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Show THE MISSOURI VALLEY. 139 Let one start where he will on the Missouri, and travel westward on any section line, he will for the first seventy- five miles traverse a region rich in landed wealth; the " bottoms" of inexhaustible fertility, the slopes and upland equal to any wheat lands in the world. Every-where rich prairie graces are mingled with bright- hued flow r ers, with the colors of the tropical and temperate climes. Continuing westward, he will notice a disappearance of the timber along the streams; it shrinks to gnarled and twisted shrubs, contending feebly for life against drought and annually recurring fires. Two hundred miles out, the verdure of the Missouri Valley disappears ; gama grass and buffalo grass begin to take its place, and only the lower valleys contain culti-vable land. Another hundred miles will take him into a region where farming land is the rare exception, and where even the high plains are dotted by tracts of alkali the range of the buffalo and antelope. In the strip along the Missouri, with an average width of a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles, will be located all the agricultural population of Kansas and Nebraska ; in the same strip continued northward along the Big Sioux and Red River, all that of Dakota, and southward the same in the Indian Territory. All the rest, to the Rocky Mountains, will be the range of the nomadic hunter and herdsmen. But in the fertile strip thus bounded are still a hundred thousand square miles unoccupied, of the best land in America a domain to support in afflu-ence ten million people. Its development will not probably be as rapid as that of Iowa or Illinois, for reasons already given ; but ere an-other generation has passed, the States of Pembina ( Huron?), Dakota, and Oklahoma will take their places beside Kansas and Nebraska. The middle of August I joined an excursion party at Omaha, and with them made my eleventh trip over the Union Pacific. The broad plains of Nebraska, the rugged mountains of Wyoming, the great desert and the plains of Bridger, the alkaline flats of Bitter Creek, and the wild beauty of Echo and Weber Cafions, had lost none of their interest by a short absence ; and I arrived at my old home in Utah more than convinced that Western life was the thing for my health and happiness. A brief rest among the Saints and Gentiles, and our party moved on to San Francisco, where we girded up our loins for the high climbs among the wonders, of the Sierras. |