The Sun.
London, England, 1860-10-18 00:00:00

211:a 3 PRINCE'S VISIT TO THE UNITED

STATES.

{From the Special Correspondent of the Times.)
CINCINNATI, OHIO, SEPT. 30.
I promised at the conclusion of my last letter to
add a few words to what I then stated of prairie
land , especially as to its agricultural values. The
remarks made on one prairie in this respect apply
With almost equal force to all the others in North
America. There are, of course, many places where
prairie land is of less value than in others, but this
depreciation is solely due to such local causes as the
ward of railway communication and the like, for
the prairies themselves have the same high average
of fertility throughout. The land round the station
at Dwight was bought some 5 years ago for 90 cents
(about 3s. 6d.) per acre. The price now in the vil-
lage itself is a little over 100 dols,, or £2l. Three
miles from the village the best prairie land for
farms is now worth about 6 dols., or 255. an acre.
Six or eight miles out 100 acres may still be pur-
chased for 100 dols. The land thus obtainable is
pure prairie ; that is to say, covered with long, rich
grass, the very finest food in the world for cattle,
and which, when cut and left to dry, gives ample
fooder for the winter. The soil is so peculiarly
light, dry, and fine—more resembling snuff than
anything else I can compare it to—that the blade
of the ploughshare has to be formed unusually deep
and wide, so as to turn the earth back to a consi-
derable distance to form the furrow at all. In such
a soil the labour of ploughing would be merely no-
minal but for the all-abounding weeds at the root of
the grass, known as the " devil's shoestrings." In
spite of its formidable name, the plant itself, as it ap-
pears above ground, is as meek-looking a little vege-
table as ever varied the monotony of long high grass.
Beneath the soil, however, its roots spread far and
wide, and are all, even to their minutest fibre, strong
and tough as good thick catgut. To cut these the
ploughshare has to be kept almost as sharp as a
razor, and its edge to be carefully filed up afresh at
the completion of each furrow. Once, however,
that the furrow is complete and the corn sown, the
settler has no further trouble till called to gather
in or sell his bounteous crops. " Tickle the land
with a hoe, and it laughs with a harvest," is true of
the prairie, for though I am told that no land in
the world so well repays manuring, still, no land in
the world does so well without it. Thus all about
Dwight on lands without manure the yield of Indian
corn this year has been in some cases as high as 70
bushels an acre, averaging 50 bushels all round.
The wheat has been far less successful, owing to
the drought, though nowhere less than 22 bushels,
and varying generally from 26 to 30 per acre, and
in a few instances much higher. The settlement
is still too young to have tried the effects of manure
steadily, but Mr. Morgan, who has one of the best
farms in the place, states from the small experiments
he has already tried, that an average amount of
manuring may be reckoned to yield at least double
the present produce of the soil. For what are
termed root crops-prairie land is considered the very
finest ; and melons, pumpkins, gourds, and squashes
sown between the ridges of Indian corn are so enor-
mously productive as to be of little more than
nominal. value at Dwight or, indeed, any town or
village which border these magnificent expanses of
righ uncultivated pastures. Coal is everywhere
abundant throughout the State of Illinois—so abun-
dant as that, even with the great demand for labour,
it can be mined, brought to Chicago by canal, and
sold wholesale at 9s. a ton, retail at from 1 ls. to 125.,
according to the season. It is, perhaps, also worth
mentioning as a singular geological circumstance,
that it is not very uncommon to find in the prairie
grass smooth round copper boulders, weighing
about a hundred weight, or more, solid pieces of
pure, soft virgin copper. How they come there it
is impossible even to conjecture, for though stray
large stone boulders are met with here and there,
there is, of course, nothing like rock in the whole
district, either above or below the soil. Some 14
or 15 feet below the prairie there is one vast bed
of the best kind of gravel, in which, of course,
there is an inexhaustible supply of the purest
water. With these few words on the general
productiveness of prairie laud for agricultural
