(Transcribed by Leora White, May 2008)

(On front cover:

S. L. Cary to H. L. Cary

Rice Farmer)

INTRODUCTORY

        A VERY important question for each of us to answer is, where shall I locate my home?  A good location means prosperity.  A bad location means adversity.  Please read carefully the very full description of Southwest Louisiana along the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad, before deciding this great question.  Is it accessible?  Is it healthy?  Can I live easily?  Can I find good society, schools, churches?  Are there more or less advantages and disadvantages than elsewhere?  The Southern Pacific Railroad furnishes good and fast transportation through this immense prairie and timber country.  More than 10,000 Northern people have located homes here, and take this means of reaching you with an invitation to come and help them develop the best partly improved field in America.  We will give you in detail the experiences of our best fruit experts, the best breeders and stock farmers, the best rice and sugar cane growers, and the best general farmers.  A careful reading of this book will give you the best opinion of the best men in the country, located on the line of the Southern Pacific in Louisiana; men of experience North and South, and experts in the business which they describe, much better qualified to judge of comparative values than men who have never lived North and South.  You must summer and winter in a country to know it.  The value of the country is no experiment, its possibilities, also, are great.  Only look at what has been done here in ten years, in one industry, rice, by the Iowa colony who introduced the twine-binding harvester only twelve years ago.  Now three thousand are in use, doing the work in harvest time (three months) of 100,000 men.  The  shipments over our Southern Pacific Railroad then two million pounds, 1886 and 1887; three hundred millions, 1892 and 1893; with an increase of thirty-nine million pounds in December, 1892, over December, 1891; since that time the crop has approximated 250,000,000 pounds yearly.  Every branch of agricultural industry has largely increased. Vast numbers of fruit trees have been planted. Stock has been improved.  Large quantities of hay have been cured and sent to market, and now attention has been turned to the sugar industry, with every prospect of success.  This book is made and distributed at great expense by the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, that its patrons may be thoroughly posted about the country along its line, to which they invite  immigration, and where there are at least ten thousand Northern settlers who have been brought there by our agents, and whose history is a marvel of success.  Read it carefully and you will act understandingly.

        Since the publication of this book, six years ago, a revolution has occurred in Immigration.   The westward trend has been stopped, and now the South, for the first time, is getting the bulk of the business.  This immigration is not only large, but is of the very best classes from the North and West, American born, who understand and love our laws and institutions; mostly farmers, who are familiar with improved farming methods and machinery.

        Southwest Louisiana, The Prairie Region, has been transformed from grass-covered plains, separated by rivers, skirted with valuable timber, to improved farms, enclosed with wire, with good buildings, gardens, orchards and ornamental trees. Rice, so far, is the leading industry, and is steadily gaining in volume and favor as the most profitable cereal grown, relished by man and beast. We can grow more bushels and more dollars per acre than can be done with any other cereal, North or South. Rice-growing leaves no waste land and has fully demonstrated the entire healthfulness of the business

        Small farmers can grow cane in the Prairie Region, where the soil is easily cultivated and the sugar content fifty per cent greater than elsewhere, at a fair profit at present prices.  Corn growing has increased nearly 100 per cent in this part of the State.  Diversity of crops crowds the farmer from the rut.  Nowhere in the North can such a diversity be grown.  The best products of two zones push the farmer to the front.  The successful feeding of rice has pushed stock-growing into greater favor.  Creole ponies and cows are fast going and the better breeds fill their places.  Larger horses of good breeds are in good favor. The mule is largely and profitably used.  Galloway, Jersey, Hereford, Holstein and Shorthorn cattle, Poland China, Berkshire and Jersey hogs all do well and fatten very cheaply on rice and sweet potatoes; but not at one cent a pound, hardly, but at a cost far below what can be done in any cold climate, and right at the best market in the United States.  Via New Orleans is as good a market for our farmers as New York City; each a seaboard market with  practically the same expense to European markets; below the storm belt; abundant rainfall; valuable crops; certainty of product; length of growing season; prairie and timber lands; short winters; excellent fruit county; cheap lands; good titles; healthfulness; law-abiding, church-going, educated, enterprising people; located on the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose facilities for distribution and transportation are not excelled, who have commenced laying a double track from New Orleans through this, the most valuable, partly developed country in the United States.

Southwest Louisiana

UP TO DATE

(Omaha Edition, 1899.)

Important Information for People Desiring to Find a Better Country.

 BY ONE WHO HAS SUMMERED AND WINTERED SIXTEEN YEARS

IN THE PRAIRIE REGION OF SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA.

        Representing yields of rough rice per acre in 1897.  The crop of 1898 was much larger, but continued rains nearly destroyed the rice in the fields at harvest time.          

        Great progress has been made in rice-growing in Southwest Louisiana the past year.  More rice had been grown under pump then ever, and this rice has yielded from 8 to 10 barrels per acre of rough rice, selling at an average of three dollars for 162 pounds.  Then rice grown along canals, given water too late in the season, yielded 3 to 7 barrels, and poverty or providence rice, depending upon rainfall alone yielding 2 to 4 barrels and a large percentage of the providence rice not worth harvesting.  The average cost of growing rice per acre is ten dollars.          

        Below are a few yields in detail of the crop of 1897:

        An average crop of ten sacks generally pays cost of growing the crop and the cost of the farm.

A WORD AS TO CANALS

        The extremely rapid increase in the number of irrigation and canal companies, and the magnitude of the recent investments in the direction of canals, makes it impossible to give a detailed history of the many enterprises.  A glance at the list of canals and irrigating plants elsewhere in this book will give the reader an opportunity of estimating to his own satisfaction the advances which have been made.  The modest investment of  a few thousand dollars in a pumping plant of three years since, has given place to companies with a capital stock of $250,000, like that of the Abbott-Duson  concern, or with plants like that of the McFarland Co., at Jennings with a battery of magnificent pumps or the Vermillion Improvement Co. at Greydan (sic - probably Gueydan), with a flow of 250,000,000 gallons every 24 hours.  Daily the extension of the system is making the rice crop a sure thing and Southwest Louisiana will be marked with artificial waterways its length and breadth.

        The new deep well system will render rains unnecessary and the rice farmer will have nothing left to do but cultivate his crop and then harvest them.

RICE MILLS

        As might have been expected, the rapid development of the rice industry has given a stimulus to rice factories.  In the past five years nearly fifteen rice cleaning mills have been erected throughout the rice country in Southwest Louisiana, and more are being erected.  At present about one-half the crop is being milled where it is grown, the reminder being shipped out in the rough.

        In a few more years sufficient factories will have been equipped to clean the entire output even taking into consideration the probable large increase in the yield.

DIAGRAM SHOWING THE ASSESSMENTS OF CALCASIEU PARISH FROM 1882 TO 1897

        Products are in greater variety, surer, and of more value than north.  Three things are essential to successful agriculture - soil, moisture and heat, and the greatest of these is moisture.  Sixty inches of rain supplemented by our system of canals and wells give Southwest Louisiana the safest and most profitable farming in the States.  Sugar and rice are a success, and we have a home market which takes one hundred and fifty millions of dollars to fill.

Don’t Invest Until You See The Prairie Region In Southwest Louisiana.

ASSESSMENTS OF ACADIA PARISH

        We have no doubt that with the improvements now in sight, planters will have one hundred percent profit in present prices of rice in five years, and you can judge what the effect will be upon the price of real estate.  The time is at hand when we can speak as confidently of a crop of rice as we do now of a crop of figs.  With water at command the gambling element in farming is gone.  Seventy-five canals and many more pumping plants have laid a sure foundation for the agriculture and general prosperity of a region that has no equal in its general advantages. 

TOO HIGH TO OVERFLOW AND TOO FLAT TO WASH.

GOOD UNIMPROVED PRAIRIE LAND SELLS ON TIME AT FIVE TO TEN DOLLARS PER ACRE.

GOOD TIMBER AT SEVENTY-FIVE CENTS TO FIVE DOLLARS PER ACRE.

SEE BOOK DESCRIBING THIS COUNTRY.

For further information, books, maps, circulars and rates, apply to:

C. C. Cary, N. W. P. & I. A., Kansas City, Mo.

S. L. Cary, N. I. Agent, Jennings, La., or Manchester, Ia.

Geo. W. Ely, Trav. Pass. Agent, Montgomery, Ala.

R. O. Bean, Trav. Pass. Agent, 4 Noel Block, Nashville, Tenn.

W. R. Fagan, Trav. Pass. Agent, Atlanta, Ga.

C. W. Murphey, Trav. Pass. Agent, 18 E. Bryan St.,  Savannah, Ga.

E. E. Currier, New England Agent, 9 State Street, Boston, Mass.

R. J. Smith, Agent, 109 South Third St., Philadelphia, Pa.

B. B. Barber, Agent, 209 E. German St., Baltimore, Md.

W. H. Conner, Commercial Agent, Chamber of Commerce, Cincinnati, O.

L. E. Townsley, 421 Olive St., St. Louis, Mo.

Geo. E. Herring, Agent, 201 Telephone Bldg., Pittsburgh, Pa.

W. G. Berg, Trav. Pass. Agent, 220 Ellicott Square, Buffalo, N. Y.

Southwestern Louisiana  

Wonderful Developments in Recent Years  

Big Returns Have Invariably Followed Intelligent Effort and Industry.

From the New Orleans Times-Democrat, May 21. 1899.

        "Very few people have a thoroughly comprehensive idea of the wonderful development of Southwest Louisiana," said General Passenger Agent S. F. B. Morse of the Southern Pacific Company to a Times-Democrat reporter yesterday, "but it only requires the most cursory investigation to determine the fact that this development has been unequaled in agricultural circles in any portion of the United States."  

        To begin with, it must be understood that it has only been in the last ten or twelve years that Southwest Louisiana from a agricultural standpoint has made any particular claims upon the attention of the people generally, and it is not a very pleasant commentary upon our own people to note this development has been the result of immigration from several of the States of the Middle West.  These people, thrifty and filled with an energy the result of long acquaintance with the winters of the West, came into this country, and quickly realizing the advantages offered by soil and climate, set up their roof trees in the verdant savannas of this Southwest Louisiana, and have made the prairie lands blossom in all the glory of ripening grain and the fruits of both tree and vine.  

        Fifteen years ago, S. L. Cary, at present immigration agent of the Southern Pacific Company, entered the prairie section of Southwest Louisiana, coming from Iowa, and disembarked from the train at what is now the prosperous and progressive village of Jennings in Calcasieu parish, on the line of the road. He found land so cheap that one of the large land owners was giving away hundreds of his acres in order to save the expense of a possibly increased taxation.  For $30 Mr. Cary purchased 300 acres of land.  Fifteen year of progress and development throughout the entire section in which these acres rested, has witnessed a gradual increase in the price of the lands, and it will be a startling evidence of what this progress has been, when I tell you that these 300 acres can only be bought for $30,000, and this is one of the results of an intelligent and comprehensive cultivation of rice.  

        This is not an unusual case.  Throughout the rice belt lying along the rails of the Southern Pacific, there have been hundreds of instances which equal this remarkable increase in values.  This fact that the farmers of Iowa, tired of placing their fortunes upon the turn of the wheat crop, and realizing that the cultivation of this cereal had worn out the soil of their home State, had brought into Louisiana improved methods of cultivation and farming, has been in a large manner responsible for the success which has attended the cultivation of rice in Calcasieu and Acadia parishes.  These farmers were quick to grasp a possibility.  They found the soil contained a subsoil, which was practically impervious to water; that water placed upon the prairie lands was held in abeyance as if this subsoil were cement; that when the water was turned off the fields became stiff enough in a short while to permit the use of horses and harvesting machines, and this to them solved the entire problem;  for they had already demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that rice grew no where as well as it did upon the 'worthless' prairie lands of this fertile State, and to cultivate rice as they did wheat, filled their hearts with joy.

        It was hardly necessary to do much proselyting. The news of the wonderful success which followed the efforts of the early contingent, was soon scattered throughout the circles they had once frequented.  Delegations were sent into the new area, and conditions were investigated.  It was found that climatic influences were benign; that timber was in abundance; that fruit grew well; that diversified crops were delightful possibilities, and that the skies of Louisiana were as balmy as ever were those of the famed ‘Islands of the Blest.’  

        And then lands began to augment in value.  From fifty cents, which sum represented its maximum value in those days when the long-horn cattle ranged at their own sweet will, throughout that section, prices gradually advanced in corresponding ratio to the demand, and the jumps became early and often.  From fifty cents it became a dollar; and from $1, $2 and so on up the gamut during the years, until to-day lands adapted to the cultivation of rice demand anywhere from $10 to $35 an acre; and values are still progressing.  Towns have been created, communities have become wealthy, branch lines have been extended and manufacturing enterprises have been located.  Thousands of enterprising and progressive farmers have entered the territory and the past ten years have witnessed an upbuilding along the line of our road between Lafayette and Lake Charles that has been almost phenomenal.

        In 1886 the Southern Pacific Railroad handled out of Southwestern Louisiana some 2,000,000 pounds of rice; in 1887 this had doubled; the following year witnessed a production of 8,000,000 pounds.  This in 1889 had increased to 16,000,000 pounds; while in 1892, which year represented the largest production, owing to peculiar climatic influences over 200,000,000 pounds were produced; or, in other words, 250 cars carried the crop of 1884 between Lake Charles and Lafayette, while it required over 7000 cars to carry the crop of 1892.  Since that banner year the crop of Southwest Louisiana has fallen a trifle behind the figures quoted, and this has been due until the past season to a scarcity of rainfall, and a consequence lowering of levels in the streams which traverse the rice-growing section. ‘Providence’ rice, or rice which receive the rains only, has practically ceased to be.  The establishment of pumping stations and the building of irrigation canals has revolutionized the industry.  In regard to the building of these canals, which are of recent institution, let me tell you that at present there exists over eighty of these artificial streams, extending throughout the prairie, and their establishment has made the rice crop ‘a dead sure thing.’  This is apparent.  Picture to yourself miles and miles of irrigation canals, fed by pumps which elevate the water from the streams, each canal irrigating anywhere from 1 to 20,000 acres of land.  The canals are flushed during the growing season and the water is given the rice at the time when it needs it most.  So successful has been the irrigation scheme that in considering the development of any uncultivated territory the first question raised is that which includes the building of a canal.

        As a natural sequence of the rapid increase in production the establishment of rice mills for the cleaning and polishing of the grain became an absolute necessity. To-day the finest rice mills in the world are located at the several rice centres of Acadia and Calcasieu parishes.  Rayne, Crowley, Mermentau, Jennings and Lake Charles each possess one or more of these mills, and during the past season five milling establishments were in operation night and day during the rice season in Crowley, while a like condition existed in a less degree at each of the other points mentioned.  And yet not one-half of the raw crop is milled in the territory in which it is produced.  It is extremely likely, however that this condition of affairs will not continue.  The rice growers themselves have gotten a taste of the extremely large profits which attend the milling of the product, and it is beyond question that they will either utilize their own capital or attract other capital to the end that the entire crop shall be handled in the sections in which it is grown.

        And now let me give you an idea as to the wonderful profit which has and is attending the cultivation of the crop, the canals and the mills, and this a profit which is but commensurate with the industry, thrift and enterprise of the people who are engaged in their several occupations, and here I want to qualify my remark in which I mentioned the stimulus given Southwest Louisiana by the injection of an element from another State, as I would not for the world take from the native element that which is their just due, for, while in the main, my remark was correct, yet it had been also due to such men as W. W. and C. C. Duson of Crowley, both of whom have labored to their own end and the country’s upbuilding and its wonderful success.  And to Messrs. Duson I might add a great many others who have also contributed to the development of Louisiana’s resources. 

        Individual cases, in which farmers have purchased farms on absolute credit, and by the cultivation of a single season’s crop have paid for their farm and put money in bank, are extremely common.  I personally am cognizant of instances where men have made large fortunes in the rice belt during the past eight or ten years.  I know of two men, brothers, who reached Crowley, eight or ten years ago with $500 between them.  To-day they are worth $250,000.  Another firm, after an agricultural and business existence of eight years, can count their total earnings at even a larger figure, while there has not been a single instance in which success has failed to attend an intelligent effort, and everywhere the eye falls upon a condition of things and of men, which conduces to the belief that God must have set a seal of favor upon the country and its inhabitants.  Beautiful residences, handsome farm buildings, are the general rule, and their opposite the exception, while progress is rampant in every direction.

        Just look at a few of these figures:  A. M. Garrison, Crowley, from 220 acres of rice received $8682; A. D. McFarland, Jennings, 300 acres, $10,500; S. W. Boyd, Lake Arthur, 200 acres, $4200; Taylor & Evans, Jennings, 200 acres, $7100; C. L. Shaw, Jennings, 230 acres, $8200; Green & Shoemaker, Crowley, 1000 acres, $77,000; Abbot Bros., Crowley, 1000 acres, $77,000.

