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Show WHERE SHALL WE SETTLE? 615 hurrah in 1874 to make a God- awful crop. Every thing come a boom-ing, and I thought I had the world in a sling. Corn, oats, potatoes and wheat just got up and laughed, they grew so fine. Thought I never saw such a country for things to grow. Worked all the week, and used to set on the fence Sunday and calculate how rich I'd be. Went out one fine sunny morning about the first of June, and thought, by jiminy, the whole ground was a moving. Ten million hoppers to the square yard all chawin' away as if the country belonged to ' em. Saturday morning they come into my farm from a ridge just south o' me Sunday noon there wasn't a green thing where the corn, cane and potatoes had been. Job's luck wasn't a circumstance. My corn lot looked as if forty bands o' wild Arabs had fell onto it. Not a smidgeon left just bodaciously chawed up and spit out. " Well, of course I had the dumps. But I rallied. ' All right/ says I; ( got wheat and tobacco left anyhow.' Professor P said they wouldn't eat tobacco; but he's a fraud, sir a barefaced fraud. The hoppers just went up on a ridge north of me and shed their second coats, and then come back on the tobacco. They eat every leaf clean to the ground, then dug up the roots and set on the fence and cussed every man that come along, for a chaw. About that time they got wings, and sudden as could be rose in the air and went off north a whirlin', like a shower o' white and yellow paper bits. ' All right.' says I ; l they've left my wheat anyhow.' Singular enough they didn't touch it ; it was on t'other side the place, and out o' their track. Well, I rallied again, and counted on six hundred bushels o' wheat and wheat's the money crop in this country. About June the middle I noticed all at once that my wheat looked kind o' sick. Come to ex-amine, sir, it was completely lined with a little, miserable, black and yellow, nasty, smelling bug. I took some to a man ' at had been here ten years. ' Neighbor,' says he, f you're a goner ; thems chintz- bugs, and every head o' that wheat that an't cut, ' 11 be et up in forty- eight hours.' Well, it was Sunday morning, and the wheat nothing like ripe; but it was a chance, and I got onto my reaper and banged down every hoot of it before Monday night. It cured in the sun and the bugs left it, and out o' the lot I got just a hundred and forty bushels o' shrunk- up stuff. It was a hundred and forty bushels more than any o' my neighbors got. You bet there was improved farms for sale in that neighborhood. My sheep had done Avell, and that was all I was ahead. Taking it by and large, the only sure crop is sheep." He touched the right point in the last sentence ; this is the country for stock- growing. Corn and hay can - be produced so cheaply that |
