Rensselaer Union, Volume 5, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1873 — What is a Western Ban? [ARTICLE]

What is a Western Ban?

He is a man who has traveled.— Men now in business at the West are in general older than the States where they live, aud so must have traveled. Not one in six of the Nebraskians wasborn in Nebraska. No Westerner perhaps has voyaged as far as Bayard Taylor, and some few other Easterlings. But western travelers are more multitudinous. Of eighteen Americans who chartered a Cairo steamer to so up the Nile in 1868, ten resided in ietroit or west of it. The proportion would be larger to-day. In a western village you always find those who before settling have roved over half a dozen States. But in New England you constantly encounter those who were never out of their native county. Twenty years ago there lived in South Danvers, Mass., one Miss Eden, near a hundred years old. During the century of her pilgrimage, so far from journeying to Philadelphia or even New York, she had never been in Boston, though born within 13 miles from it. Her most distant expedition had been five and one-half miles to Marblehead. She had been there only once, and that for the purpose of having the small pox, some years before the revolutionary war. It will be long before the West can show such a phenomenon, “fixed like a plant to one peculiar spot.” All the better for the West. Each iijan there finds what he can do best, if not in one place, then in another.— Alopg the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad in Nebraska, there are many who have bought lands on long credit, and are developing them into grain and stock farms with their earnings ifi Wisconsin lumber camps, California diggings, or while freighting to Colorado and Montana. It speaks well for Nebraska, that legions nock there to makfe a start from so many quarters where they earned money to make a start with. Nebraska is for farmers, and farmers for Nebraska. Prof. J. D. BuTI.eR.