        These are but a few of many instances taken from the crop of 1897.  And in considering these figures, it must be remembered that the expense as against the gross receipts, will average about one-third, or of a given amount received for the crop in bulk, two-thirds go to profit.

        Then the rice mills.  Take any of the mills of Crowley for instance.  I went through one of these rice mills the other day while in Crowley with Secretary Wilson, of the Agricultural Department, and I ascertained that the capacity of this mill was 1200 barrels every twenty-four hours.  The mills receive on an average for their part of the work (they both cleaning, sacking and selling the product) about 50 cents a sack.  This represents a gross earning capacity for at least ten months in the year at present of $600 per day.  Allowing $200, or even $300, as a legitimate expense and in parenthesis as it were, I will say that these figures far exceed the facts, and you have a net profit of not less than $300 a day, a total of $9000 per month, or a total net of $90,000 per year, and this on an investment of $50,000. Comment is unnecessary.

        A canal or irrigation company, whose initial expense was the raising of levees and the purchase of pumping machinery, receives one-fifth of the total crop to which it supplies water.  This profit upon the investment must be at least 25 percent.  In support of these figures, let me quote a gentleman who recently organized a stock company in St. Louis for the purchase of land for rice farming in Chambers County, Texas.  In considering the question with St. Louis capitalists he mentioned the proposed profit of 25 percent and he was laughed at.  The figures were too big and yet they were true.

        In connection with this new company let me tell you that this contemplates the building of a canal twenty miles in length and the cultivation next season of 20,000 acres of rice in one body.

        The rice condition will be changed materially in the course of the next eight or ten years.  At present this entire country produces about one-half of the rice consumed in the United States. The development of the rice sections along our line will, in the course of the time mentioned, force a production equal if not greater than the consumption, and then prices must fall of necessity.  It is because of this contingency that I am inclined to support the views of Secretary of Agriculture Wilson, who said at Jennings the other night, that farming must not consist of a one-crop idea; that a diversification of crops indicates a lasting prosperity and such must inevitably ensue.  He said that Louisiana was adapted to the growing of all the fine grasses, and consequently of fine cattle and horses; that its fertile lands could produce every agricultural product needed by its people, and that with intelligent cultivation and selection, nothing was impossible to a people who had already accomplished so much.

        Southwest Louisiana is a paradise for the farmer, and its people are growing wealthy faster than any agricultural people in the entire country.  As a rice grower of Crowley said the other day, when he was told that money could be secured in Boston for 3 percent: ‘Give us ten years of prosperity such as we have enjoyed during the past ten years and we will lend Boston money at her own figures.’

        At any rate Southwest Louisiana is progressing with a vengeance and the existing condition and its past development are without precedent.  The soil is productive, the people intelligent and enterprising and its climate delightful.  Nothing is there peculiar to the South that will not grow there, and the land is verdant with the promise of a wonderful and God-given bounty to man and beast."

THE PRESENT OUTLOOK OF AGRICULTURE IN SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA.

 A PAPER ON RICE PRODUCTION BY S. L. CARY,
READ AT THE FARMERS INSTITUTE HELD AT JENNINGS, LOUISIANA,
MARCH 21^st, 1899, SOME PROBLEMS SOLVED.

        If were well before going into the merits of my subject to determine what is success in agriculture, what shall be the measure of it. As a matter of statistics, in general business 97 percent make failures.  In the solid city of Boston (the hub of the universe),  Mr. Wise, after 45 years close observation, said that 95 percent of the business men of that city failed during life or died insolvent. 

        A prominent banker in the same city selected 1,000 of its heaviest depositors, and after 40 years he reported that all but six had failed while living or died in debt.  Someone has said “a farm that gives me a place to put the labor of my family at good wages is a bonanza.”  The late J. A. Daniels often said that Michigan farmers worked at an average wage of seven cents per day.

        My own experience tells me that 75 percent of northern farmers make failures during their business life.  From this standpoint we can better measure the success or the failure of agriculture in S.W. Louisiana of which rice growing is much the largest and best part.

        You may ask, why is this?  Answer, it pays best.  Not that we can grow little else, for we grow nearly everything grown north of us and sugar, rice and earlier truck, fruits and many other things besides.

        All of us are brought up in fiction, later on we find it out and begin the search for truth.  The fiction that rice can be grown profitably without flooding on upland or on sandy soil or without careful study is past, and now we want to know, what is truth?  Truth lies hidden in the bottom of a well (about 200 feet down), covered with clay and quick sand representing good and evil.  The clay is good and the quick sand is treacherous as evil.  Diogenes with a lamp in daylight was hunting a man.

          We are seeking truth.  Truth commends itself to all, is always eloquent, it needs no embellishing.  A railroad man or real estate agent cannot improve it.

          Our investigation will begin and end with rice growing, and its incidentals, for the very good reason that rice raising is the leading crop, and if that is a failure then we must begin again in some other line, which we can well do, but or which we see no probable necessity.  Modern rice growing began fifteen years ago with the introduction of the twine binding harvester, by Maurice Brien, of Jennings, La.  It was indeed an infant industry, a few scattered fields in the low ground trodden into the earth by the wild cattle and horses, watered by the rains of Heaven harvested with the old sickle.  The exports were limited to about 100 car loads from Welsh, Jennings and Rayne.

        Now we use 4000 improved harvesters; (each doing the work of 40 men with sickle,) over seventy canals and pumping plants aggregating over 300 miles, each mile capable of flooding 1000 acres of rice or of irrigating more then 5000 acres in other crops.   Canals are the work of the past five years, increasing the number each season.  Over 50 irrigating wells for flooding rice have been put down, beginning about three years ago, increasing in number each season.  They have an average depth of 200 feet; a six inch well will flood from 55 to 100 acres.  Ten to fifteen new canals have commenced business this season and about 20 or more deep wells, (and more to follow.)   Southwest Louisiana leads all competitors in the States by growing over one million barrels of rough rice, (or six thousand six hundred and sixty car loads at one hundred and fifty barrels per car.) But is there any evidence that rice growing pays as well as to grow other crops?  Let us see.  What percent of our rice farmers have made financial failures?  If 75 percent fail in 20 years, (the average business life of a farmer,) then in the same ratio 55 percent of the rice growers would fail in 15 years, (or during the time of modern rice growing.)  Being on the ground the past sixteen years, and my business being to investigate for the good of immigration, I will being to investigate for the good of immigration, I will make the assertion from the best of my knowledge that less then 25 percent have failed from the effects of rice farming.  In spite of the fact that it was anew business to them all.  Besides the failures have not been as disastrous as they generally are in other districts.  There has been no occasion for appeals to the outside world for help.  After all, the best test of the outlook for agriculture will be the present price of real estate as compared with the beginning 15 years ago.  If I should say that land sells more readily now at ten dollars per acre in Southwest Louisiana then at one dollar then, I am well within the mark, and that means 1000 percent advance.  But some one says:  that’s so, but how does that compare with countries that grow wheat, oats, stock and cotton!  Let us see.  The New England States that grow nearly every thing except sugar, rice and cotton, prices for lands have gone down.  In the Eastern Middle States real estate prices are lower.  In the Western Middle States prices are much lower than 15 years ago.  And the same may be said of the Pacific and the great northwest.  Looking over the whole field, Southwest Louisiana is the brightest spot on the horizon.  In the good old days when a man was a failure the trouble was in his STARS, now we lay it to the TRUSTS. 

        Ask a man what is a trust and he will answer, it’s a combination to curtail production and thereby raise prices, and all agree that it is a very wicked thing except in our own line, and in our business it’s a very commendable thing to do.  The cotton planters find the cotton trust a remedy for all the ills of life.  The same parties are death on all other so-called trusts but theirs.  My own opinion is well expressed by the colored preacher:  “Keep in the current, brudder.”  If there is any trusting going on, be sure that you are in the swim.  Keep your credit good and get TRUSTED whenever you see any money in it.  Pope said:  “It’s in the culture, not the soil.”  It’s in ourselves, and not the stars.  The world is on the up-grade, and now is the tide in the affairs of men, which, if taken at the ebb, leads on to fortune.  What about hard times, A PANIC?  Don’t talk it or fear it.  Our exports exceed our imports 600,000,000 of dollars, and bid fair to soon reach one billion of dollars.  Our debt to Europe is nearly paid, and then this balance must be paid in cash.  Ten years of such trade would exhaust the metallic money of the world. We have the raw material to manufacture, and we are the people to do it, and, unless the great wheels of trade stop, there will be no scarcity of money or material in this, the youngest, most powerful and richest nation on earth.  Eight billions of gold and silver, all the world’s stock of metallic money, and our mortgage upon it is our bread-stuffs, or cotton, our coal, iron, copper, gold and silver.  Our resources are unlimited and scarcely touched, and our labor more efficient than any other.  Assisted by the best inventive genius our manufactures have captured all markets.  American engines are hauling trains over American iron in China and the Orient.  We go wherever men go and trade follows our flag.  The Star Spangled Banner is hailed with delight by all people, including our late enemies, the Spaniards.  We are the largest exporting country, having passed Great Britain the past year.

        Southwest Louisiana is settled by a thinking people, and what are we here for?  Answer:   To make money, and that comes from higher prices for what we own and produce; to make homes, and they come of prosperity; and, above all, to make character, and that comes from obstacles overcome, and the good Lord knows we have had our full share.  I have said that we have been systematically robbed.  First and most by our ignorance of the rice business.  We tried Providence and challenged Nature to a combat in which we came out second best; then tried the New Orleans millers and came out busted; then we tried the rice buyers and speculators and came out worsted; and last we challenged the heavens and declared our independence of the clouds, and the angel of the harvest invoked the aid of Neptune, and he opened the flood-gates of heaven upon us and never let up for our crying until there was nothing to show for the largest and best crop of rice ever grown in Southwest Louisiana but a sea of mud.  And now in TRUTH, tell us what is the present outlook for the rice industry.  Has it overcome these obstacles and made them stepping-stones to success?  If so, then its character must be well developed and we can lean upon it safely.  That we have overcome our ignorance of the crop we know by the school of experience.  We have beaten the New Orleans millers by building better mills in the rice country, where we have the largest and best mills in the world.  We beat the rice speculators by compelling them to buy in our home markets and pay for the rice on delivery. 

        One more problem.  Proper DRAINAGE, and we are a long way ahead of any other rice growing country that we know of to-day.  A clay soil, easily flooded and capable of supporting the heaviest machinery.  (No transplanting, no sick ling, no plowing, sowing, weeding or harvesting in water.)  Can we solve and over come this last obstacle to perfect success, DRAINAGE?   On the ridge running from Lake Arthur on the south through Jennings and to China on the north it’s a question of little importance, 20 to 30 feet above the Mermentau and the Nezpique, and on the west 10 feet above the Grand Marias.  Water seeks its level and the problem of drainage is easy.  Three-fourths of all rice lands in Southwest Louisiana can be drained inexpensively and without pumping; one-fourth may, as many sugar planters do, use the pump and high levees.  Canals and wells will both assist in this work of drainage.  We will soon have a deep well on each quarter section.  The water rises to within 8 to 12 feet of the surface, and water turned into these wells disappears as rapidly as if turned into a canal or the river, whenever they reach a strata of coarse sand and gravel. 

        How does rice growing compare with cotton?  We grow 1620 pounds of rough rice per acre as a good average; this equals 1000 pounds of clean rice of the several grades, average price four cents a pound, equals $40.  250 pounds of lint cotton and 500 pounds of seed is a good average yield of cotton.  250 pounds of cotton at 4 cents equals $10, and 500 of seed at $12 a ton equal $3, total $13,as against $40 for rice.  How about wheat?  A good average is ten bushels, suppose we say fifteen, at an average price of sixty cents a bushel, equals $9.  As against $20 to $30 for rough rice, corn gives an average of $8 to $13, oats rather less and hay less than oats.  And now the fact that after all these disasters and after the failure to harvest the last season’s crop, more acreage will be put into rice than ever, tell us what the best men in the business think of the present outlook of agriculture in Southwest Louisiana.

Rice

ITS CULTIVATION ON THE PRAIRIES OF SOUTHWESTERN LOUISIANA.- DOES IT PAY?

        Rice is a cereal plant of the genus oryza.  It is cultivated in all warm climates and forms a large part of the food of those countries.  It is light and nutritious and very easy of digestion.  It is a staple of commerce all over the world and is largely used in the United States.

        Heretofore our supplies were mainly from Japan, China and the Carolinas.  Laterly (sic) Louisiana has come into the market as a rice-producing country, and by the use of improved machinery in cultivating and harvesting has stepped to the front rank as a rice-producing State.

        The rough rice is sown on new or old land prepared as for other grain.  Fifty to sixty pounds per acre is sufficient.

        Level land capable of flooding is best.  Soil, clay loam with clay sub-soil.  Levees should be prepared as long as possible before seeding, and field should be flooded when rice is 6 to 12 inches high, with 4 to 12 inches of water.  Sow from March 10 to June 20, and harvest in August, September and October.

        In appearance rice much resembles wheat in its early growth.  The head more nearly resembles oats, but the kernels resemble barley and are more closely packed in the head than oats.  It stools thickly, having thirty to one hundred straws from one seed and one hundred to four hundred seeds in a head.  It is the only small cereal plant that yields the hundred fold of Scripture.

        Rice raising for commerce began in Southwestern Louisiana with the advent of the Iowa Colony and twine-binding harvesters, in 1884, when Maurice Brien, of Jennings, La., put a twine-binder in the field.

        In 1883 five acres was about the largest field; since then the growth has been rapid, as figures show.

          The Southern Pacific Railroad shipped, in 1886, 2,000,000 pounds; 1887, 4,000,000 pounds; 1888, 8,000,000 pounds; 1889, 16,000,000 pounds; 1890, 60,000,000 pounds; 1891, 180,000,000 pounds; 1892, 300,000,000 pounds; crops to 1898 approximated 250 million pounds yearly.

        The Southern Pacific Railroad shipped, in 1884, bout 250 cars of rice between Lake Charles and La Fayette; in 1889, over 1,000 cars; in 1890, 2,000 cars; 1891, 5,000 cars; and for 1892 and 1893, 10,000 cars.

        With good cultivation and care rice yields fifteen barrels (60 bushels) per acre.  This has brought an average of $3 per barrel - $45 per acre.

        The cost of growing, harvesting and marketing will generally reach $1 per barrel, say $15 per acre, when you have to pump water by steam.  Most of the rice is raised by artificial irrigation, canals, wells and pumping plants which raise the water to the field level.  Some 175,000 acres are now being watered.

        Cost of growing an acre of rice, say fifteen barrels, is $15, and fifteen barrels of rice at the average, $3, is $45, leaving $30 net.

        Cost of raising ten barrels, about $10; value of ten barrels is $30, leaving $20 net.

        The total rice crop along the Atlantic Coast, 1889, was 190,000 sacks.  Louisiana raised 642,053 sacks.

        Our imports were about 500,000 sacks, 225 pounds of clean rice each.  The total consumption of domestic and foreign rice (Times-Democrat, September 1,) is as follows:

        “Domestic sacks weigh or represent one hundred and sixty lbs. of rough rice, while foreign sacks represent two hundred and twenty-five of clean product.  That rice will retain its present price is usually the best opinion of the best men in the market."   If so, then can the Louisiana planter compete with the old established planters in Carolina and on the Mississippi?  I believe that Louisiana has the field, for many reasons:  peculiarity of soil, heavy clay, supporting with ease best agricultural machinery.  One man with a machine and four mules has the working power of forty with a sickle.  We have an abundant rainfall, supplemented by steam pumps and engines on hand, and  numerous rivers and lakes to draw from, also a very long season in which to operate—from November to July for plowing and preparing ground and levees; March, April, May and June for seeding; August, September, October and November for threshing and marketing.  Rice can be grown and marketed at a cost of $1.00 per barrel of 162 pounds of rough.  All above is a clear profit.  Wheat, oats and corn are grown North and sold at actual cost of growing, and lands are sold at $30 to $100 per acre where those conditions exist.  I hear it rumored that our competitors are out of the race at $2 a barrel.  I do not hesitate to say that Southwestern Louisiana, with her improved machinery, her generous soil, wonderful climate and easy conditions, her splendid people, will be able still to let out a link or two and grow rice at a good round profit for $1 a sack.  I do not expect to see prices that low; at the same time I believe the day of high prices for all manufactured products is past and I am glad of it.  The day is near when eight hour’s work will give each one a full day’s rations.  A large part of the rice grown should be consumed on our farms.  There is no better feed for stock, and none cheaper at present prices.  Its uses will broaden with present low prices.  The good rice land is limited in quantity, and as population increases and its value as a food plant is made known, the tendency will be to stimulate prices and production.

