We reached Omaha, the chief city of Nebraska, late in the afternoon, coming into the fine granite station of the Burlington Railway system.
While in the city we were delightfully taken care of by our old school and college friends, to whom the vanished years were yet but a passing breath. We were sumptuously entertained at a banquet at the Omaha Club. We were dined and lunched and driven about with a warm-hearted hospitality which may only have its origin in a heart-to-heart friendship, which, beginning among young men at life’s threshold, comes down the procession of the years unchanged and as affectionately demonstrative as though we were all yet boys again. It carried me back to the days when we sat together and sang that famous German student song: “Denkt Oft Ihr Brueder an Unserer Juenglingsfreudigheit, es Kommt Nicht Wieder, Die Goldene Zeit.”
Omaha, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, forms, together with Kansas City on the south and St. Paul, and Minneapolis on the north, the middle of the three chief population centers between St. Louis, Chicago and Denver. It is the chief commercial center of Nebraska and of South Dakota, southern Montana and Idaho, and controls an immense trade.
In old times it was the chief town on the Missouri above St. Louis and still maintains the lead it then acquired. I was surprised to find it situated on a number of hills, some quite steep, others once steeper, now graded down to modern requirements. Its streets are wide and fairly well paved, and its blocks of buildings substantial. The residence streets we drove through contain many handsome houses, light yellow-buff brick being generally used, while Denver is a red brick town. The parks, enclosing hill and dale, are of considerable natural beauty, here again having advantage over Denver, where the flattened prairie roll presents few opportunities for landscape gardening.
The extensive stockyards and abattoirs of Armour, Swift and several other companies have made Omaha even a greater center of the meat trade than Kansas City. In company with W—— I spent the morning in inspecting these extensive establishments. The volume of business here transacted reaches out into all the chief grazing lands of the far West. The stockyards are supposed to be run by companies independent of the packing-houses, and to be merely hotels where the cattle brought in may be lodged and boarded until sold, and the cattle brokers are presumed to be the agents of the cattle owners who have shipped the stock, and to procure for these owners the highest price possible. But, as a matter of fact, the packing-houses control the stockyards, dominate the brokers, who are constantly near to them and far from the cattle owners, and the man on the range who once ships his cattle over the railroads, forthwith places himself at the mercy of the packer—the stock having been shipped must be fed and cared for either on the cars or in the yards, and this takes money—so the quicker the sale of them is made the better for the owner. Hence, inasmuch as the packer may refuse to buy until the waiting stock shall eat their heads off—the owner, through the broker, is compelled to sell as soon as he can, and is compelled to accept whatsoever price the packer may choose to offer him. So the packing companies grow steadily richer and their business spreads and Omaha increases also.
The other chief industry of Omaha is the great smelter belonging to the trust. Incorporated originally by a group of enterprising Omaha men as a local enterprise, it was later sold out to the Gugenheim Trust, whose influence with the several railroads centering in Omaha has been sufficient to preserve the business there, though the smelter is really far away from ores and fluxes.
These two enterprises, the cattle killing and packing and ore-reducing, together with large railway shops, constitute the chief industrial interests of Omaha, and, for the rest, the city depends upon the extensive farming and grazing country lying for five hundred miles between her and the Rocky Mountains. As they prosper, so does Omaha; as they are depressed, so is she. And only one thing, one catastrophe does Omaha fear, far beyond words to tell—the fierce, hot winds that every few years come blowing across Nebraska from the furnace of the Rocky Mountains’ alkali deserts. They do not come often, but when they do, the land dies in a night. The green and fertile country shrivels and blackens before their breath, the cattle die, the fowls die, the things that creep and walk and fly die. The people—the people flee from the land or die upon it in pitiful collapse. Then it is that Omaha shrivels and withers too. Twice, twice within the memory of living man have come these devastating winds, and twice has Omaha suffered from their curse, and even now Omaha is but recovering her activity of the days before the plague, forgetful of a future that—well! men here say that such a universal catastrophe may never again occur.
And the handsome city is prosperous and full of buoyant life.
We now go on to St. Louis and thence to Cincinnati and so home.