The 100th Meridian was historically important in the Western economy because for two generations insurance companies and other worldwide lending agencies, by agreed policy, would not lend money west of that line. Their reason was that a geographer had labeled it the east edge of the Great American Desert, although neither the geographer nor the insurance companies had been west of 100 degrees. The policy was geographically unrealistic and limited, and it forced South Dakota into the farm loan business, which cost the state greatly and illustrated why a state should not be in the loaning business, though South Dakota paid all its debts in full. In time the line became only a bad memory, and land once dismissed as desert was producing more than a quarter of America’s new animal wealth alone.