In to the Yukon

by William Seymour Edwards

We left Denver upon the night express over the Burlington Railway system, and all day to-day are flying eastward across flat, flat Nebraska.

At dawn the country looked parched and treeless; expanses of buffalo grass and herds of cattle. Here and there the course of a dried-up stream marked by straggling cottonwood trees and alders, their leaves now turned a dull yellow brown. A drear land, but yet less heart-sickening than the stretches of bleak and barren landscape we have so often gazed upon through Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Despite the dry and parched appearance of this immediate region, it is yet counted a fine grazing country, and the cattle range and thrive all the year round upon the tufted bunches of the sweet, nutritious buffalo-grass that everywhere here naturally abounds.

By middle morning we are entering the more eastern farming section of the State, though still in western Nebraska. The land is all fenced, laid out in large farms, the fences and public roads running north and south and east and west. The farmhouses are neat, mostly, and set in tidy yards with groves of trees planted about. Large red barns, many hay and wheat stacks, illimitable fields of thick-growing wheat stubble, and miles of corn, the stalks bearing the large ears yet standing in the hill, while, as a general thing, the roughness has all been gathered in—the Southern way of handling the corn crops. No shocks standing like wigwams in the fields.

Fall plowing is also under way. We have just passed a man sitting on a sulky plow, driving four big horses abreast, his little six-year old daughter on his knee. A pretty sight. There are many windmills, one near each house and barn, some out in the wide fields, all pumping water, turned by the prairie winds that forever blow.

We are passing many small towns. All just alike. The square-fronted stores, the steepled churches, the neat residences, rows of trees planted along either side of the streets. “That dreadful American monotony,” as foreign visitors exclaim!

The country looks just like the flat prairie section of Manitoba, Assiniboia and Alberta, in Canada, that we traversed in August, except that this is all occupied and intelligently tilled, while the most part of that is yet open to the roaming coyote, and may be yet purchased from the Canadian Government or from the Railway Company, as is rapidly being done. And this country here looks longer settled than does northern Minnesota and North Dakota through which we passed.

The planting of trees in Nebraska seems to have been very general, and along the roadways, the farm division lines, and about the farmsteads and in the towns are now multitudes of large and umbrageous trees. And sometimes large areas have been planted, and are now become veritable woodland.

At the town of Lincoln, Mr. W. J. Bryan’s home city, we have stopped quite awhile, and in the distance can see the tall, white, dome-hooded cupola of the State Capitol through the yellow and brown foliage of autumnal tinted cottonwood.

Sitting in the forward smoker and falling into conversation with a group of Nebraska farmers, I found a number of substantial Democrats among them, admirers but no longer adherents of Mr. Bryan—“Our crops have never been so good and gold never so cheap and so plenty as during the last few years,” they said. And they were not surprised when they saw by the quotation of silver in the Denver morning paper that silver had never risen to so high a price in the open market as it holds to-day, sixty-eight cents per ounce. And they spoke of Grover Cleveland with profound respect. In Nebraska, they tell me, all possibility of a recrudescence of the Bryan vagaries is now certainly dead, and that this fine agricultural State is as surely Republican as is Ohio. The farmers are all doing well, making money and saving money. They are fast paying off such land mortgages as remain. Also, there are now few, very few, unoccupied lands in Nebraska. The State is practically filled up, and filled up with a permanent and contented population. As families grow, and sons and daughters come to manhood and womanhood, the old farms must be cut up and divided among them, or the surplus young folk must seek homes elsewhere. And of this surplus some are among the great American trek into the Canadian far north.