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Show CHAPTER XXVIII. KANSAS REVISITED. IN August, 1873, I took a flying tour through the new counties in Southern Kansas. It was the year of Grangers, land leaguers and war on the railroads. Kansas had been, in the expressive language of the border, " railroaded to death." More lines had been con-structed than the business of the country would demand for ten or twenty years to come. Except perhaps the one through line, none of the roads were paying more than running expenses. The mana-gers made out to pay their own salaries by the sale of lands granted the roads by State or Nation. The capital invested in the roads was a dead loss, as far as present dividends were concerned. But stock-holders insisted on some returns, and the managers attempted to squeeze out a few dollars by cutting down their employes on one side and raising freights on the other. It took three bushels of corn to send one to the sea- board; hence grain worth sixty cents in New York, sold for fifteen cents in Kansas. The premonitory symptoms of the approaching panic were every- where manifest; but the Grangers, feeling that something was wrong, struck at the nearest object the railroads. It was a vain struggle. Where the roads were making nothing, it was obviously impossible for them to divide profits with the pro-ducers. On the fertile plains of South- eastern Kansas, one man with a " walking cultivator" could attend to forty acres of corn, which yielded in an average season from forty to eighty bushels per acre. One man, between the middle of April and the middle of August, could produce from fifteen hundred to forty- five hundred bushels of corn ; but in the midst of abundance they were poor in all save the bare necessaries of life. " Droughty Kansas" was a standing joke. On the eastern border of that area which the old geographers called the " American Desert," corn was a drug; and flaming agricultural reports were headed with sarcastic pictures of mammoth pumpkins, fat cattle, and forests of corn- stalks to which the farmer ascended by step- ladders to secure his crop. But the seven years of plenty ended with 1873. Eighteen months after, corn in the same localities was ( 432, |
