THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT . BY FRANK II SPEARMAN.
IN maps of the United States contained in the school geographies of thirty years ago, that strip of territory lying east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Missouri River, extending on the south to the Mexican border, and to British America at the north. was verily a terra incognita. A considerable portion of these Uinted States was designated as “The Great American Desert" on our maps. This feature of our old United States maps has been dropped only within the last twenty years, Even where a better intelligence has latterly completely expunged it from the maps, it still remains obstinately fixed in the minds of thousands of otherwise intelligent people, who have not kept pace with the developments of the past quarter of a century. A very interesting book could be written on the history of the cattle trade, which has grown to enormous proportion s on the vast plains of the West. It. is not our purpose, however, to dwell on this feature of the history of our desert, because, owing to the tinge of romance which is connected with the ranch, the vaquero, the bronco, and the lasso, the subject has already received attention from many pens. The development of this region presents even more curious and interesting features than the cowboy and his mustang,. It may surprise the younger readers of this Magazine to learn that a great part of our desert is designated on the maps of today as Dakota, Kansas , and Nebraska. There is enough of it left for a kingdom, after it has been robbed of these two large States and a Territory of dimensions geographically appalling, which is knocking very hard at the door of the sisterhood of States for admission—already surpassing some of them in wealth and population. It is impossible to compute how much damage has resulted to the interests of the State of Nebraska from the fact that the Union Pacific,.long its only trunk line, crosses it through the Platte Valley, the dreariest portion of the entire State. It is unfair to judge of any country from such superficial observations as are made of Kansas and Nebraska from the railroad cars; and as these, together with Dakota, show the most remarkable and rapid progress toward civilization, let us limit our discussion to that portion of the desert, which they occupy, The conditions of pioneer life in each of them are substantially the same, and speaking for one of them is generally speaking for all. Shortly after the financial disasters of 1873, precipitated by the failure of Jay Cooke, and when the stock of his pet railroad, the Northern Pacific, was selling at nine dollars a share, a number of shrewd investors, seeing the opportunity of buying this stock in the market. selecting railroad grant lands along the line of the Northern Pacific in Dakota—which the road had then just penetrated and paying for them in this almost worthless stock at par, bought large tracts of these lands, and began as an experiment to till them. Soon marvellous stories were heard, repeated among Eastern farmers about the fertility of the soil and the remarkable quality of the grain grown on it. About the same period the surplus population of Iowa and Missouri drifted into middle Nebraska and Kansas. There was only a sprinkling of them, that when the locust scourge came in l871 and 1875 they found they had no use for the broad acres at their disposal in that country, and the first wave of civilization was driven back. The few who stayed through two years of the pestilence suffered another raid from the destroyers in 1879. |