1892 - Agriculture

Agriculture

Wyoming's Johnson County has a cattle war beginning in April as angry homesteaders, rustlers, and townspeople lay siege to the 8-year-old TA Ranch (named for Tom Alsop) just south of Buffalo, where local cattle barons and their hired guns from Texas have taken refuge after trying for years to drive out smaller, independent ranchers and gain control of the Powder River country. Federal troops from Fort McKinney move in after 3 days on orders from President Harrison at Washington, D.C., the cattlemen surrender to them, the entire population of the county is less than 2,360, but hostilities continue, with cowboys pitted against other cowboys, neighbors against neighbors.

The Union Stockyards that opened at Chicago late in 1865 butcher 2½ million head of cattle and 4 million hogs.

The Corn Belt Real Estate Association of Mitchell, South Dakota, opens a Corn Palace September 28 to promote the abundance of corn and wheat and lure settlers to the state (nothing is said about droughts and bitter-cold winters). Decorated with onion-shaped domes and murals made from more more than 250,000 ears of corn, its façade will be redecorated each August for more than a century and serve as a civic auditorium.

Canadian druggist William Saunders, 56, crosses Red Fife wheat with an early ripening variety obtained from India and produces the hardy Markham wheat strain on a farm in British Columbia (see Mackay, 1886). Saunders heads Dominion Experimental Farms.

The Populist Party polls more than a million votes in the U.S. presidential election as farmers register their protest against railroad companies and farm machine makers.

The first successful U.S. gasoline tractor is produced by Waterloo, Iowa, by farmer John Froelich, who will organize Waterloo Gasoline Traction Engine Company early next year. John Deere Plow will acquire it (see 1902).

Cheap grain from America and Russia depresses French farm prices. Only one French farm holding in 15 has a horse-drawn cultivator, one in 150 a mechanical reaper, and French farmers demand higher import duties to protect them from more efficient overseas competitors.