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Reflections: Technological change on the frontier was slow, and then very fast · Kendall County News - Shaw Local

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  Reflections, technological change on the frontier was slow, and the very fast.
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  Written by Roger Mateal for Shaw Local News Network. This article is
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  being read by an automated voice brought to you by Everlett. Back
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  in 1972, paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould proposed the theory
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  of punctuated equilibrium that suggested once evolved, organisms are stable until some
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  outside event causes rapid evolutionary change, including even the creation of new
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  species. The technology of fronted settlement those first pioneers were using had
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  been in stasis for a couple hundred years before they arrived in
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  the western prairies. Log buildings, split rail fences, and plows that cut
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  shallow furrows with wooden mould boards fronted by a east iron facing
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  were either difficult or didn't work at all. The lack of timber
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  was initially solved by the earliest arrivals claiming all or parts of
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  the groves that dotted the landscape, and then laying their farms out,
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  on the east side of those wooded areas, as breaks from the
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  westerly prairie winds and fires. The flood of settlers first led to
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  the the groves being subdivided into small plots, the average frontier farm
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  required at least a ten acre woodlot, before those sudden changes kicked
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  in. Less than twenty years of early settlement, balloon construction using sawn
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  lumber replaced the timber-intensive long cabins and farm buildings that had been
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  the norm for so many years. And soon after that, clever inventors
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  designed barbed wire that could be economically manufactured and used for fences
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  that only required the use of wooden posts, not miles of long
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  split rails. When it came to turning over that tough prairie sod
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  for the first time, some of the earliest settlers made their livings
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  by renting out special braking ploughs pulled by several yoke of oxen.
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  Even those ploughs, however, cut relatively shallow furrows and thus were inefficient,
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  as well as difficult and expensive to use. Breaking an acre of
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  prairie often costs more than the land itself. But then over in
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  Grand Detour, Illinois, a young blacksmith named John Deere successfully experimented with
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  a steel plough share made from a sawmill blade. It not only
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  cut a deeper furrow, undercutting the tough prairie plant's root systems, but
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  he found it polished or scoured itself as it turned the soil
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  over, requiring far less effort on The part of horse and oxen
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  teams. Then resulting farmland was so frich it caused other unforeseen problems.
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  Yields were almost unimaginably larger than they'd been back east, far more
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  than subsistence agriculture needed. But how to get that grain to market?
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  The demand for and construction of first canals and then railroads created
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  more unforeseen upheavals. The old, horse dependent freight land, passenger transportation
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  system was relatively quickly replaced by early railroads, and then in a
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  half century became dominated by the internal combustion engine. Along the way,
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  entire trades, blacksmiths and harness makers, for instance, disappeared or severely contracted.
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  In addition, the sheer productivity of the land, in an area where
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  hired help was always at a premium, led to farmers with uncharacteristic
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  enthusiasm quickly adopting new labor saving mechanical farm machines, especially those used
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  in harvesting, but also including crop planting and soil tilling. It's unlikely
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  those pioneer farmers who broke out of the eastern timber onto the
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  open lands of the Prairie Peninsula knew they were the vanguard of
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  so many revolutionary events in tilling those open lands to come. They
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  were simply seeking a better life for themselves and their families. But
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  history is funny in the way it affects people, even when they
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  don't perceive it's happening. As the philosopher put it, you might not
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  care about history, but history cares about you. Interested in more local
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