Jasper County Democrat, Volume 6, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 April 1903 — The Spirit of the Northwest. [ARTICLE]

The Spirit of the Northwest.

When the new settler crosses the Rockies, the altitude, or the rarefied atmosphere, or some vapor of the west yet unnamed by science, seems to endow him with the roseate vision, so that ever afterward all that he beholds is good and beautiful and bigger than anywhere else. There is something refreshing and edifying in the way the northwesterner shows off his town to the stranger—his boundless admiration for the new Episcopal church, his pride in the paving of Main street, his brotherly interest in the development of the First National bank, the imagination with which he prophesies the glorious future of the place and exhibits the acres and acres of desert and hillside which the town is presently to populate. It is an adamantine visitor indeed who goes away without taking a deed or two for hopeful corner Tots in the residential district. Ray Stannard Baker in Century.