ALASKA 



NARRATIVE OF THE EXPEDITION 



BY JOHN BURROUGHS 



E left New York on the afternoon of May 

 23, 1899, in a special train of palace cars, 

 and took ship at Seattle the last day of 

 the month. All west of the Mississippi was new land 

 to me, and there was a good deal of it. Throughout 

 the prairie region I, as a farmer, rejoiced in the endless 

 vistas of beautiful fertile farms, all busy with the spring 

 planting, and reaching from horizon to horizon of our 

 flying train. As a home-body and lover of the cosy and 

 picturesque I recoiled from the bald native farm houses 

 with their unkempt surroundings, their rude sheds and 

 black muddy barnyards. As one goes West nature is more 

 and more and man less and less. In New England one 

 is surprised to see such busy thriving towns and such in- 

 viting country homes amid a landscape so bleak and 

 barren. In the West on the contrary his surprise is that 

 such opulence of nature should be attended by such squalor 

 and makeshift in the farm buildings and rural villages. 

 Of course the picturesque is not an element of the western 



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