GREAT PLAINS AS A RESIDENCE FOR SETTLERS. 33 



constantly leaving our shores to seek a home in those 

 lands, where many splendid fortunes have been realized 

 in the cattle and sheep farming business; and though 

 circumstances do not now warrant the expectation of 

 such rapid and signal successes as in former days 

 (say thirty or forty years ago), still there can be little 

 doubt that with patience, perseverance, and prudence, 

 combined with fair health and business capacity, much 

 money is still to be made there. 



It should not be forgotten that the region of the 

 Great Plains still remains what it always has been, one 

 of the finest, healthiest, and most fertile on earth ; yet 

 remarkable is the fact that it is only during the last 

 half century that this seems to have been realized. 

 Fifty years ago most of these exhaustless territories 

 were simply known as the great hunting grounds of 

 .the world, where wild beasts, and wilder men, roamed, 

 lords of all that they surveyed and when we reflect 

 what great things have been accomplished in that brief 

 period, in the way of settlement and improvement, it 

 is surely not unreasonable to suppose that still greater 

 things yet remain to be done; and that whatever 

 fortunes have heretofore been realized there, they may 

 very safely be accounted as small compared with those 

 which in a hundred ways yet wait to be realized. 



Another of the remarkable facts to which we desire 

 to call attention is the enormous extent of territory 

 which was at first, after a cursory inspection, set down 

 as desert unfit for the habitation of man, but which 

 has subsequently by human skill and labour been turned 

 into remunerative pasture, and even arable land. The 

 most contradictory accounts in fact were often brought 

 in respecting the same section of country: one party 



VOL. II. 3 



