The journey through Kansas covers in four hundred miles nearly five thousand feet of the long, upward slant. The hills and bluffs that roll away from the river are covered with scrub oaks, elms, walnut, and sycamores. When the traveler has mounted to this high table land, nearly four hundred miles from the Missouri, he may walk for days without seeing any green thing higher than his head. The even line of the horizon is seldom marred. The silence of such a scene gnaws the glamour from the heart.
Crops are as bountiful in Kansas as elsewhere on the globe.
A young man named Burkholder came out to Fountain county in 1885. In 1885 money was plentiful. He stocked his farm, put on a mortgage, and brought a wife back from the home of his boyhood. She was a young woman of culture, who put a bookshelf in the corner of the best of the three rooms in the yellow pine shanty, in which she and her husband lived. She brought her upright piano, and adorned her bed-room floor with bright rugs.