        Egyptian or soft rice is best feed for stock, and some claim better yields and with less water.  The country has been flooded not only with water but with machinery, yet notwithstanding the low prices collections are much better than elsewhere.  The first receipt of new rice in 1891 was August 31; 1890, July 31; 1889, August 1; 1888, July 29. Canals, artesian wells, pumps, engines, windmills, and improved machinery are wanted, and fortunes await the industrious men of genius and enterprise.  Labor and intelligence are at a higher premium here than elsewhere.  The crop of Louisiana for 1892 will reach 2,000, 000 of sacks-400,000,000 pounds of rough rice-250,000,000 pounds of clean rice, at four cents a pound-$10,000,000.  If Louisiana grows 250,000,000 pounds of clean rice, then the balance of the Gulf States will grow about one-third as much, giving for the domestic product 333,000,000 pounds of clean, so we will have to import as much to equal consumption. 

        The crop of 1898 has been cut 50 percent by rains.  Prices have improved as much.  The uses have broadened and now rice is being fed to all kinds of stock largely.  There is little waste land in Southwestern Louisiana-low lands to rice and higher lands for cane, corn, oats, potatoes, truck and fruits.

        Rice planters are introducing headers with binders, all of double capacity, and will try the header alone, hoping to cut and thrash thirty acres per day with one header.  If this experiment succeeds, Southwest Louisiana will have no rival in successful rice growing.

        Better and cheaper methods of production are being adopted each year.  But the broadening uses and increasing population will doubtless keep pace with production.  Rice, sugar and cotton are the three mystic links that bind Louisiana to the greatest prosperity.

WRITTEN FOR LOUISIANA FARMER AND RICE JOURNAL.

IS THERE A LIMIT?

S. L. CARY

        Where is the limit to profitable rice-growing in Southwest Louisiana?  I say Southwest Louisiana, because there is no other field in the United States that can compete with this.  Brick Pomeroy, on his return from China, filled the Chicago papers with the possibilities of rice-growing in the great Northwest, but the article received no further attention after Brick left the city.

        Now and then we see in some paper an inquiry for upland rice seed.  Some one may get a good price for a little white Honduras rice, but that customer never comes the second time.  No rice-growers in the United States compete successfully with the growers of flooded rice in Southwest Louisiana.  During the World’s Fair at Chicago, while distributing books, maps and circulars, about Southwest Louisiana, I took occasion during six months to enquire of all foreign rice-growers the cost of growing and the selling prices in their different provinces.  I became well assured that none of these can undersell us with the same standard of value.  We will not be troubled with imported rice after the Orientals adopt the genuine single gold standard (Japan’s gold standard is not genuine.)

        The New York Grocer is authority for the statement that we import double the quantity that we grow.  Taking that to be about correct, then we have the question:  How long will it take to grow three times the present amount, and also provide for its broadening uses and the ever-increasing population?  How easy my question could be answered now by the rule of three?  If in one hundred years we have been able to grow one-third of our consumption, how many years will it take to grow it all?  Such a solution would be very pleasant and desirable to me, for I find myself on very uncertain ground.  Each morning we are told of another canal project, and it looks to-day as if the domestic supply in Southwest Louisiana might be increased fifty percent in one season. 

        I have been a resident here fifteen years, and am entirely familiar with the industry, and especially its modern growth.  So I thought I had chosen a subject that would prove an easy one.  But, instead, I find that there are no precedents of facts to base arguments upon, and in the place of facts the field is full of speculations and of uncertain quantities.

        While there is plenty of available land well adapted to rice, and nearly everything else, the question of the water supply presents itself.  Rice must be flooded about sixty days.  Will the rivers, lakes and bayous furnish sufficient water to flood beyond the amount now in contemplation?  Will there be some way of reaching the large prairies far away from water?  Will deep wells successfully flood these lands, for in Southwest Louisiana all lands are rice lands that can be flooded?  Wells twenty feet deep will supply plenty of water for domestic use, stock, etc., and it appears at a depth of a 170 to 200 feet there is a supply of water that is inexhaustible.  This is beneath alternate layers of clay and quicksand into a coarse gravel.  The present outlook, after sinking many wells, is that all of these lands can be supplied with water profitably to the owner.  Then if rice can be flooded profitably, what about simple irrigation of sugar cane, corn, oats, potatoes, and similar crops from the same sources?  The cost would be merely nominal.

        Will the increase in consumption keep pace with the increase in production?  The direction in which there can be the largest immediate increase will be the feeding of rice to stock to compete with corn, oats, wheat and bran, now put on our markets at three-quarters to one cent a pound.  Rice can be grown pound for pound cheaper than wheat, corn and oats here, and I believe as cheaply as they can be grown anywhere north of us.  Rice is a better feed stuff than any of the others alone, and rice bran, polish and sweet potatoes make a feed that excels anything I have tried, especially for dairy stock.  Take good sound rice to the feed mill, grind it and feed your horses, mules, and cattle, and they will soon get fat and sleek.  We have tried this three years.  It beats corn or oats for milk or work.  This field is almost unlimited.

        Rice-growing will be limited by the price.  If the price is below cost, then the farmer will become a planter.  Sugar cane will supersede the rice industry, as these rice lands are generally well adapted to cane-growing.  The sugar cane of our prairies, for some good reason, is fifty percent sweeter than that of alluvial districts, and the tonnage equally as great.  With our better facilities for irrigation the yield can be increased fifty to 100 percent.  Thirty tons per acre will be a small average with plenty of water.  Only think of thirty tons per acre at the present price, $3 to $3.50 a ton, equal to $90 at least!  And this, too, at an average cost of $40 per acre, leaving $50 profit.  I am not talking in the air, as some may think, but good practical horse sense.  I have grown forty tons an acre on the prairie and at less cost than $40.  Moreover, it tested seventeen and a half percent sucrose.  Others have done as well, and, during this dry season without irrigation, a number have said to me that they grew thirty to thirty-five tons per acre.  It would be entirely possible to grow forty to fifty tons per acre with out coming system of irrigation. 

        Then what is the conclusion of the whole matter?  If my premises are correct the logical conclusion is that as long as wheat, oats and corn can be grown profitably north, rice will be profitably grown in Southwest Louisiana.  As that result is so very important and so many are asking the question-will you not overdo the rice business?  I will go into detail.

        Rice with water will average ten sacks, say 2,000 pounds per acre.  It costs $10 per acre to grow, and is worth, say one cent a pound, which make $20.  Wheat gives an average yield of ten bushels, 600 pounds to the acre, at a cost of about $7.  This gives a cost of $21.00 to grow 1,800 pounds.

        Corn gives an average yield of thirty bushels, 1,800 pounds to the acre, at a cost of about $11.

        Oats gives an average yield of forty bushels, 1,280 pounds per acre.  It takes one and one-half acres to make 1,800 pounds to equal rice.  The average of an acre of oats is, say $7, making one and a half acres of oats cost $10.50.

        From these conservative figures the comparative profit in rice can be readily seen.  We meet the inquiry on every hand, and especially from every home seeker-with there not be overproduction?  And I must confess our answers have been very indefinite and not assuring.  But I am sure that anyone who will read this article carefully, will come to the same conclusion that the writer came to, that there is room for a growth in the rice industry, and that it is profitable.  In addition to being profitable, it is, with flooding, an almost absolutely sure crop, and the water is a fertilizer, so that not more is needed for successful rice-growing. 

          The limit to profitable rice-growing will not be reached as long as there is stock to fatten or people to feed.  Or, in other words, there can be no overproduction in this world as long as there is a hungry man in it.  We are only a speck in the grand old universe of God, and we can’t overstock it.

Partial List of Canals and Pumping Plants for Flooding Rice.

PARTIAL LIST OF WELLS FOR FLOODING RICE

A MODEL PLANTATION

J. F. WELLINGTON

        As the years roll by and the rice industry in Southwest Louisiana is accorded its just measure of credit, as a wealth producer, more or less interest will be taken in its history.  When the historians of the future turn back the pages of the past they will discover that the most important epoch in the history of rice culture comprises the last three months of 1897 and the first three of 1898.  Those Golden Days of prosperity witnessed a phenomenal increase in the number and size of pumping plants and canals throughout the rice region.

        Two years of drouth (sic drought) in succession, for the first time in our history, had demonstrated the impossibility of raising rice without water.  During those two years, the few rice planters who owned and operated pumping plants, produced at least seventy-five percent of all the rice raised in the prairie region.  After the Providence crop of 1897 was known to be a failure and the magnificence of the irrigated crop was assured, a stampede occurred to the pump lands.  I speak particularly of eastern Calcasieu parish, as I am thoroughly familiar with the situation in that locality.  Engineers were employed and levels were taken over thousands of acres, sites for pumping plants were examined and the capacity of lakes and rivers estimated by experts.

        From the 15^th of October to the 15^th of March, one real estate firm in Jennings sold 19,000 acres of rice land. Of the amount, 925 acres were purchased by northern or western men.  All the remainder went to men who live in this vicinity and have made their money by raising rice.  Within a radius of fifteen miles of Jennings, twelve new plants are now under construction and will be ready for operation in time to insure the crop for 1898.

        Each of these plants is a monument to the wealth producing qualities of rice industry.

        Among these monuments are many that deserve more than a passing notice.  One of the most complete and up to date plants with which I am familiar is that of the Lakeside Irrigation Co. L't'd', whose home office is at Shell Beach, La.  In November, 1897, E. F. Rowson and Dr. E. I. Hall of Jennings, purchased 4,000 acres of raw prairie, on the south side of Lake Arthur and twelve and one-half miles from Jennings.

        January 1, 1898, the above company was formed, S. B. Carpenter, of Cresco, Ia., Geo. A. Sundberg and John Boyum, of Mayville, N. D., becoming stockholders.

        It was then decided to immediately put in a pumping plant, construct canals and operate the entire tract upon the tenant system.

        June 1, 1898, at the beginning of the pumping season, this company will have in operation five miles of navigable canal through which busy tugs will tow barge loads of rice to market and bring in coal, groceries and other supplies.

        In addition to this canal, there will be eight miles of irrigating canals, varying in width from sixty to one hundred feet. Thirteen new houses have been built, containing from four to eight rooms each, for the use of the tenants.  They are all occupied, and a more contented looking lot of agriculturalists would be hard to find in any country.  Barns, fences and out-buildings are all new and modern; graded roads are found at convenient distances throughout the plantation, with good bridges wherever necessary.  The pumping plant consists of two 100 horse power boilers, two 80 house power engines and two six foot McStravick pumps.  The capacity of the plant is 6,000 acres.  3,000 acres of rice will be raised this year.  All complete and ready to operate, the entire property represents the investment of $75,000.  Every tenant is an equal partner with his landlord. The company furnishes land, water, buildings, fence and seed.  The tenant furnishes the teams, machinery, feed and labor.  The crop is divided at the threshing machine, each getting one-half.  A conservative estimate of results may not be out of place in this connection.  The yield from irrigated lands in that vicinity has never been as low as eight barrels per acre.  For absolute safety, we will place it at that figure.  This would give the company 12,000 barrels as its share of the corp.  Good rice sold last year at from $2.75 to $4.25 per barrel, if only $2.50 should be realized this year, the company would still have $30,000 of an income from which to pay running expenses and dividends upon the stock.

        To would-be investors, I will say that this statement will stand investigation.  The other side of the question will also bear thorough examination.  One man and a team can handle one hundred acres of rice, except in harvest, one extra man is all that is required at that time.

        When we consider that the tenant has no expense except his living, horse feed and labor, with a practically sure income of $1,000 for each man and team that he works, that he has no possible show to lose anything and that he is only required to work one-forth as much as in the northern states, it really looks as though a tenant on a rice plantation is in a fair way to make as much money as his northern brother, who does well id he makes expenses, on a rented farm, extra well if he clears $200.00 on a quarter section that he owns, gets gay and moves to town if the fates smile upon him and he makes as much as $600.00 in one year.

RICE-GROWING IS A RECENT DEVELOPMENT IN AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

Written for the Sunday St. Louis Republic, May, 1899.

        The recent organization in St. Louis of the Trinity Riceland and Irrigation Company with a capitalization of $200,000 has called attention to the fact that a new departure in agriculture is now being developed in Texas-the culture of rice.  The Trinity Company is offered by C. F. Blanke of St. Louis, as president, W. C. Moore of Houston, Tex., as vice president, F. W. Schwettmann of Lincoln, Mo., as secretary, and Charles L. Heitzeberg of St. Louis as treasurer.  It is stated that over half the stock was promptly subscribed by Missouri people.

        St. Louis money was not invested in Texas rice lands until a careful investigation had been made. A committee was sent from here to view the situation and so satisfactory was the report that 15,000 acres of land in the northeastern part of Chamber County, Texas, was purchased.

        Vice President W. E. Moore of Houston, Tex., the first to call the attention of local capitalist to the opportunity offered by the Texas rice lands, was in St. Louis a few days ago.  He gave some details of the innovation:

        “The development of this crop,” said Mr. Moore, “in certain sections of Texas and Louisiana is marvelous, and an investigation is only necessary to create enthusiasm as to the profits of this crop.   The great trouble is, the American people always associate China men and rice as being of the same family, and not caring to cultivate the former, they manifest little interest in the latter.  The investigation, however, reveals a startling comparison, for while one is associated with the idea of cheapness, the other opens up avenues for riches.  Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas is recognized as the best section of America for the culture of this crop.  This territory extends inland from the coast a distance of about 50 miles running east and west for probably 200 miles. 

        “For the growing and successful maturity of rice it requires a peculiarity of soil and climate.  The land is prepared the same as for wheat or other small grain, and the seed then sown broadcast or in drills, about one and one-fourth bushels being used to the acre.  When the crop comes up it resembles nothing so much as a wheat field, the blades when first appearing being identical in shape and color with wheat.  Level land, or that as nearly so as possible, is selected for the rice farm.  Before the crop is planted levees are thrown up around the fields for the purpose of holding water on them.  This work is usually done with large levee plows, made for the purpose.  When the rice is from six to twelve inches in height, it is flooded with water.  In the early history of the industry the natural rainfall was depended upon for this purpose, and rice was only planted on the lowest lands, using the higher lands for water sheds, from which the water was drained into the rice fields; but as rice raising depends on a supply of water, there was always a degree of uncertainty that rendered the possibly of a failure or partial failure not improbable.  Especially was this so in view of the large profits that were being made and the consequent temptation on the part of the planters to encroach upon higher lands in order to raise more rice. 

        "Rice is flooded from two to twelve inches and kept flooded during all of the growing season, until the heads have become filled and the crop begins to ripen, when the levees are cut and the water allowed to run off, thus giving the ground time to dry and harden before harvesting time.  The harvest season does not differ from the harvesting of wheat or oats in the Northern States.  After cutting, the rice is allowed to stand in a shock from two to three weeks before staking, as, owing to the excessive amount of moisture in the straw, it takes longer to dry out than other grain.  The crop is harvested at the same expense and in the same manner with a self-binding harvesters as other small grain.  The yield is about three times that of wheat.  It is threshed by the steam tresher (sic thresher) and is put in large sacks holding about four bushels, when it is ready for market.  Under favorable conditions, it produces from twelve to eighteen barrels per acre, the average price for the past ten years being $2.00 per barrel. 

        "Probably the greatest element in the transformation of the industry from a small and insignificant beginning to what is recognized to-day as one of the leading and best-paying industries in the Southern States may be found in the extensive system of irrigation that has been established in the last few years.  The most sanguine believers in rice culture never expected to see the many inexhaustible streams and bayous with which this prairie region abounds and which connect the large bodies of freshwater lakes and bays lying close to the Gulf coast, utilized for irrigation purposes, on account of the high lift from these streams, which, in many instances, is from twenty to sixty feet.  In consequence, thousands upon thousands of acres of high land that was supposed to be inaccessible for the purpose have been proven to be bonanza to their owners.  They have on this account suddenly developed an intrinsic value that readily places them by the side of the most valued agricultural lands in the United States.

        These large canals are always kept on the highest ridges of land and are built by throwing up parallel levees from the outside, making what might be termed an overland canal, instead of cutting below the surface, thus keeping the water supply above all lands to be supplied.  This system of irrigation, on a large scale, has completely revolutionized rice-raising.  It has eliminated many of the disagreeable features from the industry, not the least among which was an uncertainty attached to the planting of the crop, and depending for its success upon the rainfall.  It has placed it upon a solid and profitable basis, when men of means engage in it upon a large scale without prejudicing the advantages of the man with less capital who farms on a small scale; and more than this, it ensures to him a degree of success both as to quality and quantity of the product that cannot be obtained where a limited supply of water is at hand.  The raising of rice under the present system of irrigation is reduced to a simple business proposition, on which any man of fair business ability ought to be able to figure intelligently and arrive at a conclusion as to the profitableness or unprofitableness of rice raising. 

