The Falls City tribune., 1909-08-20
The pronth Of 1860.

events IN history llldl o01NiItu III It.
was especially memorable 10 the PEG.
pie of Kansas and Nebraska on ae-
count of the widespread drouth that
nature inflicted upon them that sum
mer. The country was new and
sparsely settled, with very little of
the land opened to agriculture, and
what had been broken and prepared
for cultivation. was u%nfenced, and
in such bad condition for want of
the necessary means to work II sue
oessfully in the matter of planting and
maturing the crops,th that hardly enough
of the ordinary cereals could be pro-
duced to afford n scant and meager
living for the people and their domes-
tic animals. If a settler had as much
as forty acres under cultivation, he
thought he was fortunate. and in an
ordinary crop season could produce
from that much land enough to carry
him through the winter; and as there
vas an unlimited quantity of grass
land, he had no difficulty In garner
Ing enough of wild hay to keep his
stoek-and there was not much of it
in the country till the coming of
another season.
Only those who nave been through
those days of hardship and of limited
resources, can form any clear idea
of what 1t was like here, when the
country was n wilderness, where
everybody was poor-I use this word
in its broadcast significance-and
when nature was about as unfrlendly
as that universal mother can render
herself when weak, suffering man is
wholly at her mercy, as he always
is in his natural state. From the
hour of his birth to the day of his
death-the end of the struggle-his
fight for life is constant and as ceas-
less as the coming and going of the
days that make up the period of his
stay on earth.
In 1860 the country south of us, in
Guiding the whole of the territory of
Kansas, and how much more to the
SOniil ullQ SOulIlN tHl Ql illl SOULFUL
/ am not now able to say, was lit
orally burned up by hot winds from
the south that swept the country like
a very sirocco. Corn in the field
was dried in the stalk, and
other cereals shared the same
fate and never recovered in any de-
gree. No rain fell for months. Wells
dried up, as well as the wat
or courses; and famine and thirst
became as widespread as the des-
truction of the growing crops and the
prairie grass, as indeed all verdure
of every kind was as completely burn
ed out as though a prairie fire had
ran over the country.
II was not so bad in Nebraska, but
1t was so serious that the people were
barely able to get through the fol-
lowing winter; and so great was the
destitution that scarcely a farmer in
Richardson county had seed enough
to plant a crop for the coming year
This picture is not overdrawn in the
least. Ii it Is incomplete at all, it is
because | have not given it a darker
shading. | was here at that time
and know whereof | speak; and there
are others still among us who can
bear witness to the facts here de-
tailed. Some of the farmers had
succeeded in bringing to partial ma
turity a kind of sugar cane known to
botanists as sorghum COR Holcus)
saccharatum,' sometimes called Chin
csc sugar cane, a sweet juicy plant
from which. by a grinding aud press
ing process the juice was obtained,
much in the same way as cider from
apples. and then boiled till a syrup
was produced resembling molasses, In
fact it was known among the people
as sorghum molasses," and consti-
tuted along with corn bread, the
chief staple of food of a large ma
jority of the families in this county.
| venture to say that not one fam
lily in ten tasted meat that year,
after the effects of the drouth be-
came known and the discomforts pro-
duced by the loss of crops that
scorching summer. cannot be told,
much less realized, by persons who
did not share in the great privation.
But for our sorghum and corn bread,
we would have been compelled to do
what Kansas did-appeal to the char
ity and humanity of u fellow citi-
zens in the older states for aid in
our sore distress. God only knows
how much our people suffered, but
as long as actual starvation could be
kept from the door, those %dauntless
people ate what they had and bravely
turned their faces TO the future in