.

"The rain held the roofs in percfet contempt, and the snow drifted joyfully on the floors and beds. They had no barns. The horses were kept in rail pens surrounded with straw. Long before spring the sides would be eaten away and nothing but roofs would be left. Food is fuel. When the cattle were exposed to all the blasts of winter, it took all the corn and oats that could be stuffed into them to prevent actual starvation.

of one log, upon which an axe or two had been worn out in vain. There was nothing to kindle a fire with. Pickets were pulled from the garden fence, clap-boards taken from the house, and every stray plank was seized upon for kindling. Everything was done in the hardest way. Everything about the farm was disagreable. Nothing was kept, in order. Nothing was preserved. The wagons stood in the sun and rain, and the plows rusted in the fields. There was no leisure, no feeling that the work was done. It was all labor and weariness and vexation of spirit. The crops were destroyed by wandering herds, or they were put in too late, or too early, or they were blown down, or caught by the frost, or devoured by the bugs, or stung by flies, or eaten by worms, or carried away by birds, or dug up by gophers, or washed away by floods, or dried up by the sun, or rotted in the stack, or heated in the crib, or they all run to vines, or tops, or straw, or cobs. And when in spite of all these accidents that lie in wait between the plow and the reaper, they did succeed in raiseng a good crop and a high price was offered, then the roads would be impassable. And when the roads got good, then the prices went down. Everything worked together for evil."

This is only one side of an exagerated picture of facts. While it is true that plows, wagons, reapers and other farm empliments stood out in all kinds of weather the year round throughuot Seward county it is also true that they were indispensible ar icles for which it was impossible to provide covering. Fuel supply was a besetting and difficult problem that required years to solve. However Seward county was fortunate in the line of timber along its many miles of streams well distributed in different localities. But the story about living on "corn and bacon" is carrying that point altogether too far for Seward county pioneers. To tell the unadulterated truth we leave out the bacon. Had the old settlers been fortunate enough to have an addition of bacon to our bill of fare we would have been in fear of gout from too high living, and eating might have been such a pleasure that other matters would have been lost sight of. Soup made of water, salt, potatoes and a few wild onions for seasoning was a luxury we remember yet, while johnney-cake with gravy made of salt, water and corn meal made up the everyday bill of fare. In those days the most interesting and comforting book, next to the Bible, to read was the history of the travels of Sir John Franklin and his comrades in search for the north pole. The story in this book was especially interesting where it gave the account of those men feasting upon soup made from strips cut from the soles of their rawhide shoes, an every day diet, changed to a feast by the addition of an extra strip of shoe. After reading this our "grub" tasted delicious. And in those times we didn't have dyspepsia because we eat only when necessary and didn't eat too much.

But no person could charge this condition to the country. The real fault was discernable in the fact that so many people with little or no means were trying to make a start upon raw land. It should be remembered that humanity creeps before it walks. And memory carries us back to the great, delicious squashes, pumpkins, mellons, and wild onions the country produced to add to the scanty eatables, the finest of their kind ever known.

It is natural for man to want to follow the methods, not only in farming, but in every other occupation that he learned in youth. If he was raised in a country where it never quits freezing till after the fourth of July he will hang to his overcoat till after that date on the sunny coast of Florida. Many of the first settlers in Seward county were New England people. Those who were not from the far east were generally emigrants from more northern states of the wesl. And they all had their special way to raise farm products. They would not plant corn until the twentieth of May, and some of them would wait till the "old of the moon in May" to plant potatoes. These rules strictly adhered to in Seward county, Nebraska, resulted unfavorable for the crops, especially in dry years as the planting was done too late to get the benefit of the usual early rainy period. The corn was planted with hoes, and it was only an ordinary sight to see five or six persons covering corn with hoes while three or four were engaged in dropping it. Corn planted in this way usually made a light crop, but it was the way "father raised good corn." And it required the running of a risk to learn that corn planted with a planter made a better crop than corn planted in the old way, with a hoe, the same as it required an experiment, or an accidental disregard of old doctor theory to teach that a patient, sick with a fever would not die, but rather be bennefitted by drinking cold water. Occasionally a patient who the doctor said would die if he drank any cold water, would become reckless and thinking he was going to die anyway, would drink a gallon or two of water and surprise the doctor by getting well. And a few fellows got reckless and thinking they would not raise much corn anyway, took the easiest way to plant it, with hand planters, and the corn grew so even and yielded so much better that the hand planters became popular for a few seasons when they were superseded by horse planters, and as some one had become reckless and planted his corn a little earlier in the season than the schedule time, the opinion formed during the hoe planting after the twentieth of May period, that Nebraska was not a corn country, was reversed and farmers began to look upon it as the greatest corn country of all corn countries. Corn proved to be king, and although it failed occasionally on account of grasshoppers and drouth, it has been and is today the grain that has made

After a period of sixteen years of almost entire failure to raise spring wheat, the only wheat said to be productive in Nebraska, some reckless fellow, thinking no doubt, that he couldn't raise wheat anywa\7, "took chances" on the fall variety, and so deeply embeded had the delusion become that fall wheat could not be produced in the country that this benefactor shut his eyes to keep out the vision of failure his folly had projected. But the grain continued on its mission to reverse the former hobby and show that while spring wheat could not be successfully raised fall wheat was the stuff to promote the wealth of Seward county.

