Imperial Valley press., 1908-02-15
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is different in many ways from any
 other frontier settlement I have ever
 known, and for something more than
 thirty years I have had more or less
 intimate acquaintance with the sell
 wage of civilization in the West-the
 mines, the COW country and the non
 descript border towns.
 The men and women who have come
 into Imperial Valley are different from
 the people of the frontier that has
 gone into history-and fiction-with
 it's wild, crude customs and it's ele-
 mental passions, virtues and vices
 These people of the new Southwest
 are homebuilders, not adventurers of
 the earlier type, and they have brought
 with them unimpaired the spirit of
 order and the social seemliness of
 established communities.
 Here is one fact whose significance
 is monumental: this frontier county, the ultimate outpost of American oc-
 cupation of the Southwestern desert,
 began it's history by writing in the very first line-in Ordinance No. 1
 of Imperial County-that there shall
 be no selling of liquor within it's bor
 ders.
 In every other frontier settlement
 I have known-and I believe it is a rule without exception-the first build
 ing has been saloon, and usually the saloons have outnumbered all other
 places of business for a considerable period.
 Clearly community of pioneers
 capable of declaring the saloon a public nuisance as the first act of it's official existence is different in com position and spirit from the founders ; of Angels Camp, the Comstock, Lead : vile, El Paso, "Wolfville" and Gold fields. The prohibitory ordinance was hot adopted in spirit of fanaticism, but as a measure of social protection and civic policy. The new frontiers
 men took control at the start of con- 2ditions that are usually left unregu Hated through the formative period, and they also exercised a degree of 'self-restraint not commonly observable among pioneers.
 There is another manifestation of
 the sanity of this people which is re- #fected in their newspapers, for the tastes and ways of thought of a com 7munity influence, consciously or un- Sconsciously, the men who serve it as Schroniclers of the times.
 Upon my desk every day is a pile 2of exchanges, big dailies, little week 5lies and all sorts and conditions of public prints. If were exchange edit or or editorial writer on a big city paper, I would glance through all of them and read good many of them 'carefully. I should be interested pro 'fessionally in almost all the stuff that .carries headlines in large type, be- .cause my public would be supposed to desire to be told about the happen kngs deemed important enough to call for large type.
 Now l don't tear the wrappers from more than a dozen papers in the pile. bThe yellow journals go into the waste basket pronto. feel that my readers |are sane and decentminded, and so ' steer wide of the Journalistic crazies n my cruise through the exchanges, The people with whom l come in 'contact talk about the work they are 'loing, the books they read, the ration hl recreations and amusements of the They think about and p!Sp for the great development of productive industries in Imperial Val ley. They are much interested in the building of canal that is to put water upon thousands of acres of desert and pause homes and human beings to replace sand wastes and lizards, and bot at all interested in squalid details bf the debauches. of pervGts and de- generates, oozing from a New York eourt room.
 I have the feeling of being in an of social sanity Tn a |