Miscellaneous Documents

all the States lying south of them are peculiarly adapted to the.cultivation of corn.

HOG STATISTICS FOR THE YEARS 1870 AND 1871.

In 1870 those twelve States raised 15,468,453 hogs, while all the rest of the Union, including the Pacific States, raised only 13,987,048 hogs. In 1871 those States raised 19,250,686 hogs; all other portions of the country, 15,387,996 hogs. The same remarks apply to this branch of industry as to the corn crop. With this additional fact, that the hogs raised in those States average about 300 pounds each, while those raised in other States do not average over 200 pounds each. This discrepancy arises partly from the greater abundance of corn and other suitable food, and partly from the larger and superior breeds raised. Thus, those twelve States, in fact, raise about three-fourths of all the pork, bacon, and lard of the whole country.

CATTLE STATISTICS.

In 1870 those States raised 10,679,697 cattle; all other portions of the country, including the Pacific States, raised 16,555,503. The weight of beef, however, is in about the same proportion, owing unmistakably to the same causes, to wit, more abundant food and better breeds. In 1871 these States had 11,745,668 cattle; all other portions of the country about 17,111,056. They had in these two years about 4,696,700 milch-cows; all other portions of the Union, 5,326,300; only three of which are particularly devoted to this branch of industry, to wit, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan.

SHEEP STATISTICS.

In 1870 those States had 29,036,281 sheep; all the rest of the Union 11,816,719. In 1871 they had 31,441,736; all the balance of the country about 12,998,390. Allowing one and a half pounds of wool to the head, and those States raised, in 1871, 47,162,604 pounds of wool; all other portions of the country produced 19,497,585 pounds.

But it is not necessary to pursue these comparisons any further. We can, upon the authority of these statistics, which we affirm are entirely reliable, assume, without the fear of successful contradiction, that those twelve States produce more than two-thirds of all the agricultural staples of the whole country; and that all the surplus, to supply the markets of our own country, as also of Europe, comes almost exclusively from those States, while not one of them is more than one-fourth developed, and more than half not one-tenth. This state of facts will always remain. The country lying west of the lakes, and north of the thirtyeighth parallel of north latitude, will always, in all time, continue to be the food-producing portions of the continent. No revolutions of trade or commerce, or increased facilities for transportation in other portions of the country, or of any other land, will ever rival much less supersede this, in its peculiar agricultural resources. These resources are being developed, in a most unprecedented degree, by the rapid extension of railroads through all portions of the country. To get a more correct estimate of the necessity of this work, we should look a few years ahead, and ascertain what the productions of the country, and especially those States, will be a few years hence; for instance, in 1880, allowing an annual increase of 10 per cent., which is a very moderate estimate, and the account will stand thus: Wheat, 512,512,597 bushels; corn, H. Mis. 22-2

2,572,951,383 bushels; hogs, 41,928,595 head; cattle, 25,153,678 head; sheep, 67,398,146 head; wool, 101,097,219 pounds. The foregoing will be the probable products of the five great agricultural staples of those twelve States in 1880. But. with the present products of those States, the present means and facilities of transportation to the eastern markets are so meager, and the charges so high, that they are of very little value to the producer.

The following notice appeared in the Des Moines (Iowa) Daily Register of 10th November last, and other Iowa papers, to wit:

The proprietors of the Ogden House, in Council Bluffs, are using corn as a common article of fuel in all the rooms of their extensive establishment, finding it altogether cheaper and more economical than either wood or coal, although the price of neither is extravagant-indeed, is very moderate.

And this other item appeared about the same time in a paper published in the Missouri Valley, in Iowa:

We are informed, which is no doubt correct, that the farmers in all the prairie country of this valley are burning their corn for fuel, finding it altogether cheaper and more economical than wood or coal, although the latter, of excellent quality, can be obtained at any of the railroad-stations at from $3 to $3.50 per ton; and wood will not exceed $4 per cord, We may well ask, what are we all coming to? Are we never to have any relief from this state of affairs? Corn in New York City is at least 85 cents a bushel, and here our people are burning it to keep themselves from freezing. Other agricultural products are nearly as worthless. It will take three bushels of wheat and three fat hogs to get the fourth to market. There is a grievous wrong somewhere. Is it in Congress? We should be reluctant to believe so.

In all other parts of the Mississippi Valley the same state of affairs exists. Even in Michigan, within one hundred miles of Detroit, corn is also almost worthless.

General Hersey, of Portland, Maine, stated in the Detroit commercial convention of December 13, 1871, about one year ago:

The farmers of the West are burning their corn for fuel, while we, in the East, are famishing for the want of it.

COUNTRY LYING WEST OF THOSE STATES.

But the necessity for increased facilities of transportation will be still more apparent when we take into consideration the fact that there is a country west of those States, equally fertile and productive, now being rapidly developed by the extension through it of the Northern Pacific and other railroads, of more than three times their aggregate area. The country being developed by the Northern Pacific Railroad alone (including the north half of Minnesota and Dakota, and the British possessions) embraces an area of more than one million square miles. The sun does not shine upon a more beautiful or a more productive country. Although lying, upon an average, more than five hundred miles farther north, it still has the climate of Philadelphia. This extraordinary physical phenomenon exists from the fact that "the Northeast trade-winds,” which, sweeping up from the tropics of the Central Pacific Ocean, come through the immense gorge (or plain, rather) of the Rocky Mountains, caused by the interlocking of the head-waters of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers, (thereby breaking down that rocky barrier,) and overspread that whole region of country, as far north as Hudson's Bay; imparting to it the soft and genial climate of the Pacific coast. This is the true and correct explanation of the sudden "trending" north of the isothermal lines, from the head of Lake Superior, as delineated upon all isothermal maps of the present day. The unbroken ranges of the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains cut off those genial trade-winds from all portions

of "the great valley," lying farther south. Having to encounter altitudes of almost perpetual snow and ice, those winds often, especially during the winter, come sweeping down in chilling blasts upon all the central and southern portions of that valley.

