The New York World of October 7th contained the following:
“A party of New Yorkers, who have been travelling in the West for ten days in a special car, the guests of Ben Blanchard, Esq., arrived home late Saturday evening. The party numbered about twenty. Mr. Knox, who was for many years Comptroller of the Currency at Washington, went on ahead of the party to attend a meeting of the National Banking Association in Kansas City, and joined them there. It was thought that their trip might have some connection with some new financial scheme to be developed in the West, but Mr. Knox said yesterday that they had gone simply for pleasure. All declared that they had a most delightful time.
“‘The West is developing rapidly,’ said Mr. Knox. ‘It would pay every Eastern business to make a journey through the West every two or three years.’”
Was ever pleasure and profit so delightfully combined? After leaving the Bankers’ Convention at Kansas City all care or thought of business was dismissed. We were in the watch-care of Mr. Blanchard, and, confident that he knew the way, we all surrendered ourselves to his protection. My second visit was just three months after my first. Then the crops were waving in the fields, now they were harvested; and as the Hon. Darwin R. James said in his address at the banquet at Hutchinson, “All that Major Corwin has told us about the crops and the salt and the condition of things in Kansas has been more than realized.”
The “Dalmatia Party” is now scattered. Two are in Europe. Others are again controlling the finances of Wall Street, and the busy marts of trade and commerce of the East, while our host is engaged as before in developing the undiscovered wealth of the great agricultural State, which has untold riches of salt and other interests besides,—Kansas. May he go on from conquering to conquest, from success to success, is the wish of all those who enjoyed his unselfish hospitality.
GOOD-BY “DALMATIA.”
Our house on wheels, in which we travelled safely over 4,000 miles, was about seventy feet long, by ten feet wide; one story; divided into drawing-room, smoking-room, kitchen, and large family room. For two weeks we enjoyed its close quarters,—small for the residence of twenty-two people. But it was the people that made the rooms delightful.
“Some love the glow of outward show,
Some love mere wealth and try to win it;
The house to me may lowly be,