The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1883-06-15
The Great American Pasture.Field.

The 'sGreat American Desert" used
to figure in portentous letters on the
maps of the biographies of our child
hood. 1t covered an area of about a
million and quarter square miles
west of the Missouri River, between the
Tooth meridian of longitude and the
Sierra Nevada Mountains. 1t extended
from Canada to Mexico and 1000 to
1900 miles west of the Tooth meridian.
1t was an unfathomable wilderness, in
habited only by savage men, and buff
faloes and bears, and was looked upon
as the Sahara of our continent. Some
of the foreign biographies still main
tain that it exists; on the same principle,
we suppose, that one of the most
famous globe-makers of London still
puts Fort Dearborn at the head of Lake
Michigan. and knows no other division
of the Great West than the Northwest
ern Territory.
But the desert has gone, and gone for
ever. 1t is now known that the ante
lope and the bison were the precursors
of population that will, before the
close of this century, overspread all this
rast tract with grazing herds and fiocks.
The mystery of the trackiess wastes
that once seemed so formidable has dis
appeared before the intrusion of the
locomotive. Wherever streams are
found and water can be applied to the
soil of this desert it can be made to
blossom like the garden of the Nor
mons at Salt Lake City. Everywhere,
whether irrigable or not, it is covered
with nutritious grass on which the
gazelle and buffalo grow fat, and on
which their successors, the sheep and
the steer, will thrive equally well.
The capabilities of this region have
been appreciated very, very slowly.
Ten years ago the movement to put
beef cattle and sheep on the ''plains"
was in its infancy. Five years ago the
interest in this vast opening for capital
and labor first began to be keen, and
now it is intense from Texas to Mon
tana. Great joint stock companies are
being formed all over this country and
in Europe to secure good ranges and
engage on an Abrahamic scale in the
patrtlrchal business of furnishing
America and Britain with beef. Barb
wire fences hundreds of miles long are
being put around the choice grazing
grounds, and in but few years any
one who wants place to raise cattle
on a large scale will have to divide the
possessions of some one who has pre-
ceded him.
All through this territory. so admir-
ably adapted to the manufacture of
beefsteaks and mutton-chops, there are
valleys with water-courseS that will per-
NIT of an irrigation that will support
an agriculture that will easily feed the
whole population engaged in the pur-
suits of the miner. the cowboy and the
herder. Colorado raises the very finest
quality of wheat in limited quantities,
and there are many places where the
of the Latter-Day Saints
will be successfully repeated. Every
pound of meat, and every pound
of offal, and every hide or pelt
produced by this territory has a cash
value in the markets. The modern i'm
provements of refrigerator-cars and
quick transit will steadily push back
ward the line of packing-houses and
that are already be-
ginning to move towards Kansas City
and Montana, and with them will grow
up rendering establishments and glue
and the coarser kinds of
The great American Desert
will quickly assume the aspects of pros
perity that herds and fiocks always
bring with them. and will support nu-
merous population in good average
American style,
If it be true, as Edmund Burke said,
that nations breed at the mouth, there
are millions of Europeans as well as
who will owe their existence
TO the expansion given by the Great
Desert to the means of human subsist-
ence.
The capacity of the Great American
Desert to grow beef is estimated at the
low average of twenty steers per square
mile of area, will exceed twenty millions
IF cattle, which would furnish four or
five millions year for the market.
Think of what food-supply and what
r commerce these figures comprise
The plains are the great pasture-felds
Of the American Nation for all time to
come Chicago Tribune.
Witcbcraff in India