XLII.
CO-OPERATION IN FARMING
The word of hope and cheer for Labor in our days is Coöperation – that is, the combination by many of their means and efforts to achieve results beneficial to them all. It differs radically from Communism, which proposes that each should receive from the aggregate product of human labor enough to satisfy his wants, or at least his needs, whether he shall have contributed to that aggregate much, or little, or nothing at all. Coöperation insists that each shall receive from the joint product in proportion to his contributions thereto, whether in capital, skill, or labor. If one associate has ten children and another none, Communism would apportion to each according to the size of his family alone; while Coöperation would give to each what he had earned, regardless of the number dependent upon him. Thus the two systems are radical antagonists, and only the grossly ignorant or willfully blind will confound them.
A young farmer, whose total estate is less than $500, not counting a priceless wife and child, resolves to migrate from one of the old States to Kansas, Minnesota, or one of the Territories: he has heard that he will there find public land whereon he may make a home of a quarter-section, paying therefor $20 or less for the cost of survey and of the necessary papers. So he may: but, on reaching the Land of Promise, whether with or without his family, he finds a very large belt of still vacant land beyond the settlements already transformed into private property, and either not for sale at all or held on speculation, quite out of his reach. The public land which he may take under the Homestead law lies a full day's journey beyond the border settlements, to which he must look for Mills, Stores, Schools, and even Highways. If he persists in squatting, with intent to earn his quarter-section by settlement and cultivation, he must take a long day's journey across unbridged streams and sloughs, over unmade roads, to find boards, or brick, or meal, or glass, or groceries; while he must postpone the education of his children to an indefinite future day. Gradually, the region will be settled, and the conveniences of civilization will find their way to his door, but not till after he will have suffered through several years for want of them; often compelled to make a journey to get a plow or yoke mended, a grist of grain ground, or to minister to some other trivial but inexorable want. He who thus acquires his quarter-section must fairly earn it, and may be thankful if his children do not grow up rude, coarse, and illiterate.
But suppose one thousand just such young farmers as he is, with no more means and no greater efficiency than his, were to set forth together, resolved to find a suitable location whereon they might all settle on adjoining quarter-sections, thus appropriating the soil of five or six embryo townships: who can fail to see that three-fourths of the obstacles and discouragements which confront the solitary pioneer would vanish at the outset? Roads, Bridges, Mills, – nay, even Schools and Churches – would be theirs almost immediately; while mechanics, merchants, doctors, etc., would fairly overrun their settlement and solicit their patronage at every road-crossing. Within a year after the location of their several claims, they would have achieved more progress and more comfort than in five years under the system of straggling and isolated settlement which has hitherto prevailed. The change I here indicate appeals to the common sense and daily experience of our whole people. It is not necessary, however desirable, that the pioneers should be giants in wisdom, in integrity, or in piety, to secure its benefits. A knave or a fool may be deemed an undesirable neighbor; but a dozen such in the township would not preclude, and could hardly diminish, the advantages naturally resulting from settlement by Coöperation.
Nor are these confined to pioneers transcending the boundaries of civilization. I wish I could induce a thousand of our colored men now precariously subsisting by servile labor in the cities, to strike out boldly for homes of their own, and for liberty to direct their own labor, whether they should settle on the frontier in the manner just outlined, or should buy a tract of cheap land on Long Island, in New-Jersey, Maryland, or some State further South. I cannot doubt that the majority of them would work their way up to independence; and this very much sooner, and after undergoing far less privation, than almost every pioneer who has plunged alone into the primitive forest or struck out upon the broad prairie and there made himself a farm.
The insatiable demand for fencing is one of the pioneer's many trials. Though he has cleared off but three acres of forest during his first Fall and Winter, he must surround those acres with a stout fence, or all he grows will be devoured by hungry cattle – his own, if no others. Whether he adds two or ten acres to his clearing during the next year, they must in turn be surrounded by a fence; and nothing short of a very stout one will answer: so he goes on clearing and fencing, usually burning up a part of his fence whenever he burns over his new clearing; then building a new one around this, which will have to be sacrificed in its turn. I believe that many pioneers have devoted as much time to fencing their fields as to tilling them throughout their first six or eight years.
