Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 154, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 June 1910 — PAPERS BY THE PEOPLE PIONEERING STILL COMPARATIVELY HARD. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

PAPERS BY THE PEOPLE

PIONEERING STILL COMPARATIVELY HARD.

By John A. Howland.

Forty years ago the United States saw the great movement to the west. Everywhere in the Mississippi valley country the resident saw the white praitie schooner drifting, as, if with some vast tide wind, “Kansas, or Bust"—any other place westward, “or bust” —was the motto painted upon the weather beaten white canvas of the wagons. Within the last .year or more history has

been repeating itself in a great measure. With the price of the round trip ticket and money for meals in his pockets, the young man to-day may cover in hours a territory which required weeks and months in the early Many of these young men have been doing this; more of them will follow. The old westerner of to-day decries the degenerating of the we'st as he found it. It is lacking in most of those old hardships and privations which required all his manhood to withstand when he was pathfinder in the wilderness. Sharp as present day comparisons may be between the city and the new west, the old westerner looks upon it as child’s play—dilettante, effeminate. He has forgotten thta his hardships are half a century behind him now. He overlooks the fact that the desert upon which lie settled has been blossoming for these many j;ears. But blossoming as it may have been, civilized as the newer west to-day is, that young man from the centers of city life will find crude flowering of the wilderness compared with the diversions and ease of the city which he has left so far behind him. He will need all his fortitude and spirit of his fathers.