        The cost of the water, which is one of the most expensive items connected with the rice industry, under this system has been reduced to a minimum, as a hundred plantations can be supplied from one plant at 50 percent of what it would cost if supplied by separate plants for each farm.  One end of these rice irrigation canals begins at the bank of some inexhaustible stream of water or its tributary, and immense pumping plants at this point lift the water to the necessary elevation.  It requires two and three complete pumping outfits, the first of which carries the water to a certain height, where it is emptied into a portion of the lower canal or reservoir, thence it is relifted by another pump, and so on until the necessary elevation has been attained.  The water is then sent through the main canal and laterals built through prairie, feeding the rice farms with water, which is drawn from these canals by plank flumes going through the levees and letting it into the fields at the will of the farmer by the use of flood gates.  The pumping capacity of these plants varies in accordance with the land to be irrigated.  Some of them reach the enormous amount of 90,000 gallons of water per minute, and these pumps run day and night, beginning in June and stopping the latter part of August.  You will readily perceive that this is a very great volume of water, and where several of these pumping plants are located on a large tributary of the greater streams, the current is changed, and were it not fed from an inexhaustible source, it would be dry in very short order.

        As to the profits of this class of farming, Mr. Frank M. Hammon writes from Port Arthur, Tex., April 4, 1899: “Our canal will carry water for 5,000 acres of land.  We had last year under our canal 700 acres in rice.  We will have this year 1,400 acres.  There is no improved land under our canal for sale, to my knowledge.  I made a crop last year of $22,000 on 500 acres of land.  You can form your own idea regarding the value of this land after one year’s crop, as it would simply be a matter of opinion with me to place a price upon it.  Our company last year, from the profits of our crop and canal, paid the interest on $50,000 in bonds and declared a dividend of 6 percent on $100,000 in stock, and still had a profit left.

        W.W. Duson & Bro. of Crowley, La., April 5, 1899, write:  “There is no stock that can be bought in the Abbott, Duson, the Rooler, the Ferre or the Crowley Canal companies.  These canals will flood 46,000 acres. The plants are new institutions, and the only way we have of knowing how well irrigation enterprises pay is by what the Crowley Canal and the Abbott Bros. have done.  So far as the Crowley Canal Company is concerned, this is the individual property of our Mr. W. W. Duson, and while we were not careful to keep a close line of figures on the matter, we are fully persuaded that this plant would have paid last year and did pay all the while 8 percent interest on the investment and a dividend of 33 1/3 percent.  In this vicinity where canals invaded new territory, they have increased the value of the land about 100 percent.  In other words, if land were worth $10 per acre, as soon as the enterprise was assured, they immediately went to $20; if $15, they once became $30 land.

        George H. Easte of Beaumont, Tex., says he was a tenant in 1898, and from 234 acres in rice that year he received $8,579.46 as his share, which was three-fourth of the entire crop, the other fourth having gone to the land owner as rent.

        The Raymond Rice Canal and Milling Company, an Iowa concern, write that their rice land in Louisiana has more than doubled in value in the last eighteen months, while of their Texas rice plantation of 15,000 acres just purchased not an acre is for sale even at 100 percent advance. They fully expect it to pay a rental of $8 per acre as well as $5 per acre for water.”

        No people are more prosperous than the rice farmers along these irrigating canals.  They have the best and can afford the best.  They do not fear competition or over production, for the reason that the territory in which this crop is grown is limited and when it is all put into cultivation the United States will still import rice, upon which there is a duty of 2 cents a pound.  Mr. Moore said that a great number of settlers from Iowa, Illinois and Missouri had located in the rice districts, and in the past six months a million and a half dollars had been invested in these lands for future development.

IRRIGATING PLANT TO WATER 15,000 ACRES

        The agents of the North American Land and Timber Company, acting for other parties, have purchased a water front on English bayou and the right of way needed for the construction of an immense irrigating plant.  The lands to be flooded belong to the company and to those who have purchased land of the company.  For the most part the land is situated between the Southern Pacific and Watkins tracks between this city and Iowa.  The water front is three hundred feet in length.  The bank is high and precipitous, removing the necessity of a flume or high embankment.

        The main ditch at the pumping plant will be at least one hundred and twenty-five feet wide.

        The canal will intersect the Southern Pacific tracks near Chloe.  The exact method of crossing has not been determined, as the company wants to put in a head of water which would be higher than the present level of the tracks. The projectors have the choice of several methods of overcoming this difficulty, but hope the best solution will be available.  The distance from the pumping plant to the Southern Pacific tracks is not more than a half mile.  South of the tracks the canal will run in a southerly direction, bearing slightly to the east.  At a distance of two miles, or a little more, from the tracks the canal will turn to the east and extend to the land lying between Iowa and Bon Air.  The main canal in all will be over seven miles long.  As there is demand it is expected to extend the canal south of the Watkins track and flood that land.

        Large laterals will be constructed to the west, north and south of the canal.  The surveys have been made and the levels run by P. H. Philbrick of this city.  The main canal for the most part follows the ridge south of Chloe and to the east.  Much of the land can be flooded with a low head of water.

        Work on the plant will be begun in a short time.  It is not designed to have any part of the plant ready for this season’s planting.  Next year it is expected to flood at least ten thousand acres.  The plant will be constructed to have a capacity twice as large as would be needed to flood ten thousand acres, and in time it is expected that the main ditches as already planned will be of sufficient size to carry water to flood fifteen to twenty thousand acres.

        The pumping plant at the bayou will be equipped with two one hundred horse power engines at first.  As there is need, other engines, boilers and pumps will be put in.  But at all times the plant will be in duplicate and independent, so that if any part of the plant is disabled other machinery will be immediately available. 

        The lift at the bayou will be fifteen feet.  A mile and a half south another pumping plant will be installed, which will have a lift of eight feet.  This second lift is necessary because of the low level of the Southern Pacific tracks.  To get the proper lift to flood all the land the bayou lift would have to go high enough to put the tracks under about ten feet of water.  The pumping plant at the second station will not need to be of such capacity as the first.

        The construction of this enormous plant involves an immense expenditure of money for labor, material and equipment.

        The construction work of the enterprise will reflect favorably on the business interests of Lake Charles.  The lands lie so near the city that this place is the natural market, both for buying supplies and material and for selling the crops.

        The settlement of this large area will add wealth to the parish and city.  The marketing of the crops here will mean business for the mills and for all the merchants.

        It will be seen that the available sites for the rice irrigating plants are going rapidly.  In a short time Lake Charles will be surrounded with rice canals, and wealth will pour into the city from the crops taken from rice lands.

A FEW RICE POINTERS

M. B. HILLIARD

In Times-Democrat, June 8^th 1899.

        I judge that there are, or soon will be, enough rice mills in the country to mill all the rice raised.  There may be room for a few more, and they are certain to be built.  Crowley has lost three, I believe it is, and has three left.   Estherwood and Gueydan are to have a rice mill each.  Here is a partial list; Acadia Rice Milling Company, Rayne, La., 800 barrels capacity every twenty-four hours; Mermentau (estimated), 300 barrels; Jennings, 500 barrels; Welsh’s (estimated), 400 barrels; Fenton (estimated), 200 barrels; Lake Charles Rice Milling Company, 3000 bags; Westlake Rice Mill, 300 sacks.  There is another mill at Lake Charles, 500 barrels per day.  I conjecture that it is safe to assume the aggregate capacity of Crowley mills at 4000 bags every twenty-four hours.  I am not sure that I have given a complete list of rice mills in Southwest Louisiana.  Upon reflection there is or was one at Opelousas.  But I have not traversed the whole territory and don’t pretend to accuracy. Aggregating, however, the capacity of rice mills mentioned I find them to be able to dispose of about 10,000 bags of rice per day of twenty-four hours’ run.  This would only take about seven months’ run to absorb a crop of 2,000,000 bags.  In point of fact some rice mills are yet running, or were up to a short time ago, but most are closed down.

        In the very first letter I wrote on my recent trip I made the point that I expected to see the day coming when matters would be worked down to the finest point, and that would be for the land owners (rice raisers) to own the irrigation plant and the rice mill. To my utter amazement and delight I found that at least one demonstration was extant in Crowley of the practicability and its profitableness monumental. A number of rice raisers and owners and stockholders in irrigation plants made up their minds to build a rice mill in sheer self-protection, so that they could get what they deemed a fair price for rice.  The stock was subscribed.  The subscribers gave their notes for the amount of their subscriptions.   The notes were discounted (I believe in New Orleans) and upon failing (sic falling) due were renewed.  Before they were due the second time the mill had earned enough to pay the notes and a handsome surplus.  Recently some shares of stock in this mill were sold in the interests of a deceased shareholder.  One hundred shares, par value $100 per share.  These shares brought $3, 500, and the gentleman who settled the estate told me that the purchaser would not take $5,000 for the 100 shares. For an investment that did not call for a cent of cash and only involved the use of credit, and that was not entered into with any motive of direct profit this is a remarkable and impressive instance. The moral is that these rice raisers have solved all this once vexations problem as to how to get fair prices for their rice.  The mill buys the rice of its own shareholders and pays a fair price, and they set more or less the price for other mills.

        As a fact these country rice mills have revolutionized the rice business in Louisiana, so far as markets for sale, localities in milling, markets for the cleaned rice, modes of payment, etc., are concerned.  Everybody knows that little or no rough rice now comes to New Orleans except such as is bought by the rice mill man or dealer here. Formerly it all came here, or so nearly so as to be not worth consideration.  The rice business in the country is done on a cash basis.  In New Orleans not (no need to explain this to the well-informed).  Next, 90 percent of the head rice, or finished product, goes West-mainly to grocery trade-Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Cal., and other Western cities.  This is all of a few late years, or since the fairly-developed result of rice mill in the country.  No need to comment on this revolution.

        It is another interesting thing to know how the demand for rice polish is growing in Europe.  You could see at some of the large mills (even as late as two or three weeks ago) quite a number of cars loading wite (sic with) this polish.  I suppose the day will come when it will be billed through from the mill.  Now it is shipped to New Orleans, but goes to Europe in the same packages.  It is put up at the country mills in double bags.  Antwerp is a leading consumer or market. Liverpool takes a great deal of it.  In Belgium it is bolted. The flour is made into bread, and the offals or residuum makes stock feed.  Indeed, it sells very readily in this country for stock feed.  Mr. Daboval of the Rayne rice mills told me that he had letters of inquiry from Hamburg and elsewhere about rice polish.

        In my mind I have evolved a good deal what could be done in the way of creating new uses for rice.  I am told by a rice miller that there is 46 percent of starch in rice polish or flour.  And it is suggested that it would pay better to starch of it than to sell it as polish.  If this be so the rice millers ought to have starch factory at Crowley or Lake Charles or some live town.  In fact, rice raisers and rice millers ought to set their heads to work to build up a larger demand for rice.  A starch factory would be an impressive addendum to Southern progress in Southwest Louisiana.  Rice raising as large as it has grown to be, is destined to be much larger.  Its immense profits are almost staggering.  I have a number of thoroughly authentic figures to illustrate its profitableness, but I need not give them here.  What is the 1 test and greatest feature about rice-raising is that capital is creeping out of its timidity, and is touching irrigation plants so firmly and persistently that it looks as though rich men will be eagerly hunting them soon as a favorite investment.  The future of rice-raising is portentous with great auguries for Southwest Louisiana.  I shall not be surprised to find eligible rice land there held at $50 per acre and above in five years or less time.

RICE IN THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

        One of the most important food products of the archipelago is rice.  This grain forms the staple food, not only of the native population, but also of the numerous Chinese inhabitants.  Owing to its general use, a scarcity of rice always causes great hardship to the people of the islands.

        The varieties of rice grown in the Philippines number more than one hundred, distinguished by the size, color and flavor of their grains.  The best of these is the Mismis, a rice with a white, almost transparent grain of agreeable odor and flavor.  There is also a variety, called Malagquit that has an unusually glutinous quality, and is therefore much used in the manufacture of cakes and pastry.  Certain kinds of Philippine rice, the Quauamalig among others, mature very early, producing a crop within three months of planting.  It thus happens that by planting alternately and a early and a late variety, two crops can be obtained in one year.

        The ordinary price of rice in the husk, called by the Filipinos, Palay, is about 60 to 65 cents per bushel, while that of shelled rice is about 90 cents to $1 per bushel. 

        The annual production of rice in the Philippines averages about 36,000,000 bushels.  This amount, even when supplemented by maize, mango (a kind of lentil), sweet potatoes, bananas and other edible fruits and tubers, is far below the actual food requirements of the population.  It seems singular that an almost exclusively agricultural country should not produce enough food for the consumption of its own inhabitants, but such is at present the case as regards the Philippines.  In order to supply the home demand it has been the custom to draw upon the product of the other rice-growing countries.  The French colony of Cochin-China, on account of its proximity to the islands, is the principal source of supply.  In some years the quantity of rice imported into Manila, from Saigon, has exceeded 3,200,000 bushels, the value reaching nearly $2,000,000.   The Philippine trade is therefore a source of large income to the rice planters of Cochin-China.-Picayune.

A.   D. McFARLAIN’S NEW PUMPING PLANT

     The new pump at A. D. McFarlain’s private irrigating plant was started up on Wednesday morning.  This pump is of the P. H. & F. M. Roots Company rotary pattern and is constructed on the best principles known to experienced engineers.  The pump has a 38-inch suction and a 36-inch discharge pipe, and will ordinarily raise 1,200,000 gallons of water per hour, but with sufficient power is capable of raising 1,500,000 gallons per hour. The inlet canal has just been completed and is curbed with heavy cypress plank sawed at Mr. McFarlain’s mill especially for the purpose.

     The water is raised 25 feet.  2,300 acres will be irrigated by this pump this season, with the probability of increasing the average to 3,000 for next year.  This is the nearest bayou or river pumping plant to the town of Jennings, being two and a quarter miles from Main Street.

RICE PROSPECTS IN SOUTH CAROLINA

     Kindly change my address to Asheville, North Carolina, where I will be for the summer months.  We look with alarm on the great developments your rice planters are making in irrigation.  So long as they planted providence rice we did not scare worth a cent, as we knew your quality could never compete with Carolina rice, but this system of irrigation will improve your grades and free use of machinery (which we can not utilize) will so cheapen cultivation that we rice planters will not be in it the coming season, or not in the future, unless there is a radical change in our wages, and mode of working.  It is impossible to keep up our levees and pay the wages we are now doing and sell our rice for less than one dollar per bushel, while your planters will make money at  75 cents per bushel.  Won’t some of your correspondents post us as to your wages, rates, and perquisites allowed the labor?   Here they receive from 40 cents to 60 cents per day; in harvest they can make $1.50 a day; they are allowed one acre of land to plant in rice; each family is allowed free of rent, a house to live in, garden lot and fire wood. 

     It is quite clear to many of us that the heavy rice crop planted in Porto Rico is bound to be admitted into this country free of duty, and with your big crop to be marketed we ought to lose no time to unite and reorganize our affairs, to suit this changed condition of things.  The fine crop prospect now is alluring, and we will find it so when the market opens, and closes.  Prompt action to reduce expenses is absolutely necessary. 

     The rice acreage of Georgia and this state is in excess of last year and the stands of rice are better, but the harvest will be later, owing to full rivers all winter and heavy rainfalls which kept the lands soaked, which delayed early planting.  We have had fine growing crop weather since the first of May, and the outlook for a heavy crop is good, debarring our usual storms. 

Very respectfully,

William Miles Hazzard.

Annandale, South Carolina, May 17, 1899 

     ANOTHER WITNESS

ALL TALK LIKE THIS AFTER THEY VISIT SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA

        The New Orleans Picayune has this to say “F. H. Thompson, of New York, a representative of one of the largest machinery establishments of the eastern metropolis, who met Capt. C. A. Lowry, of Lowry, La., and C. A. Spencer, of Jennings, at the Cosmopolitan Hotel last week, and who went out to the rice country with them to see about putting in some extensive irrigating machinery, returned from the Lake Arthur country yesterday and put up at the Cosmopolitan.

        “A great country,” he declared to the lobby rounder. “A great country.  Captain Lowry has as fine a place as I ever saw.  It is on the Mermentau River, at the intersection of three parishes, and set down in the midst of a mammoth grove of live oaks.  His 7,000 acres of rice land lap over on the parishes of Vermilion, Calcasieu and Cameron.  It is near Lake Arthur, one of the most beautiful bodies of water I ever saw.  When he gets his plant in he will have 15,000 acres of rice land under his pumps, and I verily believe it will be the finest rice plantation in southwest Louisiana.”

