NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota
State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
June 4, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1998 Plains Folk
It started a few years ago when Mary Wilma Hargreaves published her second book about farming on the plains—"Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjustment, 1920-1990." This was not a politically correct book.
Since at least the 1930s it has been fashionable to assume that vast tracts of the wheat country of the plains never should have been broken and that the country should be put back into grass. What Hargreaves points out is that over the long haul, wheat pencils out over most of this land, and so until something better comes along, wheat farming should and will continue.
She also takes a closer look at the land of the Dakotas and Montana and observes that the feasibility of farming on the northern plains is more a matter of soil type than of rainfall. Popular conception paints broad strokes onto the map. Farmers on the land learn the micro-environments and act accordingly.
Hargreaves's book would stimulate people to think more seriously about how we use land on the plains, except that hardly anyone reads it. It's dry.
Now comes Craig Miner, though, with "Harvesting the High Plains: John Kriss and the Business of Wheat Farming, 1920-1950" (University Press of Kansas). Here is the story of a big-time wheat farmer on the high plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado told with elegance and no apologies.
"John Kriss of Colby, Kansas, was a large commercial wheat farmer," Miner pronounces. "A self-made man." He admits that Kriss's career "raises fundamental philosophical questions" because "he had the temerity to farm for a living semiarid land in the heart of what once was marked on maps as the `Great American Desert,'" but he deserves to have his story told straight. "Kriss was neither a prairie preservationist nor a land rapist, neither steely fisted nor ham-handed," Miner concludes. "He was a realist."
Kriss grew up in Colby and absorbed the hard-working values of the region. Miner writes about the high plains of western Kansas with more insight than any other historian, and his chapters sketching in the cultural background of Kriss's career are masterly.
During the 1930s, Kriss, by a combination of initiative and good luck, linked up with Ray Garvey, who most people know as lord of an empire of grain elevators, but who also was an extensive landholder—and a plunger, Miner says. Kriss contracted to farm Garvey's land and proved a genius at organization of agricultural work, so that in 1947 they raised a million dollars worth of wheat.
By then Kriss had taken on a major sodbusting and wheat farming initiative for Garvey in eastern Colorado. This was highly controversial then and now, but during the big harvest of 1947 it made Kriss something of a national celebrity, written up in Reader's Digest as the worker of a "Miracle in the Dust Bowl" and in the Kansas City Star as "A Titan of the Wheat Belt."
People are going to continue to disagree about proper land use on the plains, but reading "Harvesting the High Plains" forces us to recognize that big wheat farmers are not just impersonal forces. John Kriss was a capable and thoughtful man who made well-considered decisions at every turn. The same may be said of his biographer.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136