396 a n yd ae il i t Ny aah *) & ; ny 1 : ny ea Pah ; Rh ‘eee . Je ee fo aera Mr. GREELEY'S LETTERS FROM TEXAS AND THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI: TO WHICH ARE ADDED HIS Address to the SHarmers of eras, AND HIS SPEECH ON HIS RETURN TO NEW YORK, JUNE 12, 1871. NEW YORK: TRIBUNE OFFICE. 1871. THE LESSON OF OUR CIVIL WAR. Tke New Orleans Price Current—a journal of the intensest Southern pro- clivities—discusses the visit of Mr. Greeley to the South as follows: ‘“ The industrial doctrines professed by Mr. Greeley have subjugated the South. Not because he professed them—they were planted before his day. They originated with the great De Witt Clinton, who persisted in the execu- tion of a great work of internal improvement which connected the Atlantic with the Lakes. That canal conducted population into the Indian wilder- ness. It was the pioneer of those other ways which have poured all Europe upon the North-Western territory won by the arms of the Souther colonies, and which haye naturally brought the votes and arms of that population to the aid of the cities and sections that bestowed these blessings upon them. Mr. Webster, Mr. Carey, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Greeley have been the advo- cates of the capital, commercial, and mechanical interests. It followed that when the question of inherent rights in the States was referred to the arbi- trament of the sword ; the one section was on hand with soldiers, ships, arms, food, money, and credit, while the other had courage and a just’ cause, patri- otism and endurance. Now we are far from agreeing with the school in which Mr. Greeley is an eminent professor, that : any industry is entitled to special protection at the hands of the Government; but we are satisfied that no people can ever hope to be free that exchange staple productions, worth gold and silver, for commodities which perish in the use; nor who have to send abroad for the guns that they fight with, the food "that they eat, and the very clothing that they wear. There can be no doubt but that the com- mand of immigrant numbers, capital, and mechanical skill, with the financial resources of the Government and country, was due to the school of material and industrial development at the North. They received powerful aid from the total want of preparation in these departments at the South. We have always thought that Ames & Co., the greatest manufacturers of spades, shovels, and axes in the world, did more to conquer a people who had not a manufactory of spades, axes, or shovels, than any general of the Federal army. ‘‘ Setting aside, then, the ruinous application which has been made of industrial progress by the Federalists, we have no cause of complaint against the disciples of this school. On the contrary, it is the true duty of the South to cultivate all those industries, the want of which has enslaved her. The foundation of war and conquest was laid when Washington in vain adjured the Southern people to connect the waters of the Chesapeake with the North-Western territory. Mr. Greeley happens to have been a cotemporary of the success of the system founded by Clinton, Adams, and Webster. If there be something in that system to reform or oppose, let us do so; but do not let us commit the mistake of turning our condemmation upon individuals who profess the doctrine. ‘*There is one topic upon which Mr. Greeley i is entitled to the unreserved approval of all who live by land and labor. He has been one of the most intelligent and consistent advocates of agricultural improvement. What he ‘Knows about Farming’ has become a jocular phrase; but, if he knows as much as he has printed, he possesses no despicable amount of knowledge. It is a little late in the day to sneer at book-farming, when the best minds of the world are engaged in analyzing soil and seed to lessen the labors or in- crease the profits of the farmer. The Agricultural Department of 7’he New York Tribune contains as much of scientific and practical knowledge as any other paper, and, as it has a larger circulation than most, must diffuse much of that knowledge,” " XB F INE THROUGH: THE, SOUTH: CULTIVATION BY STEAM IN LOUISIANA. [EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE. ] New Orteans, May 17.—On our way down through Mississippi, we made the acquaintance of Mr. H. E. Lawrence, a lifelong and successful sugar-planter, who, on learning my anxiety to witness Plowing by Steam (not for show, but as a business), invited us to visit the plantation of his brother, where that style of breaking up the earth is in fashion. Accordingly, a tug-boat was chartered, and some forty or fifty gentlemen, including the Congressman of the lower district, Gen. J. H. Sypher, Collector Casey, Judge Dibble, several Editors, and my traveling companions, Gen. E. A. Merritt, and Charles Storrs, Esq., devoted yesterday to Sugar-planting by Steam. Magnolia plantation lies some fifty miles below this city, having a front of two miles on the west bank of the river, with the Gulf of Mexico but five miles distant on either hand. Most of the ten-mile strip which here constitutes the County (late parish) of Plaquemine is a reedy marsh, the haunt of alligators, musketoes, &c., which a tempest in the Gulf may submerge at any time; but a fine forest of Live Oak on the rear of this plantation indicates that the surface usually dry is wider at this point than the average. The famous Levees are slight affairs so near the Gulf, where the rise and fall of the mighty stream (here a mile and a half wide) rarely exceeds three feet, and at the utmost is seven. The river-surface is now but two to three feet below that of the Levees, and has recently been two feet higher. Water leaking through the Levee is caught in the substantial ditches that everywhere traverse the plantations, and runs swiftly away till lost under the rank vegetation of the swamps or absorbed by some bayou of the adjacent Gulf. This whole region has of course been formed of the muddy sediment deposited by the Father of Waters wherever the swiftness of its current is arrested. Thus by ten thousand annual overflows, mainly in April or May, 4 LETTER FROM NEW ORLEANS. Louisiana has been projected far into the Gulf; and the process of making new land at the expense of salt water is still in progress. Though the tide rises eighteen inches at New Orleans, and is felt at Donaldsonville, seventy miles further up, the force of the current keeps the river here wholly fresh at this season, though it is some- what brackish at times when less water is passing out. ‘That the soil is rich, black, and of unfathomable depth, need not be added. Ditching or deep plowing is constantly unearthing immense cypresses which have been imbedded here for thousands of years—some of them still sound and serviceable. Mr. Effingham Lawrence, the owner of Magnolia plantation, is a scion of a well-known Long Island family, the son of a good farmer, and. himself invented a plow when but ten years old. Cultivation is not only his pursuit but his passion. He came hither while still young, and has planted since his minority. The machinery in his Sugar-House, where he refines more sugar than he makes, has cost $300,000, and little of it has been superseded by later and more perfect devices. Of his 3,000 acres, he cultivates 1,000, which is nearly all that stands well out of water. Some of the most efficient of his former slaves have left him to plant rice on small places below him, where they make $1,000 to $2,000 each per annum, being superior workers. Most of his ex-slaves chose to remain with him, and some of them are here earning $40 per month. His arable acres are divided into tracts or fields of five to ten acres each by deep ditches on the north and south, crossed by firm high roads on the east and west. These acres have been sixty or seventy years cultivated, mainly in Cane, and have received little or no fertilization, unless an annual burning the waste stalks or “trash” of the Cane to get rid of it may be called such. Negroes and mules have till recently furnished all but the brain-power employed. Mr. Lawrence was accustomed to use teams of eight mules to each plow, and was then able to pulverize but eight to ten inches in depth. Had he not been an experienced and capable plowman, con- stantly in the field and often between the plow-handles, he could not have got below six inches, even by the aid of all the persuasives known to plantation management. Of course his soil, annually drawn upon by such exhausting crops as Cane and Corn, grew gradu- ally less productive ; and he was among the earliest to realize the ne- cessity of bringing Steam to the aid of Agriculture. He had means and credit ; he thoroughly understood his business and its needs ; he CULTIVATION BY STEAM. 5 visited Europe and scrutinized the working of various Steam Plows ; and he concluded that Fowler’s machinery, whereof two powerful engines stand at each side of the field and draw the plows back and forth by winding up and unwinding wire-ropes around their respec- tive drums, was the only device adapted to this soft, heavy, easily compacted soil. He bought successively two sets of these machines, the second much heavier and more powerful than the first ; and he is now using thirty-horse engines, supplied on his resolute demand, though none so powerful had ever been constructed for plowing till he ordered them. When the Fowlers have done their best for him, he takes the machines into his own shops and directs such modifica- tions as his own experience has suggested. He is confident that we shall soon require sixty-horse engines, and that by their aid dry prairie may be plowed two feet deep at the rate of at least fifty acres per day. Though the season has been persistently cool and rainy, so that everything is backward, and the soil was too wet to be plowed to advantage, yet we found, on our unannounced arrival, both sets of plowing machinery in full operation, with none but negro field-hands near them, though an overseer rode from field to field supervising their efforts. Boys of 12 to 14 years, who could not hold a breaking- up mule-plow, were running engines as learners, at wages of seventy- five cents each per day. The ground was cane-stubble, heavily ridged or hilled to counteract excess of moisture, with the “ trash” of last year’s crop lying between the rows and constantly clogging and chok- ing the plows, often requiring the machinery to be stopped in order to clear them. The suksoil—never disturbed till now—is a glu- tinous