The great “Mountain Empire State” of Colorado is vastly rich in deposits of gold and silver and lead and antimony and copper and coal and iron, yet very few there are, or ever can be, who do or may amass fortunes therefrom. Her coal beds exceed in area the entire State of West Virginia nearly twice over, yet thousands of acres lie unworked and are now practically unworkable. Her oil fields are promising, a paraffine oil of high grade, yet no oil producer has made or can make any great stake out of them. Her agriculture and grazing interests already exceed the enormous values of her gold and silver, yet few farmers or cattle men make more than a living. Colorado is rich, fabulously rich, yet the wealth that is wrung from her rocks and her pastures and her tilled fields passes most of it into hands other than those who produce it.
The great railroad corporations get the first whack. It has cost enormously to build them; they are expensive to maintain; they are safe from competition by reason of the initial cost of their construction. They are entitled to consideration, and they demand it and enforce it to the limit. The freight rates are appalling, and so adjusted as to squeeze out of every natural product the cream of profit it may yield—sometimes only very thin skim milk is left. The passenger fares are high, usually four cents to ten cents per mile. The cost of living is onerous in Colorado; all freights brought there pay excessive tribute to the railways. So much for the general conditions. With mining it is yet more serious. The Rockefeller-Gugenheim Smelter combine now controls mercilessly all the smelting business of the State, and, as for that, of the mining country. And unless you have an ore that “will yield more than $20 per ton, you might as well not go into the mining business,” experienced mining men repeatedly observed to me.
Colorado boasts enormous agricultural and grazing wealth. She claims that the present values of her herds of cattle and horses, and flocks of sheep, of her orchards and irrigated crops already exceed that of her gold and silver and mineral production. This may be so, and yet after the cattle and sheep and horses are transported to distant markets and converted into cash, after her farmers have paid the enormous irrigation charges to the private corporations that control the water springs, the man on the soil makes little more than a bare living, the fat profits, if any there be, having passed into the capacious pockets of the water companies, of the transportation companies, of the great meat-packing and horse-buying companies. The farmers and grazers with whom I have talked tell me that if they come out even at the end of the year, with a small and moderate profit, they count themselves fortunate. Here and there, of course, a fortune may be amassed by an unusual piece of good luck by the man who raises cattle or fruit, or crops, but as a rule the undoubted profits of these industries are absorbed by the great corporate interests at whose mercy they lie.
Just what will be the outcome of these crushing industrial conditions it is difficult to forecast, but we already see the first expressions of popular dissatisfaction in the extensive labor strikes now prevailing in the Cripple Creek region, and threatening to spread to and include all of the mining camps and operations of the State and adjoining States. Corporate greed and unscrupulous selfishness arouse opposition, and then ensues corresponding combination, and too often counter aggression quite as unreasonable and quite as inconsiderate in scope and action. Men are but mortal, and “an eye for an eye” is too ancient an adage to have lost its force in this twentieth century.
Just how these transportation, mining, agricultural and industrial problems will be finally solved I dare not predict, but we will trust that the ultimate good sense of American manhood will work out a reasonable solution.
NINETEENTH LETTER.
ACROSS NEBRASKA.
On Burlington Route Express,
October 20, 1903. }