This effort was to be rewarded, particularly after the Panic of 1873 left many unemployed and seeking a new start. Settlers began to flood into the Midwest and Northern Great Plains in response to the railway companies' blandishments. Populations skyrocketed. The state of Kansas grew from a population of just under 365,000 to nearly a million people during the 1870s. The number of inhabitants in Nebraska nearly tripled, rising to nearly half a million. Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakota Territory showed parallel population gains. New counties, villages, and towns sprang up by the hundreds throughout the region and a speculative bubble emerged around the buying and selling of farmland and urban lots. Population continued to surge throughout the region well into the decade of the 1880s. Unfortunately for those who chose to attempt to farm new lands in such places as Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Eastern Colorado, the unusually rainy years of the early 1880s which had buoyed land prices gave way to a protracted drought beginning in the summer of 1887, bringing an end to the giddy, speculative boom. With crops failing, artificially inflated land prices plummeted; Eastern capital began to withdraw from the region. Banks collapsed and credit dried up. A decade of hard times followed, marked by the abandonment of entire communities. A sense of deep discontent with the current state of affairs was felt by the farmers who remained. Agricultural crisis in the southeastern US The agrarian and plantation-based economy of the Southern United States was virtually destroyed by the American Civil War. Those who had their fortunes invested in Confederate bonds and currency saw them lost, as did those whose wealth was tied up in the ownership of African American slaves. Great landed estates were broken up or rendered unworkable by the lack of a free labor supply and the flood of land sold on the marked depressed prices and reduced the economic possibilities of those who counted their dollars in acres. The region faced enormous costs to replace the buildings destroyed in the war and the factories looted. The capacity of the gutted financial market to make loans was grossly insufficient for the needs of the region, exemplified by the 123 counties in Georgia with no banks whatsoever even in 1895. Merchants, finding a sellers' market, extracted extraordinary profits through inflated prices and usurious credit terms. A new mode of production replaced the