clay loam, compacted by sixty years’ treading of heavy mule teams, so wet that it came up unbroken, as if it were glue, and about as easy to pulverize as so much sole-leather. So obstinate is it that Mr. Lawrence had reduced each gang of plows to two, lest his engines should be stalled or his wire-ropes broken. These two each cut a furrow sixteen inches wide and fully two feet in aver- age depth: had the surface been level, they would have averaged twenty-six inches. They were drawn across the field (576 feet) faster than most men would like to walk. Three men were required to keep them in place, and clear them of the choking “ trash,” which J would have burned out of their way, though I, had I been planter, would have preferred to have it buried as they buried it. Against __ all these impediments, each set of machinery was plowing from five -¥ 6 LETTER FROM NEW ORLEANS. to six acres per day—plowing them two feet deep, remember, and thus relieving them of the generally superabundant moisture as shal- low plowing, or even ordinary sub-soiling, never did and never can. Mr. Lawrence, upon land thus plowed, makes an average of 2,000 pounds per acre of sugar where he formerly made but 800 pounds. And he regards himself as yet on the threshold of Steam Cultiva- tion. And even this was not the best he had to show us. In other fields, perhaps half a mile distant, other machines were cultivating Cane by Steam. I believe the like of this has not yet been done elsewhere on earth. The rows of Cane are fully seven feet apart ; the plants now fully a foot in average height. A locomotive engine stands at either end of the field, moving forward or backward at a touch of the hand of the negro boy standing upon it and looking out for signals. The cultivator is composed of five or six ordinary horse cultivators, enlarged and fixed in a frame, whereof the half that has just stirred the earth to a depth of two and a width of five feet is lifted clear of the ground on reaching the engine which draws it, while its counterpart is brought down to its work by the plow- guider stepping upon it. Ata signal, the boy at the other end of the field or “ land” starts his engine, and begins to wind up his wire- rope and uncoil or pay out that of the drum beneath the opposite engine, pulling the cultivators through the earth as they are guided nearer the row that they were kept further from as they passed in the opposite direction. Having thus thoroughly pulverized the space between two rows, by traversing it twice, the engines move for- ward to the next space and there repeat the operation; and so on till nightfall. Mr. Lawrence assured me that one such thorough work- ing answers for the season; whereas, while tilled by mule-power, every cane-field required working six times per season at intervals of fifteen days. A set of machinery and hands tills about twelve acres per day. I judge the cost of this day’s work, including fuel and wear of machinery, ranges from $25 to $30. This is far below the cost of repeated workings by mule-power, while it is much more efficacious. The land plowed and tilled by steam is far dryer than the rest. Mr. Lawrence considers his thousand acres under tillage worth $100 per acre more than they would be but for Steam Cul- ture. He will keep his two sets of Plowing machinery at work not only throughout each day when the earth is not too sodden, but (by relays of hands) throughout each night also, when the moon serves. LOUISIANA AND HER LEVEES. i Steam tillage of growing crops, being a nicer, more critical opera- tion, will be confined to daylight. But the Autumn is here the dry season, therefore most favorable to plowing; and he realizes an immense advantage in this: Throughout the cane-cutting months of October and November, when all the mules on a plantation are overworked at hauling up cut Cane from the fields to the sugar- house, so that plowing with animals is impossible, he will have his plowing machinery constantly at work, doing him most excellent Service in preparing for next year’s crop. . Iam quite aware that this letter will not convey any clear idea either of the machinery or the processes employed in Steam Plowing and Tillage. No sensible man expects to be made acquainted with these otherwise than by personal and careful observation. If I have given any tolerable idea of the results achieved, their cost and their value, I have done all I purposed. I close, then, with an avowal of my confident belief that Mr. Effingham Lawrence has rendered an immense service to American Agriculture, especially that of the Prairie States, by demonstrating the benefits not merely of Steam Plowing but of subsequent Steam Tillage, and that the day is not remote wherein the “barrens” of Long Island and New Jersey, the rich intervales of the Connecticut and the Susquehanna, will be profitably plowed and tilled to a depth of twenty-four to thirty inches by Steam Power, and that far larger and surer crops than those of the past will therefrom be realized. H. G. THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI AND THE GULF. [EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE.] Hovston, Texas, May 20.—I presume there is no richer soil on earth than that formed by the annual overflow of its banks by the mighty Mississippi. That inundation has been checked, not precluded, by the artificial Levees, which, though locally advan- tageous, seem to me, on a broader view, mistaken. The current of the Father of Waters is, in the main, so resistless when the river is at a high stage, and is so surcharged with the richest earth, that it has only to be modified, not arrested, to induce it to com- mence a deposit of fertilizing sediment. Now, if its banks were so adjusted that it would at once overflow them along its whole course, from Cairo to the Balize, it could never rise six inches above them, § SOIL AND PRODUCTS OF LOUISIANA. and its inundations, no longer devastating, would still further enrich, and gradually though slowly elevate the adjacent region. I dis- trust the permanent efficacy of any artificial Levees. It is not prac- ticable to pile both banks of a great river for a full thousand miles; yet, without piling, nothing will surely prevent the undermining of the highest and firmest Levees, so that they will crumble into the current and be swept away, causing crevasses which human power is inadequate to close till the river falls. I predict, therefore, that leveeing will fail to keep the Mississippi within its banks; and, while I do not suggest any alternative, I submit that it were better to bear existing evils than to seek their cure through agencies likely to create evils still greater. I judge from what I have seen that the surface of most of the acres of Louisiana accounted land, is lower than that of the adja- cent rivers and bayous. Naturally, swamps and marshes abound, mainly covered by thick forests of Live Oak, Cypress, and some smaller trees, usually standing in six to twelve inches of water, and intersected by small bayous, averaging four to six feet in depth of water, the congenial home of the alligator, as they would be of+ the frog and the duck, if the alligator were not fond of a meat diet. The gray moss which trails from most of the trees in these swamp- forests is much admired by the inhabitants, and is gathered to fill mattresses. Very little has yet been done toward draining these vast morasses, because of their very slight inclination toward the Gulf, in which direction alone can water be made to flow away from them. Ultimately, they will be severally leveed or dyked, and then pumped dry by steam; but not these many years. Mean- time, the relatively dry land which separates them, being two or three feet higher, has been largely improved and cultivated, though some of it has been neglected since the War. Cane and Cotton are grown on a part of the plantations; Corn quite generally ; Potatoes and what we call sweet potatoes, with corn and some cotton, by the Blacks on their petty holdings. I had been told that the Black women no longer work in the fields; but they were at work on most of the patches we passed between New Orleans and Brashear, eighty miles westward on the Atchafalaya, where we took boat for Gal- veston. In many places, husband, wife,and one or two children, were hoeing side by side; and, though this kind of agriculture is not very efficient, their crops generally looked well. Where their patches are easily flowed, part of each was often devoted to Rice, ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS. 9 whereof the culture in this State is rapidly extending. I under- stand that it is considered the surest and most profitable grain-crop grown in Louisiana, while it requires no costly machinery to fit it for sale. ‘The grower takes it in its rough state to the mill, where he receives 100 pounds of the cleaned or hulled grain for each 160 pounds in the hull, called “paddy.” A poor man can do better at growing Rice than Cotton. I doubt that one-eighth of the area of Louisiana is to-day under tillage, while she grows little or no other than wild grasses of slight value. She has some millions of acres of thin, poor, sandy soil in her northern and eastern sections, usually covered with Pine, some of it of good size and quality, the rest small and worthless. Leaving this to grow timber, the residue is exceedingly fertile ; yet less than half of it is arable without the aid of steam. By-and-by, bayous will be dredged, dykes or levees constructed, large inclosures pumped dry, then plowed and tilled by gigantic steam-engines; and then Louisiana will rapidly take rank among the most productive and populous of the States composing our Union. : H. G. SUGGESTIONS TO FARMERS. ADDRESS BY HORACE GREELEY, OF NEW YORK, AT THE STATE AGRICUL- TURAL FAIR, Houston, Texas, May 23, 1871.