There is always more or less gossip as regards insufficient moisture in a new country. The only thing to kill this bogy is to have plenty of rain, and plenty of rain had fallen on the Little Crow, too much at times. Large crops of everything had been harvested, but if the first three years had been wet, this fourth was one of almost continual rainfall.
In the eastern states the corn crop had been badly drowned out on the low lands, and rust had cut the yield of small grain considerably, while on the rolling land of the Little Crow the season was just right and everything grew so rank, thick and green that it gave the country, a raw prairie until less than four years before, the appearance of an old settled country. It looked good to the buyers and they bought. Farms were sold as soon as they were listed. The price at the beginning of the year had been from twenty-five to forty dollars per acre, some places more, but after the first six months of the year it began to climb to forty-five and then to fifty dollars per acre. Those who owned Little Crow farms became objects of much importance. If they desired to sell they had only to let it be known, and a buyer was soon on hand.
The atmosphere seemed charged with drunken enthusiasm. Everybody had it. There was nothing to fear. Little Crow land was the best property to be had, better, they would declare, than government bonds, for its value was increasing in leaps and bounds. Choice farms close to town, if bought at fifty dollars per acre, could be sold at a good profit in a short time.
This was done, and good old eastern capital continued to be paid for the land.
The spirit of unrest that seem to pervade the atmosphere of the community was not altogether the desire to have and to hold, but more, to buy and to sell. Homesteads were sold in Megory county and the proceeds were immediately reinvested in Tipp, where considerable dead Indian land could be purchased at half the price.
At about that time the auto fever began to infect the restless and over-prosperous settlers, and business men alike. That was the day of the many two-cylinder cars. They made a dreadful noise but they moved and moved faster than horses. They sailed over the country, the exhaust of the engine making a cracking noise. The motion, added to the speed, seemed to thrill and enthuse the investor until he bought whether he cared to or not.