blackfoot-valley

moisture is conserved by allowing alternate patches of land to lie fallow one year to build up moisture and be cropped the next. Other techniques were deep plowing, sub-surface packing, and maintaining a fine surface mulch to retard evaporation. All of this was aided by the availability of new technology and agricultural machinery in addition to the now-ubiquitous steel plow, giv- ing rise to the singularly appropriate term “sodbusters” for farmers and home- steaders who now came in numbers. The original Homestead Act of 1862 had little affect on most of Mon- tana. For one thing, its statutory limit of a 160-acre quarter-section, appro- priate in the humid lands east of the Mississippi, was woefully inadequate to support a family farm on the semiarid Great Plains. Congress doubled the allowable acreage to 320 acres in 1909, and shortly afterward reduced the approval period from five years to three, which proved irresistible to large numbers who flocked in to claim the “free” land. At the beginning of the boom, the homesteaders’ expectations were more than realized. In addition to the numerous small homestead plots, many promoters, the railroads, and Eastern business interests acquired or leased larger tracts of land for commercial farms. Their land offerings were eagerly taken up by those settlers who could afford to pay asking prices that they saw as cheap. As it happened, all this took place during a period of ample rainfall that fell at the right time of year during the spring and early summer months. The newcomers took this to be normal. Wheat harvests averaged over 25 bushels per acre during most of the 1909-1918 period, and in 1915, some farms doubled that yield. With agricultural settlement increas- ing exponentially, thriving market farms sprang up all across the Great Plains. Homesteaders on their 320-acre plots threw up sod houses or hastily erected tarpaper shacks with a potbellied stove for heat and within one year were selling wheat at good prices. Those prices were supported by the increasing population of the rapidly industrializing eastern states, and with the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914, by heavy wartime demand for food imports. Montana, from its small homesteaders to its large mechanized operations, was producing high quality, high protein, hard winter and spring wheat in huge quantities. The state became one of the prime granaries for the world. Author’s notes: The original settlers, the two Wales Brothers, came to homestead the land traveling from Ireland in 1867. The original homestead location was near the present two story Wales House. The old homestead house is gone but the original barn is still there, north of the Wales house in the meadow about a 1/4 mile from the current house. The barn is filled with antique farming and ranching equipment that was originally used. 88