During the period when efforts to raise spring wheat brought nothing but heart rending dissapointment to the hard laboring and ever economizing, destitute farmers, other products of grain were tried as substitutes. Barley and flax came to the front for a short time, the latter being resorted to by many farmers that become destitute through the failure of their spring wheat, of seed to sow, the flax dealers furnishing the seed "on time" under contract that the said dealers should have the crop at so much per bushel. But barley and flax soon disappeared from the list as main crops being found difficult to handle on account of the usual wet harvest time and the lack of barns and sheds to cover such productions.

Vegetables were bountious products to raise in Seward county. Potatoes yielded enormoush', but a market for more potatoes than the producer's own use was entirely out of sight. And along about 1874 the Colorado beetle or hard shell potatoe bug made its advent into the potatoe patches, and as there was no remedy known at that time for the destructive pests, farmers labored under grave difficulties to save enough potatoes to supply their own tables with this kind of food staple. But after a few years of suffering some reckless fellow made another beneficent discovery by spraying his potatoe plants with a solution of the deadly poison, paris green and water.

Seward county early settlers did not draw wheat two hundred miles to market, but their first market for grain was at Lincoln, thirty-five miles away from many of them, and the lumber to build Ross Nichols' house, standing yet in the east part of the village of Beaver Crossing, was drawn by team from Nebraska City, a distance of ninety miles. And that lumber was freighted by steam boat up the Missouri river from Kansas City. With the approach of the C. B. & Q. Railway into Seward county, in March 1873, a market for that year's crop was assured at Seward. And this proved to be the principal market for Seward county, and for a considerable portion of York county. Although the market had come nearer home, all the inconveniences immaginable for handling the thousands of loads of grain that were drawn to the Seward market that and the following season, were prominent and disheartening features for the early grain producers of Seward county to bear and remember. There were no elevators nor dumps of any kind for several months, grain having to be unloaded by hand from the farmers' wagons either to small warehouses or to the cars for shipment. There were only three or four buyers with limited capacities for storeing grain, many times being unable for various reasons to secure cars the market would become clogged and prices cut in two nearly in the middle. We have seen five thousand bushels of shelled corn piled up on the ground and the snow drifting onto it and around it in the Seward market for the want of store room. Many times buyers would all excepting one declare their room for grain all filled up and refuse to buy when the one would cut the price all the farmers would bear and take all the grain that appeared upon the market. We have drawn loads of wheat eighteen miles to market on such days, and after being forced to take a cut price for it were obliged to take our place at the end of a long string of wagons and wait from the middle of the forenoon until nearly'sun down, our poor, tired horses going without food or water, for our turn to unload. Of course grain buyers were not tricky and didn't want to make any more money when buying wheat than the farmers made when raising it. But it did seem a little strange to us that one buyer with no more room than his competitors should have store room to unload forty or fifty loads of wheat after the said competitors had their houses all full. But time solves many mystries. In 1875 the honest grain buyers in all the small town markets, wishing to be on the safe side, introduced a system of testing and grading wheat. This was all right, but there was another mystry to it in the fact that with the rich, grain producing soil of Seward county farmers could not raise number one wheat. It all graded number two, three or "rejected." We recollect taking a load of wheat to the Seward market in the fall of 1875, when the elevators, warehouses and grain market were just east of the prisent location of the B. & M. depot. We crossed the bridge almost into the grain market and were met by two young gentlemen who offered us twenty-five cents a bushel for our wheat, saying: "That is all it is worth today." We thought it might be as well to take it up to the city and see what people there thought of it. We drove up and halted in front of Beaty & Davis' store and Mr. Beaty came out, looked at the grain and said: "That wheat is worth fifty cents a bushel today." We told him he could have it and he directed us to his grain house where the same gentlemen who made the first bid for it unloaded it. They wished to buy it for rejected wheat, the lowest grade; Mr. Beaty did buy it and pay for No. 3 wheat when it really should have brought the price of No. 2. But if there was an honest grain dealer in the country J. N. Beaty was his name. In those davs farmers went a Ions; distance to market with their grain and before leaving home had, as a rule, planned with the other half of the family upon what necessaries must be purchased with the receipts from the sale of the produce, and felt obliged to accept just what they could get for it in order to avoid rehauling it back home and to be able to take home the articles needed there. This established a system of continual forced sale of farm produce. It is a well remembered fact by man}7 early settlers, some of whom tell the story in an almost lamentable tone, that at some future date, corn "sold for ten cents a bushel." This is a reflection, not of any market time, but of a time of no market, and represents "forced sales." Producers needed other things so much more than they did corn that they were forced to accept the price they cou d get at that time. While this was not a market price, being merely an occasional individual deal, it is only a fair representation of low prices on farm porducts as a result of pioneer needs. And corn in those days at ten cents a bushel brought as fair a price as good wheat which we sold shortly afterwards in the market for twenty-five cents a bushel. And taking into consideration the difference in the tax rate on land at that time, being on a greater portion not any, and the tax rate at the present time, together with the low price of living at that time as compared with the high prices now; and again taking into consideration the diference in the cost of production of corn during the different periods, ten cents at that period was as good a price as some of the more recent prices.