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Show WHERE SHALL WE SETTLE? 623 ent. There is no more rain there during the so- called " rainy season" than in Ohio, and half the time not as much. In fact, there never is too much rain in California, though there is sometimes too little. The summers in Oregon are delightful enough more pleasant than in California ; but, as at present advised, I would not recommend either State to the class of emigrants just now going West. Let us now turn to the great interior, and see if we can pick out any oases inviting to settlement between longitude 100 and the Sierra Nevadas. Nevada is not an agricultural State at all; and, for aught we can now see, never will be. It contains 98,000 square miles, and less good land than three average counties in Ohio. It has population enough for one- third of a member of Congress ; but our " paternal " government has granted the State one Representative and two Sen-ators. Nobody need think of going there to engage in farming. In the far distant future, when land is in much greater demand than now, some way will perhaps be found to redeem those arid tracts. Trees will be planted wherever they will grow ; the Australian eucalyptus may flourish even on the desert, and thus in a few centuries a moister atmosphere be created. But for the present the population must con-sist of capitalists and laboring miners, and their congeners. And here I might indulge in wearying words on the romance and hardship of a miner's life, had I not given him a chapter to himself. Strange it is that he should be the most imaginative of men, with a life of such prosaic toil ; but it is, doubtless, because his ways are in a path, as Job says, " which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen : the lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it" ( Job xxviii). And no finer, more poetical description of the silver miner's strange life under- ground was ever written than in that chapter, taking Louth's version : " He putteth forth his hand upon the rocks, he swings above the depths. He cutteth out water-courses through the rocks; and his eye searcheth for precious things. He makes a new way for the floods; he goes in the very stones of darkness, in the shadow of death." The perils of the prospector above ground are equally great, but the life has its charms for all that, In Utah are still a few unoccupied plateaus which could be re-deemed by canals taken out from some large stream. Bear River Val-ley contains some sixty thousand acres of fertile land, which might be redeemed at moderate cost by a canal from Bear River. The climate is mild, not very hot in summer, and decidedly pleasant in winter. The Central Pacific runs through the valley, and the location is ex- |