Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 35, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 December 1902 — TO COLONIZE SOUTHWEST. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

TO COLONIZE SOUTHWEST.

Railroads Are (Joins to Boes* Louioiana ahd Texas. More than SIOO,OOO will be spent by the management of the Southern In the next five months in colonizing southwestern Louisiana and southern' Texas. The decision to increase the efforts and expenditure which are being made to fill up these lands was reached' in a general meeting of representatives of Harriman lines held .in Chicago a few days ago. The work in Texas and Louisiana is In charge of Col. S. F. B. Morse, passenger traffic manager of the Galvos*

ton, Harrisburg and San Antonio and the Galveston, Houston and Northern roads. Col. Morse asserts that in the next ten years the development of these sections will be greater than that of any other sections of equal area in the world. “You will appreciate that this may not be an exaggeration,” said he, “when I tell ydu that between Jan. 1. 1902, end June 30 last, there were sold iu southern Texas 798,000 acres of land through the efforts Of the Southern Pacific agents, and that land is being sold there to-day at the rate of 100,000 acres per month.” Exhaustive experiments and research which have been carried on by the Southern Pacific tend to show that all of the so-called rice belt is above vast deposits of oil, but at present there is no effort to develop oil fields in that portion of the State. The rice belt extends from the Mississippi river to the Rio Grande, a

distance of 800 miles, and even beyond the Rio Grande to Tampico, Mexico, and back from the gulf between fifty and sev-enty-five miles. Speaking of the development of this section, Col. Morse said: “S. L. Carey accidentally discovered that the land in southern Louisiana, would raise rice, and one year later it took 100 cars to transport the rice output about Jennings. In 1902 it took 1,300 cars from Jennings, and land which in 1883 was worth 15 cents an acre is now worth from S3O to SSO. In southern Louisiana alone there are today 1,500 miles of rice canals and 6,000 reapers are used in that State, where but a few years ago a small yield of rice was harvested with the sickle. The story of southern Texas is just as wonderful, for in 1898 there were but 2,000 acres of land under rice cultivation, whereas there are now 200,000 acres. In one section alone residents of Chicago own 3,500 acres of rice lands.”

PLANTING A RICE FIELD UNDER WATER.