the charge of murder up os may i like � that is natural better than i had expected to the soil is richer and deeper the timber is more generally diffused the country more rolling than i had supposed them there are of course heavy in from the heavy charges for good low prices for produce indian and the high price of good lumber for instance pine boards used in building at this place came from county n y and were down some mill stream to the thence down the to and the to were thence taken up the l to st louis the to city and the to this place which has but twice or thrice been reached y a when here they were dog cheap at one hundred dollars per thousand superficial feet or ten cents for every square foot in the absence of on the they must here be richly worth one hundred and twenty five dollars per thousand feet and while there is pretty good timber here for other purposes there is and that mainly black � that will make good boards the ready cotton wood along the banks of the streams cuts easily but so when that it will draw the nails out of the on side of a house elm is of course equally perverse and i have seen few boards that were not either black or oak but much of the oak is small short and while the black is likely to be exhausted i see young ones coming up thickly in some of the river but these have much to contend with and will not at best be large enough to saw for many years no doubt the timber of each year and will increase still f as roads and improvements are multiplied the sweep of the fires but it will always cost more to build a decent house of wood in the interior of than in any part of new york or new england � i think twice as much this is a heavy tax on a new country where not only houses hut are a general and pressing need rejoice to see the new timber creeping up the of the streams i note with pleasure that much of this is and some of it white ash i doubt not that there will always be wood enough here for and fuel but if the s peak region can send a good lot of pine lumber even yellow pine down the and the it will be worth more to than all her gold i consider well watered � no state better i do not confine this remark to the present when everything is and likely to be more so i mean that springs streams rivers are quite universal for my own private drinking i should like a supply not so much with lime but for water is generally quite good and the itself is among the chief blessings up oh of i presume it every foot of her soil i have yet traversed with nearly every square mile that will be within the state of yon see it out from almost every bluff it lies thickly strewn in over the surface of every or that makes out into the low or so that if you want to use it it is always to be drawn or rolled down hill though not here needed as a it can everywhere be with little labor into building stone or burned for use iti putting up chimneys and walls though somewhat i presume by the action of water upon it through thousands of years and readily into blocks of suitable size for house walls it is said to by exposure to the atmosphere and make a very wall it is the constant though unobserved of this stone that has contributed so largely to the of this soil and now the enormous waste through the rivers i presume all the imported yearly into our country does not equal in value the annual from the river alone i judge that indian corn can be grown here as as anywhere on earth thousands of acres last year produced their hundred of grain per acre at a very moderate cost for labor and none at all for an extensive farmer who grew many thousands of near assured me that the cost of his com in the ear was just six cents per of ears equal to nine cents per of three half of cars of the great on kind here cultivated making a of grain of course this estimate the cost of breaking and but making a fair allowance for these the net cost of that corn cannot have exceeded twenty cents per i presume it would now sell in his for forty cents while here in the interior it is worth from twenty five to thirty five cents per i met at an old and now republican friend who left new york city where he had been an industrious and settled between and two years ago he had last year eighty acres in corn which yielded four thousand worth to him thirty five or forty cents per his clear profit on this corn above the immediate cost of growing it can hardly have been less than one thousand dollars he will grow more this year with wheat potatoes etc yet he is one of a class who are supposed incapable of making money by farming i suspect few life long farmers of similar means will have good buildings over their heads and fruit trees and other elements of material comfort around them sooner than my friend wheat and did badly last year owing to the heavy summer rains which and them too little of either have been sown for this year s harvest yet i find both winter and spring wheat looking remarkably well almost everywhere are scarcely more than out of the ground yet they too promise well 