—The civilization of our race is evinced and measured by the growth and progress of its Agriculture. The thorough savage is never a cultivator. What the earth spon- taneously produces, he appropriates without gratitude and consumes without forecast. He revels in abundance one week, to be pinched by hunger the next. Only his want of an ax or his ignorance of its use precludes his felling, and thus destroying, the tree which, for generations, has fed his tribe with its nourishing, palatable fruit. He delights in gorging himself on the flesh of animals, but never feeds nor shelters them. Thus devouring and devastating, never tilling nor producing, he requires square miles to subsist scantily, precariously, his tribe, where his civilized successor will feed and clothe more persons generously on so many acres. After poets and dreamers have done their best to glorify him with “The light that never was on sea or land,’ 10 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF AGRICULTURE. the savage is a miserable creature, enjoying less and suffering more than the wolf or the leopard, to which a lawless, careless, predatory freedom is truly natural, and which is at home with the elements, as he never was nor can be. The savage builds no monuments—leaves but scanty proofs that he ever existed save his bones. A hundred of his generations come and go, leaving the earth and its living vesture essentially as they found it. But let civilized man replace him for a bare lifetime, and he leaves foot-prints that centuries will not efface. Our Atlan- tic seaboard has hardly been known to civilized men for four genera- tions; yet, if these were to be swept away to-morrow, and the wilderness untrodden by human foot were here to resume its ancient sway, more memorials of these four generations would challenge attention and reward inquiry two thousand years hence than we can now discern of all the races that peopled this Atlantic slope prior to the voyages and discoveries of Columbus. The rigors of Winter, and the experienced perils of starvation during its reign, gradually impel the savage to save and store the ‘grains and: fruits of the seasons of plenty to subsist him through the dearth which regularly follows: and he slowly learns to pre- ‘serve and tame the animals best calculated to serve him by draft or as food. The grains which habitually grow and ripen on the fertile intervales of streams which annually overflow their banks, ultimately teach him to increase their quantity and render their reproduction more certain by cultivation. To plant the seed in the most promising localities and take the chance of its repro- ducing its kind ten or twenty-fold, is his first essay ; necessity im- pels and experience gradually teaches more methodical and efficient ‘cultivation. The loss of cattle by cold, by storm, by hunger, at length suggests the curing of fodder for winter use, and the pro- vision of such shelter as the climate may seem to require. The supply of food being thus doubled and trebled, population increases correspondingly ; and thus is created a necessity for a still more thorough and effective tillage of the soil. Thus pressed by want or a justified apprehension of it, Man slowly learns to deepen his cul- ture, to fertilize his fields, to diversify his implements and improve his methods, until the labor of one produces adequate sustenance for many, and ever-enlarging conceptions, wants, capabilities, achievements, enjoyments, expand his intellect, refine his nature, and exalt his aspirations. His increased power over Nature is the WATER IN AGRICULTURE. 1d general measure of his progress from the lowest barbarism up to that perfect mental and moral stature which is symbolized by Copernicus, Galileo, Shakespeare, Milton, and Newton. Modern Agriculture is an art—or rather a circle of arts—based upon Natural Science, which is a methodical exposition of Divine Law. The savage is Nature’s thrall, whom she scorches, freezes, starves, drowns, as her caprice may dictate. He lives in constant dread of her frosts, her tornadoes, her lightnings. Science teaches his civilized successor to turn her wildest eccentricities to his own use and profit. Her floods and gales saw his timber and grind his ‘ grain; in time, they will chop his trees, speed his plow, and till his crops as well. Science transforms and exalts him from the slave into the master of the elements. If he does not yet harness the electric fluid to his plow, his boat, his wagon, and make it the most docile and useful of his servants, it is because he is still but little advanced from barbarism. Essentially, the lightning gar- nered in a summer cloud should be as much at his command and as subservient to his needs as the water that refreshes his thirsty fields and starts his hitherto lifeless wheels. Nowhere has human stolidity been more forcibly demonstrated than in the average farmer’s bygone dealings with water. This mobile, subtle fluid, which will voluntarily travel wherever you will, if you give it an inch of descent per mile, ought to have long since been absolutely and everywhere at the beck and call of every cultivator. And yet, I have stood beside a corn-field parched and withering from drouth, while a mill-stream danced and brawled right through its center, falling twenty feet in a hundred rods, yet moistening the roots of no plants but those of the two rows next its bed on either side, while three days’ work of two men would have dammed and diverted its waters so that four or five acres of the corn would have been unrolled and. set to growing again by their in- uence. Whoever travels with open eyes may note a thousand such opportunities in almost any State—a hundred or more in nearly every County. : With Grass, the facility and advantage of Irrigation are still more obvious. I visited last Summer the region of the White Mountains —Coos, the northernmost county of New-Hampshire. That dis- trict is cold, mountainous, rugged, rocky, with a strong, granitic soil, which does not lend itself easily to tillage, but which is very natural to grass. And, so numerous are the horses required for the use 12 ADDRESS TO TEXAS FARMERS. of its many Summer visitors, that Hay is always worth $20 per ton, and, in Winters following dry Summers and Autumns like the last, considerably more. It is a country of abundant springs and rills, and dancing, laughing streams, which fall so rapidly as to make Irrigation an obvious and profitable resort. I am quite sure that ten thousand acres of grass land in that county might be am- ply irrigated, by dams and reservoirs and shallow ditches, at an aver- age cost of $20 per acre, and with an average increase in their annual product of one ton of good hay per acre, worth at least $10 as it stands in the field ready for the scythe of the mower. Here would be fifty per cent. annual return for the investment; and its value is likely to increase rather than diminish, And yet, I doubt that there are one hundred acres of that county irrigated: and what wonder, since the farmers of the older and richer counties south of it, whose fields have been cultivated from one to two centuries, have not yet realized the thriftlessness and waste of letting rills and brooks dance idly by and through the crops that are perishing from thirst? While the rich valleys of the Connecticut and Ken- nebec, which have for generations been tilled by farmers exception- ably wealthy and intelligent, exhibit not an acre irrigated to every thousand left to depend for water on the caprice of the often scorch- ing, withering skies, what can we reasonably expect of newer, ruder, poorer communities ? If Irrigation were a novelty, Conservatism might shake its head gravely, doubtingly, thereat, without exposing its emptiness of brains. But in fact the artificial application of water to secure and increase production is older than the Plow—older than authentic History. Nature gave the example and the broadest possible hint in the valley of the lower Nile; Italy borrowed and improved upon the suggestion in the early morn of Christendom, if not earlier; and the Spaniards brought the art to this country before the Pilgrims built their huts around Plymouth Rock. How came it that lessons so striking and so palpable can have so long been defied by a people so alert and eager for profit as ours ? I believe the time is at hand when not only will streams be generally utilized to moisten adjacent fields, and thus largely increase their product, but when every thirsty, arid plain will have its bounte- ous well, with a wind-mill erected over it to pump its contents auto- matically, at little cost, into a reservoir where, after being warmed by the sun, and perhaps fertilized, they will be drawn away in INTELLECT IN AGRICULTURE. 13 gentle rills to irrigate acre after acre on every side. I believe that even Texas could richly afford to dig and equip a thousand such wells this summer, and many thousands in the course of the next dozen years. Every plain or intervale that slopes gently, imper- ceptibly, to the stream which divides or bounds it, should have its well at the highest corner, with a spacious shallow reservoir by its side, and ditches leading thence to every point whence gravitation would carry the water gently over and through the soil of nearly or quite all its area. Even though that water should shrink until it utterly failed in seasons of severest drouth, the soil would still ‘respond to the freshening influence of the moisture with which it had been charged and saturated during the fervid weeks and months required to dry up its deeper sources. Meantime, the crop would be perfected, and the drouth, when it did at last fasten on the irri- gated plain, would perforce exhaust itself on the season of Nature’s annual sterility and wintry repose. In the great Future which Science and Human Energy are pre- paring, Artesian wells, bored to depths of a thousand to fifteen hundred feet, will be sunk on every arid plain, and near the head of every capacious valley wherein water is deficient, to enable the strong currents that flow from subjacent mountain or elevated plateau between diverse strata to rivers and seas to rise by gravitation to the surface and fruitfully overspread hundreds of acres, instead of uselessly coursing in darkness beneath. These wells, being costly, will long be comparatively rare ; but the ‘‘ Staked Plains” of Texas and New-Mexico, with the wide mis-named “ Desert” at either foot of the Rocky Mountains, will yet be trans- formed into the verdurous, plenteous feeding-ground of innumer- able cattle and sheep by irrigation, whereto Artesian wells will largely contribute; one of them subserving the end of many ordi- nary wells, while drawing water from sources beyond the reach of any or all of them. Agriculture, as it steadily rises from the low level of barbarism to the commanding altitude of a true civilization, becomes a more and more intellectual calling. The rude pioneer, wrestling stubbornly with the giant forest or the inhospitable marsh, may waste half his time in play or idleness; but his work, when he does work, is purely mus- cular, making no draft on mental power or culture. His fields are subdued and tilled, his crops produced and secured, almost wholly by dint of the strength in