The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1907-08-01
PENCILlNGS BY The WAY.
rlr. u G. Palmer Contributes Another
Lively Letter of Travels in West.

4
three times the distance from Oakland
to Chicago and equal to the distance
across the Atlantic Ocean from New
Foundland to Ireland and it takes the
Atlantic Express from o'clock Sunday
evening until 4.3O p. m. Wednesday to
cover it-almost three full days of solid
travel. After passing Barstow, 141
miles out, the only towns worthy of the
name across that vast expanse of desert
are The Needles, California, population
1000; Flagstaff, Arizona, 1000; Albu-
quesque and Los Vegos, New Mexico,
each about 1000; La Junba, Colorado,
$500, and Trinidad, Colorado, 5000,
until the fertile valley of the Arkansas
in Kansas is reached.
The railroad is about the only evil
dence of civilization along this pathway.
The two most noticeable things are
the heat and the dust. | did not learn
the temperature the day we crossed
Arizona but the papers reported it
was 1875 degrees the day before. And
yet in the shade this did not seem at all
oppressive, due of course to the lack of
moisture in the air. Beyond the
Rockies it always seems to be cool in
the shades and at night, no matter how
hot it is in the sun.
Many things of interest are to be
seen even here. For several hours
the track skirts the mighty Colorado
whose source is !, 500 miles away amid
the snow-capped Rockies in far off Col
orado and Wyoming and whose banks
here seemingly to the very river brink
are hopelessly desert bound
Farther south, the Government and
the Southern Pacific Railroad have
spent a mint of money under the worlds
greatest engineers in their endeavors
to get it back into its natural channel
out of which it broke in an irrigation
project and thousands of farms, miles
and miles of railroad and whole towns
and Villages in the neighborhood of the
Salton Sink are still under water to
depth in places of as much as fifty feet.
A few miles northward between The
Needles and Flagstaff is the Grand
Canon Of the Colorado. a visit to this
necessitates a twenty-four hour side
trip from Williams and | did not stop
off.
In the vicinity Of the Colorado many
Mojave Indians are to be seen-grimy,
barefooted and repulsive The Puebos,
along the Rio Grande in the vicinity of
Albuquerque, are one round higher up
the ladder of civilization. Here and
there we encounter an army fort or
government barracks and few com
panies Of United States regulars whose
presence is made necessary by the In
dams.
The labor for a thousand miles seems
to be the dark, swarthy Mexican only
and for hundreds of miles not building
of any kind is to be seen except those
belonging to the railroad company only
those of adobe, although we passed
many villages containing several score
of houses.
Adobe houses are tlat-roofed and built
of srndried bricks made of mud.
The Albubuesque depot has fine
museum of Indian relies connected with
1t and both are adobe and are expensive
as well as artistic.
The principal stock in the adobe sec
ton of our country seems to be great
herds of goats. Goats mean poverty,
poverty Of soil and yet the soil is rich
enough and would produce abundantly
if it had only moisture.
Where the Southern Pacific climbs
the Sierras, we are told they are so
precipitous that workmen were let down
with ropes from the top in order to get
a foot-hold for the cuts in the sides of
the mountains for the tracks. But this
does not seem a more difficult engineer
ing problem than pushing a track out on
the desert for hundreds of miles where
there isn't mouthful of food of any
kind, nor drop Of water, nor human
habitation. From Ration Pass, altitude
1908 feet, the highest point on the
Santa Fe between the Pacific and the
Mississippi, we unconsciously glide
down from Colorado into Kansas.
In the years gone by how our hearts
have gone out in sympathy to bleeding
Kansas. " We knew her only as the
land of "dreuths, " and 'grasshoppers, "
and "Populists, and "sockless Jerry
Simpson, and Carrie Nations, " &c.
Today she is magnificent empire.
Last year she produced one-sixth of all
the wheat grown in the United States.
She is prominently the land of wheat
and corn and cattle which have
no superior. And the farmer is the
car of her domain. He owns his own
land and has good bank account. They
offered as their exhibition at the
World Fair carload of cancelled farm
mortgages. Her schools are the best
that money can make. She has rural