This is a young State. Ruts left by the wagon trains of early explorers, military expeditions, and home seekers have not yet been effaced from the prairies. Red men and white men, who hunted buffalo and fought at the Little Big Horn, who saw the railroads push their gleaming paths across the Plains, who recall a puny young man named Theodore Roosevelt hunting in the Badlands with his short-stocked rifle, still survive to tell their tales. In those fledgling days, the land was rich with promise. Bonanza farms unfolded their ample acres of wheat, thousands of cattle roamed unchecked in the gullies and over the plains of the western counties. The word spread, and from Europe and the eastern States came men and women to break the new soil. Sod houses and barns and frame homes and windmills set their seal on the prairies. Tons of wheat, thousands of cattle and sheep and horses attested to the fertility of North Dakota. For more than half a century the soil was exploited recklessly. Then suddenly exhaustion and drought drove home the growing realization that this exploitation could not go on. Water conservation, diversified farming, and dams quickly became part of the agricultural scheme, and are repairing the damage of unthinking abuse. Huge mineral resources have been recognized and are being developed commercially, bringing a new aspect to North Dakota's economy. Marketing of farm products has had reverberations in the economic life of the State, and has made its people alert to changing social trends. Characteristically, in the eastern portion of the State, where soil is richer, and rainfall more plentiful, the people are more conservative; while to the west, where the climate is more arid and the soil less productive, the "isms" flourish, providing a stronghold for the leftist elements of the State's tumultuous political parties. Because of antagonism to control of early agrarian activities by out-of-State business interests, the Nonpartisan League, with its socialistic platform, was formed, and many of its enterprises have been established, some successfully, some otherwise. Cooperative economy is prominent in the social consciousness of agricultural North Dakota, and such groups as the Farmers' Union emphasize the trend toward cooperatives, strengthening their position by supplying members with purely social activities, as well as with hard economic problems into which to get their teeth. Freely admitted is the rural character of the State, and there is seldom an attempt to cover native crudities with a veneer of eastern culture. The few writers in the State recognize and honor the possibilities of their native material; and each year finds a scattered handful of books, usually verse, telling of the North Dakota known to them and to seven hundred thousand other North Dakotans.