It is different with those who settle on broad prairies, but not essentially better. Each pioneer must fence his patch of tillage with material which costs him more, and is procured with greater difficulty, than though he were cutting a hole in the forest. Often, when he thinks he has fenced sufficiently, the hungry, breachy cattle, who roam the open prairies around him, judge his handiwork less favorably; and he wakes some August morning, when feed is poorest outside and most luxuriant within his inclosure, to find that twenty or thirty cattle have broken through his defenses and half destroyed his growing crop.
If, instead of this wasteful lack of system, a thousand or even a hundred farmers would combine to fence several square miles into one grand inclosure for cultivation, erecting their several habitations within or without its limits, as to each should be convenient – apportioning it for cultivation, or owning it in severalty, as they should see fit – an immense economy would be secured, just when, because of their poverty, saving is most important. Their stock might range the open prairie unwatched; and they might all sleep at night in serene confidence that their corn and cabbages were not in danger of ruthless destruction. Among the settlers in our great primitive forests, the system of Coöperative Farming would have to be modified in details, while it would be in essence the same.
And, once adopted with regard to fencing, other adaptations as obvious and beneficent would from day to day suggest themselves. Each pioneer would learn how to advance his own prosperity by combining his efforts with those of his neighbors. He would perceive that the common wants of a hundred may be supplied by a combined effort at less than half the cost of satisfying them when each is provided for alone. He would grow year by year into a clearer and firmer conviction that short-sighted selfishness is the germ of half the evils that afflict the human race, and that the true and sure way to a bounteous satisfaction of the wants of each is a generous and thoughtful consideration for the needs of all.
And here let me pay my earnest and thankful tribute to Mr. E. V. de Boissière, a philanthropic Frenchman, who has purchased 3,300 acres of mainly rolling prairie-land in Kansas, near Princeton, Franklin County, and is carefully, cautiously, laying thereon the foundations of a great coöperative farm, where, in addition to the usual crops, it is expected that Silk and other exotics will in due time be extensively grown and transformed into fabrics, and that various manufactures will vie with Agriculture in affording attractive and profitable employment to a considerable population. I have not been accustomed to look with favor on our new States and unpeopled Territories as an arena for such experiments, since so many of their early settlers are intent on getting rich by land-speculation – at all events, through the exercise of some others' muscles than their own – while the opportunities for and incitements to migration and relocation are so multiform and powerful. Doubtless, M. de Boissière will be often tried by stampedes of his volunteer associates, who, after the novelty of coöperative effort has worn off, will find life on his domain too tame and humdrum for their excitable and high-strung natures. I trust, however, that he will persevere through every discouragement, and triumph over every obstacle; that the right men for associates will gradually gather about him; that his enterprise and devotion will at length be crowned by a signal and inspiring success; and that thousands will be awakened by it to a larger and nobler conception of the mission of Industry, and the possibilities of achievement which stud the path of simple, honest, faithful, persistent Work.
XLIII.
FARMERS' CLUBS
Farmers, like other men, divide naturally into two classes – those who do too much work, and those who do too little. I know men who are no farmers at all, only by virtue of the fact that each of them inherited, or somehow acquired, a farm, and have since lived upon and out of it, in good part upon that which it could not help producing – they not doing so much as one hundred fair days' work each per annum. One of this class never takes a periodical devoted to farming; evinces no interest in county fairs or township clubs, save as they may afford him an excuse for greater idleness; and insists that there is no profit in farming. As land steadily depreciates in quality under his management, he is apt to sell out whenever the increase of population or progress of improvement has given additional value to his farm, and move off in quest of that undiscovered country where idleness is compatible with thrift, profits are realized from light crops, and men grow rich by doing nothing.
