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corn cultivators began to appear in the 1860's, and in the late 1870's, Deere's corn-planting machines were introduced. Distance was another element that had to be con- quered. The plains Belt at its greatest width in the Missouri Basin is almost equal to the distance between the Mississippi and the Atlantic Coast. Transportation by steamboats was important in the earlier years, but it was the railroads, first traversing the plains in 1869, that gave settlement its greatest impetus. The railroads carried settlers, with their windmills, barbed wire, and farm machinery westward, and on the return trip, transported the farmers' meat and grain to eastern markets. Railroad companies actively promoted settlement along their routes, offering greatly reduced transportation fares, easy terms on railroad land, free seed, and free tem- porary housing for the settler at his destination. The farmers later struggled against the economic power of the railroads, but the fact remained that rails were essential to development of the land and utilization of its resources. In 1881, some 300 delega tes attended a Missou ri River Improvement Convention at St. Joseph, to attempt to convince the Government that the river commerce, failing because of the rail competition, should be revived. Part of their argument was the inequity of freight rates. The rail rate between Kansas City and St. Louis was 13 cents per bushel for wheat and 8 cents per bushel for eorn. The rate at which barges on the river would transport wheat and corn was 5-1/2 cents per bushel. Also, the owners of the barges charging this rate were reported to realize a profit of 100 percent. The convention succeeded. In I 8g4, Congress created the Missouri River Commission, under the provisions of the River and Harbor Act of July 5, 1884. Congress charged the Commission with two principal duties: To superintend and direct the improvement already authorized for the Missouri River, and to consider and devise additional plans for improving the river for the purpose of commerce and navigation. Major Charles R. Suter was appointed chairman of the Commission, along with two other engineer officers and two civilians as members. The Commission was abolished in June 1902, and the work of carrying on the improvement was returned to the Corps of Engineers. In the early years, the white prairie settlers lived much like the Indians of the region. Their homes were earthen dwellings and they subsisted on corn supple- mented by a meager ration of protein. The white man's cu\tu re, however, would not continue to be conditioned solely by his immediate environment. He was the vanguard of a civilization which was increasing in population, expanding in area, and, at the same time, undergoing a profound technological transformation. In the 1870's, civilization with its attendant industrial and scientific revolution overtook the American settler 30 on his prairie homestead. Between 1850 and 1900, the Nation's urban labor force grew 600 percent, and the total city population increased from 3- 1/2 million to 30 million. To meet this demand and to satisfy a large number of foreign consumers, America's new machines and techniques were applied to the soil. Machines made it possible and profitable to increase both the size ,of the farms and the acreage of a single, staple crop. Sowers, cultivators, reapers, combines, and windmills, along with barbed wire, animal husbandry, and scientific crop and livestock agriculture, were introduced. Mass production took hold on the land as it had in the factories. Horsepower gave way to steam engines, and the fields yielded even more production. In the same period, railroad mileage continued to increase, linking the prairies even more closely to eastern markets and supply centers. Between 1860 and 1890, the country's farm acreage doubled, and the cultivaled acres trebled. The corn-growing areas increased production during these years from under' a billion bushels to well over 2- 1/2 billion bushels. I f the farmer reaped benefits from this new mass- production economy, he also suffered from its evils. His well-being was still determined ultimately by the pro- ductiveness of the soils under his feet, but his problems were now ironically changed by the structure of the industrial society. His early challenge had been to scratch a mere subsistence from the earth, but now the more abundant his crops and livestock became, the poorer he found his lot. With machinery production, he earned his living from the sale of staple crops. The mass production economy made him almost as dependent on the retail store for his food and other supplies as it did his city cousin. The Nation's economy underwent several periods of severe imbalance in the late 19th century, and in times of economic depression it was often the midwestern farmer who suffered the most. This was because of the peculiar nature of plains agriculture. A factory assembly line could be regulated, but farm production, depending largely on erratic weather, often resulted in near failures or unmarketable surpluses. The amount of rainfall that could be expected in any given season was especially uncertain in the plains region of the Missouri Basin. In 1870, the basin farmer sold his corn for $1 a bushel, while in 1890 he received only 25 cents a bushel. It was sometimes cheaper to burn corn as fuel than to ship it to market. Of special significance was the fact that the farmer's income from the sale of his produce decreased in relation to costs of the goods and services he had to buy. The farmers expressed their discontent through such grass roots organizations as the Grangers, the Greenback Party, the Non-Partisan League, the Farmers' Alliances, and, finally, the Silver Standard Democrats under William Jennings Bryan. Their targets were the railroads,