and OjS gOttOBt PflatUli
pjmiGKFSSIVE FARMER VOL XX. NO. 23.
THK COTTON PLANT VOL. XXII. NO. 22.
RALEIGH, N. C, JULY 18, 1905.
Weekly $i a Year,
Tli6 Progressive Farmer
AND THE COTTON PLANT.
(Consolidated September 27, 1804.)
Entered at Raleigh, N. C, as second class mall matter.
The Most Largely Circulated Farm Weakly
Published Between Washington and New Orleans.
CLARENCE H. POB,
B. W. K1LQORB, 1
C. W. BURKBTT, J
Editor and Manager.
Agricultural Editors.
ACROSS THE CONTINENT.
IX. Through the Rocky Mountains and Up Pike's
Peak.
Xext week I shall have something to say about
Utah, Salt Lake City, and the Mormons; this
week 1 shall give some random notes of my trip
homewa rJ.
, On this return "trip the Rocky Mountains nat
urally impressed me more than anything else.
They have an individuality all their own; wild,
savage, defiant, they will .carry through the ages
the subtle suggestion of the old untamed life of
the Indian, the buffalo, and the pioneer. The
laud on either hand will become as populous as
is tin.- East to-day, and civilization, tame and
formal, will press itself to their very base; but the
Rockies themselves will never be civilized. Primi
tive, naked, chaotic, they typify forever the old
Wild West; and they are as different from the
preen, trim, gently sloping ranges of New York
and Xew England as a Boston schoolmarm is from
a Colorado cowboy.
With the refinement and sweetness of the
White Mountains and Adirondocks they have
nothing to do these rugged, brawny, sky-piercing
giants of the West. Our wildest Alleghanies
with their wooded slopes would be tenderfeet out
in Colorado. Nature was mad, drunk, rioting,
'Ted in tooth and claw with ravine" when she
piied those fierce, gaunt peaks, and tore open the
earth's rocky bosom with canyons and furrows gi
gantic. The Rocky Mountains are well named. ,Of
our eastern ranges you remember-the beauty of
the hurrying streams, the green woods, the culti
vate.l valleys. Of the Sierras you remember the
stately forests of fir and cedar, Lebanon-like. But
of the Rockies von remember the rocks.
In hft rocks are here. In
the Canyon of the Grand River, they are piled in
sheer colossal walls a half mile above your head
and you begin to realize what an insignificant
atom you are. Here it is layer after layer,
stratum after stratum, like a petrified lumber pile,
brownish red; and you imprisoned down at the
bottom, a doll-man in the hands of giants. In
other places the rocks are not in lavers at all,
tut boulders piled on boulders, Pelion on Ossa,
CrOlJ On Af 1 rrrrr o olomonfal rT-f 1191 nTV And
disorder. In yet other places you see no more
of these rocks as big as houses, but a wilderness
f smaller stones, just an old-fashioned rock pile
as big as a township or two. Here again is mol
ten rock, a sea of lava belched out by some vol
cano ages and ages ago.
The dullest magination cannot fail to be stirred
by this carnival in stone. The rocks take on fan
tastic shapes. Giants and Titans look down on
you from the summits; grotesque mammoths and
monsters are carved on the mountain side; here
is a shin ready to launch: and a thousand feet
above you is a walled city with massive towers and
battlements, its grim castles dimly seen within.
We saw no forests in the Rockies, except along:
the banks of the snow-fed rivers, if I remember
correctly, until we came to Colorado Springs
none in the Canyon of the Grand, or about Royal
Gorge or Tennessee Pass. Where the rocks failed
for a time, they gave way to great clod mountains,
barren and galled, much like those we had seen
in the desert. It was a July day, but on the
peaks beside us a snow-storm was raging, and the
first section of our train, coming out of a tunnel,
found itself in a cloud of fast-falling flakes.
Away off on either hand were blue peaks, snow
clad, and I shall always regret that it was too
cloudy for us to see the Mount: of . the Holy Groggy
"Pike's Peak or bust" was the motto of many
a pioneer in the old days, and we made it our
motto, too. And we didn't bust. Ten o'clock on
this July morning found the writer, thickly-clad
as an Esquimaux,, snow-balling his fellow travelers
from Indiana and North- Carolina and incident
ally getting snow-balled in return. The night be
fore the thermometer had gone below zero, and
the summer wind on the tower this July morning
numbed my fingers and bit and blanched mv face
so shrewdly that I did not stay long to watch the
scenery through the telescope.
