Harley, "Western Settlement," 866.
Harley, "Western Settlement," 873, 878.
Robert Higgs, "Railroad Rates and the Populist Uprising," Agricultural History 44 (July 1970): 29198
Mark Aldrich, "A Note on Railroad Rates and the Populist Uprising," Agricultural History 54 (July 1980), 42432.
Aldrich says rates relative to crop prices fell in the 1870s but rose through the 1880s and mid-1890s.
This comparison excludes the fertile Red River Valley lands along the Minnesota border of North Dakota because they were anomalous in their fertility, the speed of their settlement in the 1870s, and their access to river as well as railroad transportation along the St. Paul and Pacific, which became part of Hills St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway. Hill claimed his road had carried 20 percent of the spring wheat crop of the entire United States in 1884 and would do better in 1885.
Charles Francis Adams, "The Rainfall on the Plains, Nov. 14, 1887," Nation Nov. 24, 1887, p. 417.
Sidney Dillon, "The West and the Railroads," North American Review 152 (April 1891): 444-45.