Nebraska, its advantages, resources, and drawbacks. Illustrated

Front matter

NEBKASKA Eaton, Pfwto. Omaha. THE HIGH-SCHOOL, OMAHA. NEBRASKA, ITS- ADVANTAGES, RESOURCES, AND DRAWBACKS. ILLUSTRATED. BY EDWIN A. CURLEY, SPECIAL COMMISSIONER FROM " THE FIELD " TO THE EMIGRANT FIELDS OF NORTH AMERICA. LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, LOW AND SEARLE, CROWN BUILDINGS, FLEET STREET. 1875. [All rights i-eserved.~\ Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, by Edwin A. Curley. CHISWICK PRESS: PRINTED BY WHITTINGHAM AND WfLKINS, TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Chapter Page I. Emigration .... ... 1 II. American Immigration ; its Past, Present, and Future . 23 III. The Geography of Nebraska ; How to Get There . . 40 IV. The City of Omaha 53 V. Statistical 74 VI. Statistical 80 VII. Climatic Considerations ...... 100 VIII.

The Surface Geology of Nebraska. (By Prof. S. Aughey, Ph.D.) 114 IX. The same (continued) ...... 126 X. On the Platte and the Elkhom 140 XI. On the Elkhom and the Logan . . . .160 XII. The Missouri to the Niobrara . . . .170 XIII. On the Platte and the Loup 177 XIV. The History of Nebraska. (By Oscar A. Mullon, Esq.) 187 XV. On the Weeping Water and the Nemahas . . . 200 XVI. Otoe County. (By Dr. John H. Blue) . . . .208 XVII. Up the Salt River .223 XVIII. Some Regions of the Blues . . • . . .234 XIX. On the Headwaters of the Blues .... 245 XX. South Central Nebraska 254 XXI. South Central Nebraska (continued) .... 265 XXII. The Hateful Locust VI TABLE OF CONTENTS. Chapter Page XXIII. Forty-three thousand square miles .... 300 XXIV. The Wild Fruits of Nebraska. (By Prof. S. Aughey, Ph.D.) 316 XXV.

Timber and Fuel 336 XXVI. Fences . .350 XXVII. Pastoral Marvels 361 XXVIII. Pastoral Marvels (continued) . . . .378 XXIX. Associate and Co-operative Colonization . . . 395 XXX. Land 410 Notes on Changes in Steamship Lines . . . 430 Index ... . . LIST OF MAPS Map pa(te I. Key Map of Nebraska .... facing 1 II. North-Eastern Nebraska . . .2 pages, following 32 III. South-Eastern Nebraska ... 2 ,, 48 IV. Geological Map .... 3 „ 128 V. South Central Nebraska ... 2 „ 192 VI. North Central Nebraska ... 3 „ 288 VII. South-Western Nebraska ... 2 „ 304 VIII. Western Nebraska . . . .2 . „ 368 LIST OF PLATES. Plate Page I. The High School, Omaha .... facing title II. Panorama of Omaha . . 3 pages, following 64 III. View in Omaha from the Union Pacific Railway faeing 56 IV. Post Office and Creighton Block, Omaha . . ,, 62 V. Part of Nebraska City from the Upland . . ., 208 VI.

Preface

. HIS is the hour of heterogeneous handbooks, crude con , coctions of petty local officials who have studied no stand 1 ards, and cannot correctly compare with other lands | that which they unwisely attempt to describe ; it is the time of trashy travels, consisting of the tittle-tattle of the train, the table, and the tap, illustrated with old maps and borrowed engravings, and made to sell ; it is the period of pamphlets on the pre tensions of Paraguay, the productions of Patagonia, the potable refuse of Pachino, and the ponderous ores of Panicocoli — pamphlets with a purpose, and most generously given away ; but, nevertheless, this age of artful avarice and adroit accumulation, this era of eager enterprise and electric energy, is better than the best before it : if it has freely given its gold to the few, it has also done much for the moiling many ; it highly appreciates painstaking, persevering, and intelligent and useful work, which it well requites ; or, if it may not mete the full measure of mani fold merits from its own magnificent means, it sometimes anticipates the judgment of future generations, and by a patent process, first applied in this epoch, it draws a series of bills which will be duly honoured by posterity. London. Aug. 1875. NEBRASKA.

