Weekly national intelligencer., 1857-10-17
FOR THE NATIONAL INrELLIasEoER.
The Great West-C Character Of the Development
- IN Progress at the Vest


digging. Plaster and lime limestone, freesone clay
and sand exist beneath almost every acre The large
and economical adobe brick, hardened in the sun and
without fire, supersedts other materials for walls and
fences in this dry atmosphere and as in Syria and
Egypt, resiss decay for centuries The dwellings thus
constructed most healthy being mpervious to heat
ood, damp, and wind.
The climate of the Great Plains is favorable to health
longevity Intellectual and physical development and
simuative of exalted tone of social civilization and
refinement. The American people and their ancestral
European people having dwet for many thousand years
exclusively in countries of timber and within the region
of the maritime atmosphere, where winter annihilates
all vegetation annually Ter half the year where all ami
NAL food must be sustained fed and atened by tilage
with the plough where the essential necessities of
istence food clothing fael and dwellings, secured
only by constant and intense manual toll why to this
people, heretofore the immense empire of pastoral agr
culture at the threshold Of which arrived has
been as completely blank the present condition
of social development the Atlantic ocean and the
American continent to the ordinary thoughts of the
tique Greeks and Romansl Hence this immense world
of plains and mountains occupying three-ths of our
continent novel them and so exactly contradictory
in every feature to the existing preudices routine and
economy Of society," unanimously pronounced an unn-
habitable desert To any reversal Of such judgment
the unanimous public opinion, the rich and poor the
wise and ignorant the famous and obscure agree to op-
pose unanimously dogmatc and universal deafness
To them the dsneatons Of travellers elsewhere intel
gent are her tinged with lunacy the science of
graphy is beftgged the sublime order Of creation no
longer holds and the supreme engineering of God is
fault and chaos of blunders
The Pastoral region is longitudinal The bulk of it is
under the Temperate zone out of which it runs into the
Arctic the north, and into the Tropical zone on
the SOUTH The parallel Atlantic arabic and commercial
region fanks ii the east that of the Pacific on the
west The Great Plains then at separate and bind
together these anks rounding out both the variety and
compacness of arrangement in the elementary details of
society," which enables continent to govern itself with
| the same ease single city.
Assuming then that the advancing column of progress
having reached and established itself in force all along
the eastern front of the Great Palms. from Louisiana
Minnesota; having also jumped and aanked them
to occupy California and Oregon; assuming that this
column is about debouch upon them to the front and
occupy them with the embodied impulse Of thirty
millions of population, heretofore scattered upon the
anks but conyergng into phaanx upon the centre
reflections, legitmately made may cheer the timd
and confirm those who hesitate from old opinion and the
prejudices of adverse education.
1t is well established that sixtenhs of the food of the
human family s ought to be animal food the result
of pastoral agriculture. The cattle of the world con-
sumo eight times the food per head, as compared with
the human family Meat, milk, butter, cheese, poultry
eggs WOOL fsahers honey, the productions of pas
toral agriculture Fish is the spontaneous production Of
the water Ninetenths Of the labor Of arabic culture is
expended produce the grain and grasses that sustain