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Show 442 WESTERN WILDS. can scarcely bite it off. Washer- women have great tribulations in such a country. As I near the Arkansas, I find the flint ridges narrowing, the vales between them widening, and see from afar a green strip of level land, resembling the prairies of Southern Illinois. But a vast amount of this land is already in the hands of speculators. Uncle Sam has done his best to prevent his boys from swindling themselves out of their patrimony, but they will do it. All the old tricks are here re-peated on a grander scale, and some new ones added. Loose- footed young men erect a cabin, barely habitable in good weather, preempt and remain till they get a title, then sell to a speculator and leave; and these abandoned " dwellings " are seen dotting the vacant prairie in all directions. By this operation the preemptor has a pleasant time of it for a year, raises a small crop of " sod corn," and gets away with, perhaps, two hundred dollars. But I rejoice in the thought that the speculator will be fooled at last ; the land's increase in value will be less than his - money would have brought at interest, and the residents will make him " smoke " with high taxes on his land. At the new " city " of Winfield, situated in the Arkansas Valley, at the center of a rich agricultural region, I passed a few days of pleasant rest. It is a cosmopolitan town. There were buffalo hunters just returned from Harper and Comanche counties, cattle men from Texas, Indian traders, and returned emigrants from the abandoned settlements on Medicine Lodge Creek. These people, trusting to the confident assertions of old citizens, that " there is no desert in Kan-sas, no land too dry for cultivation," had opened extensive farms on Medicine Lodge, a little tributary of the Arkansas. Every thing they planted grew luxuriantly till the middle of June, then began to wither. They dammed the creek for irrigation, but that went dry, too. " Just appeared as if the bottom dropped out," said one of the settlers " channel as dry as a bone by the first of July." As yet it would ap-pear that the south- western quarter of Kansas is a little too dry and barren for the farmer. Winfield is on White Walnut Creek, a few miles above its junction with the Arkansas; but the level, fertile valley is here continuous be-tween the streams. Two years before buffalo could be found in the vicinity of town ; now the nearest were fifty miles west of the river, in Harper County. This, and Barbour, Comanche and Clark counties are broken in all directions by deep gullies and wooded cafions, the favorite wintering places of the bison ; as long as they could winter there undisturbed, summer found them abundant on the high plains |