readers, I may now revert to the Prince's tour.
With his stay at Dwight I may say that his Royal
Highness and all the suite were certainly to tho full
as much delighted as with any visit they had made
since they have landed on this continent, and I am
sure it was with regret that the Royal party quitted
the grand breezy expanse of soft rich meadows, and
the kind hospitable gentlemen, Mr. Spencer and
Mr. Morgan, who had done so much to make their
stay as happy and as agreeable as they could desire.
The Prince was certainly most fortunate in his visit,
for, for the time of the year, he had almost universal
sport ; he saw a prairie thunderstorm, a prairie fire
of immense extent, and, above all, a prairie sunset.
The latter took place in all its supernatural glory
—a glory which can never be described or under-
stood by those who have not seen it—while the
party were shooting quail the night before their de-
parture. As the sun neared the rich green horizon,
it turned the whole ocean of meadow into a sheet of
gold which seemed to blend with the great firma-
ment of reds and pinks—pale rosy orange hues, and
solemn angry-looking crimson clouds above till not
only the sky but all the land around was swathed in
piles of colour as if the heavens were reflected from
below, or as if the sinking sun shone through the
very earth like mist, and turned it to a rainbow.
The immensity of stillness which lay in the prairie
then—a stillness as profound and vast as the green
solitude itself, while not a breath stirred over the
whole horison as the great transmutation went
slowly on, and the colours over the land turned
from rosy to pink, from pink to orange, orange to
red and crimson—darkening and darkening always
as the tints ebbed out like a celestial tide leaving
fragments of scarlet clouds over the heavens—the
embers of the fire which had lit the prairie in a flame
of glory. There was such a quiet unspeakable rich-
ness in this grand farewell of day—such a terrible
redness about the sky at last that one could almost
fancy some supernatural phenomenon had occurred,
that the sun had gone for ever, and left a deep and
gory wound across the darkening sky. Night was a
relief compared to this dread, lurid fire in heaven—
a fire which the clouds seemed to close in upon, and
stifle out with difficulty—a fire which, like the paint-
ings of the sunset before the Deluge, left always an
ominous anger in the heavens, even when the night
was far advanced, and the prairie clothed in a blue
mist that rose over it, like water. It was such a
sunset as moved even the rural inhabitants of '
Dwight; such a sunset as even the " oldest inhabi-
tant," who had been there some five years, had
never seen before.
The prince
left the prairies at o'clock in the
morning. Some 10 or 12 people—quite a demon-
stration for the
for place—came on to the platform to
see him start;
prairie stations are places where
nobody gets on taheness
train,fo and where it would he
little short of madness
laidr
aoybody to get off. For
a long distance the line
all through prairie
land, where the road is so straight that on a dark
night with bright lights shining the train may be
seen coming for more than an hour before it ar-
rives. Springfield, where " honest Abe Lincoln,"
the Republican candidate for the Presidency, re-
sides, was passed at noon. Little hats and white
wooden cottages made up nearly the whole of the
rest of the panorama—huts which had been thrown
up in a few days wherever the settler chose to stop,
and which the inhabitants were quite prepared to
move at an hour's notice, or so whenever the °ma_
sion demanded. At last the train slowly emerged
eniivvwhiicdhe' fwOggYhaited was
at Alton, on the bank
of a
shallow river. The sid
gray, rough, and desolate, with slimy, muddy
banks, falling into rifts and chasms and unseemly
gaps, where rain and forest drainings had oozed
down for years. Here and there, scattered upon the
slippy soil, were miserable wooden cabins, damp,
comfortless, and dilapidated with their windows,
thinly mended with stained sheets of paper, or
clumps of dirty rags, with poor and sallow occu-
pants, all women busily engaged inside, while rough,
stalwart, sunburnt men, with bronzed muscular
throats, laid bare, with frouzy dark moustache and
grirrlbeards of a week's growth, lounged about out-
side, or sat an logs and spat around with a lethargic
dulness. Tangled unsightly weeds abounded, and
We getups of forest kings, long dead and gone, and