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September-Octo her, 1 949
age crop in the prairie states yields from 15 to 19 bushels to the acre and in many instances considerably more.
This amazing change was brought about by the work of the modest, little-known wheat pio' neer, Mark Carleton; a man with a passion for his native plains and for the soil.
The story of Mark Carleton's discovery of a hardy, disease-free wheat begins with his boyhood. When he was ten years of age, his parents moved from Ohio to the flat, hot plains of Kansas. That was in 1876, the Centennial year, 100 years after the Declaration of Independence. But the pioneer wheat farmers on our Western plains did not feel especially independent. They were too much at the mercy of the elements.
Mark Carleton as a boy saw wheat, lots of it. And he saw it destroyed. Still, the farmers kept trying; kept planting and harvesting what was left of it. Some years weren't too bad. The winters were a trifle milder. There was rain, enough of it for a fair crop. The wheat grew and miraculously escaped the black stem rust. A reasonable harvest in a good year kept the lean, leather-tanned farmers trying through all the bad ones.
But their average was not good. During the decades before the turn of the century, many of them kept getting poorer.
At 21 years of age, in 1887, Mark Carleton graduated from Kansas State Agricultural College. He had grown
into a tall, rangy Kansan; energetic and muscular, with an intense enthusiasm for his work. Shortly after he graduated, Mark took a position with the State Experiment Station at Manhattan, Kansas. Much of his work and experimentation there concerned wheat.
Six years later, Mark Carleton made an important discovery. He proved that each type of grain had its own particular type of rust which could not be transmitted to any other species of grain. This achievement brought him widespread recognition and an appointment by the United States Department of Agriculture as head of all government work on wheat. It seemed a distinguished appointment for a young man of 27, but Carleton's staff consisted merely of two assist' ants and a woman clerk — a meager group to solve a problem that was costing this country potentially millions of dollars in destroyed crops.
From his experiments on the problem of growing a hardier and diseasefree wheat at Manhattan, Kansas, Carleton had achieved little real progress; but he had a hunch. A small percentage of wheat always survived; therefore, he reasoned, some variety, somewhere, must exist that could survive 100 per cent. But where could it be found? The world was a big place to look for it.
Carleton plunged into this huge task by sending for varieties of wheat from countries all over the world. He