The opposite class of wanderers from the golden mean is hardly so numerous as the idlers, yet it is quite a large one. Its leading embodiment, to my mind, is one whom I knew from childhood, who, born poor and nowise favored by fortune, was rated as a tireless worker from early boyhood, and who achieved an independence before he was forty years old in a rural New-England township, simply by rugged, persistent labor – in youth on the farms of other men; in manhood, on one of his own. This man was older at forty than his father, then seventy, and died at fifty, worn out with excessive and unintermitted labor, leaving a widow who greatly preferred him to all his ample wealth, and an only son who, so soon as he can get hold of it, will squander the property much faster, and even more unwisely, than his father acquired it.
To the class of which this man was a fair representative, Farmers' Clubs must prove of signal value. Though there should be nothing else than a Farmers' Club in his neighborhood, it can hardly fail in time to make such a one realize that life need not and should not be all drudgery; that there are other things worth living for beside accumulating wealth. Let his wife and his neighbor succeed in drawing such a one into two or three successive meetings, and he can hardly fail to perceive that thrift is a product of brain as well as of muscle; that he may grow rich by learning and knowing as well as by delving, and that, even though he should not, there are many things desirable and laudable beside the accumulation of wealth.
A true Farmers' Club should consist of all the families residing in a small township, so far as they can be induced to attend it, even though only half their members should be present at any one meeting. It should limit speeches to ten minutes, excepting only those addresses or essays which eminently qualified persons are requested to specially prepare and read. It should have a president, ready and able to repress all ill-natured personalities, all irrelevant talk, and especially all straying into the forbidden regions of political or theological disputation. At each meeting, the subject should be chosen for the next, and not less than four members pledged to make some observations thereon, with liberty to read them if unused to speaking in public. Those having been heard, the topic should be open to discussion by all present: the humblest and youngest being specially encouraged to state any facts within their knowledge which they deem pertinent and cogent. Let every person attending be thus incited to say something calculated to shed light on the subject, to say this in the fewest words possible, and with the utmost care not to annoy or offend others, and it is hardly possible that one evening per week devoted to these meetings should not be spent with equal pleasure and profit.
The chief end to be achieved through such meetings is a development of the faculty of observation and the habit of reflection. Too many of us pass through life essentially blind and deaf to the wonders and glories manifest to clearer eyes all around us. The magnificent phenomena of the Seasons, even the awakening of Nature from death to life in Spring-time, make little impression on their senses, still less on their understandings. There are men who have passed forty times through a forest, and yet could not name, within half a dozen, the various species of trees which compose it; and so with everything else to which they are accustomed. They need even more than knowledge an intellectual awakening; and this they could hardly fail to receive from the discussions of an intelligent and earnest Farmers' Club.
A genuine and lively interest in their vocation is needed by many farmers, and by most farmers' sons. Too many of these regard their homesteads as a prison, in which they must remain until some avenue of escape into the great world shall open before them. The farm to such is but the hollow log into which a bear crawls to wear out the rigors of Winter and await the advent of Spring. Too many of our boys fancy that they know too much for farmers, when in fact they know far too little. A good Farmers' Club, faithfully attended, would take this conceit out of them, imbuing them instead with a realizing sense of their ignorance and incompetency, and a hearty desire for practical wisdom.
A recording secretary, able to state in the fewest words each important suggestion or fact elicited in the course of an evening's discussion, would be hardly less valuable or less honored than a capable president. A single page would often suffice for all that deserves such record out of an evening's discussion; and this, being transferred to a book and preserved, might be consulted with interest and profit throughout many succeeding years. No other duty should be required of the member who rendered this service, the correspondence of the Club being devolved upon another secretary. The habit of bringing grafts, or plants, or seeds, to Club meetings, for gratuitous distribution, has been found to increase the interest, and enlarge the attendance of those formerly indifferent. Almost every good farmer or gardener will sometimes have choice seeds or grafts to spare, which he does not care or cannot expect to sell, and these being distributed to the Club will not only increase its popularity, but give him a right to share when another's surplus is in like manner distributed. If one has choice fruits to give away, the Club will afford him an excellent opportunity; but I would rather not attract persons to its meetings by a prospect of having their appetites thus gratified at others' expense. A Flower-Show once in each year, and an Exhibition of Fruits and other choice products at an evening meeting in September or October, should suffice for festivals. Let each member consider himself pledged to bring to the Exhibition the best material result of his year's efforts, and the aggregate will be satisfactory and instructive.