Chapter I. Emigration

Its immense social and political power. — Milk and honey. — Robbers and pirates. — Trojans and Romans. — Dido and the Quakers. — Philology. — Migration an imperative necessity. — Happiness the one test. — A king on the safety valve. — Colonial Commerce. — France and Canada. — A sub stantial increase. — No better than we should be. — Reprehensible com binations. — Malthus. — Lancashire operatives. — Public opinion. — Ameri can influence. — Curious calculations. — Teutonic tribute. — Subjects and cattle. — The luxury of the poor. — Lean kine and fat. — A medicine for militarism. — Germany cannot restrain emigration, and is now haggling in the man-market. — An autocrat anxious. — " The coon comes down." — National depletions. — Folly in France. — Spanish Americans not true emigrants. — Bad laws and bad customs as a labour and money question. — Coal and iron. — What is, not what ought to be, the rule for the emigrant. — Political pickles. — Mocha at a discount. — Dear laws. — How to mea sure money and men. — Freedom. — Intelligent emigration a certain cure for real grievances.

N the following pages, I shall treat of the a^ivan^a'Sest resources, and drawbacks of Nebraska, principally with reference to the one great topic of emigration, to some of the general aspects of which I have devoted this first introductory chapter. B NEBRASKA. Emigration is, and ever has been, a tremendous though comparatively silent force, giving birth to nations, and shaping their destinies. History is full of wars, and the various tyrannical acts and conspira cies which have generally done duty in the place of statesmanship; but he who has never thought of the subject in that light before, will, on taking a compre hensive survey, be perfectly astonished to find how much of the military and political history of the world has been made or marred by the slowly acting force of emigration. When the eleven remaining sons of Israel found that they had a friend at court, they emigrated to Egypt, and when " there arose a king that knew not Joseph," their children took the earliest opportunity of re-emigrating to " a land flowing with milk and honey."

The Greeks were a barbaric race of emigrants, like our own ances tors, to a great extent of the robber and pirate varieties. They became civilised, and sent forth organized colonies, the history of whose beginnings may still be studied for instructive examples. They destroyed Troy, and, in a distant land, Rome arose, ultimately to de stroy them. Carthage, the great rival of Rome, was an offshoot of Tyre, and its founder is said to have ob tained of the natives the site of the city by an artifice, afterwards adopted with variations and improvements by some of the Quakers in Pennsylvania. Far back in the past, beyond the authentic history of many peoples, the new science of philology takes us, and shows us the kinship, the former oneness of distant peoples, and con sequently that in the progress of the world they have been sundered by emigration.

EMIGRATION. 3 Reason and analogy teach us that emigration is a matter of necessity. The young man must leave his father's house ; there is not always a suitable opening in the same village, and he must go to another, or per haps to a distant county. Migrations, to a greater or less distance, are the rule rather than the exception of life in the United Kingdom ; and between migration and emigration there is no essential difference in prin ciple. In either case, the question to be solved before making a move is whether, all things considered, we are likely to obtain for ourselves, and those dependent upon us, any real advantages, any solid happiness, or any decrease of evils beyond what we might expect if re maining in the house, hamlet, city, county, or kingdom in which we were born. Two hundred and fifty years ago emigration began to take from England considerable numbers of persons of various classes, whose condition, under the wise laws of our ancestors, made them more or less dangerous to the then existing order of things.

In a few years it had gained a great impetus. The king seems to have measured his power in some degree by the number of subjects within reach of his arm, and therefore to have stopped some of the emigrants by force. This was like sitting on the safety-valve to be able to utilize the greater amount of steam. One of the men thus retained in the kingdom against his will, became chief of the revolution which followed, and he was afterwards more than monarch of the realm. It is impossible to say how few or how many of those who were most violent opponents of the acts of the king would have gone to NEBRASKA. America had they been free to do so, but it is quite possible that the nature of the resistance would have been materially modified ; and that, instead of the intensity of passion which prevailed, we should have had a slower, surer, and more thoughtful resistance.

This would not have thwarted the king as quickly as the revolution beheaded him, nor would it have put a still more powerful despot of a different character in his place. The revolution took about fifty years to establish any substantial good for the people of England, and one may fairly hold the opinion that the rights of the people, as well as the blood and treasure of the nation and the head of the king, would have been far safer if the attractions of New England had been allowed to prevail over a large number of those who became leaders of the revolution. Notwithstanding the numerous checks that colonization received from natural and artificial causes, the political and social influence of the emigration of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can hardly be over-estimated. The year 1776 found the revolting American colonies with a population of about three millions, wholly the result, directly or indirectly, of emigration.

The population of England at that time was about seven millions. The emigration had been mostly from the middle classes, with a sprinkling of labourers taken over by their masters, or carried over by speculators, and sold into a sort of slavery, and of mechanics who had managed to save a little store for their dangerous and rather expensive voyage. From the fact, among others not so much to their credit that they knew and appreciated at something like their just EMIGRATION. 5 value many of the rights to which they were entitled, and which were ignored or persistently refused, many of these people would have been sources of serious danger to the government of their times if they had remained at home. The amount of that danger is not to be measured by their number, but by their character, and by the influence which they would have been likely to exert over their fellow-subjects.

