142 Singing Valleys 



American Desert and by irrigation turned these into crop lands. 

 There might be black magic in what the Latter Day Saints 

 were able to do with sagebrush country but, if so, it was a 

 trick worth acquiring. 



The railroads, with millions of acres in the sections along 

 their rights of way which Congress had voted them, and which 

 they proposed selling to farmers whose farm produce would 

 make the railroads pay, prompted colonies to turn the Great 

 American Desert into another Great Valley. The Central Ken- 

 tucky Emigration Society, The Wyandotte-Kansas Colony, 

 The German Colonizing Company of Chicago, the Chicago- 

 Colorado Colony under the Unitarian minister Robert Collyer, 

 advertised the future values in crops of the lands they had to 

 sell. They had an enthusiastic agent in the editor of the Star 

 of Empire Magazine, published in Denver, whose columns 

 rhapsodized the futures of Colorado, Nebraska and the 

 Dakotas. 



Not less enthusiastic was Nathan Cook Meeker who held, 

 after the Civil War, the post of agricultural editor of the New 

 York Tribune. Meeker was by nature an idealist. He had been 

 deeply influenced by the ideas of the French socialist, Fran- 

 ois Fourier, and had gone to Ohio with his young wife to 

 pioneer. There, he said, "I learned what could be done through 

 co-operation." There was not the co-operation in Warren that 

 Meeker needed to make a success of his venture. Followed a 

 period of store-keeping in Hiram, Ohio, and then another 

 farming venture in Illinois. It was then that Meeker heard 

 about the success of the Mormons' venture in Utah. It fired 

 him with new enthusiasm for the dry lands and with plans 

 for irrigation projects there. But the Civil War came, and 

 Meeker went as a correspondent with Grant's army. His 

 despatches to the New York Tribune made news. 



After the war was over the paper kept him on, with the 

 title of agricultural editor. Writing from his farm on the 

 Kansas frontier, Meeker began to inspire youth in the eastern 



