The Sun.
London, England, 1870-01-05 00:00:00

JANUARY 5, 1870.

EMIGRATION CENTRES.

COUNTRY AROUND KANSAS CITY.—(CONTINUED.)
(From the Anglo-American Tim2s.)
The town of Manhattan contains 1,500 inhabitants,
and is rapidly growing.' The dwellings are close
together, few homesteads being seen, waking the
general aspect unbroken, desolate prairie covered
with grass. The rivers are lined with. narrow
forests. Mr. Hepworth Dixon' writes of the plains
200 miles westward of the Missouri as green with
trees, most so along the Kansas River and its creeks
and inlets. " The land is alive with shrubs and
flowers, among which flourish wild marigolds, sham-
rock, water lily (in the pools), rosin-weed, stink-
weed, and sunflowers. Not the tawny gauds of our
• cottage g:rdens ; big and brazen bachelors flourish-
ing on a single stalk ; but little golden flowers
clustering in- bunches, and, like our buttercups,
numberless as the stars of heaven. The air is warm
and sweet, thesky is intensely blue, with none of that
haze which frets the eye in our own southern
landscape. A white frame house peeps out here
and there, having its green blinds, its bit of garden,
'its sheepfold. Herds of horses can be seen on the
rolling plateau, here you have a drove of cattle,
-there a long waggon train." Trees grow with
astonishing rapidity, the orchards being surrounded
by a thick belt of forest trees, an osage hedge in-
closing all. What the nature of the fruit will be
cannot yet 1:)z fully determined, as all have not had
time to develope. This, however, is a fact that in
• Philadelphia at thelast yearly meeting of the Ameri-
can Pomological Society the gold medal was awarded
to Kansas fruits. The country is too new for neat
snug farming, forroads, and close chatty neighbours,
but the cars awl hotels along the Kansas Pacific
Eailroad are filled with young men seeking land.
Livery stables do a good business, coaches drive in
all directions over the prairies with these land-
seekers on the top, and the whole has that air of
life which the most rapidly filling portion of the
United States might be expected to possess. There
was a time when the great curse of the district was
drought, but a singular fact appears to be de-
veloped with the occupation of the country.
Formerly the soil was stamped down by buffalo in
herds of countless thousands, and whatever rain
fell ran rapidly off the surface, and was carried away
in the rivers without penetrating into the soil.
Thus a heavy downfall' produced an inundation ;
creeks rising suddenly into roaring torrents ; but
with cultivation the land retains the moisture which
generates dew clouds and rain. Another curious
fact is being proved in the United States by rail-
ways. The iron acts as a conductor, disseminating
the superabundant electricity gathered in places
which otherwise would burst into thunderstorms.
The English emigrant would be in error who
supposed tint Europeans only are settling up
this Valley of the Kansas and its tributaries.
From Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, as well as the
Eastau States, thousands of Americans seek this
new country as well as families from England,
of whom 200 families are settled on the Saline,
which is not far from Manhattan. But they must
not either be deluded into the idea that in settling
on fine rich soil, the freehold of which they obtain
for a trifl that they are shaking off all the ills of
life. Settlement is accompanied with sure discoas
fort and often with sickness ; for new and un-
drained soils are apt to be unhealthy when first
broken up. They meet, too, with a class of
men almost as strange to the Americans cf the
refined Eastern Status as they are to the Eng-
lish. These border-men call all " Yanks." Dixon
describes the Western Boy dressed in Isis high
boots " his slouch hat, his belt, his buffalo skin,
his bowie-knife, and his six-shooter, as feeling
fur the unarmed, sober, unadventurous dweller
on the other bank of the Missouri, the sort, of
proud contempt which an Arab beyond Jordan
cherishes for the settlers in Galilee, spiced with the
tierce hatred which a Spanish hidalgo dwelling east.
of the Duero feels for the Portuguese peddlers
crawling on the western bank." About Junction
City therough men of the border cotne firstin contact
with the traveller, and there all have a short,
quick way, freely using provincialisms and hating
a peculiar selection of words. Two men meeting,
for instance, the greeting is " How ?"--which.
being filled up, means How do you cb to-day ?''
but the steady stream of emigrants swamp this and
gradually assimilate, all. assuming the American
type. Missouri is a case in point, for some years
ago no State was more wedded to slavery and
Southern feeling. Now this has changed, and with
it changes rapidly the appearane_! of the farms and
towns. Immigration fi:ls up the vacant land. The.
New Englander introduces a more tidy homestead,
a neater cultivation--in a word, civilization ; and
what formerly had worn a desolate air of dirt and
neglect brightens into neatness by cleanliness and
labour.

