In the new land it was human strength and the cradle in the harvest.

    Formerly, to overcome these obstacles and make any con-
 siderable progress in the work of "breaking," four or six
 yoke of oxen and two men were necessary, but ingenuity and
 enterprise have wrought a great change in the important de-
 partment of labor. Instead of the heavy, uncouth, and un-
 manageable wooden ploughs, with iron or steel points, for-
 merly used, various kinds of improved breaking ploughs are
 brought into requisition, reducing the cost of breaking by
 one-third or one-half the former price.
    The months of May and June are the best for breaking
 prairie; and should the amount of work to be done be insuf-
 ficient to require these entire months, the time intervening
 from the twentieth of May to the twentieth of June, without
 doubt is the most appropriate, although many persons com-
 mence earlier, and continue later, than the time here indicated.
    Frequently a crop of corn is raised on the sod by "chop-
 ping in" the seed corn with a sharp hoe or axe, or by drop-
 ping the seed along the edge of the third or fourth furrow,
 and then covering it by the succeeding one, and often ten to
 twenty bushels per acre is raised in this manner.
    The disparity in time and expense of "making a farm,"
 in a heavily timbered country, or on a well chosen prairie, is
 greater than would at first seem apparent. True it is, that
 most of us have listened with delight to the "loud sounding
 axe," as with "redoubling strokes on strokes" the forest
deni-
 zens were laid low with a crash that was right musical, as
 the echo reverberated amongst the hills; -but consider then
 the burning and clearing off the timber, at a cost of from five
 to twenty dollars per acre, with the stumps remaining, as a
 memorial of hard labor, for a quarter of a century--con-
 trasted with two to three dollars per acre for breaking prairie,
 which is as free from obstructions as though cultivated an
 hundred years, and which suffers by the comparison?

    Farm implements used by Wisconsin pioneer
farmers were crude and clumsy. Harrows were like-
ly to be little more than poles fastened together into


The cradler might cut three acres a day.


  which some hickory pegs had been driven. Some
  farmers dragged treetops over plowed land to smooth
  it for planting. Sowing was done by hand, broadcast,
  and many early farmers were highly skilled at throw-
  ing the seed evenly. Hoe and spade were made at
  home, or by nearby blacksmith. Hay was cut with a
  scythe and grain with a cradle-a broad blade with a
  series of curved wooden fingers above. This heavy
  instrument took strong men to swing it. Rakes were
  made of wood, and workers were skilled in tying bun-
  dles of grain with straw bands.
       But the most essential tool of the Wisconsin
  pioneers was the plow. A good plow was hard to find.
       Thomas Jefferson, who wrote descriptions of
  the ideal plow in 1788, made excellent experimental
  plows with moldboards that would turn over the
  soil. The first patent granted in America on a plow
  was in 1797 to Charles Newbold of Burlington, N.J.
  Farmers didn't take to his plow, claiming that the
  cast iron poisoned the soil and encouraged the growth
  of weeds. John Deere, a blacksmith, built a plow
  moldboard of old saws. His plows were successful in
  1837. The greatest invention in plows was the "soft
  steel" method of making plow moldboards so that
  the steel would not warp when curved to make the
  earth-scouring surface. These were patented by John
  Lane in 1868. Sulky or riding plows were first pat-
  ented in 1844. Until 1877 patents were issued on im-
  provements in the riding plow. During this period,
  gang plows were introduced, which eventually led to
  the steam plow, used on larger farms.


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