In Texas-indeed, in the whole Gulf region-they are called "the northers," in winter the terror and dread alike of men and animals.

The following extract, taken from the report of Mr. Engineer Johnson, of the North Pacific Railroad, gives a better description of the region traversed by that road than anything we can produce from any other

source:

MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT, February 18, 1868.

I am convinced that, before another generation has passed, very great changes will take place in the belt of country to be traversed by the Northern Pacific Railroad. A field is opening there for enterprise, the magnitude of which cannot be easily estimated. It will not be confined merely to the belt of country between the Lakes and the Pacific, but include the broad Pacific itself, and the densely peopled portions of Eastern Asia, bringing half the globe, where labor rules the lowest, into direct and profitable communication with our great centers of commerce. I entertain no doubt of the capability of this region to sustain a large population. I have recently been looking over the statistics of France, and find a great similarity between the two. The annual rain-fall thronghont France is 21 inches, less than the average between Lake Superior and the Pacific. One-seventh of the surface of France is set down as waste and worthless, a larger proportion, I think, than can be found on this line. In coal and other valuable minerals this line has greatly the advantage. The proportion of cultivable land is doubtless in favor of France. If half as densely populated as France, there is room for more than fifty million souls on this Lake and Pacific belt.

The above-described area does not include the valleys of the Upper Missouri and its principal tributaries, now an almost unknown and unbroken wilderness. A gentleman residing at Helena, Montana Territory, who is a native of Iowa, and well acquainted with all portions of the Mississippi Valley, lately stated to Colonel L. A. Thomas, one of the committee, that in his estimation the valley of the Gallatin River (one of the principal tributaries of the Missouri above the falls) is the very garden of the continent; and that the valleys of many other of its tributaries are very nearly, if not quite, equal to it. This region is attracting considerable attention, and emigration to it, in consequence of its great fertility of soil and geniality of climate. The lower valley (to the first rapids) is more than sixty miles long and thirty wide, nearly every quarter-section of which is susceptible of cultivation. Montana alone can, and when developed by the extension of railroads through it will, produce annually more than one hundred million bushels of wheat. This, however, never can be done with the present means and facilities of transportation from the lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, because the cost of transit thither will consume the whole crop. If we turn our eyes still farther to the Northwest, the same expanse of unbroken wheat-fields stretch away toward the mountains and the setting sun. The Saskatchewan River has a navigation, for large steamers, of more than one thousand miles, with a fertile valley more than fifty miles wide in nearly its whole length. But its fertile acres are worthless, because their wheatcrops, when raised, would be worthless. Their cost of transportation to a market would be greater than the price they would command in those markets.

There is one fact, not often, if ever, referred to by writers or others, which will make the Rocky Mountain region-indeed, all those vast plains lying west of the Missouri, including Western Texas, the Indian country, Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota, in the United States, and Manitoba, in the British possessions-the best, most permanent, as well as most productive, wheat-producing portion of the entire continent,

and that is its mineral gases and salts disseminated through the soil. That whole region is volcanic, and has in abundance (in some places in superabundance) the mineral salts, as sulphur, alkali, ammonia, and other minerals, which constitute the food for all kinds of plants and cereals, especially wheat. On those plains that alkali strata is a volcanic drift of hard, ash-colored, stiff clay, intermixed with rock and coarse gravel, forming a layer from ten to seventy-five feet in thickness, the average being, probably, thirty feet. Above this is a deposit of black mold, of from one to three feet in thickness, intermixed with about 15 per cent. of white sand. When the surface is broken this alkaline and other minerals crystallize in a white powder all over the surface, and especially in the ditches, along the railroads, looking like a deep layer or fall of snow. Beneath this alkaline strata is a layer of coarse gravel, several feet thick, in which is found pure, soft water, of the very best quality. The same alkaline and other mineral salts is found in all volcanic countries, as in the Andes, in South America. Chili is one of the best and most productive wheat countries in the world. So of the regions around Mounts Etna and Vesuvius; for more than three thousand years they have been the grain-fields of Western Europe. The same is true of all other volcanic regions. Hence, when wheat-culture is driven out of the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers, it will flourish in the Missouri Valley, on the western plains beyond, and up among the mountains, indeed everywhere, where is found this "alkaline drift." Fifty years hence that region will constitute the wheat-fields of the contineutindeed, of the world; and a thousand years hence they will be as good as new, because those mineral salts will be as abundant as now. Then "subsoiling" may, perhaps, be a good thing, and probably not before. Experiments in beet culture for several years past in California, Nevada, Montana, and other sections of the Rocky Mountain region, clearly demonstrate that those alkaline plains are better adapted to the sugarbeet than any other portion of the continent, and probably of the world. For that culture there cannot well be a superabundance of alkali.

But perhaps we can get a more definite, and, at the same time, a more comprehensive idea of the almost boundless extent of the country drained by, or tributary to, the great chain of lakes lying along our northern frontier, if we carefully examine the following tables relating thereto. It will be observed that those lakes have an aggregate coastline of 4,281 miles, very nearly equal to the entire sea-coast line of the whole country, and nearly one-half the sea-coast line of the whole North American continent within the line of the temperate or inhabitable regions. If to this we add the aggregate coast-line of the lake region, including that of Hudson's Bay in Manitoba, it will give a coast-line of the lake region of the North American continent of more than ten thousand miles. All these lakes, except, perhaps, Hudson's Bay, lie within the wheat-growing districts of the continent. And all that boundless wheat-region is necessarily tributary to the proposed waterroute down the lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.