        Mr. Thompson went over to Captain Lowry’s place to conduct some tests in the efficiency of engines and machinery in order to get at the horse-power needed, etc.  Mr. Lowry had a lot of new machinery to put in last year, but it proved to be of too light capacity for the big tracts of land to be irrigated, and the power will be increased.

CANAL EXTENSION

        Among other things the Jennings Times has the following to say that is interesting to rice growers:

        “A. D. McFarlain is preparing to make extensive additions to his already fine irrigating plant just east of Jennings, which has already capacity to irrigate 1900 acres of rice land.

        A large Roots rotary force pump has already been purchased from the P. H. & F. M. Roots Co., of Connersville, Ind.  This is one of the finest pumps made, with a guaranteed capacity for throwing 20,000 gallons of water per minute. 

        The main canal, which is 60 feet wide, will be elevated two feet and will extend south two and a half miles and the same distance southeast, to a point near R. Lehman’s store.  Over 4,000 acres of additional rice land will thus be brought under pump, giving 6,000 acres in reach of this plant, all of it among the best rice land in the state.

        A. R. McMurtry, of Marshal, Ind., is here.  He came to look after his interests in the Fere canal.  After looking the plant over he reports everything in fine shape and pumps going all the time.  Contracts are already signed for 3,000 acres and it is thought 2,500 more will be contracted.

        The grade work on the new Midland canal is almost completed.  The pumps and flumes will be finished within the next fifteen days and at least 2,000 acres will be watered this season.

        The Duson’s and Abbots have contracted with Captain Lamont to come up Bayou Plaquemine with his dredge-boat as far as the pumping plants.  This will be quite an undertaking but will allow room for tugs with wood and boats to supply the plants with necessities.  Another and more prominent feature will be that more water will be supplied for the pumps.  Work will begin at once.

        Captain Lamont has completed the dredging of the layout to the new Midland canal plant.

        Work on the relief plant, with which water will be thrown into the bayou for the pumping plants, is being pushed.  The dam will be finished in a short time and the pumps put in.

A BIG FARM

A SIGNAL REPRESENTATIVE VISITS THE ABBOT BROS. 1500 ACRE RICE PLANTATION

        A representative of the Signal made a trip to the Abbott Brothers farm northwest of Crowley Wednesday and was well repaid for the trip by what was seen.  There is probably no better rice farm or plantation in the country than the Abbott Brothers.  They are farming 1,500 acres this year, and already have as fine a stand of rice as one could wish to see.  Something like 150 men are employed about the place. The Abbott Brothers have their own pumping plant and flood their land through a canal built and owned by themselves.  The pumping plant was started May 15.  But two of the pumps were running when the writer saw the place, but these two throw out an immense amount of water and the long flume which runs out to the canal was almost full to the top. 

        It is a big thing when one stops to think of it.  Fifteen hundred acres of land, at a very modest estimate, will produce ten bags of rough rice to the acre.  It is generally estimated that there are four bushels of rice to the bag.  This would make 60,000 bushels of rice, and if a good season is had, it will come nearer 70,000 bushels.  It takes money to seed all this land, to keep it in shape, supply water and harvest the crop, and the amount paid out for labor and supplies reaches a big figure.  It will be worth the time of anyone to drive out and see this big plantation.

        Dr. J. Morris, of the Miller Morris canal, stated to a Signal reporter that all their pumps were running full force.  They have fourteen feet of water to draw from and will have plenty to draw from all season.  Ten thousand acres will be watered this year, and the doctor says it as fine a growth as he ever saw.  If no unforeseen circumstance occurs, there will be immense crop this fall.

        The Roller canal is now running night and day, and already has contracts signed to water 4,500 acres.  It is expected that 6,000 acres will be watered by this plant this year.

WORK ON THE BIG RICE FARM

LOUISIANA SYNDICATE LOSING NO TIME ON ITS HARRIS COUNTY ENTERPRISE

        Galveston, Tex., May 5.-It was announced last week that W. E. Jones, son of the late M. T. Jones, of Houston, has leased 4,000 acres of land near Deepwater to a Louisiana syndicate composed of Messrs. Bel. Kaufman and Viterbo Bros., of Lake Charles, whose purpose it was to sink 50 eight-inch artesian wells, and put the entire tract into rice.

        This morning J. Wharton Terry and Major R. B. Baer informed a reporter that work on this big undertaking had already begun.

        “The derricks are up, the engines are at work and they are already boring,” said Major Baer.  “There is an enormous amount of pipe on the ground.  Teams are out with plows and rollers and they are cutting out cotton stalks.  The rice seeders are running and the work is in full blast.  The wells that are being sunk now are about a quarter of a mile north of the depot.”

        Major Baer was asked if he thought the syndicate would have any trouble getting water. “No,” he replied.  “Even if they not get as much water as they expect, they will not have far to go to tap the bayou.  With a pumping station there they could get all they want.”

SULPHUR CANAL COMPLETED

SEVERAL THOUSAND ACRES OF RICE WILL BE SURE OF WATER.

        The work on the irrigating canal at Sulphur under the direction of S. A. Robinson has been completed. 

        The successful solution of this project means much for Lake Charles and the western part of the parish.  The water is pumped from the west of the Calcasieu.  The main canal extends south and crosses the S. P.  tracks near Sulphur.  North of the track is a small prairie, which lies in a pocket of the woods.  The canal runs through this land, and much of it that was uncultivated last year is now green with growing rice. 

        On the South side of the Southern Pacific track is the large plantation belonging to Fred Lock.  On this place are nearly 1,800 acres which are planted in rice.  It is due to Mr. Lock’s push and energy that the canal was built.

        When it is known that there are at least 3,000 acres on the north side of the stack available for rice it can be seen how large the plant really is.  The location and general surroundings are among the best to be found anywhere.  The lift is not great and there is water in abundance.

        The rice, when ready for market, can be loaded on barges at the river, or on the cars at Sulphur, and the haul to the other points is not great.

        The products from the farms and plantations tributary to the canal will naturally gravitate to Lake Charles, and the mills here will profit by them.

GOVERNMENT RICE

        The U. S. department of agriculture has shipped to this city 2500 pounds of Japanese rice, which has been donated to planters whose lands are tributary to the Lake canal.

        The planters have agreed to plant the rice under certain conditions of fertilization, soil and irrigation.  The government reserves the privilege of buying all the product at $3 a bag.

        A number of rice growers have taken quantities of this imported rice and next season there will no doubt be much of this seed planted here.  The government officials are taking a deep interest in the rice growing in this country.  When the crop is growing it is expected that some of the officials from Washington will visit this part of the country.

RICE WELLS

THE SALVATION OF THE SMALL PLANTERS

         Facts.-Wells from 2 up to 12 inches can be put down successfully.  From 50 to 100 such wells are in successful operation in the rice belt of southwest Louisiana.  Passing through alternate layers of clay and quicksand, coarse water bearing gravel is reached at a depth of 100 to 150 feet. Forty feet of screened pipe reaching into this bed of gravel is sufficient.  A 6-inch well will furnish a constant stream to a 4 to 5-inch pump.  A system of such wells may be put down 10 to 40 feet apart and each one will act independently and furnish as much water as if it stood alone.  Such a combination of well may be united just below water level and all run by one engine and pump.  Water rises naturally in these wells to within from 20 feet of the surface, and a number of flowing wells have been secured.  The lift is not greater than from rivers, lake and bayous into canals.  Eight 4-inch wells united at the top can by one 16-inch pump and a 50 h.p. engine, and will flood 1000 acres rice.

        Rice is the largest factor in the world’s food supply, and modern rice-growing is in is infancy.  With present conditions there are good profits for the grower.  Water is the largest factor in its production, and we are prepared to take the advice of the millionaire, “Sell water.”

        Fancies.-Under this whole prairie runs a great river of pure water 150 miles wide, 50 to 200 feet deep, and as long as the Mississippi and Missouri together, at varying depths from the surface and quite generally in the prairie region 100 to 150 feet below surface.  Pumping plants may be made anywhere in southwest Louisiana prairie as large and efficient as any now used to fill the canals.  The cereal rice is with present conditions, the best-paying cereal crop, and rice is the world’s greatest food supply.  Water from wells is better for rice-growing than river water; it increases the yield and gives better quality.  If so, then all the expense of water might be paid by the increase and better quality of the product.

        Benj. Andrews and Frank DeShay were at Fenton Tuesday, where the Andrews people put down a deep well for Fenton Bros.   Their pump has been put in good shape, and we are told, throws 1000 gallons of water per minute.  They have over 50 acres of rice nicely flooded from their well.

DEEP WELLS

THE ONE PUT DOWN AT JENNINGS PRONOUNCED A SUCCESS.

        The Jennings Times has the following to say of the deep well put down there last summer:

        Great interest was manifest last summer in the deep well put down on the farm of Dr. G. W. Remage, and the Times takes pleasure in publishing the results, which were highly satisfactory, even though the well was not finished until after the irrigating season was well advanced. Eighty-five acres of rice was planted on the farm.  Of this amount, 40 acres was very late and is only partly harvested yet.  The bulk of the crop has been threshed and will yield 600 sacks.  Over $1,000 worth of rice has already been sold and there is fully $1,000 worth on hand.  Dr. Remage is well satisfied with the results, and he may well be, for without the deep well the 85 acres of rice would not have yielded a sack of grain.

        Now that the well, engine and pump are complete, the future expense will be only nominal.  The well can easily care for 90 acres of rice.  The cost of gasoline per twenty-four hours operation of the engine is $3.50, much less than wood.  Allowing liberally for all expenses and the investment, the cost of irrigating by this method is no more than rent by the canal system.

DEEP WELL TEST

        A. Brecher made a test today of the two 6-inch deep wells recently sunk on S. L. Cary & Sons’ land in the west part of town, and a crowd of people went out to see the sight. The two wells are connected with a T joint, the Van Wei pump being set half way between the two.  The pump has 6-inch suction and 5-inch discharge, and is driven with ease by a 6 h. p. engine.  Speeded to 600 revolutions per minute, the pump throws a strong stream of clear water, estimated at between 1,200 and 1,400 gallons per minute. With an elbow attached at the discharge, the stream of water was thrown out to a distance of 12 feet, the stream running away 6 inches deep, 3 feet wide and moving at the rate of 8 miles per hour.  Pump men and farmers who were present expressed the belief that these two wells will furnish water sufficient to properly irrigate 200 acres of rice.  This set of deep wells is certainly a success.  After noon the elbow of the pump was removed and the water shot straight up 8 feet.  Owing to the rain the belt slipped and normal speed could not be attained.  It was freely admitted that with a dry belt the water would be shot up at least 12 feet.-Jennings Times.

WELLS

        We are often asked:  “What do you think of wells of flooding rice for general irrigation?”

        The subject is an old one, but here in the prairie region of Southwest Louisiana the general conditions are new.  Canals for flooding have proved successful, and so far as we can see, wells will be a still greater success.  There have been serious difficulties to overcome, but as we are assured, success has been reached.  The wells can be dug, water in great quantities is reached, a constant stream is sure and a system of wells can be put down, say 10 to 20 feet apart and united at the top for one pump and engine.  These plants can be located at the highest prairie at less cost than grubbing timber, dredging and building canals from river, lake or bayou to the dividing ridge.  The lift is less from wells than from rivers and may be reduced to zero by best pumping devices.  Contracting parties are on the ground offering to put in wells and pumps with guarantee of plenty of water in one week.  A. Barber, of Jennings, has an eight-inch flowing well put in by the Andrews Well Co., of New Orleans, from which he pumps a six-inch stream constantly with a second-hand 10-horse power engine.

        We estimate that four 8-inch wells, a 16-inch pump, 50-horse power engine and 75-horse power boiler will cost say $4,000.  Six percent equals $240.  This can be run 60 days at about $20.00 a day.  20 multiplied by 60 equals 1200, and interest $240, equals $1,440, and will flood 1000 acres or $1.44 per acre.

        Larger plants would give much better results.  Ditches to carry the water would be comparatively inexpensive.  Evaporation, generally one-fourth inch per day, is less with cool water and possibly cooler water may increase the yield or may improve the quality of rice.

        Flooding any crop improves the soil.  Rice growing never injures the land.  Rice is the most nutritious of all the cereals.  Three quarters of the world lives on rice almost entirely.  So that besides our home market requiring almost ten million dollars to fill, we have the great hungry world for a market, and we are well assured that we can not be beaten by cheap labor or low prices.

        We are assured that from Crowley west to Iowa water is in strata and not confined to veins as is the case north and west of this territory, and here we can grow everything that requires water and can sell it in the best markets as WELL watered stock.

        The Andrews Well Co., New Orleans, have put in fifteen 8-inch wells here in Southwest Louisiana, A. Breechner (Brecher?), ten 6-inch, Horr Brothers the same, all ready to work and guarantee plenty of water in the prairie region.- S. L. Cary, in The Record.

 The Production of Sugar in Louisiana

BY PROF. S. A. KNAPP, LAKE CHARLES, LA.

        That the lands of Louisiana are well suited to the raising of sugar cane has been demonstrated for more than one hundred years.  A brief mention of methods may be interesting to the non-producer.  The seed bed for cane is generally prepared by sowing cow peas on the land the season preceding planting.  The last of August, when the pea-vines are in full vigor, they are split with a double mould-board plow, six or seven feet apart as the planter deems best.  At the next round the plow catches the furrow and gives it a second roll; this is continued until furrows meet.  Thus all the peas or six or seven feet of land across the field are in each row and covered with soil.  At any time after the first of October these rows may be opened with a plow and two continuous lines of cane stalks places in the bottom of the furrow.  The cane is then covered and a roller passed over the land.  Planting may be done from the first of October till February.  The general plan of cultivation differs little from corn, and continues from February till into July, when cane is supposed to shade the land.  Cotton-seed meal is generally used as a fertilizer.  One planting produces cane two or three years, according to the strength of soil and the conditions of the winters.  Harvesting continues from October till January.

        This may be said of cane:

1.     It is among the safest of farm crops.

2.     It furnishes employment nearly the whole year.

3.     It yields the largest income per acre.

        The average of cane per acre, where properly cultivated and fertilized, is seldom less then twenty tons, and of stubble cane (second year) fifteen tons, or thirty-five tons for two years, which at present prices would be worth $140. We estimate cost of

          The above are liberal estimates, and should be reduced considerably. The second year the total cost would be $22, as seed cane, preparation, and planting would be omitted.  The total cost for two years would be $66, leaving a profit of $74 per acre for two years, or $37 per year.  This estimate is based upon hiring the work done under careful supervision.  One man could easily superintend one or two hundred acres.  Should cane fall considerably below $4 per ton it would still be a profitable crop.  It is estimated that cane can be profitably produced at $2.50 per ton by small farmers who do their own work and are out of debt.  Cane cultivated is so well adapted to the farm that it would become general in all the Gulf States were it not for the serious problems connected with the extraction of the juice and manufacture of sugar.  The old-time plantation mill with fifty or sixty per cent extraction and open kettle boiling could not compete in the markets of the world with Germany and Cuba.  To do this it was necessary for the planters of Louisiana to establish the central factory, with its ponderous and expensive machinery and its complete railway system; $250,000 is necessary to the building and equipment of a first-class central factory.  Such a sum is out of the reach of the average planter; hence he has been trying to get along with half a quarter equipment, or if the factory was secured it took several years before adjoining planters could change to cane farming and furnish a full supply for the factory.  Few industries in the United States, however, have made more rapid advancement in the last ten years than the manufacture of sugar.  It has now been reduced to a complete science.  The results are exact and are very satisfactory.  The factory of the future must turn out at least two hundred pounds of mercantile sugar per ton of cane.  The labor and fuel must be a minimum.  The success of the large central factory is assured in Louisiana, paying the planter a liberal sum for his cane and netting a most satisfactory per cent, on the capital invested.  The next problem in sugar making is to discover a less expensive method of extracting the juice of cane and yet secure a high percent of the saccharine matter.  Nor is this so far from solution as may at first appear.  It has been found that by cutting and slicing the cane the strain upon the first mill was greatly reduced, and that by using water between the mills the extraction of saccharine matter was increased.  The small farmer remote from any central factory may then cut and slice his cane with a simple machine, then pass the cane through several sets of rollers-possibly three small three-roller mills-using water on the bagasse after pressure and he will secure a high extraction of saccharine matter.  If fuel is abundant as in most portions of Louisiana, boiling may be done by open kettle, as in the olden time; at least, molasses can be made and shipped in tanks or barrels to the refinery.  Hundreds of planters have made the mistake of throwing aside their small mills, when the best results could have been secured by increasing the number of mills, that is, by placing additional small mills behind the one in use.  Down to the  point of making molasses there is not great loss (if  any) in open kettle boiling, except that the use of fuel in not economical; but in many portions of Louisiana  fuel is so cheap that a small loss in economic methods will  not effect the general problem seriously.  If the planter will work his cane upon this plan his net profits will be greatly increased.  Sugar planting is one of the most attractive kinds of farming.  The crop is safe; the prices fluctuate but little, and the markets readily absorb the products.  As soon as the old semi-feudal plantations are broken up and the small, thrifty farmer produces the cane, sending it to the central factory or manufacturing it at home upon improved methods, the whole sugar industry will be buoyant.  To summarize, it may be stated the old methods of producing cane and manufacturing sugar used in the period of slavery, when labor was scarcely considered, prevailed generally in Louisiana till within the past ten years.  In the past ten years there has been an earnest effort to introduce the most approved modern machinery in the factory and better the methods of production on the plantation.  In the next five years, by the inevitable force of events, we may see many of the old plantations broken up into small farms and most of the sugar cane of Louisiana produced by independent farmers, selling the cane either to the large central factory or manufacturing it upon the home place with the same labor that produced it.  When this shall be accomplished there will be an era of prosperity in Louisiana never before witnessed in a purely agricultural community, for there is no other general farm crop which will produce annually $150 per acre, spot cash, and this without other expense than labor-where the manufacture is at home.  It is a crop well suited to the genius of the American farmer, for it can be handled entirely by the farm machinery and is certain.  It furnishes labor the whole year and brings large returns.  Four thousand pounds of sugar per acre is not unusual from well-cultivated tracts of cane. The average farmer can realize thirty tons per acre from land in cane if it be prepared and handled with care. He can manufacture it with improved small machinery and obtain a gross income of $150 to $200 per acre.  Thus without detriment to his general farming, the owner of 160 acres could plant twenty acres of cane and obtain an income of three to four thousand dollars.

