1866.] KANSAS AS A FARMING STATE. 559 thought the darkey must be painted. But finding that he could not, with wet finger, rub the color from his cheek, he went away bewildered and alarmed. These pioneer explorers reported that the best land along the great river as between the mouth of the Osage and the mouth of the Platte. This undoubtedly embraces and borders upon the largest and best unbroken farming tract on the globe. Kansas has had only two injurious drowths in thirty years. With early planting and sowing, and deep plowing, she suffers no more from dry weather than New York or Massachusetts. Her soil is the very richest. There is not a swamp in the State. It is difficult to find ten acres of untillable ground. Coal underlies almost every county. Limestone and sandstone make excellent build A PAINTED DARKEY. ing material, and Osage orange admirable fences. Cottonwood, black walnut and maple grow large enough for sawing in five years from the seed. The average yield of corn is from forty to sixty bushels to the acre. With the best machinery, one man will plant, cultivate and gather fifty acres in a season. The hoe is never used. Weeds are kept down by plowing. Wheat yields from fifteen to forty bushels. Oats are easily raised and produce largely. In one instance one hundred and seven bushels of corn were gathered from an acre; in another, ninety bushels of oats. Hay is a natural crop, grass growing from five to ten feet high. It may be cut any time between the first of July and the middle of November. Hungarian and other cultivated grasses often produce three or four tons to the acre. The Chinese sugar-cane succeeds well. 560 BEAUTIFY THE DWELLINGS. [1866. Stock-raising is the most lucrative pursuit. In 1866, Kansas sold more than a million dollars worth of cattle to Illinois alone. Illinois is fenced in. She lacks grazing capacity, but winters the stock and then sends it to eastern markets. Grapes, cherries, apples, peaches, strawberries, gooseberries, currants, and blackberries thrive. As a fruit State, I think Kansas will have no equal in the Union, except California. All vines and flowers grow luxuriantly. The sun never shone upon lovelier expanses. Nowhere else is Nature so kind. To build a road, the settler has nothing to do but drive over the prairie wherever he wants to go. To raise a grove, one need only plow the field, and trees spring up spontaneously. To open a farm, he simply breaks the soil and plants his corn upon the upturned sward. To inclose it, he puts in the Osage orange; for one or two seasons replants what the gophers destroy; and in four years he has a fence equal to a stone wall. But in many sections the eye is pained by the absence of fruit and shade trees, and the lack of beauty in dwellings. Residences are plenty-homes few. The slovenly log houses, with jet-black bare soil all around them, and the stiff frame dwellings with naked walls and glittering white paint, all standing right beside the road after our detestable national fashion, have no single attractive feature. Beauty at first cost is as cheap as deformity, and a great deal more remunerative afterward. In a new country, settlers are poor. Meat and raiment, sheltering the head, keeping the wolf from the door, are first inexorable necessities. But these Kansas dwellings are plainer and uglier than those of Iowa, Wisconsin, or Minnesota. Set them back a hundred feet or a hundred yards from the road. Then, though the home be only a cabin, have greensward not naked dirt about it; plant trees in front; open a flower-patch; throw a little stoop over the front door, or a bay-window into one end-any thing to break this square, dreary, coffin-like appearance. Let rose bushes smile under the window, and creepers cling to the eaves, and clematis fringe and entwine the doorway. Make a real home, be it never so homely, and let the boys and girls grow up under its mellowing and refining influence. It seems only yesterday that Stephen A. Douglas introduced 1866.] PEACE HATH HER VICTORIES. 561 his bill organizing Kansas and Nebraska; and we all began to ask: 'Where are they, and what Indians inhabit them ?' In 1853 there were not one hundred white settlers. There was absolutely no property except wild land. Kansas real estate and personal would not have sold under the hammer for one million dollars. Nothing was produced except a little corn and beef by missionaries and Indians. Now, the value of property in the State, as assessed for taxation is fifty-five millions of dollars. And one encounters in full operation all the institutions of commerce, society, government, education and religion-school-houses on every prairie; homes dotting hill and valley; hamlets with neat churches, 'their taper fingers pointing to heaven;' great cities; generous universities; extensive manufactories; a net-work of railways; and these late lonely prairies teeming with the busy life of a quarter of a million of people. These be the victories of Peace, no less renowned than War. 562 FROM SAINT JOSEPH TO OMAHA. [1866. CHAPTER XLVI. FROM St. Joseph to Omaha I took the steamer Colorado. The little stern-wheel Ontario, which passed up the Missouri a week before us, loaded with railway iron, had snagged. An insurance agent came up on our boat to inspect her. He must have been satisfied that there was no fraud; for we found the wretched steamer with only one guard above water, lying half-overturned, and bayoneted through the heart. Workmen in skiffs were cutting her to pieces to save the iron. Nebraska City, fronted by a sand-bar which compels boats to land below, has two thousand people. Once huge blocks were erected, and freighting for the plains made the town a miniature Babel. Now its glory has departed, drawn to Omaha by the allpotent locomotive. Plattsmouth is at the mouth of the shallow Platte, which stretches long arms into the very heart of the Rocky Mountains. The stream is as broad as the Mississippi, and looks large enough for the Great Eastern. But its actual depth can hardly average fourteen inches; and in dry weather it is barely navigable for shingles. A bright ruddy boy of four years, who had been playing all over our cabin, was suddenly smitten with cholera, and died in a few hours. At midnight the engines stopped, a plank was put out, the rude coffin carried on shore; and in the deep woods, by flaring torches, the little fallen bud of life was given back to the kindly earth. The family were emigrants from Missouri to Iowa. After we started again, the agonizing shrieks of the poor mother disturbed every sleeper on board, though she had five other children with her-five other little mouths which her life slaves itself to fill. O human nature, human nature l' 1866.] A BEAUTIFUL TOWN SITE. 563 Shallows and sand-banks forced us to land a mile below Omaha. The young city will have to compress the river by narrowing the banks, as St. Louis did the Mississippi. Omaha is not on the water's edge like Leavenworth and other Kansas towns; but leads a sprawling existence back on a level and hill-side, with a broad strip of lowland intervening. Its area is immense; horizontally it is a great city. From the boat I could not detect one feature of beauty, save the white capitol on a symmetric hill a mile away. But riding up to the summit, and looking back down upon the young metropolis, I saw the fairest town-site on the Missouri. This bird's-eye view |