When they left England their places were filled by others whose position was in consequence materially improved, and who, feeling this improvement, were much less discontented subjects than they otherwise would have been. Commerce with the colonies brought wealth to the manufacturers and merchants, and in directly to the landowners and the farmers ; and as employers had, in a measure, to bid against the great attractions of the colonies, the material condition of all classes but the very krwest was decidedly improved by that emigration upon which many influential persons looked with the greatest disfavour. It is difficult to imagine' the extent of the difference in the condition of the lower, middle, and working classes which would have been produced if the ranks of the shopkeepers, mechanics, and labourers had con stantly become more and more overstocked by the competition of these emigrants and their descendants.

Under wise laws there might have been room for four times the population, but wise laws are very difficult to obtain even now, and in those circumstances they would have been most unlikely with the aid of revolution, and utterly impossible without it. Turning to the condition of France at the present NEBRASKA. time, we may obtain some crude idea of the probable results of a permanent non-emigration policy in Eng land. That country was wealthier, and in many re spects more favoured than this; it was also far more advanced in the arts and sciences. England's superiority, partly the result of her insular position, was almost entirely confined to the sea. But this supe riority of England at sea was a check upon French emigration, and, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the conquest of the great French colony of Canada, by a British imperial and colonial army, virtually destroyed it.

In that country, in the mean time, as the population increased, the working classes were more and more at the mercy of those above them, and the share of the fruits of their labour which they obtained became less and less. They could only manage to exist from hand to mouth, and combination for better pay would have been very generally un successful, even if there had been no terribly repressive laws to insure abject submission. Their misery passed the limit of endurance, and everybody knows that the great French revolution was the result, and that the vibrations of that terrible political earthquake have not yet ceased to shake the earth. It is easy to point to many shortcomings of the people as well as of the rulers of France, and to imagine that these were prime causes of the revolution ; but a more careful scrutiny will show that the facts were otherwise.

Power is blind, stupid, and self-seeking in all other countries as well as there, and the majority of any people which feels the iron heel of oppression is both EMIGRATION. 7 deceitful and impatient. That the faults essentially French, to which it is fashionable to attribute the revolution in that country, are really non-existent, can be plainly seen by comparison with the French Canadians, who undoubtedly possess all of the essentials of the French character. They and their brethren in the United States are about a million and a half in number, and the descendants of less than ten thousand original emigrants. They have felt little oppression, and they are a people as patient and as contented with then' generally humble circumstances as any other population under like conditions on the face of the earth.

Nor can it be attri buted to the inherent vices of Roman Catholicism, or its injurious effects on the French character, for this religion has had freer scope among the Canadians than among the people of France. No one who carefully examines and compares the whole circumstances can doubt that a large and constant stream of emigration from France would infallibly have ameliorated the con dition of the humbler classes, enabling them to cope in a regular manner with the power of those above them, and that it would thus have been a force sufficient to have changed for the better the whole history of France for the last hundred years, possibly preventing the revolution, and at any rate depriving it of many of its horrors, and benefiting in a general way the blind oppressors quite as much as the people oppressed.

It is no doubt very gratifying to that self-love which we are apt to miscall patriotism to attribute to the English race and nation very special capacities for progress and self-government, but our self-glorification NEBRASKA. in these respects can only proceed from ignorance of the comparative disadvantages under which our neigh bours have laboured, or from something still worse. If we examine our political history without prejudice, we shall find that our kings have seldom been very brilliant specimens of humanity. Our nobles have not often been gifted with remarkable political foresight, and the wisdom of our squirearchy and the self-denial of our bishops and beneficed clergy have never been so great as to become proverbial among the nations of the earth. Until very recent times these have been our gover nors ; they have resisted all improvements which inter fered with their pet privileges, and they have never yielded while there was a chance of standing out with success.

Even with all the strength which our vast emigration has lent to the rights of the poorer classes, the rulers have frequently resisted change till we were upon the brink of a civil war. Nor can we maintain that the middle classes, which are now the foundations of power, are in any respect more unselfish and politi cally wise than those above them, except in so far as contact and conflict with the lower classes have taueht them greater respect. They have never conceded to the lower orders any substantial advantage whifeh the latter were not in a position to exact as the price of service or co-operation; and indeed it would be no more reasonable to expect it than to expect that indi vidual masters who are making heavy profits should hasten to divide them with their employes without pres sure or hope of any reward beyond the great social and EMIGRATION. 9 political advantage that unselfishness would confer upon the community at large.

