or cut to pieces in the process of grinding. It was with this wheat that
the mills of the country had chiefly to do, and the defects of the old
system of milling were not then so apparent. With the settlement of
Minnesota, and the development of its capacities as a wheat-growing State,
a new factor in the milling problem was introduced, which for a time bid
fair to ruin every miller who undertook to solve it. The wheat raised in
this State was, from the climatic conditions, a spring wheat, hard in
structure and having a thin, tender, and friable bran. In milling this
wheat, if an attempt was made to grind it as fine as was then customary to
grind winter wheat, the bran was ground almost as fine as the flour, and
passed as readily through the meshes of the bolting reels or sieves,
rendering the flour dark, specky, and altogether unfit to enter the Eastern
markets in competition with flour from the winter wheat sections. On the
other hand, if the grinding was not so fine as to break up the bran,
the interior of the berry being harder to pulverize, was not rendered
sufficiently fine, and there remained after the flour was bolted out a
large percentage of shorts or middlings, which, while containing the
strongest and best flour in the berry, were so full of dirt and impurities
as to render them unfit for any further grinding except for the very lowest
grade of flour, technically known as 'red dog.' The flour produced from
the first grinding was also more or less specky and discolored, and, in
everything but strength, inferior to that made from winter wheat, while the
'yield' was so small, or, in other words, the amount of wheat which it took
to make a barrel of flour was so large, that milling in Minnesota and other
spring wheat sections was anything but profitable.

"The problem which ten years since confronted the millers of this city was
how to obtain from the wheat which they had to grind a white, clear flour,
and to so increase the yield as to leave some margin for profit. The first
step in the solution of this problem was the invention by E. N. La Croix