And if the grasshoppers were bad enough they could strip the fields, as they had done a couple of times within his father’s memory, and the brand of wheat would not make any difference at all to them, either. Moreover, Ceres and Marquis were equally vulnerable to dust storms and wind. Hail, or even a hard rain, would dislodge the hardening kernels during their maturing weeks, and the kind of seed he had planted wouldn’t make any difference at all.
But after the way his Marquis had surrendered to rust last summer, George had made up his mind never to plant it again. He had simply sold every bushel he harvested and decided that one way or another he would find the money for the new seed when the spring came. Now spring had come, and he was left with exactly one place to get the money. He squeezed hard on the shovel handle again. The man he had sworn never to go to for help—the man he had cut off this very morning.
He pushed the wheelbarrow down the aisle and laid a row of planks from the barn door to the manure pile across the slushy barnyard. That morning the ground had been hard with thickly frosted ridges outlining the hoof prints in the mud of yesterday’s thawing, and water had been frozen in the deeper tracks. Tomorrow morning it would be the same. Spring came reluctantly to this northern place, but it was here, nevertheless.
Ceres, goddess of growing things, was the name that had been in his mind all winter long. No more Marquis, that debilitated aristocrat which bled so easily that he could lose up to fifty per cent of his crop in a bad rust year. Ceres, after all, was of the family of aristocrats also, as far as wheat went. Hard spring wheat was bread wheat—the best in the world. All the soft wheats and the winter wheats grown farther south and west were used for inferior products—restaurant pies and crackers and abominable new kinds of cereals to be eaten cold. Durum wheat was used for macaroni and spaghetti and other foreign things. But the bakers had to have hard spring wheat for bread, even when they mixed it with winter wheat. When there was an American surplus of the softer wheats, they still would have to import Canadian spring wheat in the years when North Dakota did not produce enough. It took an austere climate to create that kind of wheat—wheat that grew hard and full of protein under the withering semidesert sky. It was the kind of durable, determined grain that could survive and flourish on the smallest possible margin—very much like the men who grew it. Like George’s ancestors, who had fought for and built the state that men like James T. Vick were now taking away from them. Half the farmers in the state were tenants now, like George.
Nevertheless, George was still proud to have been born in a state that created distinction from hardship. It pleased his Scottish blood. If ever there was a one-crop state, it was the one he lived in.
The trouble was that a state with such extreme dedication to one crop—bread—was so helpless when something went askew with the market for bread. When the world was lean with war and could buy bread, North Dakota fattened; when the world was lean with peace and could not buy bread, North Dakota starved—through drought and bumper crops. A North Dakota farmer ought to be able to lay up enough cash and own enough livestock so that he didn’t have to plant wheat at all in such a bad year as this one promised to be. But half the farmers in the state had to do what a city man told them to do. The economy needed radical changes that were long overdue. The absentee landlords must be stripped of the absolute power they had over their tenants, the railroads and elevators must be forced to abandon their monopolies, and the Wall Street and Chicago speculators must be outlawed. Until these changes were made, George Armstrong Custer must go on obediently plowing up a hundred and sixty acres of dry blowing land and trying to get a wheat crop out of it.
That night
But after the way his Marquis had surrendered to rust last summer, George had made up his mind never to plant it again. He had simply sold every bushel he harvested and decided that one way or another he would find the money for the new seed when the spring came. Now spring had come, and he was left with exactly one place to get the money. He squeezed hard on the shovel handle again. The man he had sworn never to go to for help—the man he had cut off this very morning.
He pushed the wheelbarrow down the aisle and laid a row of planks from the barn door to the manure pile across the slushy barnyard. That morning the ground had been hard with thickly frosted ridges outlining the hoof prints in the mud of yesterday’s thawing, and water had been frozen in the deeper tracks. Tomorrow morning it would be the same. Spring came reluctantly to this northern place, but it was here, nevertheless.
Ceres, goddess of growing things, was the name that had been in his mind all winter long. No more Marquis, that debilitated aristocrat which bled so easily that he could lose up to fifty per cent of his crop in a bad rust year. Ceres, after all, was of the family of aristocrats also, as far as wheat went. Hard spring wheat was bread wheat—the best in the world. All the soft wheats and the winter wheats grown farther south and west were used for inferior products—restaurant pies and crackers and abominable new kinds of cereals to be eaten cold. Durum wheat was used for macaroni and spaghetti and other foreign things. But the bakers had to have hard spring wheat for bread, even when they mixed it with winter wheat. When there was an American surplus of the softer wheats, they still would have to import Canadian spring wheat in the years when North Dakota did not produce enough. It took an austere climate to create that kind of wheat—wheat that grew hard and full of protein under the withering semidesert sky. It was the kind of durable, determined grain that could survive and flourish on the smallest possible margin—very much like the men who grew it. Like George’s ancestors, who had fought for and built the state that men like James T. Vick were now taking away from them. Half the farmers in the state were tenants now, like George.
Nevertheless, George was still proud to have been born in a state that created distinction from hardship. It pleased his Scottish blood. If ever there was a one-crop state, it was the one he lived in.
The trouble was that a state with such extreme dedication to one crop—bread—was so helpless when something went askew with the market for bread. When the world was lean with war and could buy bread, North Dakota fattened; when the world was lean with peace and could not buy bread, North Dakota starved—through drought and bumper crops. A North Dakota farmer ought to be able to lay up enough cash and own enough livestock so that he didn’t have to plant wheat at all in such a bad year as this one promised to be. But half the farmers in the state had to do what a city man told them to do. The economy needed radical changes that were long overdue. The absentee landlords must be stripped of the absolute power they had over their tenants, the railroads and elevators must be forced to abandon their monopolies, and the Wall Street and Chicago speculators must be outlawed. Until these changes were made, George Armstrong Custer must go on obediently plowing up a hundred and sixty acres of dry blowing land and trying to get a wheat crop out of it.
That night
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