The Oakes times. [volume] (Oakes, N.D.) 1906-current, 1909-03-04
I. P. MUSTAR
WRITES OF TEXAS
Left Ludden With a Party of
Friends on January 22nd
for the South.
Is Well Pleased with the Trip
Much Better Satisfied with
North Dakota.

I left Ludden on January 22nd and
went to Texas with a party of friends,
eur first stop was at New Orleans. I
like New Orleans very much and COLI
slider it by far the best and most import
ant city saw on the trip. Invent from
New Orleans to Houston, Texas, where
We stayed three days. had several op-
portunities to talk with men engaged
in ''truck farming and they informed
ne that the yield of cabbage, onions
and other vegetables was big but it
was hard to find a market and that
they are usually obliged to ship their
crop to commission houses and as the
goods are of highly perishable nature
it frequently occurs that they do not
get much for them, and when they sell
them to buyers in the towns near where
they are grown they usually getso little
for their vegetable crop that itscarcely
pays them to haul it to town and when
this does occur it is very discouraging
because the enormous amount of labor
in hot climate to keep the weeds out
Of these patches of vegetables makes it
even more laborious than to care for a
small garden in North Dakota, and
when consider what an amount of
back aches I would get if was obliged
to weed and hoe ten or twenty acres of
vegetables want to shirk the work.
saw a big orchard of pear trees
about forty miles from Houston and
noticed that most of the trees were
dead and found that the crop of pears
and peaches gets ripe at time of the
year when the Texas climate is so hot
that the fruit must be pickel and
shipped at once as it is ripe today and
rott m tomorrow, so that the grower
does not have an opportunity to get a
very fancy price and frequently sells at
a price that does not pay the expense
of caring for the trees and Grating the
fruit. What oranges saw and tasted
there were not equal to California
oranges and. concluded that the orr
anges were for show and not for profit.
A few trees in the front yard of a city
nome of course are ornamental, but
they have as much to do with the own
ers profit as the good house wife's
posey bed in North Dakota garden.
also stopped at Galveston two days
and one night. My next stop was at
San Antonio and looked at the many
very interesting buildings, such as the
Alamo where Davy Crockett and Col.
Bowie made their last stand against
Santa Anna and his Mexican army.
There are old Mission churches there
IT'S years old and yet right outside of
the CITY limits there are thousands of
acres of land covered with cactus and
mesquite brush so dense and thick that
a man can scarcely penetrate it and
wild hogs roam about devouring reptiles
and insects. After viewing San An
tonic I went to Corpus Christi on the
Gulf of Mexico where we remained one
night and where there was not much to
be seen except Mexicans and negroes,
from there we went to Brownsville, the
city farthest south on the American
gulf coast. Its population consists of
about three-fourths Mexicans and one
fourth Americans. The writer saw
many beggars squatted on the inner
edge of the sidewalk against the build
ings holding out their hats and hands
asking for aims which I think denotes
the poverty of some of the people.
Outside of the city the land is over