The organization of a Farmers' Club is its chief difficulty. The larger number of those who ought to participate usually prefer to stand back, not committing themselves to the effort until after its success has been assured. To obviate this embarrassment, let a paper be circulated for signatures, pledging each signer to attend the introductory meeting and bring at least a part of his family. When forty have signed such a call, success will be well-nigh assured.
XLIV.
WESTERN IRRIGATION
I have already set forth my belief that Irrigation is everywhere practicable, is destined to be generally adopted, and to prove signally beneficent. I do not mean that every acre of the States this side of the Missouri will ever be thus supplied with water, but that some acres of every township, and of nearly every farm, should and will be. I propose herein to speak with direct reference to that large portion of our country which cannot be cultivated to any purpose without Irrigation. This region, which is practically rainless in Summer, may be roughly indicated as extending from the forks of the Platte westward, and as including all our present Territories, a portion of Western Texas, the entire State of Nevada, and at least nine-tenths of California. On this vast area, no rain of consequence falls between April and November, while its soil, parched by fervid, cloudless suns, and swept by intensely dry winds, is utterly divested of moisture to a depth of three or four feet; and I have seen the tree known as Buckeye growing in it, at least six inches in diameter, whereon every leaf was withered and utterly dead before the end of August, though the tree still lived, and would renew its foliage next Spring.
Most of this broad area is usually spoken of as desert, because treeless, except on the slopes of its mountains, where certain evergreens would seem to dispense with moisture, and on the brink of infrequent and scanty streams, where the all but worthless Cotton-wood is often found growing luxuriantly. A very little low Gamma Grass on the Plains, some straggling Bunch-grass on the mountains, with an endless profusion of two poor shrubs, popularly known as Sage-brush and Grease-wood, compose the vegetation of nearly or quite a million square miles.
I will confine myself in this essay to the readiest means of irrigating the Plains, by which I mean the all but treeless plateau that stretches from the base of the Rocky Mountains, 300 to 400 miles eastward, sloping imperceptibly toward the Missouri, and drained by the affluents of the Platte, the Kansas, and the Arkansas rivers.
The North Platte has its sources in the western, as the South Platte has in the eastern, slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Each of them pursues a generally north-east course for some 300 miles, and then turns sharply to the eastward, uniting some 300 miles eastward of the mountains, where the Plains melt into the Prairies. Between these two rivers and the eastern base of the mountains lies an irregular delta or triangle, which seems susceptible of irrigation at a smaller cost than the residue. The location of Union Colony may be taken as a fair illustration of the process, and the facilities therefor afforded by nature.
Among the streams which, taking rise in the eastern gorges of the Rocky Mountains, run into the South Platte, the most considerable has somehow acquired the French name of Cache la Poudre. It heads in and about Long's Peak, and, after emerging from the mountains, runs some 20 to 25 miles nearly due east, with a descent in that distance of about 100 feet. Its waters are very low in Autumn and Winter, and highest in May, June and July, from the melting of snow and ice on the lofty mountains which feed it. Like all the streams of this region, it is broad and shallow, with its bed but three to four feet below the plains on either side.
Greeley, the nucleus of Union Colony, is located at the crossing of the Cache la Poudre by the Denver-Pacific Railroad, about midway of its course from the Kansas Pacific at Denver northward to the Union Pacific at Cheyenne. Here a village of some 400 to 500 houses has suddenly grown up during the past Summer.
