Trouble Ahead

Years of easy credit and high prices  - when farmland was prized more for speculative purposes than for growing crops and the values of well-placed town lots rose 1000% -  couldn't last.  By 1886-1887, frontier farmers awoke from the dream to a decade long nightmare.

The mid-1880s saw short harvests.  Commodity prices fell, and less profit for what grain did actually grow.  The conventional thought - by bankers, industrialists and merchants - blamed the farmers' distress on world-wide overproduction of food, even though the Plains were producing less.  The farmers, citing the millions of malnourished in America, said the fault lay in the distribution system set up for quick profit.  The reality was pressure from bankers and merchants who had extended all that easy credit.  Many farmers were in no position to meet those obligations.

Between 1889-1890, some 11,000 farmers lost their farms due to foreclosure.  Not every farmer was willing to forfeit his land and equipment and a sense of militancy swept the Plains.  An attorney named Mary Elizabeth Lease, aka the "Kansas Pythoness", set out to rally debt-ridden farmers.  In Paola, Kansas, she shouted, "You farmers were told to raise a big crop.  What became of it?  Six-cent corn, ten-cent oats, one-cent beef.  We want the foreclosure system wiped out!  We will stand by our farmers and use force if necessary.  We will not pay our debts to loan sharks until the government pays its debts to us!"

The Farmer's Alliance was founded in 1875 in Texas and spread throughout the South and West that began a political voice for the farmers.  The farmer's political platform included crop prices, railroad rates, even gold vs. silver money.

Next time...Ignatius Donnelly
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Today in Pioneer History: "On November 12, 1799, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, an early American astronomer born in Vermont, witnesses the Leonids meteor shower from a ship off the Florida Keys, the first meteor shower ever witnessed.