WHAT INFORMATION IS MOST URG- 

 ENTLY NEEDED BY RAILROADS RE- 

 GARDING TIMBER RESOURCES 



BY 

 GENERAL CHARLES F. MANDERSON 



General Solicitor, Chicago, Burlington and Quinc; Railroad Company 



A SHORT time before the year i860 there crossed 

 ^^ the Missouri River, on the line of latitude of 

 the most progressive development and most intelligent 

 progress, to make a home in the then Territory of 

 Nebraska, a young man, who joined to physical 

 strength and virile force a keen appreciation of the 

 needs of the future and a determination of purpose 

 only equalled by the intelligence which guided that 

 purpose, and the abounding faith that led to the desired 

 result. Settling upon broad acres of virgin soil, he 

 found himself in a treeless region, on the eastern edge 

 of what the geographers of the day were pleased to 

 call the Great American Desert. He was one of the 

 leaders of that hardy band of men by whose aggressive 

 power that desert land, the range of the wild buffalo 

 and the hunting ground of the wilder Indian, was to be 

 developed into an agricultural garden, whose products 

 in a single year, in less than fifty years of development, 

 were to very nearly equal in value the annual output 

 of all the gold and silver producing mines of the world. 

 For had this pioneer lived to 1904 he would have seen 

 from the yield of the fields of vast extent of corn and 

 small grain, from the domestic animals ready for the 

 world's market, a product valued at $500,000,000, or 

 over three times the value of all the gold and silver 



