landscape.
For most white settlers and their descendants, however, the region was one characterized by a modest degree of equality. The Midwest was free of sharecropping and the crop lien. In much of the nineteenth century, tenancy in the region often functioned as a ladder to farm ownership, with young farmers represented more frequently among tenants and older farmers more likely to own land (Cogswell 1975; Winters 1978; Winters 1990). Later, rising land values made it more difficult to break into farming, reinforcing the social and economic hierarchy.
For the early settlers in the midcontinent, corn for cattle feeding for eastern markets was an early commodity wave that sustained both small and large farmers. The origins of these practices were found in several of the cultural hearths identified by John C. Hudson, with the addition of West-central Illinois. Smallholders could sell one or more animals to large-scale operators who opened large feedlots to put pounds on the animals. These cattle feeders planted large tracts of corn, typically in 10-acre fields. After shocking the corn in the fall, they turned in approximately 100 cattle per field, rotating animals through to fatten them to the desired weight before driving large herds to river cities such as St. Louis or along the National Road such as Indianapolis, Indiana, and Columbus, Ohio. In the decades before the Civil War, cattle drives from the midcontinent over the mountains were common, with ready markets in New York City and multiple points in Pennsylvania, including Erie, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia (Bogue 1959; Henlein 1959; Hudson 1994).
Hog production thrived as part of this cattle feeding system. Those early cattle ranchers who accumulated the large herds put hogs in the lots as cattle fed or even after the cattle, allowing hogs to glean the corn that the cattle left and consume what passed undigested through the cattle. Those hogs, while sometimes driven eastward over the mountains, were more often driven to river towns after fall fattening. There, nascent packers utilized the cold weather and empty warehouses (vacant because the goods had been distributed to country stores after the rivers froze), and surplus labor to transform hogs into meat, lard, and by-products. When the rivers opened in the spring, the packed pork was shipped downstream to New Orleans, where it was subsequently trans-shipped to other American port cities or to Europe (Walsh 1982; Cronon 1991; Hurt 1998a ; Anderson 2019).
This process of transforming golden corn into beef and pork laid the foundation for the post-Civil War wave of fattening Texas cattle. The cattle trails that led northward from Texas first passed through Missouri to Chicago, and later to famed cattle towns such as Abilene, Dodge City, and Ogallala. There, the cattle were shipped via rail to Midwestern points, where farmers found it profitable to purchase range-fed Texas cattle and fatten them with corn (Whitaker 1975; Cronon 1991).
Yet Midwestern livestock production was more than cattle and hogs. Horse breeding for racing and light draft work was more significant than for the farm, given the comparatively small size of early nineteenth-century horses. But the importation of European breeds, such as the Percheron starting in the late 1830s and in significant numbers in the 1850s, fueled regional growth in horse breeding. Missouri mules, first bred for the Santa Fe trade in the 1820s and 1830s, became famous across the South by the late nineteenth century. Planters relied on mules rather than horses because many of them believed that only mules could withstand rough handling by enslaved people. This prejudice continued after the demise of slavery and explains, in part, the importance of mules in the transition to sharecropping and tenancy in the cotton-producing states and the role of midwestern farmers in sustaining the cotton economy. (Ashton 1924; Bogue 1963; Jones 1983)
Sheep production, while never rivaling the importance of midwestern cattle, hogs, or draft animals, was a regular feature of farming across the region. Another legacy of northern farming, sheep required closer attention than hogs or cattle and were at risk on the open range that characterized much of the South. The settlement of the Midwest coincided with the beginning of the Merino craze, a mania for the superb fleece of Spanish sheep. Merinos were first imported into Vermont in 1802 and spread rapidly throughout the Northeast (Jones 1983). In Wisconsin, as the fortunes of wheat farming waned due to soil exhaustion, farmers turned to sheep, increasing the size of their flocks. In general, however, western farmers did not practice the kind of careful sheep husbandry that was typical of the Northeast. Poor feed and the lack of winter shelter were common complaints before 1860. During the Civil War, government demand for wool boosted prices and spurred production across the region as well as growth in the number of carding and woolen mills (Bogue 1963; Lampard 1963; Crockett 1970; Jones 1983).
Northern influences also included commercial dairying, an artifact from New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Butter production was common across the region from the early days of midwestern settlement, reflecting the tradition of diversified northern farms. Local shopkeepers purchased and collected farm-produced butter and then sold it in urban markets. Dairy for commercial cheesemaking reflected Yankee culture. The Western Reserve of Ohio became an early cheese-producing area, later challenged by Yankee farmers near Columbus. In Wisconsin and northern Illinois, New Yorkers influenced the course of dairying by importing their expertise and practices from the leading dairy state in the nation (Lampard 1963; Jones 1983).
During the early to mid-nineteenth century, a wave of wheat production moved across the region, extending from the Mid-Atlantic region and following the opening of new land for settlement. Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, supplanted New York and Pennsylvania as leading wheat producers. Both winter and spring varieties were often grown on prairie and newly cleared land following an initial year or two of corn production. Wheat was a reliable cash crop for many farmers, with ready markets in local communities as well as New Orleans or New York, especially after the completion of the Erie Canal that resulted in lower transportation costs (Lewis 2002; Salstrom 2007). By the 1860s, wheat production surged in the more westerly states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa. A pastor at Cottage Grove, Minnesota, noted in 1866 that “Nothing interests the people of this community more than the price of wheat” and in 1861 a Wisconsin newspaper had proclaimed that “Wheat is King, and Wisconsin is the center of the Empire” (Jarchow 1949; Ross 1951; Lampard 1963).
By the 1870s, farmers in the Dakota Territories, Nebraska, and Kansas were emerging as important producers. In particular, the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota experienced a wheat farming bonanza. A crash in the Northern Pacific Railroad stock price led promoters to trade deflated bonds for land in hopes of sparking settlement which would, in turn, restore value to the railroad. A handful of investors began large-scale mechanized farming, sustained by a large contingent of seasonal labor to assist with the harvest and threshing. While there were never many bonanza farms, perhaps no more than 100, global media turned attention not only to the region but also to the viability of highly mechanized farming (Drache 1964).
Mechanization became a hallmark of the region. While corn harvesting resisted mechanization in the nineteenth century, machines for corn planting and cultivating, wheat seeding and harvesting, and threshing small grains were developed in the antebellum period and became commonplace after the Civil War. While mechanization resulted in only modest productivity gains on the farm before the war, largely due to the comparatively small number of machines in use, limits on farm size, and improved acreage, the technology of the mid-century promised to permit production to scale up in subsequent years. By 1900, farmers could do much of their field work while sitting down (Bogue 1963; Atack and Bateman 1987). Some farmers were slow to mechanize and there was even resistance to mechanization. Throughout the region, farm laborers resented being supplanted and deskilled by mechanical harvesters. In some cases, they threatened to burn or destroy machines, barns, and stacks of unthreshed grain (Argersinger and Argersinger 1984).
Settlers who occupied the public domain concerned themselves with improvement, traditionally understood as erecting buildings and fences and bringing land into cultivation. But there was one significant obstacle for many farmers in realizing the potential of the investment in farm land: drainage. There were millions of acres of these marshy lands in a broad arc encircling the Great Lakes and extending beyond the Red River Valley of the North, through central Iowa across Illinois and Indiana and extending into central Ohio. This part of the region was scrubbed flat and
