The Wichita city eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1872-1883, 1875-01-14
Kansas, the Prodigy Of the Period

Kansas, Ine fCOQl9y Oh the FerlOo.
Inhabiting land as we do of un-
halting growth and intimate pOssibili-
ties, it is only by successive surprises
that an American learns the progress
of this country.
Yesterday, Kansas was the memory
of the dark and vengeful skirmish that
foretold the great war of slavery to-
day she is commonwealth in the
march of great states, measuring her
broad shoulders with the veterans of
the Union. With her dozen iron
highways, her ninety cities and noble
towns, her splendid public cditices, her
mile-long bridges, her universities and
schools, her sixty-one banks, her open
mines, her flour mills, her queries, her
one hundred and forty-nine news pa
rers. and most significant and impor-
tant of all, her strangely early manu-
features, that young and powerful
state-breezy as Iowa withoutits cold,
mild as Virginia without it's heat,
with air like the plains of Buena Wis
ia, yet soil like the ague bottom Of the
Wabash, demands recognition which
we cannot WITHHOLD; fresh as we ap-
pear to be from her facts, as preseut-
ed in her executive documents, IN sci
entific reports and surveys of profess
ors Hayden, Snow, Swallow, Blodgett,
Parker, Nudge, Saunders and he writ
ings of Bayerd Taylor, Horace Greeley,
ETC., and in the industrious and public
spirited illusions Of her local public
lists and writers. But we must for
bear beyond remark or two more
particularly benetiting this journal of
manufactures.
Kansas is prairie country, yet with
an endless diversity of surface, Alto
gether swampless, and drained by
nnmberless rapid streams. The rivers
fall 2,7s5 feet in crossing the state, the
tributaries of the Arkansas, Kansas,
and other principal valleys, nearly all
in their courses leaping limestone
benches, aftording water power. Even
the average slopes of land from end to
end of the state, eastwardly, is six and
half feet to the mile. BY river and
railroad, everything to be produced
can be marketed. The Indian terri
tory, recently so extolled by President
Grant, adjoins her on the south, with
fields that alone cold furnish the whole
American cotton yield, while the con-
cession is unanimous that in nowhere
than in Kansas, could there be better
wool growing. 1t needs but to quote
the expression of the eastern writer,
that mo state west Of Massachusetts,
excells Kansas in water power" and to
add that photographed surveys more
than confirm him. in order to under
stand how justly attention so early
turns there, to manufactures. That
well-informed body, the national wool
growers association, announces in the
Bulletin: at is evident from, facts
observed by us, that the west will
hereafter rely, to large extent. upon
the products of its own mills for ordi-
nary clothes, and that the east must
relinquish that market, or compete by
cheaper productions Impossible or a
higher class of fabrics
First, agricultural produce; next,
merchandising and general commerce;
then. last of all, manufacturing. This
progress has taken nations thousand
] wears: it took our old eastern states a
hundred. But, 10! Kansas plants cot
ton mill by stalking out claim on the
lonely prairie Western Manufacturer.