his good right arm. But, for his civilized, 14 ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS. enlightened descendant and successor, all this is changed. Water, wind, steam, supply the needed power ; his task is‘to mold and guide that power to beneficent ends. In my boyhood, the man who cut an acre of heavy grass did therein a good day’s work, which taxed his physical energies to the utmost and sent him weary and exhaust- ed to bed, to rise stiff and sore for the morrow’s duties ; now, any intelligent, resolute girl of fifteen, guiding a span of horses, may cut five acres of just such grass before noon, cut it better than the best mower ever did, and alight from her seat on the mowing-machine untired and eager for a pie-nic or frolic after dinner. Steam saws wood into fuel for the kitchen fire-place and the parlor stove ; cuts stalks and straw into half-inch pieces and then cooks them into a pulpy mass ; slices roots ; churns cream into butter without super- vision; and is just harnessing itself to the plow, resolved to pulve- rize the soil more rapidly, more cheaply, to a greater depth, to a more equal and perfect comminution, than it has ever been possible to attain by the force of animal power. Manifestly, we stand but on the threshold of the new age whereof Steam is at once the har- binger and the impulse: but enough has been developed to assure us that more and better is at hand. Nor should we doubt that Steam itself is the forerunner of agen- cies still more potent and more cheaply efficacious. Mighty as have been its achievements, they only serve to render more obvious and lamentable its limitations. Of the power actually generated by the vaporization of water, I cannot say how great is the share utilized by an ordinary steam-engine, but I believe the estimates of scientists all range below twenty per cent. Then the enormous weight of boiler, fuel, and water, that must be transported with every form of locomotive, absorbs nearly half the power not squandered by imper- fect devices for directing and applying it. Mighty as Steam assur- edly is, it is not only a blind giant, but we are deplorably blind with regard to its economy and adaptation. And why should Steam, even in its best estate, be final? In- telligence has already spurned its trammels; Thought has far out- stripped it in the invention and operation of the Magnetic Tele- graph; why should the wondrous power we have evoked in Elec- tricity be limited to the transmission of ideas? Why may it not be employed to impel material substances as well? True, we have not yet learned how to transmit the power unquestionably generat- ed by Electricity ; but our average ignorance and incapacity, result- ELECTRICITY ——UNDER-DRAINING. 15 ing in obstruction and defeat, are constantly overstepped and trans- figured by the men of genius and of prescience whom God _ benig- nantly sends to lead us on from achievement to achievement, from triumph to triumph. To be conscious of a need or a deficiency, is to be far on the way whereby we shall at last overcome it. Steam, as a productive force, an industrial factor, is barely a century old; Electricity was harnessed to a wire and made a _post-boy hardly thirty years ago. I do not believe this all, nor even the best, that _ this all-pervading, irresistible power is destined to do for us. I believe that plants will yet be grown by its aid with a celerity never yet attained ; that heat will be profitably produced and diffused by its agency; and that power will be generated from electric bat- teries, of old or new device, which will supplement, if not in time supersede, all other mechanical forces, liberating Man almost wholly from obstruction and defeat by material obstacles, and rendering Productive Industry a matter of application and oversight, rarely or never taxing human sinews to achieve a result which invokes the employment of material force. IfI do not speak here of what, in my section, as in Europe, is the basis of all thorough culture—I refer to Under-draining—it is not because I deem it inapplicable to your State, but simply that the time when it can be expected to command general attention here has not yet arrived. You do not need to warm your soil, lengthen your season of verdure, or hasten the growth and matur- ing of your crops, as we do; and there are but few square miles of your State on which a net-work of under-drains three feet in average depth and but three rods apart, would not cost more than it would be worth. And yet, I have no doubt that many gardens, nurseries, &c., in this State ought to be thus drained, and would be to profit, if only to relieve them of an excessive moisture in Spring and early Summer, remaining stagnant in and souring the soil. By-and-by, you will begin to under-drain grain-fields and meadows as we do ; but that topic can wait. The draining of bogs and marshes, by widening, deepening, and straightening, the channels wherein water now flows from them—often making new ones in part, if not wholly —proffers more obvious and instant advantages. The lands waiting to be thus reclaimed are nearly always exceptionally fertile ; they rarely present other obstacles to cultivation than water ; while their proper drainage must contribute signally to the healthfulness of the surrounding country. No State which embosoms extensive swamps 16 ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS. or bogs should hesitate to have them surveyed by competent engineers and the best means of drying them ascertained and reported. Knowledge will almost inevitably lead to practical, decisive action with regard to these nurseries of fever, these magazines of disease and death. Bear with a few suggestions upon a standing topic of debate among Southern cultivators. I am not young, as you see; yet I cannot remember a time when the South did not affirm and deplore an excessive addiction of her people to Cotton. That eminent scholar and statesman, Hugh S. Legaré, alluded to it as a venerable grievance, thirty-odd years ago. Before as well as since, every one remonstrated with every one against the fatuity which impelled Southrons to plant so much Cotton; exhorted all to retrench and reform; and then slid away to plant a few more acres than ever before. For generations, it was réiterated as an axiom that Cotton culture depended on Slavery ; yet Slavery is dead, and we produced nearly One Million tons of Cotton in 1870—more than in any former year, with the excep- tions of 1859 and 1860. Yet, in this year of grace 1871, we have the old cry from millions of throats— Plant less Cotton ! ”’—and I presume with the old result. The army-worm, the boll-worm, may diminish the Cotton-crop; expostulation, I judge, will not. I know no more striking illustration of what St. Paul terms “ the foolishness of preaching” than this incessant yet fruitless clamor against growing so much Cotton. Doubtless, the remonstrants are right, as remonstrants are apt to be. But, after two generations of incessant deprecation, the passion for cotton-planting seems as intense and peryading as ever. The owner of a thousand arable acres, after hearing all that is to be said against it, plants almost exclusively Cotton. The poorest negro, who owns or rents a dozen acres, puts in his field of Cotton, and takes his chance for bread. He has endured less preaching on the subject than his old master ; but, had he been lectured from infancy on the madness of cotton-planting, he would have planted all the same. And this for a most obvious reason. Cotton is Money, and Money is Power. Cotton is of such moderate bulk in proportion to its value that it bears transportation far better than Wheat, or Corn, or Fruit, or Vegetables. It endures tropic suns and arctic frosts without injury; it neither molds, nor rots, nor rusts, nor INDUSTRY SHOULD BE DIVERSIFIED. ib putrefies. He who has Cotton to sell does not quake at the foot- steps of the tax-gatherer, and can generally look the sheriff square in the face. Admitting that the South has grown, and still grows, too much Cotton—(and I judge that three millions of bales grown in 1870 would have netted her as large a sum as the four millions she actually did grow)—I see no way to counteract this tendency but by introducing new branches of industry whereof the product will also command money. In vain do you exhort the average planter to grow more Corn and make more Pork: he is often in debt, and ‘chooses to produce what will surely sell for the money he sorely needs. He is sure Cotton will do this; he is not so sure as to Corn ‘or Pork. But plant one hundred Cotton and as many Woolen Fac- tories on the soil of your State, making a steady cash market here for Wool and Meat, for Grain and Vegetables, as wellas Cotton, and now your Agriculture will naturally and certainly divide its forces and diversify its products. Farmers will grow diverse crops, if they know that a sure cash market is at hand. A denser population, a greater variety and range of employments, these are pressing wants of the entire South. Every wheel set to turning on a Southern water-fall, every manufactory of Edge-Tools or Farm Implements, started in any of your cities or villages, is certain profitably to divert labor from your Cotton-fields, as naked preaching never will. There is hardly an acre of Southern land which would not be doubled in value if Southern farms were mainly cultivated with Southern-made implements, Southern backs clothed in Southern- woven fabrics, and Southern’ dwellings filled with Southern-made furniture and wares. And, now that Slavery has gone out, it is high time that the useful arts were steadily and rapidly com- ing in. Am I inculeating what would injure my own section? Not at all. The more you do for yourselves, the more you will require from abroad. The State of Arkansas has more inhabitants than the City of Boston; yet the latter, while the focus of an immense interchange and large consumption of domestic products, buys and consumes far more of the productions of foreign lands. Our pur- chases are limited, not by our needs, but by our means. A thousand times it has been predicted that we should destroy our Foreign Commerce by protecting Home Industry, and a thousand times this has been proyed a fallacy by increased imports under high duties. 