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Show WHERE SHALL WE SETTLE? . 621 and despite the hurried flight of the savages, who bad their own women and children with them, the Rangers saw among them a captive white woman. They charged desperately upon the savages, who fled in all directions, but not till one of them had buried his knife in the body of the girl, who was still breathing when the Rangers came up. It was Minnie Lockhardt. She was but just able to smile, as if to welcome the Rangers, then peacefully breathed her last. " And," said the weather- beaten frontiersman who gave me these facts, as he choked down his emotions, " it was a God's blessiu' she was dead, an' her father never seen her." For she had suffered the last terrible indig-nity savage malice could invent. As is common when a captive woman is not taken by one Indian, she had became the common prop-erty of the band ; and loathsome disease had worn her to a skeleton. Heart- broken and disfigured, death was to her an unmixed gain. Her afflicted father soon followed her to the grave. The Lockhardt place is now desolate ; its dwellings burned, its tenants gone. But the chivalry and hospitality of the father are still the theme of local story, while the beauty and sorrowful fate of the daughter are still told around the camp- fires and hearth- stones of Texas, and warm anew the hearts of its sons to undying vengeance against the Comanches. Texas ends the list of the border States proper. Observe that in all these States as one goes west he rises slowly to a higher, dryer and more barren country, till at last, about longitude 100 or 101 he en-ters on " the area of corrugation," as geologists call it, where barren-ness is the rule; and this area includes all the western border of Da-kota, Nebraska, Kansas, Ocklahoma and Texas, of eastern Washing-ton, Oregon and California, and all of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. Let us skip this region of mountain and desert, and pass at once to the fertile section of the Pacific coast, lying west of the Sierra Nevadas. California ? Well, I should not be in a hurry to recommend it to any man of moderate means. The worst objection is the oppressive land monopoly. " A little ranche of twenty thousand acres " is a com-mon expression. A dozen men each own a dukedom all but the in-habitants. They will own them after awhile, unless this thing is remedied. The beginning of this system was in the Mexican grants. The old Spanish custom was to grant a county of land to an impresario, on condition that he should settle a certain number of families on it. The Mexicans continued the system with some modifications, and in due time the inferiors became peons to the lord. These titles were all confirmed by treaty when the United States took possession, and |