Tripp County, South Dakota
They Broke the Prairie
Taken from the Country Gentleman, August 1948. A reprint from the Tripp County Historical Society.
Bob Collins farms in Tripp County, South Dakota, west of the Missouri River, where the trees end and the swings of fortune have been as wide as the swings in temperature, which can touch 110 degrees in the summer and 40 below in the winter. Once he was a prosperous farmer sending his daughters to college. Next he was broke, foreclosed. Now he is clearing $25,000 or $30,000 a year.
It isn't unusual in South Dakota that Bob and Zera Collins should have started in a sod house on a homestead. They broke virgin prairie where they could pick up buffalo bones. But that doesn't make them old. The youngest of their six daughters is in high school.
Where Bob farms with his back to a 400-foot butte, you look north and west over 20,000 treeless acres. It may be 30,000 acres. The land rolls to the horizon in great ground swells like a sea. Miles away but very clear, the scattered table-topped buttes could be islands. Eyes like to look that farm. The distances lay a balm on them.
In this country a quarter section of land, only 160 acres, seems very small, though it's plenty roomy to park a car. The farms are far apart. So far, it's said that every farmer has to keep his own tomcat.
Bob Collins has ten quarter sections of cropland. Of this 1300 acres are in small grains, corn and sorghum. Three hundred are in hay, including alfalfa. The rest of Bob's farm is 1000 acres of pasture slanting up the sides of buttes and on the flat top of one that once offered a landing for flying coyote hunters, who banked round Bob's farm and dropped him a coyote.
Bob's land is free and clear. This includes a square mile he bought a year or so ago for $15,000, which was, he says, the easiest piece of land he ever bought. All he had to do was write a check. Ten years ago, when he was 48, he thought he'd never get clear of a $1000 note. A few years before that he had lost everything.
"I was so low the dogs wouldn't bark at me," said Bob. Out here the farmers got hit by everything at once. Drought, grasshoppers, dust. If you had an accident and raised any wheat, the country was in a depression and didn't want it."
Bob's face is spare and bony, likable and alive. He talks a breezy Western language in a quiet voice with some southern accent from a Kentucky boyhood. His skin of Dakota leather wrinkled into a grin as he turned his blue eyes on 200 fat Herefords in the feed lot.
"There's the size of my bank account. Mainly. The beef market is as hot as a sheriff's pistol."
The whitefaces that munched hay along the fence or licked in the ground-corn bunks had consumed, besides pasture, 9000 bushels of corn, 3000 bushels of oats, and 42 stacks of prairie hay. They averaged almost 1200 pounds and were worth more than $70,000.
"They're eating more than a hundred dollars a day. But I'm holding a few weeks. I think that will work out. My wife and daughter are jumping me every day to sell. I like to keep on plunging ahead and plunging ahead a little all the time – if I see the way clear." Ordinarily there would be 200 calves on pasture while these fat steers went to market. But Bob was holding off. The price he would get for steers was fine, but the price he would have to pay for calves was too high for a man to hurry.
Bob studied a year at Centre College in Kentucky before his family moved to South Dakota when he was 18. His father had farmed worn-out tobacco land about thirty miles from Louisville. It was very rolling land. "He got tired of going up and down hills," says Bob. "He swore that when he got out West he'd take up a piece of land so level it sagged in the middle."
They settled in adjoining Gregory County. Bob worked awhile in a country bank. He taught school. In the same school taught Zera Oakes, whose father had come from Iowa. Tripp County was then an Indian reservation, but in 1910 it was opened to homestead. Bob was one of 117,000 who filed for the 6000 claims. He failed to draw a number. "A lot of men filed to sell out if they drew any luck," said Bob. He bought a relinquishment for $1000. You were supposed to be twenty-one to homestead, but at least he was going on twenty-one. The 160 acres carried a price of $6 an acre, to be paid to the Sioux Indians who had elected to sell it off through the Government.
Bob built a one-room sod house and batched while he broke land with four horses and a walking plow. He put in flax and "sod corn". The corn was planted in a furrow between strips of sod and left uncultivated; next year the land grew wheat. Bob was 20 and Zera was 18 when they married in 1910. Zera was a big handsome girl with a vigorous wit. In 1948 Bob is still chuckling over things that Zera says.
When Bob speaks of a mistake, he calls it shooting the wrong barrel. "We shot the wrong barrel in the early days. Everybody talked about intensive farming. The idea was that each quarter would support a family. The idea broke down in hard times. A quarter section didn't give a family any reserve. Now you need a section to afford the machinery."
Five families had settled on the land that Bob Collins farms now. The dust bowl days moved them away. South Dakota's population has declined, in the agricultural trend, to more land per family. Bob pointed westward across a few thousand acres to a schoolhouse looking lonesome on a grassy hill. "That school was built when everybody figures on a family to a quarter section. It has seven rooms. This year it has seven pupils."
The homesteaders shot another wrong barrel. "We believed in cultivating hard, keeping a dust mulch. Dust mulch! The deal was to conserve moisture that way. We kept blacking the earth. We got it all ready to blow."
The soil hereabouts is Pierre (pronounced Peer) clay. It's better known as gumbo. Wet, it is very slippery. Cars blow into ditches unless roads have gravel tops. At one stage, gumbo is very sticky and rolls up on tires like taffy. Dry, the soil is soft and black. A sweating man on a windy day comes off a field looking like a coal miner. A badger excavating in Bob Collins' wheat throws up a ton of what looks like ground charcoal. The soil will grow tremendous crops, says Bob – just give it enough moisture. The black soil runs two feet deep on his fields, and below that is clay with nodules of lime. The land has never seen fertilizer. Now Bob hates to "black the earth" – leave it bare and looking black – longer than can be helped. Not until it's green again is it safe from blowing.
Bob's face darkens and he grunts as he points out dust evidences that still remain on his farm. A stranger might not notice that a slight ridge runs half a mile east and west through fields of spring wheat and barley; at right angles another ridge crosses it. There was fence under those ridges. The barbed wire caught the brown plants of Russian thistles that rolled bushel size from one county into the next. The Russian thistles caught the dust.
Submitted By: Tripp Co. Historical Society
Permission granted by the Winner Advocate
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