The first farmer who discovered the value of the telephone was the market gardener. Next came the bonanza farmer of the Red River Valley--such a man, for instance, as Oliver Dalrymple, of North Dakota, who found that by the aid of the telephone he could plant and harvest thirty thousand acres of wheat in a single season. Then, not more than half a dozen years ago, there arose a veritable Telephone Crusade among the farmers of the Middle West. Cheap telephones, yet fairly good, had by this time been made possible by the improvements of the Bell engineers; and stories of what could be done by telephone became the favorite gossip of the day. One farmer had kept his barn from being burned down by telephoning for his neighbors; another had cleared five hundred dollars extra profit on the sale of his cattle, by telephoning to the best market; a third had rescued a flock of sheep by sending quick news of an approaching blizzard; a fourth had saved his son's life by getting an instantaneous message to the doctor; and so on. How the telephone saved a three million dollar fruit crop in Colorado, in 1909, is the story that is oftenest told in the West. Until that year, the frosts in the Spring nipped the buds. No farmer could be sure of his harvest. But in 1909, the fruit-growers bought smudge-pots--three hundred thousand or more. These were placed in the orchards, ready to be lit at a moment's notice. Next, an alliance was made with the United States Weather Bureau so that whenever the Frost King came down from the north, a warning could be telephoned to the farmers. Just when Colorado was pink with apple blossoms, the first warning came. "Get ready to light up your smudge-pots in half an hour." Then the farmers telephoned to the nearest towns: "Frost is coming; come and help us in the orchards." Hundreds of men rushed out into the country on horseback and in wagons. In half an hour the last warning came: "Light up; the thermometer registers twenty-nine." The smudge-pot artillery was set ablaze, and kept blazing until the news came that the icy forces had retreated. And in this way every Colorado farmer who had a telephone saved his fruit. In some farming States, the enthusiasm for the telephone is running so high that mass meetings are held, with lavish oratory on the general theme of "Good Roads and Telephones." And as a result of this Telephone Crusade, there are now nearly twenty thousand groups of farmers, each one with a mutual telephone system, and one-half of them with sufficient enterprise to link their little webs of wires to the vast Bell system, so that at least a million farmers have been brought as close to the great cities as they are to their own barns.