At Junction City the Reputlican River and the
Smoky Hill unite and form the Kansas, awl there
stands Junction City three miles to the west of
Fort, Riley. This town is perhal s destined to a
brilliant future, though it is impossible to predict
A hick will be the great ci.y of Kansas. We select
this slot because the two rivers there join, because
it is the head of the valley of the Kansas, and
because being but 18 miles from the head of the
Neosho, the finest wheat growing valley of the
United States with which it wid shortly be con-
nected by a railroad terminating at Galveston, the
great port of Texas, it bids fair to be the best placed
of all the cities of Kansas. Fort Riley was formerly
the ultinut thule of American civilization. Beyond
began the Great American Desert, incapable, it was
supposed, of producing food. Proceeding westward
the traveller launched into an unknown waste,
barren, treeless, waterless, yet roamed over by
ferocious tribes of Red men who lived on the game,
which in countless thousands grazed over the coun-
try called the Buffalo Range. In itself this would
have given the lie to the Great Desert theory, for
game cannot inhabit a country without water and
vegetation. It was found on penetrating along the
smoky Hill that the country for many miles to the
westward was of the same character as to the east,
that other junctions were made such as that of the
Solomon, which is a gentle stream less than 100
feet wide, fringed with a few scattered trees on
banks like those of a canal, the water flowing
through a vast meadow of prairie grass, it is difficult
to imagine is not a well settled and thrifty valley.
At the mouth has grown another town, and our
readers will observe as we travel up the Kansas
Valley that we pass stream after stream, all flowing
south-east, and all joining the Kansas on its left
bank. Thus they get an idea of the dip of the
land southward down to the Gulf of Mexico. Not
far from this portion of the Smoky Hill, really a con-
tinuation of the Kansas, is the Arkansas river, the
bend of both westward of Solomon City, being to-
wards each other. All the drainage to the right of
the Kansas flows down the incline into the Arkan-
sas through the-Indian reservations, lands of un-
equalled fertility. Junction City is less than three
years old, and the Louses are for the most part
built of cotton wood, though fine limestone quar-
ries are in the neighbourhood, the stone coining
out soft, so as to be easily cut, and getting hard
by exposure. Some twenty years ago only buffalo
grass grew to the west, the short curly grass, vhich
alone can survive the tramping down of the herds.
As they retire prairie grass takes its place, and the
climate becomes more moist, the rainfall being
greater. Now the valleys of the Smoky Hill and
of all the streams flowing into it are covered with
the prairie grass, but really little as yet beyond the
way in course of construction for the Kansas Pacific
Railroad—that is the old mail track over which
Hepworth Dixon passed to Denver-- is known of
the country. A very, valuable book entitled "New
Tracks in America," by Dr. Bell, gives the infor-
mation acquired by the explcriog party sent by the
Kansas Pacific Company through Arizoga and Isie.w
Mexico. Still their route, with digressions, was
along the road to Santa Fe, and on to Fort Mohav
somewhere below the bead of the
,navigation of
the Colorado. At Junction City, and twenty-
five miles further up—at Adelene
—the'Texas
herdsmen are met in numbers, riding on swift
ponies, adorned with straps, buckles, and appara-
tus, the riders with long spurs, which touch the
ground as they walk. Waggons come up from Santa
Fe in lines, miles long, the drivers cracking their
whips with a report like that of a gun. Brave and
enterprising these men undoubtedly are, still but
little qualified to describe the country they traverse.
Hence the land, till Dr. Bell's book appeared, may
be almost said to have been unknown, further than
the brief accounts given by United States officers, of
the districts around their lonely forts. Travellers,
as a rule, burry over this ground, for there is
little in the way of comfort to attract, but much
to repel. Few fancy h,iving their hair " raised," yet
no one crossing the Buffalo Range can consider
himself wholly safe from such a contingency. 'Thus
it happens that only the three routes ac. .ross had
been described, until the Kansas Pacific Railway
Company sent out explorer., who have discovered
beds of coal and valleys heavily titnbere,l, in districts
hitherto supposed to be without fuel. Kansas is
divided into two part.?, bol.h prairie, and each about.
200 miles square. That to the west is dry, that to
the east moist; the former is supposed to be poor
in soil, though a geological analysis, it is believed,
will show the ravers° to be the case ; the latter is
known to be rich, and in no ordinary cleureeots
valleys, of which there are many, being of exceeding
fertility, and the uplands being all of fine grass
country. Of all the buffalo regions Kansas appears
to be the chief ; therefore it may be argued that if
naturally adapted to buffalo, antelope, elk, and such
animals,it must be equallyqualified fordomestic flocks
and herds. The opening of the Kansas Pacific line
to Sheridan ba4ziven a great spur to stock-rearing.