The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette., September 10, 1910, YOUNG FOLKS' SPECIAL., Page 629, Image 9

About The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette. (Starkville, Miss.) 1910-1920

Image provided by: Mississippi Department of Archives and History

                
I
!
IT IS SOMETIMES hard to realize that the
world is really round, even long years after
the statement in our first geography lesson is
reluctantly accepted as being somehow true. So
it was In New York the other day when I paid
'I homas Cook & Son $90.~>.6S for a steamship and
railroad ticket around the world, and they gave
me first a ticket reading from New York to San
Francisco, and then an order on the Pacific Mail
Steamship Company for a ticket “from San Fran
cisco to New- York.”
"What do I want with a ticket from San Fran
cisco to New York again?" I demanded And then
I looked at it more closely and discovered that it
was a ticket from San Francisco to New York in
deed, but by way of Honolulu, Yokohoma. Shan
ghai, Manila, Calcutta. Bombay, Joppa. Cairo, and
various other unspeakable places, while I have
additional orders for railroad tickets for travel
ing through the interiors of Japan, China, the
Philippines, India, Palestine, Egypt, etc., etc.
CROSSING “THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT.”
So 1 am really off for my long trip "ovor the
world and under the world" and I write this on
board tho Union Pacific's magnificent "Overland
Limited" making the trip from Chicago to San
Francisco in threo days. This morning we are
crossing the dreary wastes of Wyoming's great
deserts, as we have been doing for hours and
hours -in fact, ever since bedtime last night:
county after county with never a farm nor a farm
house, never a tree nor an acre of decent pastur
age: only the gray-green sage brush half burled in
sand as far as tho eye can reach, and never a hu
man habitation except at the far-scattered way
side mining stations. The last one of these at
which we stopped seemed to be a town of perhaps
two thousand people, but 1 didn’t see a home with
a tree or a sprig of grass to relieve the dry bar
renness, though one house did have a cluster of
morning glories, and beBide the depot was a well
untiTa.il iilnt iif L’rnnn urnsw which rmint Iihva tinnn
an object of curiosity to the children of the
place.
Against the horlKou on either hand as I write
this are great bluish-pink sun-parched clod ridges,
bare to the pitiless sun in summer, the heavy
snows in winter. It looks indeed like “The Coun
try God Forgot”: at places us if primeval Titans
had ripped open the earth with colossal harrows,
cursing it with barrenness: at other places as if
the elder gods had battled here and hurling peak
upon peak had left the great masses of earth and
rock In matchless confusion.
NOTES FROM THE CORN BELT.
Yesterday morning at this time we were indeed
in unite a different country from this: out in the
ever rich and fruitful prairie belt of eastern Ne
braska where mile after mile of corn some times
gnve the impression that we were actually going
through a sea of corn and the farm houses only
the sailing-craft anchored here and there upon this
ocean of green blades with a foam of golden tas
PI IO> t'tl »» Mltlll III III ItliU MV III V ; VIII w wpv
hud actually aeon corn used as fuel.) In most
cases now, however, corn alternates with hay and
pasture llelds, say 50 acres of corn, 50 of alfalfa.
50 of pasture grass, 60 of wheat, and In the pas
tures beautiful herds of sleek Shorthorn, Red
Poll, or other cattle, with hogs and sheep In un
limited numbers, and young colts somewhere
about the big red barn or the ever-present wind
mill. Somehow no farm landscape ever seems
completo without stock: I must think that there
is bred In us some sub-conscious knowledge that
the soil, the plant, the animal, do indeed consti
tute the Almighty’s trinity for keeping the earth
fertllo, and that no land can permanently prosper
where this Divine plan Is disregarded.
Another thing a Southerner can not fall to no
tice In the corn-cattle-hay belt is the size of the
Helds: no little piddling patches where the plow
man must wasto countless hours in fruitless turn
ing round and where the ragged edges of weedf
and sprouts make these farm patches give about
the same Impression of poverty as similar ragget
•The*® letter* are pertly protected by copyright, but we shell b
glad to have editor* reprint not more than one-third or any on
article. Thu is No. 1 of the aerie*.
patches on one’s clothes. These Nebraska fields
are large and the furrows sometimes half a mile
long.
ONLY ONE TWO-HORSE PLOW.
The farmers are breaking land for wheat-sow
ing now, and as I have been so persistently urging
the use of more two- and three-horse plows to
take the place of one-horse affairs in the South, I
was interested yesterday in finding out what kind
of plows the progressive, prosperous Nebraska
farmers use. And I have to confess that though
I traveled several hundred miles and saw many
hundred acres of newly-broken earth, I saw only
one two-horse plow all day long.
"What then,” you ask, "do these enterprising
western rarmers you have been telling us about
—do they break land with one-horse plows?”
Certainly not; I said that I saw only one two
horse plow yesterday, because all the others that
1 saw were three- or four-horse plows, the farm
er riding while the broad, black furrows opened
swiftly behind his big, sleek, quick-stepping
horseB. For a one-horse plow or a one-horse wag
on, I looked in vain all day, and the solitary two
horse plow that I was able to distinguish clearly
(there may have been one or two others in the
distance that I couldn’t make out), was in use in
plowing a garden! And I do wish our Southern
farmers could think enough of their brain, their
labor, and their time not to fritter it away on out
of-date implements and one-horse equipment. A
Westerner I talked with last night had the Idea
that our Southern farmers are indolent, whereas I
believe they do much more sheer, exhausting phy
sical labor than the Western farmer: the Western
er makes horses and machinery do more of the
