44 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



staple crop. The hay and meal are being shipped to all parts of the 

 world, and some of our people are crowding brome interests to the front. 

 In fifty years we have seen the iron horse supplant the ox teams; we have 

 seen the deer, antelope, buffalo, either exterminated or driven back to the 

 Rocky mountains. In fifty years we have seen telephones, wireless tele- 

 graphy come, and electricity harnessed to draw cars and automobiles. The 

 self binder, band cutter, straw stacker, two and three rowed corn 

 planteers, and a thousand other devices to lighten labor have been 

 invented. 



Looking back fifty Mty j'ears it seems only a span, but in progress 

 it's up to a thousand years preceding it in inventions, education, arts, 

 etc. If we judge the future by the past fifty years, the mind can not im- 

 agine the strides that will come in the next fifty years. 



We have had our ups and downs as might be expected in a new coun- 

 try, but I am safe in saying we have had more ups than downs, or our 

 land would no<t have raised from $1.25 an acre to $75 and 2100 in 1908. 

 In the fall of 1866 we had our first visitation of grasshoppers. "Word 

 came that they were where Lincoln now stands, and moving southeast at 

 a rate of four or five miles a day, devouring every green thing. Some 

 thought when they reached the Nemaha river they would be drowned and 

 never reach the river counties, but one day about 1 o'clock something 

 began to drop, and in an hour they filled the sky like a snowstorm. 



Some places they seemed to be two or three deep and they seemed to 

 want our crops, and we stood by and saw them taken. I had a flock of 

 turkeys and when the grasshoppers began to fall the turkeys got busy 

 but only for a short time as they got too full for utterance. It was funny 

 to see them stand, and_ see so many grasshoppers go to waste. Again in 

 1874 they came, devastating the countrj'. They deposited their eggs in 

 the fall. Hatching out in the spring they ate everything within ten miles 

 of the river and On July 1 they took wings and flew away, going where, 

 nobody knows, but probably to some other planet. 



We fought them with tar, coal oil, fire, but they were too numerous. 

 A kind providence ordered them to move, and they went. We have had 

 bed bugs, chintz bugs, fieas, lice, mosquitoes, wood ticks, dog ticks and 

 politics. The combination as bad as it is, is not in it with a grasshop- 

 per scourge. 



Referring to one of the above plagues, namely politics, while we were 

 in the territory we were disfranchised from national politics, but had a 

 delegate to congress who was allowed to speak but not to vote. The main 

 attraction to go there and sit like a lump on a log was mileage and 

 salary. Still it kept politics from going out of fashion until we became 

 a state. The political parties were pretty evenly divided in our first elec- 

 tion of J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska City and David Butler of Pawnee 

 City were pitted against each other for governor. Morton was elected 

 by eight votes, fraud having been found in Rock Bluff precinct in Cass 



