ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 
31 
white man’s country. Although under the equator, the 
altitude is so high that the nights are cool, and the re¬ 
gion as a whole is very healthy. I saw many children, of 
the Boer immigrants, of English settlers, even of American 
missionaries, and they looked sound and well. Of course, 
there was no real identity in any feature; but again and 
again the landscape struck me by its general likeness to the 
cattle country I knew so well. As my horse shuffled forward, 
under the bright, hot sunlight, across the endless flats or 
gently rolling slopes of brown and withered grass, I might 
have been on the plains anywhere, from Texas to Montana; 
the hills were like our Western buttes; the half-dry water¬ 
courses were fringed with trees, just as if they had been 
the Sandy, or the Dry, or the Beaver, or the Cottonwood, 
or any of the multitude of creeks that repeat these and 
similar names, again and again, from the Panhandle to the 
Saskatchewan. Moreover a Westerner, far better than an 
Easterner, could see the possibilities of the country. There 
should be storage reservoirs in the hills and along the rivers 
—in my judgment built by the government, and paid for 
by the water-users in the shape of water-rents—and irriga¬ 
tion ditches; with the water stored and used there would 
be an excellent opening for small farmers, for the settlers, 
the actual home-makers, who, above all others, should be 
encouraged to come into a white man’s country like this of 
the highlands of East Africa. Even as it is, many settlers 
do well; it is hard to realize that right under the equator 
the conditions are such that wheat, potatoes, strawberries, 
apples, all flourish. No new country is a place for weak¬ 
lings; but the right kind of man, the settler who makes a 
success in similar parts of our own West, can do well in 
