“—and corn.”
We exploded with laughter, and even the enthusiastic orator smiled grimly as he sat down.
“May be Mr. Whittier wouldn’t have seen so much poetry in the way I used his words, but I tell you Montrose knows there’s a heap of truth in it.”
“Yes, no doubt. But how about the ‘icy horn’—these high and dry benches up here?”
“Well, they say the very strongest and most productive soil of all is on those same gravelly mesas. It’s lighter and different from the saline clays of the bottoms. Now, over there”—pointing to the great upland, which lay elevated a hundred feet or so above the river on the southern side of the Uncompahgre—”lies a mesa that contains about twenty-two thousand acres. Then down below, at the mouth of the river, is another stretch just twice as large. All that is needful to make that productive farming land is water. A company here is building a canal which will be twenty-seven miles long and will cost a hundred thousand dollars. It takes the water out of the Uncompahgre away up by the Cantonment, leads it along the foot of the wooded bluffs behind the mesa, and can furnish enough to water the whole expanse. If you have a farm there, all you have to do is to select half a mile square or so—there’s heaps of it left untouched as yet,—pay $1.25 an acre, dig side ditches and draw as much water as you need at so much an inch rental from the company. That’s going to make one vast wheat-field.”
“I see, but what next?”
“Well, by the time your wheat is grown there will be mills here to grind it. There is one now at Montrose which will make from seventy-five to one hundred barrels of flour per day, and when the crops get ahead of it other mills will be built. This is not poetry and fancy and talk; it is a settled fact, for the soil has been tried in more places than one, and—but, hello! there’s our train!”
Precipitately retreating to our “parlor,” we don our dusters and go steaming down toward Grand Junction.
The mountains whence I have just come lift their snow-embroidered heights grandly to the sky, and I can point out nearly all the separate peaks though they are fifty miles away.
“You should have seen that long hill-range