Episode Synopsis "Confession Is Good for the Soil"

You can see it taking shape in pages of cursive in the letterpress copybooks of J. B. Power, Land Commissioner of the Northern Pacific Railway Company. Following the financial panic of 1873, he had to find some way to revive interest in land investment; he had all those land-grant sections on his hands, and no one was buying. The success of some modest homesteaders raising wheat, and the existence of a lot of discontented bondholders of the railway, gave Power an idea: let the holders redeem their bonds with railroad lands, jump-start big-time wheat farming on them, and initiate farming on a grand scale, bonanza farming, in the Red River Valley of the North.

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More episodes of the podcast Plains Folk

• The Phobia of Hydrophobia
• The Smell of Paint
• Heartbreak and Dying by Inches
• First Chapters
• Confession Is Good for the Soil
• Mr. Power’s Letterpress
• The Bullhead Craze
• History and Memory
• Juneberries on the 4th of July
• Young Love in the Juneberries
• Talking About the Weather
• The Weekend of Lawrence Welk
• The True Patriot
• Syttende Mai
• The Tree of Life
• Our Songs
• The Baldwin Ranches of Dickey County
• Baldwin Farms
• 1889
• The Pasque