Then at 6:00 A.M. we were at the last station in New Mexico, Raton. Getting into mountains, S.E. part of Colorado & Western part of Kansas. Was the first land that we came to that I would have if they would give it to me. 1:30 P.M. Now at Syracuse, a little town in West Kansas. Salvation Army Colony in W. Kansas. We are now traveling zig-zag- bumpty-bump at a lively rate across the plains of Kansas & we’ll be in K.C. in the morning unless the train jumps the track & in that case we may be farther away from K.C. in the morning than now. Prairie dog to a frazzle. We went through about 25 tunnels on the way back & about that many going to Frisco. Just 6 mo. ago today at this hour, 3:30 P.M. we had stopped the train at Chilli. bound for Calif. & we got there. Left Dodge City at 5 P.M. Thur. Larned, Ks 7 P.M. they say wheat between here & Topeka went 26 Bu. per acre & a lot of it went to waste for the want of hands.
Coming from a line of farmers and having first-hand experience working in the dirt, Jesse knows what it takes to grow crops, and he’s just had a tour of the Southwest for a couple of days and can’t see any use of it. For reasons Bench researchers haven’t worked out, in a few years, Jesse’s dad James will receive a federal land grant (signed by President Taft) of over 2,100 acres outside of Tucumcari in Quay County, New Mexico.
Jesse mentions a “Salvation Army Colony” in west Kansas. Quick research does not show one in Kansas, but there was one nearby on the southeast side near Holly, Colorado, on the Arkansas River. The Salvation Army founder William Booth in London invested the organization’s money into three large properties in America, and one of them was established in 1898 as Fort Amity in Colorado. He wanted to play out an experiment in domiculture by giving impoverished men from Chicago acreage to develop as a family farm, and over time the men would pay earnings to the Salvation Army to eventually own the farm.
Hopefully Jesse decided to eat at the new Harvey House that was in the Dodge City Train Depot. Fred Harvey opened the chain of restaurants and train cars to help feed the growing numbers of travelers riding the Santa Fe Railway. He specifically wanted to bring great food to the train stops where meals were really bad and really expensive (see Jesse’s September 11th entry).
On November 16, 1901, Modern Miller newspaper in St. Louis noted Kansas’ record wheat crop for any state ever that year.
One of my regular consultants tells me that 26 bushels per acre is a terrible yield, and the folks at eatwheat.org said that comparing to 2019’s yield of 53 bushels per acre, it isn’t an impressive number at all. However, for 1901 technology, 26 bushels would be an extraordinary number especially in light of the average for Kansas in 1901 at 17 bushels per acre. The yield was so unexpectedly large and it could not all be harvested fast enough in the appropriate window of time. The EatWheat responder also said that Jesse would be talking about the winter wheat crop that was grown and harvested a couple of months back. He’s not on the train looking over fields of grown wheat. He’s having conversations with local train riders. “If there’s one conversation you have with a farmer, it’s going to be about a previous crop, especially if it was a great yield,” EatWheat said. Just for a larger context, compare this to the Kansas wheat situation as of 2018.