2 18 ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS. If Texas were expending four times as much as she is, per annum, in the purchase of home-made wares and fabrics, she would buy far more from abroad than she now does. If she hada dozen ax-factories in full operation, she might import fewer axes than now, but her im- ports of Steel, Iron, and a hundred other articles, would be swelled beyond computation. IT hold the naturalization of new and the extension of existing Manufactures among the most urgent wants of this State, as of nearly every young community. Hence, I hold—not that you ought to pay a high price for a poor article because it is home-made —not that you should forego the gratification of a legitimate want because the article it contemplates is not of Texas growth or fabri- cation—but that each of you should give an intelligent preference, other things being equal, to whatever is made on your own soil— should buy your harness, or saddle, or pail, or broom, or plow, or ax, of your neighbor’s make, in preference to one brought from abroad; should take and pay for some first-rate Texas journal before looking abroad for a better. Having thus done your duty by the community whereof you are a part, if you are able and will- ing to take a second journal, I might possibly aid you in finding a good one. Is Agriculture a repulsive pursuit? That what has been called Farming has repelled many of the youth of our day, I perceive ; and I glory in the fact. An American boy, who has received a fair common-school education and has an active, inquiring mind, does not willingly consent merely to drive oxen and hold plow for- ever. He will do these with alacrity, if they come in his way; he will not accept them as the be-all and the end-all of his career. He will not sit down in a rude, slovenly, naked home, devoid of flow- ers, and trees, and books, and periodicals, and intelligent, inspiring, refining conversation, and there plod through a life of drudgery as hopeless and cheerless as any mule’s. He has needs, and hopes, and aspirations, which this life does not and ought not to satisfy. This might have served his progenitor in the Ninth Century; but this is the Nineteenth, and the young American knows it. He needs to feel the intellectual life of the age flowing freely into and through him—needs to feel that, though the City and the Railroad are out of sight, the Jatter is daily bringing within his reach all ‘that is noblest and best in the achievements and attractions of the former. He may not listen to Sumner or Thurman in the Senate; THE PRESERVATION OF TREES. 19 to Ward Beecher or Tyng in the pulpit; but the press multiplies their best thoughts and most forcible expressions at the rate of ten to twenty thousand copies per hour; and its issues are within the reach of every industrious family. Any American farmer, who has two hands and knows how to use them, may, at fifty years of age, have a better library than King Solomon ever dreamed of, though he declared that “of making of many books there is no end;” any intelligent farmer’s son may have a better knowledge of Nature and her laws when twenty years old than Aristotle or Pliny ever attained. The Steam Engine, the Electric Telegraph, and the ' Power Press, have brought knowledge nearer to the humblest cabin than it was, ten centuries since, to the stateliest mansion; let the cabin be careful not to disparage or repel it. To arrest the rush of our youth to the cities, we have only to diffuse what is best of the cities throughout the country ; and this the latest trinmphs of civili- zation enable us easily to do. A home irradiated by the best; thoughts of the sages and heroes of all time, even though these be compressed within a few rusty volumes, cheered by the frequent arrival of two or three choice periodicals, and surrounded by such floral evidences of taste and refinement as are within the reach of the poorest owner of the soil he tills, will not be spurned as a prison by any youth not thoroughly corrupted and depraved. But thousands of farmers are more intent on leaving money and lands to their children than on informing and enriching their minds. They starve their souls in order to pamper their bodies. They grudge their sons that which would make them truly wise, in order to provide them with what can at best but make them rich in corn and cattle, while poor in manly purpose and generous ideas. —It may seem presumptuous in me to speak to you of the pres- ervation and diffusion of Trees in a State so new as yours, and of whose alternations of hill and valley, forest and prairie, you know so much and I so little. But there are laws everywhere potent, needs everywhere felt, and errors very generally committed ; and of these last the most pervading is the reckless extermination of Trees. It is not peculiar to this continent; for France and Spain, Italy and Portugal, have for the most part been denuded of forests, and suffer for it not only in the scarcity of Timber and Fuel, but in the severity and duration of their drouths, the fierceness and devastations of their gales, the violence and aggravation of their floods. Allof them have timber on their rugged, sterile moun- 20 ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS. tains, where it is scarcely accessible, and where it is least available to their denser and more active communities. But if one-tenth ot the surface of each arable square mile were now covered with state- ly and serviceable forest-trees, those countries would be better fitted to maintain a large population, and their inhabitants would be more thrifty, efficient, and comfortable, than they are. My own section of this continent has destroyed trees too eagerly, recklessly, and planted them too tardily, too sparingly. My county, of Westches- ter (New York), began to be inhabited by our race fully two hun- dred and fifty years ago; it has been divided into farms from one to two centuries, and its people are not behind others in sagacity and intelligence; they have still much land covered with mainly young timber; yet there are not less than five thousand acres in that county to-day exposing rocks thinly and partially covered with soil which ought never to have been stripped bare of trees. Cut off the timber, if you will, though it is better to thin out than to sweep away a forest where the land is not needed for tillage, and have trees of all ages and sizes growing on each acre devoted to forest. If those five thousand acres were reclad in their primitive vesture, all the springs and streams of the county would be more copious, more equable, more constant, than they are, and the soil of the subjacent fields and meadows would endure drouth and retain moisture as they never can while hill-side and rocky ridge are ex- posed to sweep of wind and glare of sun. In this new, bounteous, sunny land, where the need of fuel is so much less than with us, you are exposed to the miscalculation made by my ancestors two to four generations back, when, seeing seven- eighths of New-England covered by stately, luxuriant trees, they said, “There will always be timber enough. Let us cut and slash, and clear all the land we can; others will save wood enough though we destroy all we have;” but their children have lived to deplore their error. Fifty-five years ago, great pines were cut from hills now included in the city of Burlington, Vermont, sawed into boards, and these rafted down Lake Champlain and the Sorel to the St. Law- rence, and so shipped to Europe, not paying fifty cents per day for the labor, calling the worth of the timber nothing. Barely thirty years later, when Vermont began to construct her railroads, she had to draw the bridge-timber from Canada, paying for it many times what her own disparaged pines brought when they were so recklessly swept rway. The world is full of experiences as instructive as this. MAXIMS FOR FARMERS. 21 It is not too soon to begin to plant forests in the more naked and arid portions of Texas; it is high time that you were regarding good timber as property, and saving it with scrupulous care and foresight. Extensive sections of your State will need it before they can grow it, aside from those loealities which need it already; and your Society can do her no better service than to impress on all own- ers of the soil, whether in village or rural district, the duty and profit of an annual and persistent planting of choice and serviceable Trees. But—not to trespass too far on your patience—let me close with ‘ a few maxims, applicable to cultivation in every clime and under all circumstances, whether among populations dense as that of China or sparse as that of British America. I. Only coop Farming pays. He who sows or plants without reasonable assurance of good crops annually, might better earn wages of some capable neighbor than work for so poor a paymaster as he is certain'to prove himself. ; Il. The good farmer is proved such by the steady appreciation of his crops. Any one may reap an ample harvest from a fertile virgin soil; the good farmer alone grows good crops at first, and better and better ever afterward. Ill. Zé is far easier to maintain the productive capacity of a farm than to restore it. 'To exhaust its fecundity, and then attempt its restoration by buying costly commercial fertilizers, is wasteful and irrational. IV. Zhe good farmer sells mainly such products as wre least ex- haustive. Necessity may constrain him, for the first year or two, to sell Grain, or even Hay ; but he will soon send off his surplus mainly in the form of Cotton, or Wool, or Meat, or Butter and Cheese, or something else that returns to the soil nearly all that is taken from it. A bank account daily drawn upon, while nothing is deposited to its credit, must soon respond “ No funds:” so with a farm simi- larly treated. V. Rotation is at least negative Fertilization. It may not posi- tively enrich a farm ; it will at least retard and postpone its impov- erishment. He who grows Wheat after Wheat, Corn after Corn, for twenty years, will need to emigrate before that term is fulfilled. The same farm cannot support (nor endure) him longer than that. All our great Wheat-growing sections of fifty years ago are Wheat- growing no longer; while England grows larger crops thereof on 22 ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS. the very fields that fed the armies of Saxon Harold and William the Conqueror. Rotation has preserved these, as the lack of it ruined those. VI. Wisdom is never dear, provided the article be genuine. 