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Show 614 WESTERN WILDS. southern Kansas an inviting field indeed is open to us. Good land is cheaper to- day than it was five years ago. This I happen to know from painful personal experience. But it don't follow that it will be cheaper still five years from now. Surely " the bottom " is reached by this time. In the second tier of counties, including Anderson, Allen, Neosho and Labette, the Leaveuworth, Lawrence and Galveston Rail-road Company have large tracts of good land for sale; and private owners a still larger amount. This region boasts of many advantages: a mild climate, soil of rare fertility, timber sufficient for all ordinary purposes, rock in abundance, and easy communication with the rest of the world. Society is unsur-passed by that of any section, east or west. Churches and school-houses are within convenient reach of every section of land, and a man can not settle in so wild a spot that the mail will not bring him late papers at least twice a week. For seven years this region was blessed with good crops; then came the " bad year" of 1874, when drought, chintz- bugs and grasshoppers in succession desolated the land. In Allen County large streams dried to beds of dust, the fish literally parching on the rocks; and pools and springs disappeared which the oldest inhabitant had considered perennial. In 1875 nat-ure resumed her wonted courses ; but the people had been too poor to sow wheat, and the country remained in a condition of general pov-erty. But such a crop otherwise I had never seen. There were miles on miles of corn- fields, yielding from forty to eighty bushels per acre, and for sale at twenty cents per bushel ; tens of thousands of tons of hay, worth two dollars per ton in the stack ; potatoes by millions, and more feed than the stock could eat. And there was the trouble. The people had not a sufficiently diversified industry. They had relied al-most entirely on the sale of grain, and this year there was no sale, and they remained poor despite their immense crops. I came down from the mountains on a visit just after the last grasshoppers had left, and a rural wag gave me this dialect picture of his experience with them : " You see I bought early in ' 72 give $ 2,200 for 240 acres. Could a bought the same for half that two years after; can buy good land right alongside o' mine now for a V an acre. Been a deal o' cramp in real estate in this country. Well, nobody ever makes a crop the first year in a prairie country think themselves in luck to get fences built and sod broke. I bought a hundred sheep two blooded rams and the rest common ewes and put all the rest of my money in im-provements. Raised a little corn and oats in 1873, and put thirty acres of the new land, sod broke in 1872, into wheat, and went to work with a |