IS SUGAR CANE PROFITABLE IN SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA?

S. L. CARY

Written for Louisiana Farmer and Rice Journal

        Is raising sugar cane in the prairie region of Southwest Louisiana a success?  And what will it do for the country?  In reply, I will say that any crop which pays fair wages to grow it is a success.  And any farm that gives me a place where I can put the labor of my family at reasonable wages is a success also.  By starting with a correct definition of success we will be more apt to arrive at correct conclusions.

        Sugar cane has been grown in a small way by the Acadian settlers for the past one hundred years.  The cane always grew well, but its manufacture was very crude and wasteful.  Lately, many small fields have been grown successfully, and now we have the highest and best authority in the State endorsing our success and the adaptability of the whole prairie region to the industry.  The answer to the second question, “What will it do for the country?”  depends upon conditions and prices.  The most important condition of success is the location of a factory nearby or on the farm.  With a factory within one mile cane can be grown at the following estimate of cost:

        This cost of raising one acre is against an average yield of twenty tons at an average price for 1897 of $3.25 which the return per acre $65.00, leaving the sum of $36.50 net.  And as land in all civilized countries sells at all it will pay five percent upon, you can readily see for yourself what such land is worth per acre for the purpose of growing sugar cane. 

        The cost of growing can be lowered materially, and in fact should be thus:

        Irrigation from canals and wells is now assured, which, if used, will enable us with little doubt to double our yield of crop.  The cost for the amount of water necessary for cane will be about $1.00, making a total cost of $26.50 per contra forty tons at $3.25, equal to $130.00.  And when I say that sworn statements of sixty-eight tons per acre have been made of cane grown in Southern Louisiana without the benefit of irrigation, my figures may not seem too high.  Our competition from the sugar beet and other cane growing countries is not so strong as it otherwise would be, since from these we have tariff and transportation protection.  In France the cost of growing an acre of beets is placed at $80, $40 being for fertilizing, leaving the balance $40, which is above cost of growing an acre of cane here.  Other European countries have about the same expense.  But in the United States on our new lands the expense is very much less, caused largely by the item of fertilizer, which is generally put at $2 per acre yearly.  These estimates vary from $40 to $50 per acre, the yield is placed at ten to twenty tons, the price $4 to $5 per ton, the percent of sugar, eight to eighteen.

        The average sugar content and purity for the States where beet sugar is now made are as follows:                                          

        A fair average crop of beets is eleven tons per acre at $4.50, or gross returns of $50, and with a possible crop of twenty tons at $5 equal to $100 an acre, as compared with an average crop for Louisiana cane of twenty tons with a possible yield of sixty-eight tons, worth as much a ton as beets on the same market.

        As to quality of sugar, the beet men claim that beets make sugar of equal quality. But the market does not justify their assertion. 

        In the future the trial will come as to which will supply the home market that in 1896 took an amount equal in value to all the wheat and flour exported to pay.  Will sugar beets or sugar cane fill the bill?   As you see by my figures, cane sugar has a much larger tonnage per acre with about the same percentage of sucrose and of equal purity, and the manufacture is at little cost, with equal, or perhaps better, facilities for increasing the yield, and of lessening the cost of production.

        The sugar will be produced more cheaply in the future than now is not doubted.   Years ago sugar sold at twenty-five to fifty cents a pound, recently ten to fifteen cents; now three to six cents.  No one can say it will not be grown and manufactured at the bare cost of one cent per pound.  Indeed, one of our best informed sugar experts said it could be made at that price to-day.  If, as these statistics and tables indicate, cane sugar has the field, is our territory adapted to cane-growing extensive enough to grow a supply for the whole country?  There is no doubt of it since it is determined that Southwest Louisiana is well adapted to its growth.  And for this we have abundant proof, including a statement at a meeting of the Louisiana State Agricultural Society in 1892, by Prof. W. C. Stubbs, of the State Sugar School.   At the Lake Charles meeting, Professor Stubbs said:  “I will now make a statement, which I wish my friend Cary to hear.  Mr. Cary brought to my office at Audubon Park, four samples of cane grown on the prairie, the equal in size and appearance of any seventy varieties growing at Audubon Park.  What was my surprise to find that they tested fifty percent sweeter than alluvial cane.” And he added later: “If I have a million dollars to invest in the sugar business I would invest it in the prairies of Calcasieu.”  All of Southwest Louisiana prairie country has these advantages; soil easily tilled, a good rainfall supplemented by canals and wells, and for some unknown reason, the cane is fifty per cent sweeter than most alluvial cane, settled also by an enterprising, intelligent people, who think and make life worth living.”

        How to grow and manufacture sugar at a bare cost of one cent a pound is worthy of consideration.  The farmer must grow, say thirty tons of cane for $30.  This cane, if grown on the prairies of Southwest Louisiana, will contain more than two hundred pounds of sugar per ton, making a cost to the farmer of half a cent a pound.  The manufacturer has the best of it to manufacture it as cheaply as the planter grows it.  Believing this to be possible in Southwest Louisiana we invite the attention of capitalists to this wonderful field.  Of five samples tested, four at Audubon Park and one at Franklin, besides others that have been made, the percent of sugar has averaged fifteen, which is 240 pounds of sugar per ton. 

        In commencing any business, it is wisdom to locate where you can obtain the best results.  And it does not destroy my argument for you to prove that it costs three, four or even five cents a pound to grow and make sugar.  By the open kettle process we get 80 to 100 pounds of sugar per ton and lose the rest.  By the latest improved method we get 190 to 225 pounds per ton, so that 165 pounds was the average for the State in 1896, and we expect it will be higher for 1897 and for any succeeding years, until very little sugar content will be lost.

        If central sugar factories could be located at Crowley, Jennings and Welsh, with latest improved machinery, we believe that all above one cent a pound would be equal profit between planter and manufacturer.  I am not counting transportation to market, commissions, drayage, insurance, leakage and stealage, but net prices at the mill.  Such an invitation to capital and labor does not exist elsewhere within my knowledge.  The fact of double irrigation in  a semi-tropical and healthful climate, with nature’s laboratory giving fifty percent more sugar than other soils, ease of cultivation, ease of living, and the fact that a greater variety of products can be grown, are all evidence of this.

        One man and three mules will care for twenty acres of sugar cane.  Growing 400 tons at $3.25 means $1,300.  Southwest Louisiana offers the highest premium for labor, capital and brains of any section of country we know of, and sugar cane and rice are its most profitable products.  One planting of cane may do for two or three seasons, depending upon the strength of soil and conditions of the winters.  Planting may be done from October till February, and harvesting from October till January.  It is among the safest of farm crops.  It furnishes employment nearly the whole year, and yields the largest income per acre.  A yield of thirty tons with two hundred pounds of sugar per ton equals 6,000 pounds, and at three and one half cents a pound is worth $210.  This is our invitation to labor and capital, and labor and capital are all that are wanting to make Southwest Louisiana the richest and best agricultural country within the world of our knowledge.

TWO MORE SUGAR PARISHES

          So fast has been the development of the agricultural resources of Southwest Louisiana that the cane is now rapidly following rice as one of the principal crops there.   True, a central factory was prematurely built at Lake Charles, but we hear from good authority that it will be reopened this fall.  This, together with the impetus given from a knowledge that the cane in that section is richer in saccharine than anywhere else in the State, and the movement to divide Calcasieu Parish and to create a new parish out of the eastern portion with another sugar factory near the latter, will surely create a healthy rivalry and soon add to the list two more important sugar parishes.-Sugar Planter’s Journal.

FRUIT GROWING

         WHAT FRUIT GROWING WILL DO FOR SOUTHWESTERN LOUISIANA.

        T. Jay Lacy, a fruit grower in Southwestern Louisiana of over thirty years’ practical experience, says in a letter published herein that fruit growing here is very profitable, giving a great variety of fruits in his list.  He has used local markets mainly, but now that direct lines of railroads have been opened to out markets North, we may well expect much better results.  Again, there is more economy in car-load lots.  We want more fruit growers, for whom there are great inducements.  The southern fruits generally have excellent keeping qualities.  The experimental stage is passing away, and the successful varieties are becoming well known.  Intelligent local nurserymen will give you on application a list of fruits adapted to soil and climate of your particular locality.  With the introduction of the hardy budded varieties of oranges, the area of successful production has been widened to include the prairie region.  These orange trees generally bear the second year from setting out.  The Creole or Louisiana bears after ten years.  The budded oranges bring the highest price in market.  Another very important fact is that detached groves on the prairie will be less liable to disease and insect pests than on old orange ground or in the vicinity of other orchards.  Another valuable feature is the fact of continuous blooming in spring, so that if the early bloom is caught by the frost, a second or third blooming will be successful.  Peach growing is a serious question for experts.  Can we beat the curculio?  The trees do well.  Open winters, late frost, wet seasons and curculio are all difficulties to be overcome. We always have more or less peaches.  Plums of certain varieties and of the best do well, but must have careful handling to yield a profit.  Pears are receiving more attention than any other fruit.  Large orchards are and have been planted all over Southwest Louisiana.  At Jennings fully 10,000 pear trees have been put in orchards. Leconte and Keifer leading all others.  They are considered a success along the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad, through Louisiana and Texas.  Dewberries, blackberries and strawberries are very successful.  The mayhaw, growing wild and in great abundance, rivals the guava for jelly; and the fig, queen of fruits, is most prolific and valuable of all. The best variety for Louisiana is the native celeste, or purple sugar fig, the easiest to propagate, surest to grow, hardiest, most prolific, and best quality, best size, for the best uses that can be made of the fig.  No pruning, early bearing, sweet as honey, food for man or beast.  It seems to me to be a proper emblem of the tree of life, (or the tree itself), escaped from the garden, of which if a man eat he should live forever.  Figs can be grown in Southwestern Louisiana at one cent a pound.  The average yield is 500 to 1,000 pounds.  The average price for canning, four cents.  100 trees per acre will bear at ten years old 500 pounds each, making 50,000 pounds at four cents-$2,000 per acre, or $500 per acre at one cent a pound.   Celeste figs ripen first of July, and you can gather ripe figs for nearly two months from every tree, as once figs always figs, no off years, and the tree lives to be seventy-five to one hundred years old.  The older the tree, the sweeter the fruit.  The fig tree has the form of the cabbage, the size of the apple, is inclined to spread from early killing by freezing.  Let her spread!  You may get more fruit, with less trouble to pick.  It never blooms, puts out leaves and fruit late.  “When the fig tree put forth her leaves, then know that summer is nigh.”  A few figs put out early, called blossom figs, generally killed by frost.  The main crop comes with the leaves and after-just pop out through the bark at base of the leaf like a bud, grow slowly until about ripening, when, presto change! They come out like popping corn, the sweetest most wholesome morsel in the gift of the gods.  There is a mistaken notion that fig leaves are a proper material for clothing in tropical climates.  The fact is there are so many excellent fiber plants south that it would be invidious to make any one prominent.

S. L. CARY, Esq.

        Dear Sir:  Fruit growing in Southwest Louisiana is very profitable.  Northern fruits do not succeed here, but Chinese and Japanese varieties are a wonder to behold.  Chinese pears may be grown here as bountifully as apples in the North, and for size and quality cannot be surpassed anywhere in the world, and if I should tell you of the marvelous crops I grow here, you would think it more like a fairy story than a reality.  Japanese plums grow here as large as a peach, and of such exquisite flavor that I am now throwing away all my American and European varieties, as they are worthless in comparison with the Japanese varieties.  Many kinds of Japanese persimmons are grown here, which are as large as apples and without seeds.  We cut them open and eat out the meat with a spoon, as you would a custard.  They keep well, ship well, and will always sell for a good price, as they can not be grown very far north.  Many varieties of oranges are grown in Southwest Louisiana.  The Louisiana orange, the mandarin, and other tender varieties grow well near the Gulf, while the Japanese varieties, being more hardy, grow farther north.  They will stand fifteen degrees above zero.  Of these oranges there are many varieties.  I prefer the Oonshiu and Kin Kan to all others.  Their fine flavor and abundant bearing will recommend them wherever known, and, like all the Japanese fruits in this climate, the trees bear when very young.  Many varieties of grapes grow here:  I have found the Scuppernong the most profitable, as it bears abundantly and needs no pruning.  Strawberries may now be made very profitable, since we have a direct railroad to the Northern markets.  Besides the foregoing, there are many other fruits that may be grown here, for home use and for market, such a figs, loquats, goumii, Japanese chestnuts, pecans, etc.   In conclusion I wish to say, that with Chinese, and Japanese fruits I have made good crops with ordinary culture, which always sold for high prices, and I see no reason why others may not do the same.

Yours truly,                    

T. Jay Lacy.

MEXICAN EVER-BEARING STRAWBERRIES

        Three years ago A. C. Brainard, of Jennings, La., introduced the Mexican Ever-bearing Strawberry.  They are a native of Mexico and grow very large.  He says:  “I have ten other varieties, but the Mexican stands at the head for size, quality, quantity, and every other feature that goes to make a first-class berry, both for home use and as a shipper.  They grow very deep; therefore will stand a long continued drought.”  Mr. Brainard says, “I am confident that 10,000 quarts can be raised on one acre of land.”

        The Jennings Times has the following to say of them:   “A. C. Brainard brought the TIMES several samples of Mexican Ever-bearing Strawberries, a new variety introduced by him.  They are a large berry, of a tart flavor. The strong point is their keeping quality.  This fruit, unlike the usual strawberry, begins to ripen at the tip.  When half ripe the berries were picked and laid away.  The samples had been picked 123 hours and were ripe and sound.  Mr. Brainard claims that they can be shipped to New York and we see no reason why the claim is not entirely reasonable.  As a shipper they will be an especially valuable shipper.”

A PARADISE FOR THE IMMIGRANT

This Article was Written by Request of the City Editor of the New

Orleans Picayune, for its Trade, September, 1^st, 1898

By S. L. Cary

        Immigration, as related to Louisiana, is a very broad and popular subject.  A few years ago an ingenious writer in the popular newspaper, Alexandria Town Talk, took the following unpopular view of a popular question:  “Why is it that we, a prosperous people, with the best country on earth, are not satisfied and are striving to bring in here among us people we know nothing about, and care less, and for what?  To raise more cotton?  What for?  To raise more corn?  What for?  To make a garden of our luxuriant clover fields?  For what?  To enrich us?  Oh, no; people who have the energy to make fortunes, generally make them for themselves and not for others. *** We have a good thing; for the Lord’s sake let us keep it.  If a few hundred acres are idle and it’s the owner’s fault and nobody’s business.  There are too many acres now to plow.  We need more hogs (and coco will raise them), we need horses and cattle, and above all we need contentment enough to go slow and hold onto our lands.

        “Instead of having Dutch, Irish, and the devil knows what, for too close a neighbor, I for one, would rather have the clover field, the brook of trout, the wooded hills, with luxuriant grass, and my dear good neighbor over yonder, who probably still carries the stone in one end of the sack, but who is honest and a true friend.  He is better than forty Dutch, who care for nothing but themselves and theirs.”

