330 



dental facilities supplied by records of the ofiicia], scientific, and rail- 

 road explorations of the great region — vrhich will only be used for pur- 

 poses of comi^arisou, verification, and illustration — our regular corre- 

 spondents, as well as local officials and residents of enlarged information 

 and accurate and unbiased judgment, will be employed, public addresses 

 examined, and the records of current newspaper and book literature 

 searched, for the material, which will be sifted, analyzed, and compared, 

 and the compilation made by the statistician and others, after explora- 

 tion and observation to the greatest i)racticable extent. The work will 

 be difficult and laborious, and may not be concluded for the report of 

 1871, but its results, it is hoped, will find at least a partial record in 

 the annual of the current year. 



With reference to this work the statistician joined the agricultural 

 editorial excursion party, (consisting of many of the principal agricul- 

 tural editors of the country,) which left New York on the 18th of July, 

 passing through Southern ]!!«[ew York, N^orthwestern Pennsylvania, 

 Ohio, Indiana, (diverging here to Southern Kentucky,) and Illinois to 

 St. Louis ; making another diversion, via the Atlantic and Pacific Kail- 

 road, to the rich agricultural and mineral lands of Southwestern Mis- 

 souri and to the verdure-clad and cattle-teeming prairie of the Indian 

 Territory ; thence to the fruit-yielding bluff-lands of Missouri, the long 

 vista of intermingled corn and grasses for tvfo hundred miles of the 

 Kansas Valley, and the plains stretching through four hundred miles of 

 buffalo pasture to Denver. Nearly three weeks were then spent in Col- 

 orado and Wyoming in observation by railroad, by carriage, on horse- 

 back, and on foot, among the agricultural valleys of the mountainous 

 mining sections, the elevated pasture-grounds of the South Park, the pro- 

 ductive farm-lands of the Grand Divide which separates the waters of the 

 Arkansas from those of the South Platte, the great cattle-herding plains 

 of Laramie and the valley -lands of the Platte and its branches, for a 

 distance of six hundred miles. Opportunity was afforded to inves- 

 tigate the methods and prove the success and comparative cheapness 

 of irrigation in farm and garden culture, and also to witness the won- 

 derful i3rogress of agricultural colonization, on a cooperative and peculiar 

 basis, as illustrated at Greeley, in Weld County, near the junction of the 

 Cache-a-la-Poudre and the South Platte Kivers. The location, about 

 twenty-five miles from the Snowy Eange, in a valley which gathers the 

 waters of the most reliable mountain streams of Colorado, is a good one; 

 the population is rapidly increasing, as is the price of lands ; the crops 

 are generally good, remarkably so for the first year of cultivation and 

 the inexperience of colonists in irrigation. 



The tree-i)lanting operations of Mr. E. S. Elliott, industrial agent of the 

 Kansas Pacific Eailroad, which embrace three locations on the arid plains, 

 and include several varieties of deciduous and evergreen trees, have thus 

 far been quite successful, Avithout irrigation. A great variety of trees, 

 including maple, walnut, ash, pine, larch, ailanthus, chestnut, and poplar, 

 presented nearl}^ as promising an appearance as similar plantations in 

 Illinois. The experiment will be continued with a reasonable expec- 

 tation of continued success. 