The first irrigating canal of Union Colony leaves the Cache la Poudre six or eight miles above Greeley, on the south side, and is carried gradually further and further from the stream until it is fully a mile distant at the village, whence it is continued to the Platte. Branches or ditches lead thence northward, conveying rills through the streets of the village, the gardens or plats of its inhabitants, and the public square, or plaza, which is designed to be its chief ornament. Other branches lead to the farms and five-acre allotments whereby the village is surrounded; as still others will do in time to all the land between the canal and the river. In due time, another canal will be taken out from a point further up the stream, and will irrigate the lands of the colony lying south of the present canal, and which are meantime devoted to pasturage in common.
Taking the water out of the river is here a very simple matter. At the head of an island, a rude dam of brush and stones and earth is thrown across the bed of the stream, so as to raise the surface two or three feet when the water is lowest, and very much less when it is highest. Thus deflected, a portion of the water flows easily into the canal.
A very much larger and longer canal, leaving the Cache la Poudre close to the mountains, and gradually increasing its distance from that stream to four or five miles, is now in progress by sections, and is to be completed this Winter. Its length will be thirty miles, and it will irrigate, when the necessary sub-canals shall have been constructed, not less than 40,000 acres. But it may be ten years before all this work is completed or even required. The lands most easily watered from the main canal will be first brought into cultivation; the sub-canals will be dug as they shall be wanted.
At first, members of the Colony arriving at its location, hesitated to take farm allotments and build upon them, from distrust of the capacities of the soil. They saw nothing of value growing upon it; the little grass found upon it was short, thin, and brown. It was not black, like the prairies and bottoms of Illinois and Kansas, but of a light yellow snuff-color, and deemed sterile by many. But a few took hold, and planted and sowed resolutely; and, though it was too late in the season for most grains, the results were most satisfactory. Wheat sown in June produced 30 bushels to the acre; Oats did as well; while Potatoes, Beets, Turnips, Squashes, Cabbages, etc., yielded bounteously; Tomatoes did likewise, but the plants were obtained from Denver. Little was done with Indian Corn, but that little turned out well, though I judge that the Summer nights are too cold here to justify sanguine expectations of a Corn-crop – the altitude being 5,000 feet above the sea, with snow-covered mountains always visible in the west. For other Grains, and for all Vegetables and Grasses, I believe there is no better soil in the world.
To many, the cost of Irrigation would seem so much added to the expense of cultivating without irrigation; but this is a mistake. Here is land entirely free from stump, or stick, or stone, which may easily and surely be plowed or seeded in March or April, and which will produce great crops of nearly every grain, grass or vegetable, with a very moderate outlay of labor to subdue and till it. The farmer need not lose three days per annum by rains in the growing season, and need not fear storm or shower when he seeks to harvest his grass or grain. Nothing like ague or any malarious disease exhausts his vitality or paralyzes his strength. I saw men breaking up for the first time tracts which had received no water, using but a single span of horses as team; whereas, breaking up in the Prairie States involves a much larger outlay of power. The advantage of early sowing is very great; that of a long planting season hardly less so. I believe a farmer in this colony may keep his plow running through October, November, and a good portion of December; start it again by the 1st of March, and commence seeding with Wheat, Oats, and Barley, and keep seeding, including planting and gardening, until the first of June, which is soon enough to plant potatoes for Winter use. Thenceforth, he may keep the weeds out of his Corn, Roots, and Vegetables, for six Weeks or two months; and, as every day is a bright working-day, he can get on much faster than he could if liable to frequent interruptions by rains. I estimate the cost of bringing water to each farm at $5 per acre, and that of leading it about in sub-ditches, so that it shall be available and applicable on every acre of that farm, at somewhat less; but let us suppose that the first cost of having water everywhere and always at command is $10 per acre, and that it will cost thereafter $1 per acre to apply it, I maintain that it is richly worth having, and that nearly every farm product can be grown cheaper by its help than on lands where irrigation is presumed unnecessary. There are not many acres laid down to grass in New-England, whether for hay or pasture, that would not have justified an outlay of $10 per acre to secure their thorough irrigation simply for this year alone.