"I couldn't sell anything. There is no market there. The farmers raise so much that they can hardly give their grain away."
"Did you sell your farm?"
"No, I left it. It is there for anybody to take."
"Is it cold there?"
"No colder than it is here. We have a few cold days in winter, but not much snow. Cattle live in the fields through the winter, feeding on bunch-grass, which grows tall and is very sweet."
Here was information worth having,—the experience of a farmer. The Deer Lodge Pass is at the head-waters of the Missouri, in the main divide of the Rocky Mountains, and one of the surveyed lines of the Northern Pacific Railroad passes through it. We have thought of it as a place where a railroad train would be frozen up and buried beneath descending avalanches; but here is a man who has lived within seven miles of the top of the mountains, who raised the best of wheat, the mealiest of potatoes, whose cattle lived in the pastures through the winter, but who left his farm for the sole reason that he could not sell anything. Montana has no market except among the mining population, and the miners are scattered over a vast region. A few farmers in the vicinity of a mining-camp supply the wants of the place. Farming will not be remunerative till a railroad is completed up the valley of the Yellowstone or Missouri. What stronger argument can there be, what demonstration more forcible, for the immediate construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad? It will pass through the heart of the Territory which is yielding more gold and silver than any other Territory or State.
This farmer says that Montana is destined to be a great stock-growing State. Cattle thrive on the bunch-grass. The hills are covered with it, and millions of acres that cannot be readily cultivated will furnish pasturage for flocks and herds. This testimony accords with statements made by those who have visited the Territory, as well as by others who have resided there.
We have met to-day a long train of wagons filled with emigrants, who have come from Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and some from Ohio.
Look at the wagons, each drawn by four oxen,—driven either by the owner or one of his barefoot boys. Boxes, barrels, chairs, tables, pots, and pans constitute the furniture. The grandmother, white-haired, old, and wrinkled, and the wife with an infant in her arms, with three or four romping children around her, all sitting on a feather-bed beneath the white canvas covering. A tin kettle is suspended beneath the axle, in which a tow-headed urchin, covered with dust, is swinging, clapping his hands, and playing with a yellow dog trotting behind the team. A hoop-skirt, a chicken-coop, a pig in a box, are the most conspicuous objects that meet the eye as we look at the hinder part of the wagon. A barefooted boy, as bright-eyed as Whittier's ideal,—now done in chromo-lithograph, and adorning many a home,—marches behind, with his rosy-cheeked sister, driving a cow and a calf.
To-night they will be fifteen miles nearer their destination than they were in the morning. Some of the teams have been two months on the road, and a few more days will bring them to the spot which the emigrant has already selected for his future home. They halt by the roadside at night. The oxen crop the rich grasses; the cow supplies the little ones with milk; the children gather an armful of sticks, the mother makes a cake, and bakes it before the camp-fire in a tin baker such as was found in every New England home forty years ago; the emigrant smokes his pipe, rolls himself in a blanket, and snores upon the ground beneath the wagon, while his family sleep equally well beneath the canvas roof above him. Another cake in the morning, with a slice of fried pork, a drink of coffee, and they are ready for the new day.