work instead of his muscles. With their three
and four-horse plows and their two-row cultiva
tors they tell me that a farmer here will culti
vate 100 acres in corn, the big job being to husk
it ‘‘before snow flies.” Husking Is done in the
field, the ears thrown into a wagon, and the stalks
left for the cattle to graze.
A DREAM THAT FAILED.
After a few hours’ travel we leave the rich corn
belt of eastern Nebraska behind us and come to
the section where the main dependence is in alfalfa
— God’s greatest gift to Western agriculture—and
other grasses and hays for cattle feeding, and
further on we reach the drier plains broken by
beautifully rounded hills. One of these sentinel
hills, with its wide outlook over the grassy prairie
yesterday brought to mind an almost-forgotten
story of an Indian buffalo-hunt in old Holmes’s
Third Header, and I almost fancied that I should
see on its crest a blanketed Indian waving the
signal that buffalo had been sighted and hear the
war-cry of on-rushing braves eager for the chase—
and just then our engine turned a corner and
there was indeed a break on the landscape, but it
was not the Indian of history and romance, but a
twentieth century American girl in a twentieth
century American autombile! Of course, a twen
tieth century American girl is worth a whole tribe
of red men, but I confess I should rather have seen
the Indian just then! But the day of his free
dom and of his wild hunting races across the
nnfnnuntari nlnins has pnno as irr«tr1pvahlv as tho
days of the Iliad and the Odyssey!
BUT THE WEST IS STILL UNTAMED.
Let not the reader suppose, however, that the
West has become efTete merely because the auto
mobile has taken the place of the buffalo. The
mettlesome Western horses and their picturesque
ly attired riders are still in evidence from the
cars; wre frequently pass the old-time covered
wagons; Mexicans and Chinamen give variety to
the human species; we have but recently passed
near Buffalo Bill's ranch at North Platte, and
there is a sign at the depot where I stopped a little
while back offering a reward of $2,500 each for
three desperadoes who less than two months ago
robbed a mail train at one of the stations on
our route. The disregard of Sunday by carpen
ters, draymen, merchants, and others, is another
evidence of primitive conditions, and a little later
, we shall pass Reno which had succeeded to South
1 (Continued on page 633.)
“What’s The News?” |
IN THE NEWSPAPERS Mr. Roosevelt con
tinues to hold the most imminent place. In
his Western speeches he has allied himself
thoroughly with the insurgents, or the “progres
sives,” as he prefers to call them. Mr. Bryan’s
speeches were never more radical than those with
which he has enthused Kansas and Nebraska. In
them he has attacked the decisions of the Supreme
Court, favored an income and an inheritance tax,
publicity of campaign contributions before elec
tion, and other measures which the Republican
Party was vigorously condemning when Mr.
Roosevelt was President. At Kansas City and
again in Nebraska he was cheered as the next
President; when asked about this matter, his com
ment was: “That is a matter I can not discuss
new. ’
» • •
The death of William James, for many years
Professor of Psychology at Harvard University,
removes one of the really great men of our time.
“He made science as interesting as a novel,” was
a comment on his writings, and their influence on
thinking men and women all over the country is
not easily over-estimated. It is not too much to
say that he was our foremost scientist; and with
it a great writer and a man of unusual breadth
of vision and wonderful depth of insight. He is
likely to be remembered when most of the names
that now fill the newspapers are forgotten.
• • •
It is now announced that the germ of leprosy
has been isolated and grown in cultures. This
means that it will be possible to prepare a serum
—like the anti-toxin used against diphtheria—and
control the disease. That this scourge of the race
that has gone on unchecked through the centuries
should at last be mastered, is one of the great
triumphs of modern science.
• • •
Returns from the South Carolina primary In
dicate that the second race for Governor will be
between C. C. Featherstone, prohibitionist, and
S. L. Blease, local optlonist. C. A. Smith is nomi
nated for Lieutenant-Governor, and J. F. Lyon for
Attorney-General. All the present Congressmen
will probably be re-nominated.
• • •
Over in Spain,—and to a less degree in Por
tugal,—the old war between Church and State
goes on. Premier Canalejas has brought forward
a bill placing other churches on practically the
same footing as the Roman Catholic, and the
Clericals are fighting it furiously. The outcome
is yet uncertain.
• • •
The Department of Agriculture, estimates that
the average condition of the cotton crop on Au
gust 25, was 72.1 per cent of a normal, as com
pared with 75.5 on August 25, 1909, and 73.1
the average of the past ten years on August 25.
• • •
The population of New York City is now 4,766,
883, an increase of 38.7 per cent; on the other
hand, it is reported that the State of Vermont has J|
actually decreased in population in the last de-^B
cade. M
In the Republican campaign Handbook Presi- ™
dent Taft again defends the Payne-Aldrich Tariff
Bill, but also emphasizes the necessity of a tariff
commission and more scientific methods of tariff
making.
• • •
Governor Sanders, of Louisiana, has declined
to serve as United States Senator, preferring to
hold his present office till the end of bis term
and then become a candidate for the Senate. As
Senator he has appointed Judge J. R. Thornton.
• • •
Cholera is killing thousands of people in Rus
sia. It Is also prevalent in southern Italy, and
sporadic cases are reported in Germany.
• • •
A ha^d fight is being waged by Wisconsin
“stand-patters” against Senator Lafollette, but
there seems little likelihood of his defeat.
• • •
President Taft has appointed Dr. J. A. Holmes,
formerly State Geologist of North Carolina, Direc
tor of the Bureau of Mines.
* * *
Another native rebellion is reported in the
Philippines.