You can see it taking shape in pages of cursive in the letterpress copybooks of J. B. Power, Land Commissioner of the Northern Pacific Railway Company. Following the financial panic of 1873, he had to find some way to revive interest in land investment; he had all those land-grant sections on his hands, and no one was buying. The success of some modest homesteaders raising wheat, and the existence of a lot of discontented bondholders of the railway, gave Power an idea: let the holders redeem their bonds with railroad lands, jump-start big-time wheat farming on them, and initiate farming on a grand scale, bonanza farming, in the Red River Valley of the North.