        This is a very pleasant picture, well painted, well finished, and all said that can be said upon that side of the question.  But is it true; does it represent the interest of the race?  Does it represent the best interest of the people of the great state of Louisiana?  We have an object lesson in the great Northwest.  Look at the once great American desert.  See its teeming millions.  See the great highways of commerce, its mighty cities, its business blocks, its palatial homes, its wonderful system of education, its million churches, its open mines of silver, gold, iron, coal and cooper, the most valuable on earth.  Its fields of grain can be feed the world.  Its people from all lands excel them all.  Then turn to a more pleasing picture to a Louisianan, Southwest Louisiana.  A field adjacent to out friend, of Rapides.  Fifteen years ago it would have answered for a background for our friend’s beautiful picture.  Millions of acres of prairie and timber in beautiful proximity (as nature adorned).  To-day, after an immigration of fully 15,000 people from this same Northwest, what a picture of home, of fertile-fields, of growing cities, of smiling villages, of model farmhouses, of active business, no idle men or tramps around our homes.  But the fair prairies, made fairer still by the skilled hand of labor, are made to yield to their happy owners million of wealth to supply their ever-returning wants.  Men of Louisiana.   Which picture suits you best?  Civilization, prosperity, progress, come as handmaids of immigration, in its immediate wake are advancing prices and general prosperity.  Is it desirable?  Not always.  It depends very largely upon the character of the people brought in.  The vicious criminal classes are worse than useless.  Families of moderate means, of good character, active and intelligent, are the best.  Honest people willing to work (with or without means), are very desirable.  Speculators we do not want.  In a new country of undeveloped, cheap lands, we fear the man with a pocketful of money.  Capital is needed to develop, but it comes best as in Southwest Louisiana; it comes from the proceeds of our own industries.

        In all frankness we want the best farmers of the North.  We have succeeded remarkably well with such as we could get, such, often, who had made failures, who had experimented too long with a long winter.  We shall not go to Europe or to Africa, and will find them at home as soon as they learn the facts as they exist.  Going South we are no longer competitors, but consumers, sending North our barrels of sugar and rice for barrels of port and flour.  It’s a relief to the labor market of the North.

        What have we to offer to would-be immigrants?  Health, good climate, cheap lands, prairie and timber, sure and most valuable products, a home market for our principal crops and a seaboard market for all.   Sixty inches of rainfall and sixty irrigating canals.  A long growing season.  Always remember that the largest factor in your prosperity is the length of your growing season.  Each degree south adds ten days to the season, and a greater variety of crops. 

        But there are two that have a home market taking $150,000,000 to fill.  In other words we send nearly that amount to Europe and Asia for sugar and rice, selling our wheat, corn, oats and cotton at a small price, to exchange for articles of an inferior quality that could be grown in Louisiana at four times the profit and of superior quality.  Time for social and literary pursuit.  We can earn more money in the same time with less expense to live, have more time for pleasure.  Railroads are best adapted to carry on this business, and very fortunately, are most directly benefited.  I am greatly surprised that they do not push the business to the very front.

        There is a great amount of prejudice and ignorance of the South.  Continual advertising such as the World’s Fair and the present great trans-Mississippi Exposition affords are exceedingly beneficial and will largely increase immigration south.  At Omaha there is in the Louisiana exhibit of red cypress (the best of the ground) sections of trees and moss from them.  Doors finished equal to veneering, fire-place and mantel finishing’s in three patterns of latest designs and most exquisite finish, a table and a large section of a parlor, in cypress (labor on this cost $400) over material, a plank 42 inches wide, 2 ½ inches thick and 12 feet long, beautifully done in oil varnish.  Mr. Chas. McDowell, Secretary of the Cypress Lumber Association, in charge, has it well arranged to attract attention.  For fifteen years the Southern Pacific Company have had an agent in the Northwest, the very best field to select immigrants from, and with such success that southwest Louisiana, along its line, has 15,000 northern people capturing the great industry, using 4,000 twine-binding harvesters, and all machinery “up-to-date,” each harvester doing the work of forty men with the old sickle.

        The Southern Pacific Company has an exhibit of the leading products of the state, sugar cane, rice, fruits, salt, sulphur and ornamental trees (by kindness of Prof. W. C. Stubbs).  This makes a good foundation for the distribution of literature that has already done much for the state-Louisiana will, at this exhibition, be the best advertised state in the Union.  She has the richest soil, the most valuable products, the best all-round climate, the best markets, good people, and, better than any other state, “double irrigation.”  Only let the Northwest know and we will get our full share.  There is a vast field to work and a great amount to do.

        Farmers are the gods of this world; “they feed and clothe us all.”  We would all go to heaven in a month if the farmer should go on a strike.  It is very wonderful what nature has done for southern Louisiana (level clay soil) clay sub-soil, plenty of rivers and lakes, always full of fresh waters, sky and earth full also.  All rivers and lakes are skirted with heavy timber, just where wanted, by pumping plant or for market.  And a prairie of such rare beauty and utility, nothing on the surface to mar the picture, naught but a waving expanse of green grass and many colored flowers, no wreck of tree, no stone, no woodman’s ax nor grubbing hoe to prepare these most fertile lands for the farmer’s use.  All the conditions seem to have been carefully met so as to return to man the greatest possible benefit with the least labor; no waiting for the sod to rot, no water to escape through leaking sands.  The very winds seem tempered to the shorn lamb, and, with a very reasonable amount of labor, all our wants are well supplied.

        Longfellow has well-placed words of welcome on our lips:  

“Welcome once more to a home, better, perchance, than the old one. 

Here no hungry winter congeals the blood like the river.

Here no stony ground provokes the wrath of the farmer;

Smoothly the plow-share runs through the soil as a keel through the water.

All the year round the orange groves are in blossom

And the grass grows more in a single night than a whole Canadian summer.

Here too, numberless herds run wild and unclaimed on the prairies;

Here, too, land may be had for the asking, and forest of timber.

Beautiful is the land with its prairies and forest of fruit trees.

Under the feet of a garden of flowers, and the bluest of heavens bending above and resting its dome on the walls of the forest.

They who dwell there have named it the Eden of Louisiana.”

TRUCK FARMING

        Truck farming according to the census of 1890, is most remunerating, paying an average of $150 per acre, and over $250 for every man, woman and child employed in the business.  The very early and late season, without frost, give to our products a peculiar value.  For instance, it costs no more to grow a strawberry in February that sells at fifty cents to one dollar a quart, than it does to grow strawberries in June that sell at five to ten cents per quart.  Climate is of great value, but costs you nothing, but its operations are often very expensive or the reverse.  Truck raised South has good keeping qualities, can be shipped long distances.  One hundred miles nearer the Gulf of Mexico may give you thirty days earlier products, while the time for transportation will be only a matter of two or three hours.  We want expert truck men by the hundred at all our villages, that cars may be loaded at any one point.  The advantages of truck farming over general farming are very many.  It requires less land; it is much easier to get help, and you do not need to keep laborers when not needed.   You need not burden your wife with the care of help. Your location is in or near town.  Schools, churches, lectures, and the circus, doctors, stores, shops, are all near by.  Your property, kept in order, is always attractive and salable.  Your business is surer than the fruit grower’s better than the farmer’s as good as the bank.

CLIMATE

        We give you an address given by Capt. R. E. Kerkam, U.S. Signal Corps Director, Louisiana Weather Service, at a convention of Northern residents of Louisiana, held at New Orleans, August 7 and 8, 1888.  Then read and learn the climates of California, Florida, and earth’s most favored regions, and Southwestern Louisiana will discount them all.  You ask, how excel California?  I answer, we have no “wet and dry” season.  How about Florida?  I answer, we have no sand.  How about Mexico and South America?  We have as good climate, backed by a stable government.  We have a climate and soil best adapted to the largest paying field crops, sugar cane and rice, and adapted to the largest variety of paying products grown anywhere. 

        Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:-It affords me pleasure as a representative of the National Signal Service, to be able to bring the work of the Service before this convention in a practical manner, and to prove by official records that the climate of Louisiana is more agreeable the year ‘round than that of any other section in the United States.  To do this a series of comparisons will be necessary, and to avoid a lengthy dissertation on the subject, by States, will consider only the sections embraced by the extreme Northwest, the Upper Mississippi and Missouri Valleys, and the Pacific Coast Region.

        These sections have been taken for comparison not because they make Louisiana’s claims stronger for the immigrant, but because they include a greater acreage of farming lands and are considered the best in the Union.  Should a doubt exist in any mind, that a choice was made, it can readily be dispelled by a glance at the weather map displayed here.

        Considering the extreme degree of heat, the normal mean maximum temperature, for the hottest month, July, we find from Signal Service records that the section of country from southern Illinois and southeastern Missouri to Central Minnesota has an average of 84°, with an average of the lowest temperatures for the same month of 66°, making the average daily range of temperature 18°.  The same figures for the same month for the section of country from southwestern Missouri to central Dakota are, average highest, 85°, average lowest, 63°, making the average daily range 22°.  For the section of country embracing northern Minnesota and northern Dakota, we find an average highest temperature of 78°, and average lowest of 55°, making an average daily range of 23°.  For Louisiana, for the same month, the average highest was 91°, average lowest 74°, making an average daily range of 17°. 

        Considering the coldest month:  It is found that the first named section (the Upper Mississippi Valley) had an average highest temperature for January of 31°, and an average lowest of 13°, making an average daily range of 18°.  For the second section (the Missouri Valley) for the month of January has an average highest temperature of 25°, an average lowest of 3°, with an average daily range of temperature of 22°.  The third named section (the extreme Northwest) has an average highest temperature for January of 9°, an average lowest of 13° below zero, making the average daily range of temperature 22°.  Louisiana has for the same month an average highest temperature of 59°, and average lowest of 44°, making the average daily range for the month 15°.

        To consider the highest and lowest temperatures recorded on any day of the stations in the various districts:

        It is found that the maximum temperature for the Mississippi Valley for summer is 103°, recorded at Des Moines, Iowa, and at Cairo, Ill.   The lowest temperature for that section in winter is recorded as 43° below zero, at La Crosse, Wis., or an absolute range of temperature of 146°.  The highest temperature on record for the Mississippi Valley is 111°, recorded at Fort Sully, in South Dakota.  The lowest temperature for that section is 42° below zero, at Fort Bennett in South Dakota, making the absolute range of temperature for the Missouri Valley 153°.  The third section (the extreme Northwest), has a highest temperature of 107°, recorded at Fort Buford, North Dakota, and a lowest temperature of 59° below zero, recorded at Pembina, North Dakota, making the absolute range of temperature fort he extreme Northwest 166°.  The highest temperature on record for northern Louisiana is 107° recorded at Shreveport and the highest on record for southern Louisiana is 97° at New Orleans.  The lowest temperature on record for northern Louisiana is 6° at Shreveport, and the lowest for southern Louisiana is 20° at New Orleans, making the absolute range of temperature for the northern part of the State 101°, and for the southern part 77°, the latter range being less than one-half of the range of either of the three sections quoted.

        To compare the mean relative humidity of the various sections:  From a record covering from 1870 to 1885, the mean annual relative humidity of the Upper Mississippi Valley is computed to be 69 percent, the mean for the Missouri Valley is 69 percent, and the mean for the extreme Northwest is 74 percent, and the mean for Louisiana is 71 percent, being but two percent above the average for the two first named and three percent below the latter.  The highest mean monthly during the year in Louisiana, is but 74 percent, where as the highest in either of the other sections is 91 percent.      

        The rainfall of the sections under consideration is as follows:  The average annual for the Upper Mississippi Valley is 39 inches, the greatest part of it falling during the summer months.  The average for the Missouri Valley is 29 inches, the greatest part of which falls in May, June and July.  The average for the extreme Northwest is 21 inches, majority of which falls during the summer.  The average for Louisiana is 60 inches, ranging for 4 to 6 inches for each month during the year.

        From the fore going official records it is plain that there is no section east of the Rocky Mountains that can compete with Louisiana in climate.  If we have rivals, they along exist in sections of Oregon and California. 

        The following are extracts of reports for those States:

        The State of California has an average annual temperature ranging from 51° to 55° on the cost, to 62° in the interior, against a normal annual temperature for Louisiana of from 65° in the northern portion of the State to 68° in the southern portion.  California has an average rainfall of from 11 inches at San Diego to 28 inches at Red Bluff.  An average annual relative humidity of from 54 to 82 percent-San Francisco having an average of 75 percent and San Diego 73 percent against an average for Louisiana of 71 percent.

        The highest temperature at Los Angeles, Cal., is 108°; at Red Bluff, 110°, at Sacramento, 106°; and coast maximums ranging from 90° to 101.  At Davisville and Dunningan, Cal., maximum temperature of 118° was recorded. 

        The lowest temperature for that State range from 16° to 33°, the highest minimums being reported from stations on the coast.  The  lowest temperature recorded on the Louisiana coast is 34°. 

        Westerly winds prevail in California, blowing from the ocean.  In Louisiana southerly winds prevail, blowing from the Gulf.

        In the matter of clear, fair and cloudy days, California has doubtless a greater amount of sunshine during the summer months, with almost a total lack of rainfall.  During the winter months, fogs are very frequent in California.  The rainfall in Louisiana is evenly distributed throughout the year with an absence of the foggy days.

        Climatically speaking the therapeutic area of Southern California is small.  It is limited to those localities only which are directly influenced by the ocean breeze, and extends but a few miles inland.  In the valleys back from the coast, the summer heat becomes unbearable, there is but slight vegetation, and good water is not easily procured.  The winters are, however, mild and dry.  Only a few inches of rain falls annually, and out-door life is practicable.

        Oregon claims several distinct climates within its borders; on the coast the rainfall averages from 39 to 79 inches; in the Willamettte Valley from 41 to 67 inches; and in the remainder of the State from 9 to 35 inches annually. The rainy season begins about October 15 and ends about May 1.  Regarding the temperature it is sufficient to state that the range in the interior of Oregon is from 22° below zero to 106° above.  Killing frosts occur on an average of 9 months during the year.

        Louisiana has but one climate, and that well defined.  We have hot weather, but we have also the cool Gulf breeze extending inland, reaching the extreme northern portion of the State, which has, however, a somewhat highest temperature than that recorded in the southern portion during the summer.  The rainfall and moisture in the atmosphere are nearly the same, being slightly less north than south.  The summers are long, but necessarily so for the crops that are grown.

        Louisiana’s comparative immunity from killing frost is graphically portrayed on the small chart on the lower corner of the weather map.  It will be seen that the extreme northern part of this State has the advantage of northern Florida in this particular, and that the southern part of Louisiana from Avoyelles Parish to the Gulf has no rival save the southern portion of Florida Peninsula.  This is explainable by the fact that the majority of the cold waves that sweep southward over the country during the winter season are deflected east of Louisiana, and for the following reason:  The atmosphere moves in huge waves similar to water.  The cold wave is the base of the crest of this wave, and the hollow between the crests is the storm centre.   A storm off the Texas coast and a cold wave forming in the Northwest are conditions suitable for a great fall in temperature between those regions, since the air resting on the surface of the earth moves out from under a high pressure, flowing in the direction of a lower pressure, which in this case would mean cold northerly winds flowing from the Northwest to Texas.  But since all movements of the atmosphere have an eastward tendency, the storm that was in the Gulf yesterday will be found hundreds of miles to the eastward to-day, and the cold wave sweeping down from the Northwest has had its attraction removed and the cold surface winds are now from the Northwest.  Another cause of the immunity we have from these cold waves is that there is a wall of warm moist air overhanging the Gulf, extending over the interior of the State, and the intermingling of the mass of cold air from the north with this warm air is seldom accomplished before masses have passed eastward out of range of the State.

        Another cause is that storms having their origin on the Eastern Rocky mountain slope have for an attraction of great lakes, since all storms will move toward a humid atmosphere and to where they have a clear sweep, thus accounting for the great number of our cyclones moving out the St. Lawrence Valley.

        It must not be understood from the foregoing that Louisiana has no cold waves, for during the past winter (my first in the South) the temperature in this city fell to 29° above zero; but while we escaped with that temperature, caused by a high pressure of air that swept down below a storm having its origin in Indiana, Florida on the same latitude had a temperature lower than that recorded here. [Great Applause.]

        Note.-The data from which the foregoing has been compiled are from Signal Service records covering the period from November 1, 1870, to January 1, 1885, and do not include the cold wave of January 1886, when minimum temperatures of  from 5 to 10 degrees below any previous record were reported from the majority of Southern and eastern States.

LOUISIANA WEATHER SERVICE

SOUTH LOUISIANA

        Spring has a normal mean temperature ranging between 66° in west and north portions, to nearly 70° in southeast portion; the highest temperature ranges between 93° in southeast portion to 98° in west-central portion, the lowest on record ranges between 20° in west-central portion to 30° in southeast portion, and 35° along the east Gulf coast.  The sunshine averages 54 percent.  The rainfall averages between 9 and 14 inches, the former in southwest portion, and latter in the extreme north portion, with the east portion having a uniform fall of 12 inches.

