blackfoot-valley

The westward movement of American agriculture leapfrogged over the short-grass steppe lands of the Great Plains and hardly touched them. To the pioneer farmers headed for Oregon and California, these great expanses of bunch grasses over which they drove their wagons seemed impossibly dry. The region west of the 98th meridian (which runs from just west of Ft. Worth and Wichita and through easternmost Nebraska and the Dakotas all the way to the Rocky Mountains), was labeled “The Great American Desert” . This was a region to be left behind as quickly as possible. The plains remained empty in the late 1800s except for small numbers of Indians and the tendrils of rail lines pushing toward the Pacific. Other than stimulating a few brave ventures in dry farming and limited irrigation in scattered areas, even the penetration of railroads did not immediately bring a rush of farmers to the Great Plains, much of which remained Indian country for decades. In Montana, the great land rush began after 1908 when large promo- tional campaigns began being launched by the railroads, especially The Mil- waukee Railroad and carried on by the Northern Pacific and Great Northern. The railroads wished to fill the empty lands their rails crossed and had plenty of land to sell, not only in Montana but in the southern Great Plains as well. Their advertising centered on the concept of “Dry Farming” in which soil “ Homestead Granted to Hugh J. Wales” 1895 87