Year: 1876

in addition that Scotland, which has II
harshcr and fully as rainy and disagree.
bic climate as Puget Sound, without
our delightful summers, is IN exceedingly
healthy country, and has produced race
OF statesmen, philosophers, orators, he
roes, and poets standing head and shoul-
dcls above their fellows, moral and in
tcllectual giants, more numerous in
proportion To her population than any
other land, we are driven to the concIu-
sion that the natives of Washington
Territory are destined some day to hold
"a proud physical, intellectual and rellg-
ious pre- emiminence among mankind.
of course this prediction is based upon
the belief that proper efforts to secure
these ends shall be put forth by all our
citizens, in the way Of faithful observance
of the laws OF health and the proper cd
ucation OF body, brain and sonl.


We may very properly congratulate our
selves at such time as the present, and
amid such surroundings as those which
have called US together, Wpom tile JeHitity
Of our soil. say this with Il full under
standing of the fact that our Territory.
especially those portions of it which bor-
der upon Puget Sound contains much
light and sandy soil; but the rains which
fall so plcntifully during one half of the
year and at intervals during the other
half, make even our lightest soils pro-
ductivc. There is no valid reason why a
bundant crops should not be raised upon
many sandy and grayelly prairies that
are now considered worthless, save as
sheep and cattle pastures, Glover and
rye will grow upon them all and by
ploughing down the crop for n year or
two in succession n good and lasting
coat of manure can he secured. | have
made this subject study, for | grew
up on my fathers farm and he was II
practical farmer who titled the soil on
scientific principles by a skilltul rotation
of crops and regular application of
needful fertilizers. | have seen him take
soil that was naturally AS poor as any in
Washington Territory and make it rich
and productive as garden.


If you visit England or Scotland, or
even some of the older states of this Tn
ion, you can see thousands Of acres now
considered the most fertile and valuable
soil, which have been reclaimed from
ages OF poverty and waste by means of
proper scientific farming. But some men
have an idea that they can keep on crop
ping, cropping, cropping at iqfnitnm
without giving back any substance to ro-
place that of which they thus systematic
ally rob the soil, and when the returns
grow smaller by degrees and not very
beautifully less they begin to abuse the
soil for being light and worthless
Why Darwin would expect South
American monkey and would expect q
wild Sioux Indian to know better than
those fully developed and civilized
American farmers falsely so called) who
act in that kind of way. Such farming
is disgrace to any country or ruinous
to any land, no matter how fertile nat
urally. Yet you may visit the fertile
prairies of the Mississippi valley and see
thousands of farms once as rich as the
Garden of Eden, reduced to such pov-
erty by this wholesale robbing of their
essential elements that they now barely
furnish living TOR their owners. l can
take you to prairies in the neighborhood
of the Puget Sound Short time as the
country has been settled) which once
yielded crops of wheat equal to.the aver
age return of Indiana and Illinois, and
superior to that of my own old home.
p. E. Island the settlers of which kept
on cropping without manuring, until
they were compelled to abandon their
fields for want Of enough to eat. And
now these once pleasant farms are trans
formed into sheep and cattle pastures.
So much for the so called worthless soil
of our own Territory. Every acre of it,
with but few exceptions, may by proper
treatment be made as rich as garden.
And the time will come when it will all
be cultivated on the proper scientific
principles, for which our warm, moist
winters furnish peculiar facilities.


But there are thousands of square
miles of most fertile soil along our creek