APR&31895 



Kansas University Quarterly. 



Vol. III. APRIL, 1895. No. 4 



''Semi- Arid Kansas." 



BY S. W. WILLISTON. 

 (With Map of Kansas.) 



The state of Kansas has a superficial area of nearly eighty thousand 

 square miles in the form of a parallelogram four hundred miles long 

 by two hundred broad, stretching from the Missouri river two-thirds 

 of the way to the Rocky Mountains. Its extremes of fertility and bar- 

 renness are found in the northeastern and southwestern corners. In 

 the former, with its forty inches of annual rainfall, its varied topog- 

 raphy and its deep soil, enriched by the alluvium of the glacial drift, 

 failures of crops are almost unknown, and harvests are bountiful. It 

 is this part of the state which has, preeminently, given to Kansas its 

 reputation for agriculture. In the region at the other extreme, even 

 moderate returns from the husbandman's labors have been the rare 

 exceptions; the land there for a large part of the year lies barren and 

 dead, burnt by the scorching rays of the summer sun, or swept by the 

 bitter winds of winter. Between these two extremes there are all 

 intermediate conditions; imperceptibly the rainfall diminishes from 

 forty to fifteen inches per annum, and the land rises from eight 

 hundred to thirty-five hundred feet in altitude; the bluffs and timbered 

 valleys merge gradually into the high and barren plains, and the rich 

 vegetation into buffalo grass, cactus and yuccas. 



While the eastern portion of the state is enjoying a prosperity 

 nowhere excelled, I believe, by any other equal area of agricultural 

 country, the western third has been deserted as utterly unfit for agri- 

 culture under present conditions and methods. The reason for this 

 change from fertility to barrenness is not inexplicable, but it is lament- 

 ably true that the inevitable results of geographical and geological 

 causes have not been accepted until bitter experience has demonstrated 

 them. In the face of experience, and almost without facts to sustain 

 the theory, it was contended that the rainfall would increase with ex- 

 tended settlements. That the snow-capped Rocky Mountains are 



(209) KAN. UNIV. QUAR., VOL. Ill, NO. 4, APRIL, 1, 1895. 



