DBQ - Changes in Agriculture

DOCUMENT 3

To every one applying to rent land upon shares, the following conditions must be read, and agreed to... The sale of every cropper's part of the cotton to be made by me when and where I choose to sell, and after deducting all they owe me and all sums that I may be responsible for on their accounts, to pay them their half of the net proceeds.

DOCUMENT 4

An establishment in Chicago which combines the operations of 'shipping' and of 'canning' beef has a slaughtering capacity of 400,000 head annually. When we add to this the requirements of other similar although smaller concerns, and the larger number shipped eastward on the hoof, we have a grand total of not far from 2,500,000 head marketed in the city of Chicago alone... Whence does it come? Let the five great trunk lines which have their termini on the borders of Lake Michigan answer. Like the outstretched fingers of a hand, they meet in the central palm, Chicago. All from the West, but from the extreme northern and southern portions, Texas representing the latter, and the utmost limits of Montana the former. Ten thousand miles of rail at least are occupied in th[is] transit...

DOCUMENT 5

Money rules...The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. We were told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop that was all we needed. We wen to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef, and no price at all for butter and eggs—that's what came of it. Then the politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States.

DOCUMENT 6

I take my Pen In hand to let you know that we are Starving to death It is Pretty hard to do without any thing to eat in this God for saken country we would have had Plenty to Eat if the hail hadent cut our rye down and ruined our corn and Potatoes I had the Prettiest Garden that you Ever seen and the hail ruined It and I have nothing to look at my Husband went a way to find work and came home last night and told me that we would have to Starve he has bin in ten countys and did not Get no work It is Pretty hard for a woman to do with out any thing to Eat

DOCUMENT 7

Many of the country's most profound students of the Indian question — men and women who have made the race and its relation to the nation a life study — have become converts to the policy of individualism and severalty. The citizenship question aside, the folly and injustice of reserving many millions of acres of arable land as a wilderness used only as a camping ground for a few thousand lazy, squalid governmental paupers is palpable. If the Indians must be fed and herded like a dumb brute, it should be done with smaller enclosures and not so senselessly at the expense of the American homesteader.