 At the onset of the famine, the rich salt merchants of the middle "Doab" were immediately able to switch from salt to grain and make windfall profits.The small salt merchants, especially the itinerant merchants, however, did not have such flexibility.According to , a British military officer observed Banjara merchants—who had traditionally traded salt from their region in Rajputana for grain from Rohilkhand to the north-east—returning "from the northern markets of Farrukabad and Shahjahanpur" with no loads of grain on their cattle; the price of grain had been too high for them to turn a profit.