Chapter 7
Decline of the Bonanza Farms

By the end of the century, bonanza farms began running out of new land to be broken during the slow months between planting and harvest. This posed a labor problem for the farm managers. What to do with the workers when they're not needed?

The answer often was to lay off most of the labor after spring planting with hope the farm could hire on the needed workers when harvest season approached. This could be risky for a farm however, there was only a window of ten to eleven days to harvest. On a farm with fifty thousand acres to contend with, hundreds of laborers would need to be hired quickly.

To fill the need, the farms made a shift towards a greater reliance on transient labor. These men often had no place to call home and traveled the rails in boxcars, moving from job to job. In the summer months, transients would pour into the Red River Valley region by the thousands looking for farm work. This in turn created resentment toward the bonanza farms by local residents. Many in the region had unfavorable views already of the absent landowners who gobbled up land. To top things off, many believed the bonanza farms' dependence on transient labor only helped to increase crime and lower the quality of life. Even despite the fact that, besides the occasional complaint of a raided garden, very few crimes committed on residents were attributed to the transient population.