Sun, Oct 11, 1942: plenty of work

"...I plan to start 'spring-toothing' the wheat ground on King tomorrow, I was over there this afternoon and I think the ground is about dry enough.

“Augusta won their football game Friday night, I guess I'll have to quit betting with Lee Lenz.  I see Southwestern won their game Friday night.

"If you want to to [sic] come home next Saturday and stay till Tues, it will be O.K. there is always plenty of work to be done...."

--Letter from my grandfather, Leonard Reeves Brown, on the farm in Bloomington, Kans., Sunday, October 11, 1942 to my father, Sidney DeVere Brown, at college in Winfield, Kans. 
          That Monday, my grandfather was planning to use a spring-tooth harrow to prepare the ground for planting.  (There are youtube videos of spring-toothing, if you're interested).  Farmers in my grandfather’s community planted winter wheat in late October.  It sprouted soon after and then turned brown and dormant with the first frost.  It came back to life in the spring, was golden by late May and the harvest began in June. Wheat helped my grandparents pay for my father's college education and as a college student, my father occasionally took long weekends at home to help with farm work on wheat and other crops.  

          In planting wheat in the ground of his Bloomington farm, my grandfather was relying on the work of two peoples, without whose work there would have been no “wheat ground” in Kansas, at least not in the form it took.  He was relying on the efforts of the people of the Middle East who first domesticated wheat millennia ago.  And he was relying on the efforts of the Osage people and other indigenous people who had maintained the tallgrass prairie free from trees for centuries using fire.  Like all of us, he was indebted to distant people and not-so-distant people in order to make his livelihood in the world -- people who likely rarely crossed his mind.

Transforming Kansas prairies to wheat fields cultivated by whites was only possible, because whites had taken that land from the Osage people in the late nineteenth century.  On their lands in a large region where Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma meet today, Osage cultivated corn, beans, and squash.  They also hunted deer and buffalo.  Like other indigenous groups on the plains, the Osage burned the prairies for a variety of reasons: to create environments that attracted herbivores, to drive animals, to signal other groups, to prepare land for planting.  Thereby, they helped to create and maintain the tallgrass prairies, altering the prevalence of grass species and preventing the encroachment of trees.  In the 1860s, just a few decades before my great-grandfather arrived in Bloomington with my grandfather, his older sister, and younger brother (in 1906), whites had dispossessed Osage people and confined them to a much smaller reservation in Oklahoma, some 45 miles south of my grandparents’ farm.

 People in the Middle East began eating wheat they collected from the wild long before domesticating it and transforming its genome through human selection.  Early archeological evidence of gathering Triticum turgidum (durum wheat) exists near the Sea of Galilee around 17,000 B.C.E.  Early evidence of domesticating these plants comes from near Damascus, around 7800 B.C.E.  Triticum aestivuna (bread wheat) -- the species of wheat making up 90% of wheat cultivated today including the winter wheat my grandfather grew -- evolved from the already domesticated durum wheat.  There is evidence of bread wheat as early as 7,000 B.C.E. near the Caspian Sea.

            As people chose to plant seeds with certain traits, the size of wheat seeds increased.  It also developed a rachis that held its seeds once they were ripe, allowing humans to harvest the grains, rather than having them scatter on the ground.  One factor that made wheat especially suited to domestication is that, unlike most flowering plants, it is self-pollinating.  This allowed farmers to keep their crops genetically separated from their wild cousins and maintain changes in its DNA.  In plants cross-pollinated by bees or other animals, there is no way to keep genes from moving from wild plants to nearby domesticated plants.  The properties of wheat helped shape Middle Eastern and European cooking practices: gluten proteins in wheat allow it to rise when leavened, allowing baking of the leavened bread that is central to Middle Eastern and European diets.

            Spreading from the Middle East into Europe, wheat came to dominate the diet of the Europeans.  Europeans, in turn, brought it with them when they resettled the lands of North America (already settled by American Indians) in the seventeenth century.  Wheat was introduced in Kansas as early as 1839.  Winter wheat specifically was brought there in the 1870s.  It proved to be especially suited to that state, since it could take advantage of the months when Kansas receives most of its precipitation, winter and early spring.

Relying on the work of Middle Easterners and Osage, and their own hard work most days of the year, farmers transformed a fifth of Kansas into wheat fields.   Kansas soon became one of the nation’s leading producers of wheat, as it remains today.  Its license plates proudly proclaimed it the “Wheat State” in the 1940s and 1950s.  More recently, the plates have prominently featured a stalk of wheat.  Kansas land in wheat went from 68,000 acres in 1866, to 4.2 million acres in 1900 to 10.3 million in 1942 – the year described in this letter.  That means that in 1942 about 20% of all the land in the state was planted in wheat, a plant had never grown there before the 1830s.

            (Sources: Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and Youth [2008], 104-5; Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf, Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Europe and the Nile Valley (Oxford University Press, 2000); Julie Courtwright, Prairie Fire: A Great Plains History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 20-31; Garrick A. Bailey, "Osage," in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 13, Part I, Plains, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie, 476-96; USDA, "Kansas Wheat History," 2011, available at http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Kansas/Publications/Crops/whthist.pdf); Biennial Report of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture, 1922; "Wheat" in Kansapedia, available at http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/wheat/12235)