1891 - Through Russia on a Mustang With Sunflower Seeds and Oscar Wilde

Through Russia on a Mustang

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At Constantinograd, a small town, two days ride south of Kharkoff, we were getting well into Malo Russia. The most striking feature of the landscape were big fields of sunflowers.

All Russia nibbles sunflower seeds in its moments of leisure. Imagine half the citizens of the United States carrying, habitually, a supply of peanuts around in their .pockets and nibbling them continually, and you have a hardly exaggerated idea of the ubiquitous part played by the sunflower seed in Russian life. In the circus, in the theater, in the offices, the shops, the tea-houses, the city streets, the village door-stoop, men, women, girls and boys, peasants, nobles, merchants, soldiers—everybody, everywhere, nibble sunflower seeds.

It is to supply this universal taste that thousands of acres of those gorgeous flowers are cultivated on the northern border of Malo Russia.

People who have only seen the big sunflower as a garden ornament can have but a dim conception of the magnificent sight afforded by a forty-acre field of these gorgeous yellow blossoms. I first saw a field of them in the morning, when every big round golden face, without an exception in all the myriads, was looking toward the east. The scene was striking, and suggested a vast multitude of floral Aztecs worshiping the morning sun. Not being acquainted with the habits of the sunflower I wondered all the morning whether all those worshipful faces would, in the evening, be turned toward the west. So I watched other fields as we rode along, and learned, what every other reader of these pages very likely knows already, that the sunflower always turns its face to the east.

Here the mind naturally reverted to a period of the past,
when a slim gentleman in knee breeches,long hair, and with a big sunflower in his button-hole, emerged from the fogs of London to create a passing furore in America in favor of the floral
monarch of the Little Russian steppes.








The sunflower crop is one of the best paying in Russia. A good crop is worth, as it stands in the field, 100 rubles a dessiatine (approximately 2.7 acres ), or about $25 an acre. The seeds are sold by the farmer for one and a half to two rubles a pood. Then the merchants retail them for four rubles a pood, and at about every street crossing in Russian provincial cities are stands and peddlers with baskets, selling to the passers-by the product of the big sunflower.

In the field the sunflowers are sowed in rows like the " drilled corn " of the Kansas farmer, and, like corn, are cultivated and hilled up with shovel plows.
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Is this awesome, or what!?  The company also made a similar fan where the cigar was a billy club!  

Stevens was a journalist who wrote 3 adventure books, this being a small excerpt from one, another being the first person to ride a bicycle around the world!!
Through Russia on a Mustang
Thomas Stevens
Cassell, 1891