When an Indian squaw made bread, she had to do all the work herself. She had to dig up the ground, plant the seed, cultivate the growing corn, harvest it, shell it, grind it, mix it into dough, and bake it. Today all this work has been divided among many different groups of people scattered all over the country.
Take first the planting, cultivating, and harvesting. Where and how is that done today? It is done in hundreds of little plots and in thousand-acre wheat farms, north, south, east, and west; but what we think of chiefly are the wide prairies of the West, with waving grain as far as eye can see—green in summer and golden in the autumn. Then we see the huge harvesting machines driven by powerful tractors or pulled by four or five horses abreast. Then all over the prairies the threshing machines wave their plumes of flying chaff, and presently high piles of straw gleam in the sun, and along the roads lines of “grain tanks” are hauled to the nearest elevator, which is always beside a railroad track leading to some great city.