Montana news. [volume] (Lewistown, Mont.) 1904-191?, 1904-04-27


greatest care and the widest know
ledge it is almost impossible to
avoid ascribing to the type what is
characteristic only of single sec
tion OF class.
If we are to select any particular
section as a type, which shall it be
Shall it be the New England Yankee
wrestling from his stumpy and
rocky soil a nIggard subsistence and
swapping his products with his
neighborsa IL so, when we seek
him in his native states we shall find
him displaced by French Canadians
and Irish immigrants, and if we
follow up his children we shall
hardly recognize them in the tillers
of the broad prairies of the west
with a mind and hospitality as wide
and as fertile as the teeming soil
| pCuCdtH tuClI lCCt' vi II 'hS
American Farmer best typihed by
the early pioneer,-that strange
combination of hunter, fisher, lum-
herman, farmer, trapper and scout,
now well-nigh extinct, but to whom
we owe Lincoln, the best and most
typical American citizene Or shall
we find him in the south, amid the
cotton, rice and sugar plantations ?
And if here, is he white or black-a
member of ante-bellum aristocracy
or poor white trashe7 II purity
of American blood is to be the test,
the latter will demand first consid-
Grafton, for in few places is the
foreign strain less present than
among the moon shining, feud- fight
ing mountaineers of Kentucky and
the Carolinas. Or is the typical
American farmer the resident of the
great arid irrigated belt, depend
ent upon a great water company,
raising almost fabulous crops and
receiving a beggarly Teturna Or is
he the Slav, or Italian, OF Dutch
truck farmer of the city suburb,
working beneath glass and aided by
steam and electricity. Or shall we
find him upon the dairy and stock
farms of Illinois, Iowa and Wiscon-
SIN? Or is he fruit farmer, and
if SO is he in tropic OF temperate
climes? Is it all of these, OF none,
or part of each, or composite pic
ture of the whole that makes up the
American Farmer1
1t will be the object of the follow
ing study to seek in some degree to
select from out these various ele-
ments the common factors and to
analyze the fundamental facts and
relations that determine the present
condition and probable future evo-
luton of the American Farmer
AS we shall have occasion to no
tice frequently in the course of ouI
investigations almost every portion
of America has passed with more OF
less rapidity and elaborateness OF
detail through all the stages of hu-
man history from savagery to the
most complete development of mod
ern social organization. New Eng
land being one of the oldest settled
portions of the country and hence
having been more nearly synchron-
Gus in its social evolution with
Earope, exhibited these successive
stages in much greater detail than
the remainder of the country.
AT the time of the earliest settle.
ments in New England, European
society was still at that stage marked
by common ownership of village
lands. But the economic conditions
in New England were such rs to
develop a much earlier social stage
and SO we see a reproduction of the
institutions corresponding to the
conditions in Europe centuries be-
fore. This does rot mean that the
traditions of these old conditions
were revived and the customs copied
from the caller days, or that they
are traceable to inherited customs
as some of the foremost historians
of America would have us believe.
CD Prof. Herbert b. Adams in
The Germanic Origin of New