The farmers of the Northwest had not yet learned that no country long can thrive which depends upon a single crop.

But the once familiar figures of the bonanza farms of the Northwest--the pictures of their long lines of reapers or selfbinders, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty machines, one after the other, advancing through the golden grain--the pictures of their innumerable stacks of wheat--the figures of the vast mileage of their fencing--the yet more stupendous figures of the outlay required to operate these farms, and the splendid totals of the receipts from such operations--these at one time were familiar and proudly presented features of boom advertising in the upper portions of our black land belt, which day just at the eastern edge of the old Plains.
There was to be repeated in this country something of the history of California.

In the great valleys, such as the San Joaquin, the first interests were pastoral, and the cowmen found a vast realm which seemed to be theirs forever.

There came to them, however, the bonanza wheat farmers, who flourished there about 1875 and through the next decade.
Their highly specialized industry boasted that it could bake a loaf of bread out of a wheat field between the hours of sunrise and sunset.

The outlay in stock and machinery on some of these bonanza ranches ran into enormous figures.