ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 31 



white man's country. Although under the equator, the 

 altitude is so high that the nights are cool, and the re- 

 gion as a whole is very healthy. I saw many children, of 

 the Boer immigrants, of English settlers, even of American 

 missionaries, and they looked sound and well. Of course, 

 there was no real identity in any feature; but again and 

 again the landscape struck me by its general likeness to the 

 cattle country I knew so well. As my horse shuffled forward, 

 under the bright, hot sunlight, across the endless flats or 

 gently rolling slopes of brown and withered grass, I might 

 have been on the plains anywhere, from Texas to Montana; 

 the hills were like our Western buttes; the half-dry water- 

 courses were fringed with trees, just as if they had been 

 the Sandy, or the Dry, or the Beaver, or the Cottonwood, 

 or any of the multitude of creeks that repeat these and 

 similar names, again and again, from the Panhandle to the 

 Saskatchewan. Moreover a Westerner, far better than an 

 Easterner, could see the possibilities of the country. There 

 should be storage reservoirs in the hills and along the rivers 

 in my judgment built by the government, and paid for 

 by the water-users in the shape of water-rents and irriga- 

 tion ditches; with the water stored and used there would 

 be an excellent opening for small farmers, for the settlers, 

 the actual home-makers, who, above all others, should be 

 encouraged to come into a white man's country like this of 

 the highlands of East Africa. Even as it is, many settlers 

 do well; it is hard to realize that right under the equator 

 the conditions are such that wheat, potatoes, strawberries, 

 apples, all flourish. No new country is a place for weak- 

 lings; but the right kind of man, the settler who makes a 

 success in similar parts of our own West, can do well in 



