History and Development of the Fruit Industry 3 



Pacific, with all these Rocky Mountain railways, these 

 cities, including San Francisco and the entire Pacific 

 Coast, would to-day be with the unawakened atoms still 

 floating in the primordial abyss of being. While Web- 

 ster, with his giant strength, was holding this worthless 

 region away from Boston, the Carsons, and Fremonts, and 

 Gregories, and Greeleys, and their thousands of assistants 

 were breaking his hold; and while at that time these 

 mountains were sixty to seventy days from Boston, they 

 are now within about as many hours, and becoming nearer 

 and nearer with the opening of each succeeding decade. 

 Humanity is stronger than any one man; enterprise more 

 powerful than conservatism; exploration and discovery 

 more potent than apathy and inanition. 



"Daniel Webster sleeps at Marshfield; his words linger 

 as curios. The energy and genius of his fellows and their 

 posterity are converting these 'deserts' into gardens, 

 and causing these mountains to pour their long-hidden 

 treasures into the lap of the world. Strong cords of 

 interest and fellowship now bind us to the Atlantic and 

 the Atlantic to us, and Denver stands to-day in the midst 

 of those cheerless realms of fancy pictured by the great 

 statesman to attest the wondrous change on this half 

 of our continent within a lifetime, and the memory of 

 thousands. 



"For fifty years the new states have one by one passed 

 through a peculiar period of 'We can't raise fruit.' Illi- 

 nois had it; and Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. It is 

 like measles and chicken pox, 'must go round.' Colorado 

 caught it when a mere infant and had it very hard. ' We 

 can't raise fruit ' was impressed on almost every mind 

 from the very first. 'Too high!' 'too dry!' 'too cool o' 

 nights ! ' too this ! and too that ! so that Fruit Culture was 

 not admitted for many years, and when a few men less con- 

 servative than rash asked to enter apples at the annual 

 exhibits, as Colorado Grown, they were subjects of legiti- 

 mate suspicion as lunatics or knaves, just as though 



