and 103,751 in fodder, figures indicating that dairy farming was still important. Actually, statistics also showed that there were 52,818 head of cattle and more than a half-million chickens: more cattle than people and ten times as many chickens as cattle.

Several competent studies and surveys have been made of Otter Tail County and especially the New York Mills area, showing conclusively that agriculture has been the main occupation. In all, 62% of the Finns have lived on farms, and of them 84% have earned their income mainly from farming. Six percent of these farmers did not own their own properties. In second place comes the group gaining its livelihood from industry, in spite of the fact that there has been no extensive mining or other similar activity in this area. The number of persons employed in sawmills leads the list, employing 1417c of this group. Another 9% are artisans, while about 8% have been in business and trade. Other occupations have even smaller figures : 3 % as `white collar' workers, a scant 2% in professions (law, medicine, etc.), 2% engineers, about 1 % industrialists.

Wadena County

Wadena County is situated to the east of Otter Tail, and its Finnish population came there spreading out from the New York Mills region, first to the townships along the county border and then later throughout the rest of the county. Here, too, the influx of Finns was caused by the railroads, of which the first, the Northern Pacific's line through the county seat was completed in 1871, to be followed by the Wadena-Park Rapids branch line, completed in 1891. Of these, the latter in particular contributed to the growth of Sebeka and Menahga.

Eero A. Pulli has written of his trips through these regions that, "when a traveller gets off a Northern Pacific train in the heart of Minnesota and continues his travels northward in a bus crammed with people and crates of new-born chicks, he notices that the road leads to an undulating plain where the eye seeks in vain a distant forest to frame the green fields. In the sparkling sun the landscape reminds one of the prairies, which should not begin until over a hundred miles farther westward. The trip takes one along the western edge of the Great Forests, but the forests no longer exist. Two reasons have led to man's felling the forest: first, only thus could man get at the rocky but fruitful soil; second, only the forest offered the pioneer who could harvest it a ready source of cash. For centuries those

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