The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1890-10-16
A BANKER ON WICHITA.
AS SURE AS THE MULTIPLICATION
TABLE
The Present Status of Wichita and
Kansas City. Their Respective
Territories and Inevita-
BILE Rivalry.

institution, as shown by the comptroller's
report for October, is the strongest bank
in Southern Kansas outside of Wichita,
was in the city yesterday and made the
EAGLE brief call Mr. Gardner in speak
| ing of the economical stress of the west
and especially of the financial outlook for
Kansas, among other things said that as
for Wichita her future is as simple and
as sure as the multiplication table.
The booms experienced three or four
years since by the surrounding towns in
southern Kansas, and, in fact, by the
towns in the state at large, were, in reali-
ty, begotten through a reflex spirit and by
the adoption of Wichita methods. That
boom brought to all of these towns and
cities such enterprises, such stocks of mer-
chandise and such other lines of business
as could not be sustained under normal
conditions, and when the reaction came
these merchants, ETC., were either COMPEL
ed to remove elsewhere or cut down the
quality of their stocks to the level of the
restricted and collapsed demand. Wichita
alone, Kansas City excepted, had been able
with her greater population and greater
aggregated strength, to hold her own,
own city, and that of dozen
other prominet towns in southern Kansas,
be found that in all the finer and higher
priced lines Wichita was dividing the
trade f-or1
and with Kansas City alone. The boom,
or that character of boom with the co rela-
tions and incidents alluded to, will never
occur to these towns again, and Wichita
gained by the loss of others, but will in
crease it until some day in the near future
people, including business men, financiers,
railroad men, manufacturers and so forth,
everywhere will awaken to the fact
that there are two cities in the west whose
foundations are as permanent as
the soil and sunshine, Kansas City and
Wichita, one the center of population and
trade for western Missouri and eastern
Kansas, the other the center of population
and of trade for southern Kansas and Ok
lahoma. No business man, be he disinter
ested or otherwise who has lived twenty
years in Kansas and who will carefully go
over the situation, can arrive at any other
conclusion. Kansas City will rival the St.
Louis of today and Wichita will rival the
Kansas City of today before half of the
struggling people of the average ambitious
towns understand what or how
it ALL happened. Mr. Gardner
went on to say that while his home was in
the county seat of a county of wonderful
resources and prosperity, a county which
if not today, soon would be, recognized as
the great live stock county of the state,
and while FL Dorado has been less dis
astrously affected by the boom than any |
of the more pretencious towns of southern |
Kansas, he was not blind to the fact /
that Wichita and Kansas City are the |
only cities where great returns could be /
realized on real estate investments |
within a period of ten years, at |
the expiration of which time neither /
Wichita or Kansas City would know I
that they had ever doomed, then shrank !
and then leveled up again. Those who |
own unincumbered property in either city |
would, in his estimation, be very short |
sighted if they parted with their titles
short of ten years hence, although before |
the expiration of five years much that he |
was now saying would be realized and I'M /
derstood as the truth, even by those to |
whom it might be unpalatable. Except |
ing the cities of Wichita and Kansas City |
no cities of Missouri or of Kansas woul d |
show a hundred per cent of increase by
the census of ten years hence, or in 1900, by |
which time Wichita would show from two
to three hundred per cent in
crease, even though she but held
her present relative status with
Southern Kansas and Oklahoma, or her
own, or half her own, in the jobbing trade
and in this live stock trade and in the
packing trade, now dominated for her for
This territory. Mr. Gardner went on to
say, that during the fair week he visited
Wichita in company with Chicago capt.
-alist, who was on his way to San Antonio
They did not go down to look at the expo
;ition or its crowd, but the Chicago man,
who had the week previous sold out a
sixty acre fair addition to Chicago, and
who, as an old business man, was dreading
collapse which he feared might come be-
ore the snow flew said, that had it not
been for Wichita's unalterable ad
,antages of location. and her confident
lestiny as a city; instead of her increasing
bank clearings, her growing volume of
business, her doubled freight tonnage, her
,ostly street improvements, her magnifi-
,ent public buildings, and her life and en-
srgy everywhere, of today. there would
nave been plate glass fronts nailed up,
signs swinging by a single hinge, mud
loles in the middle of the streets, with
weeds on the margins; with general d.
apidation everywhere and discousolate
people. And the Chicago man further
said that, while Kansas City would doubt ]
ess hold her own, and solely because she
the trade of Western Missouri
md Eastern Kansas, that, in his judy
nent, instead of worrying over the posi-.
Die future of Galveston, eight hundred
niles away, as a supply point for
Northern Texas, Kansas City had better /
,e looking out for Wichita which had ex-
.ctly the same elements TO back I'D her
I. l., I al I