blackfoot-valley

nearly all in the southwestern valleys. And by that time, the precious metal mines were playing out and markets for produce drying up, to be substantially revived only after the copper discoveries at Butte in 1881. Farming was heading west, and had been for some time, spurred on by what had become a tradition of frontier difficulties overcome. Decades earlier, when the settlers came to the prairies covered with tall, thick grass, starting in Indiana, reaching full fruition in Illinois and Iowa, and spilling into eastern Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas before thinning out to the short steppe bunch grasses across the larger western expanses of the latter states, they found the soils hard to till. Although we have noted that grassland soils are among the richest on earth, their sticky mud clumped so tenaciously to the settlers’ cast-iron plows that farmers had to stop incessantly to clean them. Farmers were spending more time cleaning than plowing. An entrepreneurial individual who came to the Midwest from Vermont, John Deere, changed that. In 1840, he designed a curved plow of polished steel attached to a moldboard, calling it a “self-scouring” plow. It lived up to its nickname. Once word got around, he was selling as many as he could make in his blacksmith shop, and later, his factory in Illinois. Seldom has such a seemingly simple invention wrought such a revolution. Because of Deere’s steel-tipped plow, later to be immortalized by Virgil Thompson’s 1936 orches- tral score “ The Plow that Broke the Plains,” the American Midwest was transformed into the world’s richest granary and remains so today. 86