1 have known tarmers who toiled constantly from daybreak to dark, yet died poor, because, through ignorance, they wrought of disad- vantage. If every farmer would devote two hours of each day to reading and reflection, there would be fewer failures in farming than there are. VIL. The best investment a farmer can make for his children is that which surrounds their youth with the rational delights of a beauteous, attractive home. The dwelling may be small and rude, yet a few flowers will embellish, as choice fruit-trees will enrich and gladden it; while grass and shade are within the reach of the hum- blest. Hardly any labor done on a farm is so profitable as that which makes the wife and children fond and proud of their home. VIII. A good, practical Education, including a good trade, is a better outfit for a youth than a grand estate with the drawback of an empty mind. Many parents have slaved and pinched to leave their children rich, when half the sum thus lavished would have profited them far more had it been devoted to the cultivation of their minds, the enlargement of their capacity to think, observe, and work. The one structure that no neighborhood can afford to do without is the school-house. IX. A small library of well-selected books in lis home has saved many a youth from wandering into the baleful ways of the Prodi- gal Son. Where paternal strictness and severity would have bred nothing but dislike and a fixed resolve to abscond at the first oppor- tunity, good books and pleasant surroundings have weaned many a youth from his first wild impulse to go to sea or cross the continent, and made him a docile, contented, obedient, happy lingerer by the parental fire-side. In a family, however rich or poor, no other good is so cheap or so precious as thoughtful, watchful love. X. Most men are born poor ; but no man, who has average capaci- ties and tolerable luck, need remain so. And the farmer’s calling, though proffering no sudden leaps, no ready short-cuts to opulence, is the surest of all ways from poverty and want to comfort and independence. Other men must climb; the temperate, frugal, dili- gent, provident farmer may grow into competence and every exter- nal accessory to happiness. Each year of his devotion to his home- TOPOGRAPHY OF TEXAS. 23 stead may find it more valuable, more attractive than the last, and leave it better still. Farmers of Texas! I bring you mainly old and homely truths. No single suggestion of this Address can be new to all of you; most of them, I presume, will be familiar to the majority. There are discoveries in Natural Science and improvements in Mechanics which conduce to the efficiency of Agriculture ; but the principles which underlie this first of arts are old as Agriculture itself. Greek and Roman sages made observations so acute and practical that the farmers of to-day may ponder them with profit, while modern liter- ‘ ature is padded with essays on farming not worth the paper they have spoiled. And yet, the generation whereof I am part has wit- nessed great strides in your vocation, while the generation prepar- ing to take our places will doubtless witness still greater. I bid you hold fast to the good, with minds receptive of and eager for the better, and rejoice in your knowledge that there is no nobler pursuit and no more inViting soil than those which you proudly call yéur own. TEXAS,..THE STATE MATERIALLY CONSIDERED. [EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE. ] Houston, Texas, May 25.—* How do you like Texas?” I have been many times asked during the week I have been in the State— asked even before I was at all qualified to give an answer of any value. Now that I have traveled some hundreds of miles, mainly in the valleys of the Trinity and the Brassos, I can speak somewhat more to my own satisfaction. Still, it should be considered that I have as yet seen only the south-eastern quarter of Texas, and but a small proportion of that. Of course, I knew long since that Texas has a warm though variable climate, and a soil generally, though not uniformly, fertile. Few who read considerably can need to be told so much. Let me endeavor to indicate the points on which obser- vation has modified my former impressions. I. Texas seems to be better timbered than any other prairie State with which IT am acquainted. I do not mean that the timber is ex- ceptionally good, for it is not. Eastern Kansas, with her Hickory groves and the stately, luxuriant forests that cover the intervales 24 LETTERS FROM TEXAS. (“bottoms ”) of her rivers, is decidedly ahead of her in this respect. But the prairies of Eastern Texas, though often large, are inter- rupted, chequered, diversified, by clumps or groves of timber, as I never saw any other. Wherever water finds or makes a course, no matter how shallow or how generally dry, there trees spring up and struggle resolutely for existence. And, since these prairies and glades have been fed down by innumerable cattle, the annual prai- rie-fires, if not prevented, are so enfeebled, by the relative scantiness of their aliment, that they no longer charge upon and drive back the ‘timber as they formerly did. It is plain that the forests are steadi- ly extending their boundaries on every side,while every tree cut out of them is replaced by half a dozen young ones. I judge that the increase of timber throughout the region I have traversed has been very great during the last ten years, and that it will continue for the next twenty, in spite of the rapid increase of population. As to quality, this timber is not what I could wish it. Oaks, otf almost every known variety, with two or three’ species of Pine, are most abundant; while Cottonwood, White Ash, Pecan, Elm, Gum, &e., garland the rivers and bayous. The Live Oak is quite-common, and is a good timber-tree ; the long-leaf Pine is of tolerable quality, though not equal to our White Pine. But most of the Oak is “brash,” as the woodmen say—that is, it lacks toughness and elas- ticity. Much of it is low and scrubby, but the young trees, growing thickly, promise to be tall and comparatively limbless. I hope their timber will prove more elastic than that it replaces. I would gladly hear that Hickory, Locust, Larch, and other desirable spe- cles, are extensively planted ere long. As yet, more sawed Pine is imported (especially for bridge-building) than I wish was needed. II. As to the Soil, I have seen few acres that would not yield good crops to good cultivation; but this is expected of a prairie country. Some of the pine-covered lands, especially near the Gulf, seem but moderately fertile; a part of the upland “ Oak openings ” only a little better. On the other hand, the river bottoms, espe- cially those of the Brassos, are very fertile, as annually overflowed in- tervales are apt to be. Here, however, the inundations are frequent and of enormous extent, so that I judge the intervales of the Trinity, Brassos, Colorado, &c., deeper and richer than those of the Connec- ticut, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna, or Potomac, ever were or could be. I never saw better soil than the Brassos bottoms. J was more surprised, however, by the remarkable fertility of the HOW THEY LIVE IN TEXAS. 95 rolling prairies, especially those of Washington County, on either side of Brenham, its capital. These have been twenty to thirty years planted to Corn or Cotton, never manured, and cultivated so shallowly that every rain sweeps off thousands of tons of their soil to be borne into the Gulf by the Brassos or squandered upon its intervales. Yet these prairies still sustain and mature bounteous harvests; and no wonder, since their black mold ranges from two to five feet in depth. Mellow, dry, breezy, healthful, I do not see how these lands could be made more inviting. The level prairies are of good quality, though not equal in the ‘ average to those just spoken of. They may average a foot of dark mold, generally overlying clay. They are mainly left in a state of nature, and devoted to the rearing of cattle, which are sold at three or four years old for $10 to $20 per head to drovers or packers. Tens of thousands in good condition have been slaughtered for their hides and tallow—the flesh, after yielding all its tallow, being fed to swine. This, I’ trust, is ended; it certainly will be when the first railroad shall have connected the valley of the lower Colorado with that of the Missouri or the Ohio. As yet, the State is full of cattle, and will be for a few years longer ; but they must ultimately give place to tillage. Whenever lands devoid of stnmp or stone, equal to those of the Connecticut valley, and within four days by rail of New York, shall be worth $5 per acre, these prairies will be gradually inclosed, broken up by the Steam Plow, surface-drained by gigantic machines, and cultivated for Corn, Cotton, Wheat, or some choice Grass; and then Cattle will gradually disappear, or be reared in some more civilized fashion. At present, they simply hold the ground till Cultivation shall be ready to claim it. III. Whether it be a recommendation or not, I judge that it has required less effort to live in Texas than in any other State of the Union. The common saying, ‘It costs no more to rear a cow here than a hen at the North,” is literally true. The cow was never fed, never sheltered, no matter how cold or stormy the weather ; and you might have ten thousand head of cattle ranging the prairies and openings without owning an acre of land on earth. Many a man has thus grown rich without effort and almost without thought. Rich, but to little present purpose. His home was a rude cabin, with little or no glass in its windows, and nothing but dirt on its floors. His children grew up unschooled and rude-mannered. His 26 LETTERS FROM TEXAS. wife was slatternly, deprived of society, and rendered unhappy by memories of better times and more congenial associations. Man, lives as a herdsman mainly on horseback, in the open air, often meeting acquaintances or strangers ; Woman, being confined to her small, rough cabin, found therein no solace, no comfort, but in her children. The partnership was not an equal one; there was no similarity in its conditions. There are proud and happy wives in Texas as elsewhere, but the rancher’s life has not tended to make them so. Iam glad that I can see to the end of it. And I trust that the ranchemen’s wives are even gladder than I am. While Slavery iasted in Texas, any decided change was hardly possible. The tillers of her soil were slaves. White men almost uniformly refused to “ make niggers of themselves” by plowing and hoeing; but they did not hesitate to mount a horse and gallop after a herd of Cattle. Boys early learned to lasso a steer or colt; they liked the herdsman’s life, with its excitements and adventures ; it was the next thing to a buffalo-hunt. Land had no value; products, unless near navigable water, next to none. Many a man has been unable to sell his Corn at 25 cents per bushel in one County, when no better Corn was wanted at six times that price in another; im- passable streams and unfathomable roads separating them. So the owner of five thousand cows was often for weeks without flour bread, and very rarely had either Cheese, Butter, or Milk; ‘ hog > were his staples for diet; Fruit he seldom tasted ; and hominy ’ Tobacco and Whisky were his only luxuries. So much for the Past. I will speak of the Future in my next. H. G. TEXAS...THE FUTURE OF THE STATE.,..ITS RAILROADS. [EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE. ] CotumBus, Colorado Co., Texas, May 26.