In fact we see among them organizations in restraint of liberty and justice, and combinations to monopolize profits or other advantages, which, considering the position and circumstances of the members, are far more reprehensible than any trades union of the labouring classes. It is thus very evident that in England, as elsewhere, without emigration the blind selfishness of power would have overreached itself in all directions, and have crushed the lower orders till it prepared a terrible catastrophe for the nation. The working men could not rigidly and universally apply among themselves the doctrines of Malthus, of which they knew nothing ; from wholesale infanticide they would ever shrink with horror, and re volution, or these impossibles, would have been the only alternatives to starvation or slavery.

The greatest example of that unselfish regard for the right, which is the foundation of true political wisdom, that we can boast of, was that afforded by the poor operatives of Lancashire, in the earnest sympathy and moral support which they accorded to the American people in their death-struggle with slavery ; and, broadly speaking, it will be found that, numerous errors of ignorance or misapprehension notwithstanding, a true political instinct resides with the working masses of the people, the amelioration of whose condition by all reasonable means is as definite and real an advantage to their superiors as it is to themselves. It is mainly through the silent working of emigration that commerce has recently attained such enormous NEBRASKA. proportions, and that public opinion is gradually be coming stronger than armies, and more powerful than governments.

The commerce of the existing colonial dependencies of the European States is very great, and these colonies exercise a very definite influence on the public opinion of the world through their connection with the parent States. But the American Union was so recently a wilderness, that its forty millions of people may, without a very great stretch of imagination, be considered as a nation of emigrants, whose public opinion is brought into most intimate contact with all civilized nations, and is universally felt. Germany has no colonies of her own, but in every hamlet of that country are relatives and friends of citizens of the great republic, who are frequently receiving thence letters and papers from happy and prosperous emigrants. Through the various influences thus created the action of the most powerful and stubborn government of Europe is more sensibly affected than by any other external agency, if we except only the warlike array of some of its neighbours.

For Germany, emigration is not less important than for England, and in the end it is not unlikely to mould the government to the popular will without the aid of a revolution. Notwithstanding their friendly attitude to the United States, German rulers fear and dislike emigration for many reasons. Its action on the people remaining at home is by no means alto gether approved ; from an economical point of view they consider it a great loss to the country, and worst of all, it takes no inconsiderable portion of the grist from the mill of the army. EMIGRATION. Dr. Engel, Director of the Prussian Statistical Bureau, has considered the subject of emigration from the point of view of political economy. He assumes that on the average a man is worth to the country as much as he will cost to produce.

He does not tell us how much Germany lost on this score in packing off the King of Hanover, and in her numerous emigrant princelings, but he deals at once with the manual labourer, whose life he divides into three periods ; fifteen years of unpro ductive youth, fifty years of labour, and the balance of life a period of unproductive senility. Whether or not the child in his first period lives at the expense of his parents, there must be means for his maintenance and education, which means are the result of labour. The productive period (1) should repay the expenses in curred by parents or others in the juvenile period ; (2) should satisfy the daily wants and maintain the productive power of the individual ; (3) should produce a sur plus fund for sustenance during the aged period. Thus the cost of bringing up and educating a man constitutes a specific value which benefits that country which the adult individual makes the field of his exertions.

Dr. Engel computes the cost of producing a manual labourer in Germany, at an average for both sexes, of forty thalers a year for five years, fifty thalers a year for five years more, and sixty thalers a year for the third term of five years, with which he completes the period of un productive youth. He thus arrives at a total cost, and therefore, according to his theory, a total average value of seven hundred and fifty thalers for the manual labourers of Germany, considered as working animals, NEBRASKA. and this sum of about one hundred and twelve pounds ten shillings sterling he reckons as the correct measure of the country's loss by the departure of an emigrant, irrespective of the amount of money or goods which he takes to the new field of his labours. According to Engel's theory, this sum increased by the extra per centage of the cost of sound males above the general average of the sexes would also measure the value of any such emigrants as food for gunpowder.

Taking the figures of Dr. Engel as our basis, and adding one hun dred and twenty-five thalers as the minimum amount representing the cost of the passage, goods, and clothing of each emigrant, and the money taken by him,1 we find on reference to American statistics that the total German emigration to the United States is a tribute worth in Germany about three hundred and fifty millions sterling. The annual average of this tribute for the four years immediately preceding the Franco-German war was very nearly sixteen millions sterling, and it bids fair to reach twenty-five millions in a very few years. Dr. Engel's book gives expression and definite shape to an idea fixed in the Prussian official mind, an idea which has long influenced the acts of the Government, and which is now being pushed further than ever before.

