Dodge City times. [volume] (Dodge City, Kan.) 1876-1892, 1883-08-30

First Primary-Miss Grace Mullen
dore, $40 per month; Mrs. Jennie
Moore, assistant, $50 per month.
The school will open Monday, Sep
TENDER 10th.
The board adjourned to meet at
school house Saturday, Sept. Sth, at 2
p. m. n. B. KLAINE, Clerk.
The f'Great American Desert. -
The "Great American Desert used
to figure in potentious letters on the
maps of biographies of our childhood.
It covered an area of about million
and quarter square miles west of the
Mississippi river, between the Tooth
meridian of longitude and the Sierra
Nevada Mountains. 1t extended from
Canada to Mexico and about 1900 miles
west Of the Tooth meridian. 1t was an
objectionable wilderness inhabited only
by savage men, and buffalos and bears,
and was looked upon as the Sahara of
our continent
Some of the foreign biographies still
maintain 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 di-
vision of the Great West than the
Northwestern Territory.
But the desert has gone and gone
forever. 1t is now known that the an
telope and the bison were the precursors
of population that will before the
close of this century overspread this
east tract with grazing herds and focks
The mystery of the trackless 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 Mormons
at Salt Lake. Everywhere, whether
irrigable or not, it is covered with nutri-
Gus grasses on which the gazelle and
buffalo grow fat, and on which their
successors, the sheep and the steer, will
thrive equally as 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 field for capital and
labor first began to be keen, and now it
is intense from Texas to Montana.
Great joint stock companies are being
formed all over this country and in Eu-
rope to secure good ranges and engage
on an Abrahamic scale in the patriarchal
business of furnishing America and
Britain with beef. Barbed wire fences
hundreds of miles long are being built
around the choice grazing grounds, and
in few years anyone who wants to
raise cattle on large scale will have to
divide the possessions of some one who
has preceded 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
permit of 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 quail
ty of wheat il limited quantities, and
there are many places where the exper-
iment of the Latter-Day Saints will be
SUI ,cessfully repeated. Every pound of
meat and every pound of offal, and ev-
cry hide or pelt produced from this
territory has cash value in the mar
kets. The modern improvements of
refrigerator-cars will steadily push back
the line of packing-houses and slaught-
er-houses that are already beginning to
move toward Kansas City and Montana,
and with them will grow up rendering
establishments and glue manufactures
and the coarser kinds of tanning. The
Great American Desert will quickly as
sumo the aspects of prosperity that
herds and focks always bring with
them, and will support a numerous pop
ulation in good average American style.
If it be true, as Edmund Burke said,
that nations breed at the mouth, there
are a million Europeans as well as
Americans who will owe their existence
to the expansion given by the Great
Desert to the means of human existence.
The capacity Of the Great American
Desert to grow beef, is estimated at the
low average of twenty steers per square
mile of area, win exceed twenty millions
of cattle, which would furnish four or
five millions year for the market.
Think what food supply and what
commerce these figures comprise /! The
plains are tie great pasture fields of
the. American nation for all time to
come Chicag, Tribune.