WESTERN SUrilEMACY. 31 



the population would not be as dense as that of England 

 and Wales. Place them in New Mexico, and the density 

 of population would not be as great as that of Belgium. 

 Those 50,000,000 might all have been comfortably sus- 

 tained in Texas. After allowing, say 50,000 square miles 

 for "desert," Texas could have produced all our food 

 crops in 1879— grown, as we have seen, on 164,215 square 

 miles of land — could have raised the world's supply of 

 cotton, 12.000,000 bales, at one bale to the acre, on 19,000 

 square miles, and then have had remaining, for a cattle 

 range, a territory larger than the State of New York. 

 Place the population of the United States in 1890 all in 

 Texas, and it would not be as dense as that of Italy ; and 

 if it were as crowded as England, this one state would 

 contain 129,000,000 souls. 



Accounting all of Minnesota and Louisiana west of the 

 Mississippi, for convenience, we have, according to the 

 census of 1880,^ 2,115,135 square miles in the West, and 

 854,865 in the East. That is, for every acre east of the 

 Mississippi we have nearly two and a half west of it. But 

 what of the " Great American Desert," which occupied 

 so much space on the map a generation ago? It is 

 nomadic and elusive; it recedes before advancing civili- 

 zation like the Indian and buffalo which once roamed it. 

 There are extensive regions, which, because of rocks or 

 lava-beds or alkali or altitude or lack of rain, are unfit 

 for the plow ; but they afford much of the finest grazing 

 country in the world, much valuable timber, and min- 

 eral wealth which is enormous. Useless land, though 

 much in the aggregate, is far less than is commonly sup- 

 posed, and in comparison with wealth-producing lands 

 is almost insignificant. The vast region east of the 

 Rocky Mountains, though once the home of the " Great 

 American Desert," really contains very little useless 

 land. We have all heard of the " Bad Lands " of theDa- 

 kotas, but they comprise only about 75,000 acres out of 



1 The areas of the states given in the Ninth Census have been recomputed 

 for the Tenth. 