It is even said that Prince Bismarck had formed the intention of increasing year by year the restrictive action of the government until emigration should practically cease ; but, bold as the German government may 1 This sum of one hundred thalers, exclusive of passage, is based on statistics obtained with great care by the Commissioners of Immio-ration at New York. EMIGRATION. 13 be, it is not likely that it will venture to carry out its theories to any such dangerous extreme. Notwithstanding the very high authority of Dr. Engel, and any conclusions to which a government so astute as that of Germany may have arrived, it is not too much to say that this theory is utterly fallacious, and that very little unbiassed consideration is needed to demonstrate the fact. The theory assumes, in the first place, that German subjects, like German cattle, come into the world in obedience to a definite law of supply and demand, that each German is born because he is in some degree wanted, not merely by his parents, but in an economical sense by the nation at large.

The actual facts are very different. The child is born to gratify the natural desires of his parents, or else he is, so to speak, an accident of life, which they lack either the inclination, knowledge, power, or resolution to prevent. Once in the world, the affection or duty of his parents induces them to make very substantial sacrifices for the purpose of giving him such advantages as they can command, and from his birth to his manhood, questions of profit or loss to themselves, or of State economy, have no more to do with the matter than the law or other cir cumstances compel. Children are, in fact, the one great luxury of the poor, which the State can neither regulate nor prohibit. Under these circumstances the actual supply of will ing hands is very much in excess of the home demand for reasonably rewarded labour, and notwithstanding whatever it may have originally cost, this excess, if re- NEBRASKA. tained at home, would be an element of trouble, ex pense, and positive danger.

The economical value of the subjects of a government depends quite as much upon quality as upon number, and any surplus of population deteriorates the rest much more than any benefit its retention can possibly confer. It is as if a farmer with sufficient pasture and forage for a hundred head of cattle should insist upon keeping a stock of a hundred and twenty, in which case the six score will be found to be worth less in the market than four score bred under proper conditions. Owing in some degree to State interference with the liberty of the subject, and to various other causes which tend to restrict emigration from Germany, its amount is probably somewhat less than what might fairly be considered the increase of surplus population. If so, the total amount of emigration is on economical as well as other grounds an advantage to the State.

It is true that every man who escapes military service by emigration renders it more irksome to those that remain, and that the influence of the republican ideas im bibed by the emigrants is so strong upon the people at home, as to give some concern to the government, but these are evils which a semi-constitutional militarism must perforce endure, or risk others still worse ; they are evils which the majority of thinkers will look upon as having the nature of medicines ; a species of blessing in disagreeable guise. Just as this work is going to the press, the telegraph tells us that the various ministerial departments in Berlin are engaged in making inquiries in order to re- EMIGRATION. move as much as possible the causes leading to emigra tion. The plan under consideration is to enable the peasants to become landed proprietors, by the division into small allotments of certain State domains, and by thus ameliorating the condition of the people of the agricultural districts to counteract the inducements said to be held out by agents in the pay of Transatlantic governments.1 This is undoubtedly the truth, if not the whole truth, and the bare consideration of such a democratic measure for such a purpose is a very strik ing illustration of the political and social influence of emigration.

Emigration conflicts very strongly with the military spirit. By raising the price of wages, and making a large and effective army a very expensive machine, it has done much to place England in a reserved attitude in respect to foreign politics, and its tendency will be found the same everywhere else. The vast extent of the undeveloped resources of Russia might well tax the energies of her government, and of a much larger population than the empire at present possesses. But recently the government has become concerned — alarmed would perhaps be the better word — at the steady, settled, persistent emigration of a comparatively well-to-do and very worthy body of 1 It seems to be thought convenient to speak of the efforts of paid agents as the chief causes of emigration, but as a matter of fact the para mount influence is that of successful emigrants, through private letters and pecuniary assistance to friends left in the fatherland.

Agents could have very little influence, and that of the most transient character, were they not able to appeal to very substantial facts. NEBRASKA. people — the Mnenonites, a religious sect, objecting to military service. These people, after explorations of large portions of the United States by trusted members, have commenced settlements in Nebraska, and other parts of the far West, and there was no telling how many -of the Russian people would eventually follow the example of these successful pioneers. It is now stated, on what appears to be good authority, that a ukase has been issued giving this sect a special exemp tion from military service, in hopes of thus checking the movement. In Russia this exemption, as everywhere on the Continent, is an important boon; it gives the Mnenonites a great advantage over their fellows, makes them a farmer and peasant aristocracy, in fact, and tends greatly to augment their numbers at the cost, from the point of view of the government, of a very considerable mischief.