—Before I dilate on the bright future now opening before this State, let me indicate some of the drawbacks which have hitherto retarded her material and still more her intellectual and moral progress. Bad water is quite often the accompaniment of very good land; and South-Eastern Texas has little that is good. I have now travel- ed over nearly every completed mile of her railroads without having DRAWBACKS ON LIFE IN TEXAS. 27 been offered one glass of water from spring or well. Rain-water is very generally drank; nearly every tolerable dwelling being pro- vided with a tank or reservoir for keeping it, oftener underground. As very many lack even this, the excuse for drinking bad coffee, or worse whisky, is here stronger than almost anywhere else. That springs are very rare, while well-water is uniformly undrinkable, is certain ; but why each city and considerable village has not tried to obtain better, by sinking to a depth of two or three hundred feet (not expecting the fluid to rise to the surface and flow over, on the Artesian plan, but drawing it up by wind or other power), I do not ‘understand. The muddy product of the rivers, creeks, bayous, and sloughs, which the cattle must imbibe per force, cannot but be prejudi- cial to their health and thrift; to say nothing of the dry seasons, when even this detestable stuff can hardly be obtained. The suffering of animals from thirst, and from the villainous witch-broth wherewith they must quench it, must work them serious harm. If I werea herds- man here, I would have better water for my stock, or I would sink at least three hundred feet in quest of it. Bad roads and other impediments to inter-communication have sadly crippled Texas, and still cripple her. Her crops, as a gene- ral rule, have cost the grower more after than before harvest. Though oxen and horses have long been abundant and cheap, the wheat-growers up North could reach no market with their product unless at ruinous cost, while the lower counties were importing Flour at the rate of three thousand barrels per day. A State whose chief products are Grass and Cattle, has imported both Hay and Milk ; her herdsmen, as a general rule, never see either. A purely agricultural State that buys most of her bread, a splendid soil for Corn on a good part of which Corn is dearer to-day than in New- York City, a capital State for growing Swine at no cost, yet which has bought three-fourths of the Hams universally consumed by her people—such are among the causes which have kept her people poor in spite of the remarkable fertility of her soil. Her rivers, creeks, and bayous, rarely bridged, are subject to great and sudden floods, whereby teamsters are often imprisoned for days between two creeks which in dry seasons are waterless, and halted by a river for weeks. But for Railroads, Texas is doomed by nature to stagnation, impotence, and barbarism. As yet, she has barely begun to be penetrated by railroads. A line north by west from Galveston to Houston (50 miles), and 98 LETTERS FROM TEXAS. thence by Hempstead, Navasota, Bryan, Hearne, &c., to Groesbeck, in Limestone County, soon to be extended to Corsicana, in Navarro County (say 250 miles from Galveston), with a branch from Hemp- stead westward across the Brassos through Washington County to Giddings, 55 miles, soon to be extended 50 miles further to Austin, the State Capital, with another from Harrisburg, 6 miles below Houston, through Fort Bend and Colorado Counties, across both the Brassos and Colorado to this point (84 miles) : such are about all the pieces of railroad now in operation in the State. The piece from Shreveport, Louisiana, westward through Harrison and Smith Counties to Hallsville (56 miles), is rather a suggestion than a practical road. And these are about all that are in operation to- day. The work of providing this people with necessary railway communication is barely well begun. But that is half the battle. At last, nearly every line seems to be in the hands of solvent, capable, upright men, who are backed by ample capital, and is pushed with vigor and clear-sighted reso- lution. The Texas Central is going right on north by west to meet one of the Missouri-Kansas roads at the north line of the State, near Gainesville or Sherman. A new road (“The Great North- ern”), well backed by Northern capital, pushes directly north from Houston, crossing the Southern Pacific near Tyler, strikes the Red River near Fort Towson, and connects with the Missouri, Kan- sas and Texas from Kansas near that point. The ‘‘ Chattanooga and Mobile ” is now pushing due westward through Louisiana, and expects to reach Houston before this time next year. These, with the Southern Pacific, now certain to be vigorously prosecuted, will give Texas not less than 1,000 miles of completed railroad within a year, and 1,500 within two years. But the most important and effective single line of railroad in the State is “‘ The International,” which is to connect at Fulton, Ar- kansas, on her north-eastern border, with one from Cairo, Hl., and thus with Chicago and New York, running diagonally through Texas from north-east to south-west, crossing the Southern Pacific and “The Great Northern” near Tyler, the “‘ Texas Central” at ' Hearne, and thence pushing straight for Austin, the capital, and hence to San Antonio, and so to the Rio Grande not far from Laredo. This road, though begun last November at Hearne, where it crosses the “ Texas Central,” and impeded by the necessity of importing Corn at a cost of $2.10 per bushel and Hay at $85 per TEXAS AS A LAND OF PROMISE. 29 tun for its oxen and mules, has been pushed right vigorously in either direction, and will have crossed both the Brassos and Col- orado, and reached Austin on the one hand, the Trinity on the other, by next May. Two years hence, it will have been completed from Fulton to San Antonio (400 miles), and will then have brought the heart of this State within four days’ travel of the Commercial Emporium, where it will be known as one of the most judicious and successful railway enterprises ever planned. It will carry more Beef Cattle than any road on the globe, and it will bring into Texas more immigrants than railroad ever carried into any ‘State till now. TI close with a single instance of the spirit in which our Northern railroad-builders are met by the people of Texas. The Legislature having granted a liberal subsidy in State Bonds to the Southern Pacific Road, Gov. Davis felt constrained to veto the bill. The Legislature thereupon repassed it by a vote of seven or eight to one in either House; and the Democratic vote in the affirmative was, like the Republican, all but unanimous. And, while no man ques- tions the purity of the Governor’s motives, I have heard no dissent from the satisfaction with which the triumph of the measure is received. —TI hope to leave Texas on my homeward way very soon, having been dissuaded by heavy and extensive rains from my purpose of reaching Austin and perhaps San Antonio on the one hand, or Tyler, Marshall, and Shreveport, on the other. The time does not serve for stage-rides or other travel off the line of operated Railroads. ” H. G. 4 TEXAS AS A LAND OF PROMISE. [EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE. ] GALvEsToN, Texas, May 27.—Texas is as large as France, with a more genial climate and far richer soil. She has to-day less than One Million inhabitants, while France (as reduced by the late war) has more than Thirty-six Millions. She has more and better Timber, and moré Cattle and Horses than France ; why should not her for- tieth part of France’s population be rapidly increased to a twentieth, a tenth, and, before the close of this century, to a fifth or fourth ? 30 LETTERS FROM TEXAS. Why should not this State be the home of Ten Millions of the human family early in the next century ? Before deciding to say a word in favor of Texas as a home for those as yet strangers to her, I made inquiry and satisfied myself _ that her wild lands are not merely cheap to-day, but certain long to remain so. They are held in tracts of a thousand to many thousands of acres, by men of limited means, who bought them for a song, or obtained them without price by Mexican concession, and who have held them to this day partly because wild lands paid no taxes, and partly because they could find no purchasers: every one who either had property or aspired to have being already gorged with wild land. Now all is changed. Slavery being dead, lands are in request and have a value, which railroads are rapidly doubling and quad- rupling. Taxes are high and rising ; Common Schools and State loans to Railroads are certain to enhance them; so that moneyless holders of unproductive tracts must sell or be sold out by the sher- iff and tax-collector. I amsure that at least One Hundred Millions of fertile acres are to-day owned by men who must sell them within the next five years. And this necessity is sure to keep down prices. Let me, then, give some idea of their range. I traversed yesterday the railroad which runs westward from Harrisburg near Houston, through Harris, Fort Bend, and Colorado Counties, by Richmond to Columbus, 83 miles. Most of this route lies through a rich, level prairie, covered with Horses and Cattle ; but Timber is always in sight on one side or on both, and we pass through the generally forest-covered intervales of the Brassos and Colorado, with those of Oyster Creek, San Bernard, and Caney. This is one of the earliest settled portions of Texas, and its popula- tion has largely increased since the war. I was wiehettied by Mr. Wm. Brady of Houston to offer a league of it (4,400 acres), includ- ing a sufficiency of timber and water, for $1 per acre ; but, if that should not meet the views of pioneers, he would survey it into farms, and give alternate tracts of 100 acres to industrious, sober, thrifty pioneers who would settle upon and convert them into productive homesteads. And I have been assured by others that a colony of two or three hundred Northern farmers and mechanics could obtain lands for settlement on like terms in almost any part of the State. Do not jump at the mistaken conclusion that the landholders of Texas are exceptionally philanthropic and generous. They make no pretensions to this character. They want to make their lands UNDEVELOPED RESOURCES oF THE SOUTH. 