THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW 



them, mostly Canadian French, light-hearted, 

 care-free wanderers who had come in from 

 Montreal through the Straits of Mackinac at 

 the confluence of Lake Michigan and Lake 

 Huron and established a well-defined route of 

 travel to the plains beyond the Mississippi by 

 way of Green Bay and the Fox and Wis- 

 consin Rivers. 



Still, as late as 1832, Washington Irving, 

 journeying up the Missouri and out across the 

 plains in search of information as to the "far 

 west" at first-hand, conceived the "Great 

 American Desert" as a territory so remote, 

 so mythical in its confines and so terrible in 

 its hardships that he believed it would never 

 become an integral part of the States. In- 

 stead, he pictured fantastically the growth 

 there of another nation, a nation that would 

 forever exist beyond the pale of civilization, 

 a nation composed of outcasts, half-breeds, 

 the scum of society; a race of men so wild, 

 so lawless, so adventurous that they had al- 

 ready adopted the worst traits of the savage 

 Indians as their own and become the blood- 

 brothers of the red-men of the plains. 



He pictured this roving mongrel horde 

 pushed farther and farther back by the exten- 



