COLORADO.
When you have once set eyes upon the never-ending sweep of the Great
Plains, you no longer wonder that America rejects Malthusianism. As
Strachey says of Virginia, “Here is ground enough to satisfy the most
covetous and wide affection.” The freedom of these grand countries was
worth the tremendous conflict in which it was, in reality, the foremost
question; their future is of enormous moment to America.
Travelers soon learn, when making estimates of a country‘s value, to
despise no feature of the landscape; that of the plains is full of life,
full of charm--lonely, indeed, but never wearisome. Now great rolling
uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains; there is all the
grandeur of monotony, and yet continual change. Sometimes the grand
distances are broken by blue buttes or rugged bluffs. Over all there is
a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze; the air is bracing even
when most hot; the sky is cloudless, and no rain falls. A solitude which
no words can paint, and the boundless prairie swell, convey an idea of
vastness which is the overpowering feature of the plains.
Maps do not remove the impression produced by views. The Arkansas River,
which is born and dies within the limit of the plains, is two thousand
miles in length, and is navigable for eight hundred miles. The Platte
and Yellowstone are each of them as long. Into the plains and plateau
you could put all India twice. The impression is not merely one of size.
There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe; no
patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveler wishing here to
end his days.
To those who love the sea, there is a double charm. Not only is the roll
of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the crispness of
the wind, the absence of trees, the multitude of tiny blooms upon the
sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the ocean, the effect
of which is we are always expecting to hail it from off the top of the
next hillock.
The resemblance to the Tartar plains has been remarked by Coloradan
writers; it may be traced much farther than they have carried it. Not
only are the earth, air, and water much alike, but in Colorado, as in
Bokhara, there are oil wells and mud volcanoes. The color of the
landscape is, in summer, green and flowers; in fall-time, yellow and
flowers, but flowers ever.
The eastern and western portions of the plains are not alike. In Kansas
the grass is tall and rank; the ravines are filled with cottonwood,
hickory, and black walnut; here and there are square miles of
sunflowers, from seven to nine feet high. As we came west, we found that
the sunflowers dwindled, and at Denver they are only from three to nine
inches in height, the oddest little plants in nature, but thorough
sunflowers for all their smallness. We found the buffalo in the eastern
plains in the long bunch-grass, but in the winter they work to the west
in search of the sweet and juicy “blue grass,” which they rub out from
under the snow in the Coloradan plains. This grass is crisp as hair, and
so short that, as the story goes, you must lather before you can mow it.
The “blue grass” has high vitality: if a wagon train is camped for a
single night among the sunflowers or tall weeds, this crisp turf at once
springs up, and holds the ground forever.
The most astounding feature of these plains is their capacity to receive
millions, and, swallowing them up, to wait open-mouthed for more. Vast
and silent, fertile yet waste, fieldlike yet untilled, they have room
for the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, for all the teeming multitudes
that have poured and can pour from the plains of Asia and of Central
Europe. Twice as large as Hindostan, more temperate, more habitable,
nature has been placed here hedgeless, gateless, free to all--a green
field for the support of half the human race, unclaimed, untouched,
awaiting smiling, hands and plow.
There are two curses upon this land. Here, as in India, the rivers
depend on the melting of distant snows for their supplies, and in the
hot weather are represented by beds of parched white sand. So hot and
dry is a great portion of the land, that crops require irrigation. Water
for drinking purposes is scarce; artesian bores succeed, but they are
somewhat costly for the Coloradan purse, and the supply from common
wells is brackish. This, perhaps, may in part account for the Western
mode of “prospecting” after water, under which it is agreed that if none
be found at ten feet, a trial shall be made at a fresh spot. The
thriftless ranchman had sooner find bad water at nine feet than good at
eleven.
Irrigation by means of dams and reservoirs, such as those we are
building in Victoria, is but a question of cost and time. The
never-failing breezes of the plains may be utilized for water-raising,
and with water all is possible. Even in the mountain plateau, overspread
as it is with soda, it has been found, as it has been by French farmers
in Algeria, that, under irrigation, the more alkali the better corn
crop.
When fires are held in check by special enactments, such as those which
have been passed in Victoria and South Australia, and the waters of the
winter streams retained for summer use by tanks and dams; when artesian
wells are frequent and irrigation general, belts of timber will become
possible upon the plains. Once planted, these will in their turn
mitigate the extremes of climate, and keep alike in check the forces of
evaporation, sun, and wind. Cultivation itself brings rain, and steam
will soon be available for pumping water out of wells, for there is a
great natural store of brown coal and of oil-bearing shale near Denver,
so that all would be well were it not for the locusts--the scourge of
the plains--the second curse. The coming of the chirping hordes is a
real calamity in these far-western countries. Their departure, whenever
it occurs, is officially announced by the governor of the State.
I have seen a field of indian-corn stripped bare of every leaf and cob
by the crickets; but the owner told me that he found consolation in the
fact that they ate up the weeds as well. For the locusts there is no
cure. The plovers may eat a few billions, but, as a rule, Coloradans
must learn to expect that the locusts will increase with the increase of
the crops on which they feed. The more corn, the more locusts--the more
plovers, perhaps; a clear gain to the locusts and plovers, but a dead
loss to the farmers and ranchmen.
The Coloradan “boys” are a handsome, intelligent race. The mixture of
Celtic and Saxon blood has here produced a generous and noble manhood;
and the freedom from wood, and consequent exposure to wind and sun, has
exterminated ague, and driven away the hatchet-face; but for all this,
the Coloradans may have to succumb to the locusts. At present they
affect to despise them. “How may you get on in Colorado?” said a
Missourian one day to a “boy” that was up at St. Louis. “Purty well,
guess, if it warn‘t for the insects.” “What insects? Crickets?”
“Crickets! Wall, guess not--jess insects like: rattlesnakes, panther,
bar, catamount, and sichlike.”
“The march of empire stopped by a grasshopper” would be a good heading
for a Denver paper, but would not represent a fact. The locusts may
alter the step, but not cause a halt. If corn is impossible, cattle are
not; already thousands are pastured round Denver on the natural grass.
For horses, for merino sheep, these rolling table-lands are peculiarly
adapted. The New Zealand paddock system may be applied to the whole of
this vast region--Dutch clover, French lucern, could replace the Indian
grasses, and four sheep to the acre would seem no extravagant estimate
of the carrying capability of the lands. The world must come here for
its tallow, its wool, its hides, its food.
In this seemingly happy conclusion there lurks a danger. Flocks and
herds are the main props of great farming, the natural supporters of an
aristocracy. Cattle breeding is inconsistent, if not with republicanism,
at least with pure democracy. There are dangerous classes of two
kinds--those who have too many acres, as well as those who have too few.
The danger at least is real. Nothing short of violence or special
legislation can prevent the plains from continuing to be forever that
which under nature‘s farming they have ever been--the feeding ground for
mighty flocks, the cattle pasture of the world.