Seeing Pike's Peak from Colorado Springs, I
was rather disappointed in it forests at the
base, but beyond this a naked, gullied, snow
streaked and wind-swept desolation of rocks. I
had expected another Shasta, its last 4,000 feet
wrapped deep in perpetual white. But the disap
pointment vanishes as you ascend the Peak or see
the wonders from its summit.
About the mountain itself two things are es-
sneciallv impressive the grim, picturesque, al
most human struggle of the trees for existence at
the timber line, and the acres of yellow volcanic
rocks beyond, unrelieved by a single speck of
green. Rocks' I had grown accustomed to, how
ever, while I had never before seen this struggle
for the masetry between Bareas and the forest
s-ods. Beyond 11,578 feet it is too cold .for even
the hardiest shrub to live, and here the timber
linft ends almost abrutly. Like an army, the tree
growth seems to be storming some enemy up the
mountain slope, and the foremost ones, those that
loft, thft main line and dashed ahead, seem
All w w -
kinship with human heroes ragged,
scarred, gnarled, deep-rooted and unshakable. All
about the timber line the battle rages fiercely, and
only the hardiest survive its near approach, them
selves beaten down and half blasted by the storm -..
king, their gashed, half -dying fellows abottt them.
I know hardly anything else in nature so poetic.
When I began this letter I intended to discuss
irrigation and a number of other topics which I r' -
now see I must leave over for another letter.
But Utah will be the subject next week, anyhow. -
C. H. P. ;
THOUGHTS FOR FARMERS.
Subsoillng. .
If the writer could persuade one-fifth of the -
readers of The Progressive Farmer to begin sub- ;
soiling their clay lands in a systematic way he
would be greatly gratified. We have just in
spected a six-horse farm, some of which has been
subsoiled during the last three yeare. There had
been no ram on the farm for five weeks. On the
land that had been plowed with two-horse plows, '
disc plow and subsoiler, the cotton was larger and .
greener than on similar land not subsoiled. The
year after land was subsoiled there was little dif-
ference in the crops, but it is telling this dry
weather. There was an eight-acre lotplanted in,
cotton. The land was a light sandy soil, rather
loose. It was thin, but made fine cotton for poor
land. It was prepared with one horse. The seed
were planted and enough cotton came up for five
-stands Aboutthe 10th of3Iay.it began to die. V,
ilULLl 11UW IUCIC AO uxujr uaii a. a icia-lva. iiumj ----- ;
ers suffered the same way. They said it was the
sandy land that caused the trouble. We con- -gra
tula ted that eight-acre lot. After scraping
three or four inches of loose light dirt, with
plenty of humus in it, the hard pan was struck,
and it was certainly hard. The tenant was in-
formed what 'caused his cotton to die. He said:
"I noticed that when it rained the water stood
on top of the ground and did not go down." This v -winter
that field will have two or three inches of
the hard pan broken and next spring the cotton -
will not die. .
Botatlon of Crops.
The danger is that 10 cent cotton will drive far
mers away from their purpose to improve their ;
farms. There is no possible chance of improving
lands planting hoed crops year after year.; The
soil needs humus or vegetable matter, and it can
be supplied in proper quantities only by sowing
small graim In the Piedmont section of the
Carolina the three-year system of rotation is the .
best one. Take the two-horse farm as an ex
.ample There should be about sixty acres of ara
ble land. Plant one-third of that in corn, with
peas between the hills, or sown broadcast at lay- . ;
ing-by time. Follow with wheat or oats and then
sow peas after the small rrain is harvested. The -third
year it will be ready for cotton, and then
begin with corn again the fourth year. By this .
system of rotation, and deepening the soil gradu
ally until it is ten inches deep, the land will yield
twice as much as under the poverty-producing-system
of planting all cotton. If this Cotton ;
Growers' Association can bring our farmers round
to rotation of crops, deep preparation Land raising ,
all necessary supplies on the farm the wealth of -the
farmers will be largely creased. - -
Spartanburg, S. C.
The love we have to God is realized in our love
to men It cannot abide alone. They who hp e
tSoSSht to gain it by retirement and meditation
Kund SSU a wiU-o'-the-wisP, save as lUias
issued in the love that seeks men and tries to
dV them good.-Hennan Packard De Forest.