Five Mile Beach weekly journal., 1923-03-23
Story of the
Highlands
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
Copyright, 1922, by the Macmillan Co.


Copyright, 1922, by the Macmillan Co.
"ROSSING the Missouri river into
Kansas, the west-bound traveller
~ begins a steady, upward climb,
until he reaches the summit of the
Rockies. The journey through Kansas
covers in four hundred miles nearly
five thousand feet of the long, upward
slant. In that long hillside there are
three or four distinct kinds of land
scape, distinguished from n another
by the trees that trim the bottom.
The hills and bluffs that roll away
from the river are covered with scrub
oaks, elms, walnuts and sycamores. As
the wayfarer pushes westward, the oak
drops back, then the sycamore follows
the walnut, n finally the elm disap-
pears, until three hundred miles to the
westward the horizon of the "gently
rolling" prairie is serrated by the
scraggy cottonwood, that rises awk-
wardly by some sandbarred stream
oo5ihg owe the moundy land. Another
fifty miles, and a Garden City, high up
on the background of the panorama,
even the cottonwood staggers; and
here and there, around some sinkhole
in the great fiat prairie, droops a desc
late willow-the last weary pilgrim
from the lowlands.
When the traveller has mounted to
this high table land, nearly four hun
dred miles from the Missouri, he may
walk for days without seeing n green
thing higher than his head. He may
journey for hours on horseback, and
not climb a hill, seeing before him only
the level and often barren plain,
scared now and then by irrigation
bitches.
The even line of the horizon is sell
dom marred. The silence of such a
scene gnaws the glamor from the
heart. Men become harsh and hard
women grow withered and sodden u n
der its blighting power. The song of
wood birds is not heard; wen the
mournfu! plant of the meadow lark
loses its sentiment, where the dreary
clanking drOne of the windmill is the
one song which really brings good It'd
ings with it. Long and fiercely sounds
this unrhythmical monody in the
night, when the traveller lies down to
rest in the little sun-burned, pine
board town. The gaunt arms of the
wheel htIrl its imprecations at him as
he rises 10 resume his journey into the
silence, under the great gray dome.
with its canopy pegged tightly down
about him everywhere.
Crops are as bountiful in Kansas as
elsewhere on the globe. 1t is the con-
slant cry for aid, coming from this
plateau-only a small part of the state
which reaches the worlds ears, and
the world blames Kansas. The fair
springs On these highlands lure home
seekers to heir ruin.
Hundreds of men and women have
been tempted to death or worse, by
this Lorelei of the prairies.
A young man named Burkholde1
came out to Fountain county in 1885.
He had been a well-to-do young fellow
in Illinois, was a graduate of an inland
college, a man of good judgment, OF
sense, of a w~ell-arranged mental per-
spective. In 1885 money was plentiful.
He stocked his farm, put on a mort
gage, and brought a wife back from
the home of his boyhood. She vas a
young woman of culture, who put a
bookshelf in the corner of the best of
the three rooms in the yellow pine
Shanty, in which she and her husband
lived. She brought her upright piano,
and adorned her bedroom floor with
bright rugs. She bought magazines at
the post Office Book Store of the
prairie town, She was not respondent.
The vast stretches of green cheered
her through the hot summer. There
was a novel fascination in the wide,
treeleSs horizon which charmed her for
q while. At first she never tired of
glancing up from her work, through the
south window of the kitchen, to see the
level green stretches, and the road that
merged into the distance. She sat in
the shade of the house, and wrote
home cheerful, rollicking letters. AS
for roughing it, she enjoyed it thor
oughly.
The crops did not quite pay the ex-
penses of the year; so Thomas Burk-
holder and Lizzie his wife" put an
other mortgage on the farm. The
books and magazines from home still
adorned the best room. And all
through the winter and spring the pre-
vailing spirits of the community
buoyed up the young people. 1t was
during the summer of 1887 that the
first hot winds came. They blighted
everything. The kaftir corn, the grass,
the d%ust-laden weeds by the wayside
curled up under their fiery breath from
the southwestern desert. Mrs. Burk-
holder stayed indoors. The dust spread
itself over everything. 1t came into
The house like a flood, pouring through
he loose window frames and weather
boarding. Mrs. Burkholder, looking out
Of her window on these days, could see