31 valuable and marketable; to which end, they will sometimes give away a part to enhance the value of the remainder. Only a few will do this ; but almost any one will sell a part very cheap in or- der to obtain a price for the rest. And they are quite aware that a Yankee or German colony raises the value of the lands all around it. The Railroads are in like circumstances. Some of them have land-grants ; all want the population and production along their lines rapidly increased. Their interest leads them to invite settlement and encourage the transfer of lands from non-residents to cultivators. ' Hence, while lands near railroad junctions and other locations of predicted cities are held for higher rates, I judge that half the soil of Texas is this day in market at prices ranging from 50 cents to $2 per acre, and that $1 per acre in cash would buy the greater portion of it. And, while a rapid rise along some of the railroad lines is inevitable, I judge that $2 per acre will buy good wild land in this State for at least ten years to come. The least favorably situated of this vacant land is more eligibly located to-day than the best was twenty years ago. Railroads are bringing markets and comforts to every man’s door. Milk sells for $1 per gallon in this city; there is not a quart of it to every thou- sand cows throughout the State; and you whiten your tea or coffee with the condensed article from New York or you don’t whiten it at all, even at petty hamlets in the far interior, where a likely cow and calf will bring not more than $10. As yet, the Mineral wealth of this State sleeps undisturbed and useless. She has Iron enough to divide the earth by railroads into squares ten miles across; but no tun of it was ever smelted. She has at least five thousand square miles of Coal (probably much more); but no tun of it was ever dug for sale. She has Gypsum enough to plaster the continent annually for a century ; but it lies inert and valueless—a waste of earth-covered stone. She has more land good for Wheat than Minnesota, yet imports nearly all her Flour; she has millions of acres of excellent Timber, yet builds mainly of pine from Louisiana and Florida; she sends to the Ohio for her Hams and to New York for her Butter, and would import Berries and Fruits if her people had not learned, while they were unattainable, to do without them. If ten thousand Northern farm- ers would settle just below Houston, and devote themselves to supplying that city and this with fresh Milk, Butter, Strawberries, 32 LETTERS FROM TEXAS. Raspberries, Peaches, Grapes, &c., they might charge double prices, and get rich faster than so many cultivators ever did before. They would have to make their own Ice, but that is not difficult; they might have to teach the Texas Central how to run a milk-train fifty miles; but that need not exhaust their energies. Their pasture- land, fenced, might cost them $10 per acre just around a depot and a junction; their cows might be picked at $15 per head; and they would soon sell Hay enough at 200 per cent. profit to defray the cost of feeding and shedding their stock. This is but one of a hun- dred equally promising enterprises now impatiently awaiting the right men to direct them. Who will send them along? H. G. GLEANINGS FROM TEXAS. [EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE. ] New Organs, La., May 29.—Texas is a great State geographi- cally, with immense natural resources and gigantic possibilities ; but she has not yet justified her early promise. Her wealth in soil and cattle, with the ease wherewith an abundance of food may be secured from these with little labor, has blinded her people to many shortcomings which should not have endured or been endured so long. Her habitations, as a whole, are far smaller, ruder, and less comfortable, than they might and should be. She ought to pay for ten million panes of glass, and hire ten thousand glaziers to set them directly. She is in urgent need of twenty thousand more school-teachers and fifty thousand instructed cooks. It is a grief to see beef that might be broiled into tender and juicy steaks fried ar stewed into such repulsive, indigestible messes as I have en- countered at all but her two best hotels. It is a crying shame for a region where the Peach, the Grape, the Pear, the Strawberry, &e., grow so luxuriantly and bear so bounteously, to be living almost entirely on Meat, Bread, and Coffee, even if these articles were what they should be, and in Texas are not. In Labrador or Alaska, such a “hog and hominy” diet would be faulty; under this fervid sun, it is atrocious. No family which has been five years or over in Texas has any right to live so badly. I judge that there are, at the outside, fifty acres of cultivated Berries of all kinds in the State, perhaps as many of Grapes, and IMPEDIMENTS TO TRAVEL IN TEXAS. 33 possibly one Peach-tree to each family, though I consider that a high estimate. At all events, not one family in every ten has either fruit-tree, grape-vine, or strawberry-bed, down to this hour; and fruit makes no part of the average meal. Yet the profusion of wild grapes (Mustang) in the Brassos bottoms, covering nearly every tree for miles after miles, argues that choice Grapes would grow here if any one would only plant them; while I know that Peaches and Strawberries are hardly anywhere more luxuriant or prolific. Almost every one owns land; those who do not, easily might; but the great majority seem content to live as the pioneers of Texas had to, on coarse, gross food alone, when they might have Fruits, Milk, &e., by moderate exertion. The girls working in Lowell factories would strike the first day that they were fed like the family of a Texas planter who owns five thousand acres of land and a large stock of cattle. I speak of these things at the risk of giving offense, because they ought to be discussed till corrected. The Texas pioneer, living a hundred miles from anywhere, with a neighbor to each ten miles square, no roads and no bridges, had to fare as he could. That is no reason for cherishing his privations after all excuse for them has passed away. If half the money spent in the State for Liquors and Tobacco were devoted to making dwellings comfortable and supplying their tables with fruits, &c., the whole people would be happier and better. A few words as to the cities: I missed Austin, the State capital, by an accident and an all-night thunderstorm, which stopped ‘me at Giddings, the present western terminus of the Texas Central Railroad, leaving 55 miles (rapidly diminishing) of staging over tracks which might be converted into roads were not the railroads so soon to supersede their most impor- tant use. As they are, 18 hours are usually required to traverse: them ; but the stages which I didn’t take at Giddings had not reached Austin two days after they started—the usually dry water-courses having been converted by the rain into raging torrents which could not be crossed. Had I duly reached Austin, I hoped thence to make New-Braunfels, the nucleus of the principal German settlement in Texas and the seat of considerable manufacturing industry, and thence (if possible) San Antonio, the Capital and pride of Western Texas, which boasts a population of 15,000, with a tendency to rapid increase. Within two years, it will have been reached by the Inter- 3 oe LETTERS FROM TEXAS. national Railroad from Austin and the north-east, and by that from, Columbus, connecting it with Houston, Galveston, New Orleans, and Mobile ; when its population will go up like a balloon to 50,000, if not higher. I am assured that they have good (though hard) spring water near the Capital and all these Western cities, which made it harder for me to turn back without reaching them. Galveston seemed to me a little nervous lest the railroads now in progress should draw offher trade and leave her hard aground ; which does not to me seem probable. Her relative importance may be reduced by them, but I judge that her actual trade will be largely increased. She has by far the best harbor in the State, with a pri- macy already achieved which will not lightly depart. I profoundly trust that she may soon and forever lose the profit she now derives from the importation and distribution of all the Flour and most of the Hams and other Pork consumed in the lower half of the State, drawing her own supplies from Northern Texas by rail instead ; but “Texas will always grow Cotton for export, and most of it will find its way to the North and to Europe through Galveston. Sugar will be made on the coast and distributed throughout the interior wia Galveston; while Beef, Hides, Tallow, and ultimately Corn, Hams, Wool, &c., will be exported thence, and many cargoes of Dry Goods, Hardware, &c., be received and distributed in return. “The vessels that take away the exports of Texas will come freighted -with imports. As her manufactures expand, she will require many ship-loads per annum of Coal from the Ohio before she can have adhieved easy access to her own. Galveston must devote part of her wealth to making advantageous connections with all the great railroads that cross or reach the State; she must work hard to im- prove or at least maintain the capacity and accessibility of her har- bor ; and she must resolutely fence out the Yellow Fever by internal purification as well as external vigilance, and her future is secure. Houston is now intent on so deepening and straightening her Bayou that any vessel that can pass the bar at Galveston may dis- charge at her wharves, 50 miles inland, and so much further on the way to a large majority of Texan consumers. It is a spirited en- terprise, in good hands, well backed, and its early success fully as- sured. It will increase the trade of Houston, but will not aggran- _dize her at Galveston’s expense to any such extent as is expected. Most of the vessels that cross the bar at Sandy Hook might go up to Newburgh or Poughkeepsie ; but they generally conclude to stop THE FREEDMEN OF THE SOUTH. 4 35 at New-York.