In those years of plentiful money and multiplying fortunes, railroad building was rapid and easy in Minnesota. Investors were keen for bonds secured by land grants of enormous extent, and bearing a liberal interest, especially when offered at a seductive discount. The controlling spirits of the companies found some profit in financing construction companies, but more in town lot and land speculations. Railroad building out on the open prairie far in advance of settlement was a novelty then. The gentlemen whose privilege it was to determine the lines and locate the stations were in position to make profitable selections of lots and lands, and to let their friends “in on the ground floor” for a consideration. Around the selected stations considerable villages would arise in a single season. In some cases the town would be built before the track had reached it. There were instances in which settlements were made on mistaken calculations of actual location, and then the houses and shops were literally put on wheels and hauled over to the chosen spots. The lands adjacent to the railroad lines, especially within a few miles of the stations, were, of course, in great demand and rose rapidly in price. Cultivation was no longer confined to the river counties, but spread rapidly inland. It did not take a generation of the hardest labor to make a farm on the Minnesota prairie. In the first season the newcomer could win his subsistence, and in the second begin to build. The cultivated area of the state, which was 630,000 acres in the closing year of the Civil War, rose to 1,863,300 in 1870, and five years later fell not much short of 3,000,000. A large fraction of this area was devoted to a kind of cultivation novel to this country, but which remained profitable only so long as the virgin fertility of the soil survived, and that was rarely longer than ten years. “Bonanza farming,” so called, was carried on by large proprietors or lessees, owning or controlling many thousands of acres, employing machines and large gangs of men and animals. For these estates there were developed out of the petty apparatus suitable to the little eastern farm, the sulky plow with its two mould-boards, the disk harrow, the twelve-foot seeder, the self-binding reaper, and the giant threshing machine. There was but one principal crop, spring wheat, which was commonly threshed from the shock and immediately marketed. To handle the great quantities, grain “elevators” were built at the railroad stations, tall, ungainly structures with conveniences for weighing in, lifting, weighing out, and spouting into waiting freight cars. At terminals were erected elevators for cleaning and drying grain, as well as for storage for many thousands or millions of bushels. The country elevator was also convenient for the small farmer, who was saved the cost of building a granary of high-priced lumber from distant pineries.