        Summer has a normal mean temperature of 80°, being 79° in west portion, and 81° in extreme east portion.  The highest temperature on record range between 97° in southeast portion and 101° in west portion; the lowest ranges between 50° in west portion to 58° in southeast portion.  The sunshine averages 53 percent in east portion and 47 to 50 percent in west portion.  The rainfall varies between 16 inches in eastern half to less than 19 inches in western half.

        Autumn has a normal mean temperature between 65° and 70°, the former in west portion, and latter in southeast portion.  The highest temperatures on record range between 94° and 98°; the lowest between 22° and 25°.  The sunshine averages 55 percent and is greatest in southeast portion. The rainfall averages from 10 to 13 inches.

        Winter has an average temperature of 55°, being 54° in west and north portions and 56° in southwest portion.  The highest temperature on record ranges between 82° and 88°, the latter in west portion; the lowest, between 10° and 15°; the former in west and north portions.  The sunshine gives a general average of 47 percent.  The rainfall ranges from 12 to less than 16 inches; the later in northeast portion, and former in southwest.

ADVANTAGES OF CLIMATE

        In order to provoke discussion and diffuse knowledge of the utmost importance to man, I give a few suggestions derived mainly from experience.  My first suggestion is that extremes are injurious to the best interests of man.  The life of man, beast or vegetable is dwarfed, shattered or killed outright by our cold climate, and is injured to some extent by torrid heat, the exceptions being the superior development of vegetable and animal life in the tropics.  In the struggle for life, nature’s greatest effort, her largest expenditure of force, is to counteract the vicissitudes of climate.  Then it follows, the polar region is most unfitted for the abode of man and the temperate zones most favorable to life and its proper development.

        Now, man having power of choice and means of transportation should fairly consider these conditions and place himself where he will receive most benefit from climate, seeing that the climatic condition cannot be changed, but man’s condition maybe. Then comes the question what part of the temperate zone is the most favorable; and for present purposes let us say the United States.

        Then I say, (other things being equal), where you can have most of life’s blessings, with the least expenditure of labor; also where we require least protection from extremes, and where we require least protection from extremes, and where most of the necessities and comforts of life can be produced on the spot; where we can raise the greatest variety and where we have best markets and means of exchange.

        Where have we the most even climate and the cheapest protection against extremes?  I answer, confidently, the coast line of the Gulf of Mexico.  One season merges almost imperceptibly into another; extreme heat and cold, about 70°, and climatic changes very gradual, about 20°, cover the changes of the twenty-four hours, and 5° to 10° from month to month.  Corn can be planted from February to July, and gardens made from January to November, and fuel and lumber had at nominal prices; wool and cotton at lowest price; stocks of all kinds roam over the prairies at will and are never fed by the hand of man.

        The cereals here require same labor as further north, but at a more seasonable time.  Fall-sown crops mature and are harvested in May, while sugar, cotton, hay and rice are harvested from August to January.  There is little to do during the heated term; and fruits, delicious fruits, luxuries of life, necessities of health, solace our leisure hours.  Where are our orchards to-day?   Follow the coast line, and you will see nearly all.  The peach king of the world, Parnell, of Georgia; and for pears, Thomasville, of the same State; for tropical and semi-tropical fruits the coast line alone, while figs, apricots, prunes, olives, grapes, pomegranates and berries are in abundance.  Go to the coast for fish, oysters, game, sugar, rice, cotton, tobacco, corn and textile fabrics.

        Here flourish walnuts, pecans, almonds and most nut bearing trees.  It's eminently a tree bearing country-a prairie only by accident.

        But, says the Northern man, living comes too easy; you will lose energy, your vigor will abate, and ignorance and indolence will be your inheritance.  Does it follow, or is it not a fact that success induces energy, and failure brings despondency and sloth?  When my efforts are successful, will I not renew them?  When I plant a successful orchard, will I not enlarge it?

        The results of unfavorable conditions are often mistaken for results of climate (slavery for instance).  That the very highest degree of success has been attained in a similar climate, all will admit.  (I refer to Greece and Rome.)  The successful raising of fruits is one of the fine arts; a good orchard is the work of an able man.  Does chilling the body improve the mind?  Does freezing improve the quality of man, beast or vegetable?  Does the heat of the tropical sun give energy or ambition?  Neither extreme is favorable.  But give me a genial climate, a generous soil, clouds laden with moisture and skies sparkling with dew-a land where human effort meets a kind return; where fruit trees grow to maturity in shortest time and where returns are made with largest liberality.

        Men are only thankful for favors received and always respond promptly to the touch of plenty.  Pinching cold, chattering teeth, frost-bitten limbs awake neither intelligence, enterprise, thankfulness or genius in man.  We love to work in comfort-neither hot nor cold, but on the middle plane; no cold to freeze or heat to burn.  And this most favorable place and these most favorable conditions we find in Southwest Louisiana, the future home of the orchards of America,  where the finest quality of fruits are raised without irrigation, with little care, on a clay soil, which gives highest flavor and best success in raising trees from cuttings, thereby avoiding the expense of budding and grafting, insuring more abundant crops of the finest varieties, and so situated that fruit picked by day can reach a seaboard market by the next morning, and the home of its most enterprising and prosperous people.  A land of grass, and land of fruit, a land of easy conditions and great natural advantages?

WHY THEY NEVER FEEL THE COLD

        “Yes,” remarked the St. Paul man to a friend from Chicago, as he stood arrayed in his blanket suit and adjusted a couple of buckskin chest protectors:  “Yes, there is something about the air in this Northwestern climate which causes a person not to notice the cold.  Its extreme dryness,” he continued, as he drew on a pair of extra woolen socks, a pair of Scandinavian sheep-skin boots, and some Alaska overshoes-“it’s extreme dryness make a degree of cold, reckoned by the mercury, which would be unbearable in other latitudes, simply exhilarating here.  I have suffered more with the cold in Michigan, for instance,” he added, as he drew on a pair of goat-skin leggings, adjusted a double fur cap, and tied on some Esquimaux (sic Eskimo) ear muffs-“in Michigan or Illinois, we will say, with the thermometer at zero or above, than I have here with it at 45 to 50 below.  The dryness of our winter air is certainly remarkable,” he went on, as he wound a couple rods of red woolen scarf about his neck, wrapped a dozen newspapers around his body, drew on a fall cloth overcoat, a winter cloth overcoat, a light buffalo skin overcoat, and a heavy polar bear skin overcoat; “no, if you have ever enjoyed our glorious Minnesota winter climate with its dry atmosphere, its bright sunshine, and invigorating ozone, you would scarcely believe some things I could tell you about it.  The air is so dry,” he continues, as he adjusted his leather nose protector, drew on his reindeer skin mittens, and carefully closed one eye hole in the sealskin mask he drew down from his cap-“its so dry that actually it seems next to impossible to feel the cold at all.  We can scarcely realize in the spring that we have had winter, owing to the extreme dryness of the atmosphere.  By the way,” he went on, turning to his wife, “just bring me a couple of blankets and those bed quilts and throw over my shoulders, and hand me that muff with the hot soapstone in it, and now I’ll take a pull at this jug of brandy and whale oil, and then if you’ll have the girl bring me my snow shoes and iceberg scaling stick, I’ll step over and see them pry the workmen off the top of the ice palace who were frozen on yesterday.  I tell you we wouldn’t be going out this way, 500 miles further south, where the air is damp and chilly.  Nothing but our dry air makes it possible.”—Chicago Tribune.

SPEECH OF SECT’Y OF AGRICULTURE, JAS. WILSON

DELIVERED AT JENNINGS, LA. MAY 15, 1899

Ladies and Gentlemen:

        I came down to the State of Louisiana to learn my duty towards you; to see what it might be possible for me to do to serve you and make the Department of Agriculture do you some good in connection with the cultivation of these magnificent prairies down here. 

        The President of the United States requires me to make the Department useful and serviceable to all localities of the country.  He is just as anxious that the people of Louisiana, and this part of Louisiana, should prosper and be happy as is the people of his own home, in Ohio, should prosper and be happy.  Therefore, in order to live in peace with the President, I have to be on the go and see what he Agricultural Department can do for the people throughout the country, here and there. (Applause.)

        I have known nothing of the South, except by reading, until within the last year when I visited most of the Gulf States east of you to study the conditions of Agriculture there. 

        This is not a typical Southern town I know.  If you were to drop a Northern man down here in the night, when daylight came, he would say ‘Well, I happened to fall upon a Northern village.’  Everything looks so much like what I have seen in the North.  Those homes look like Northern homes.  Those people look like Northern people.

        But you have come here to build up homes and make the most of your opportunities.  You have shown a rapid growth.  I have seen your beautiful school house and churches. But you are doing what all other localities in the North are doing-building too many churches.  When I was a boy, I remember that we built six or seven churches more than we needed, but we supported them all and probably it was the wisest thing to do any way.  You have made a good start, however; a good start. 

        My business is to study production; PRODUCTION!  My visit to the South is for that purpose.

        If you will stop to consider for a moment, you will see the humor of putting a stranger on the stand either for the purpose of entertaining or instructing you; in fact, you should all be up here telling me something about yourselves, because it is very evident I will not be able to tell you anything that you don’t know.

        Let me tell you one thing that has astonished me-surprised me.  I had supposed that the animal industries would never be successful in the South as they are in the North.  That idea was based on the impression that you could not produce grasses, legumes, etc. as we produce then up there, and for that reason your efforts in that direction must be limited.  All the states east of you, bordering on the Gulf, grow some of the legumes we have in the North that are necessary for the support of the domestic animal.  But when I come here to Louisiana, I find everything that grows in the North growing here.  It is true they do not grow in this neighborhood; possibly, the seeds may not have reached this neighborhood.  I did think that the climatic conditions were such that the various legumes such as red clover, white clover, in fact all the varieties would not grow down here, but when I come to Louisiana I find them growing everywhere in the settled portions of your state and so I have come to the conclusion that it is not climatic conditions but soil conditions that make the distinction; that this magnificent stretch of country between here and New Orleans will grow all these things simply because it has the proper soil which is not the case in the Gulf states east of here.

        You see the condition between Louisiana and Iowa, we will say for illustration, are very different.  There you are frozen up half the year and are forced to do all your work in the summer time, while in Louisiana you have practically, no winter.

        Another distinction between Louisiana and Iowa I may make is, we have in Iowa thirty inches of rainfall and you have sixty.

        You have certain conditions of heat and we have also.  It may occur to some people who come here for the first time that the great objection to Louisiana is the amount of heat you have down here, and I have no doubt July and August are a little warmer than is comfortable, but take all the conditions as they exist here and they are much more favorable than they are in Iowa.

        I have mentioned the value of the legume.  No country can succeed without it.  It is impossible to go on year after year producing any crop without legumes-that is without clovers; or in their stead cow peas.  And why?  Because there is no other way under the sun by which nitrogen gets into the soil and when you exhaust the nitrogenous matter from the soil you cannot produce enough on it to make a living.

        Twenty years ago we were growing wheat.  For ten to fifteen years we exhausted the soil and we could not grow a crop any longer.  The question arose, what are we going to do?  The answer was, you must either milk cows and make dairy products or starve; so take you choice.  It was a desperate alternative left to a proud, spirited people who had been in the habit of riding on a plow with a spring seat beneath them and canopy over then to have to get down on a milking stool and milk cows for a living.  But Ladies and Gentlemen, we have come to it, and I will tell you, people will milk cows before they will starve.  We have today, in the state of Iowa over a thousand Creameries, and we sell thirty million pounds of butter.  That is how we got out of the difficulty.

        You sent one man to Congress last winter, General McEnery who stood by your interest, and you have a protective tariff on your rice.  But in raising this one crop you are in danger.  It always comes to the people who confine themselves to one crop instead of diversifying. 

        Two year ago the state of Iowa raised so much corm it only brought 10 cts.  a bushel.

        It is true that the United States of America does not produce more than one third of the rice it consumes, so you have some time to get ready for the diversification of your crops.

        Now I am only going to talk a few minutes, but permit me to turn in another direction in my efforts to entertain you.  You have heat, moisture and an open winter.  You can produce fine horses down here in the South.  We sold fifty thousand head of horses last year to Europe, and the demand is growing all the time and the price increasing.  But there is a horse we do not produce in the North, and that is the high-spirited saddle horse which is only found in the South.  Whether you have them here or not I do not know.  When you produce fine hunting horses, you can get your own price for them.

        I have seen as fine Jersey cows since coming here as I have seen anywhere.  I have eaten as good butter in the South as I have eaten anywhere and what one man has done another can do.

        You can grow Alfalfa, the crimson clover and twenty other things in the winter.  You have green food for your cows and can make as fine butter as is produced in the North.

        You can raise the early lambs.  I have seen them in Louisiana today, and what one man has done another man can do.  The early lamb is wanted as much in the North as your early strawberries and they are not produced in sufficient number to supply the demand.  We have to send to Europe for them.

        And when you have the dairy started, you can produce what the South has been famous for for years-the Southern Ham; a ham which sells for twenty five to forty five cents a pound, and we want the very finest in Washington.  It is produced away from the cornfield.  In the great cornfields of the North we produce hogs and have to send them to Chicago for fat.

        We buy seventy million pounds of tea and pay over ten millions of dollars for it.  I propose to have a garden established in every Southern state.  There was one in South Carolina where it has been demonstrated we can grow tea and grow it as fine as anywhere in the world.

        Do you know that Easter Lilies (the Bermuda Lily) cost forty cents each last Easter?  My business is that whenever I find Uncle Sam buying things outside, to stop it.  So I bought five hundred dollars worth of those bulbs and put $125.00 worth of them in North Carolina, $125.00worth in Mississippi, $125.00 worth in Louisiana and $125.00 worth in New Mexico, and we will find out from some of those four Southern states where our people can get their Easter Lilies.

        I am very glad to have had the opportunity to meet you here tonight.  We just stopped off, as it were, so I might look you in the face and make your acquaintance, and tell you of our good intentions, and to say that anything that can be done will be done by the present Administration to help you along in all your undertakings.

        I might add one more thing.  You grow sugar down here.  From New York all the way to the Pacific Coast, the states are beginning to make sugar from the sugar-beet, and in future, when Congress meets and considers the wisdom of keeping a duty on foreign sugar, or taking it off, you will see the Northern people there to fight your battles for you. (Applause.)

        There is something here I think you could not see under much finer auspices, and which we did not see in the early days in the Northwest.  I refer to the railways.  In the Southern Pacific you have one of the finest railways in the world and its roadbed is one of the best I have ridden over in my life.  (Applause.)

        In the early days, those who managed railroads were not very civil, but the gentlemen managing your railroads are gentlemen to begin with.  So I see your lot is placed in pleasant places.

        I thank you for listening to me and bid you good night.

MINERALS

        Southwestern Louisiana has not been favored with a geological survey; surface indications are rich.  Salt crops out at Petit Anse; rock salt, the purest in the world has been found.  The island is one immense block of crystallized chloride of sodium.  A mine has been worked for many years, a train load a day leaves the rich mine (for the Southern Pacific) and it has made it owner, Mr. Avey, a millionaire.  The mine is being worked on the second level, 180 feet below the surface, and borings have been made to the depth of 800 feet through pure rock salt, revealing at least ninety millions of tons.  Sulphur has been found near Lake Charles in large quantities.  At Sulphur Mine Station on the Southern Pacific Railroad, millions of dollars have been expended in sinking shafts and borings that have resulted in finding immense beds of pure sulphur, petroleum and other oils.  The Standard Oil Company is working these mines successfully.

        The salt mine is beautifully located on an island in the open prairie country with considerable timber, only ten miles from New Iberia with which it is connected by rail; only a few miles from Orange Island, the home of the famous comedian, Joseph Jefferson.

        Healthfulness.-If the same care was exercised in Louisiana to keep the system in order as in the Northern States, the average health of  the family would be much better here than there.  There is very little malaria in the prairie region of Southwestern Louisiana, and that is easily managed by ordinary care.

        Topography, Etc.-Along the entire Gulf Coast, and from thirty to seventy miles northward, it is prairie, intersected by rivers and interspersed with picturesque lakes and woodland.  North of the prairie is a vast forest of yellow pine, oak, hickory, beech, gum, magnolia, etc., of great value for lumber.  The surface is quite rolling near the streams, but more remote rises into slightly undulating table lands.

        Roads.-These are easily and quickly made with clay that packs well and is easily handled, fall, winter or spring; can be made first class for fifty to seventy five dollars per mile.

        Calcasieu Parish has a large fund for road purposes and is letting contracts for grading and bridging wherever right of way has been obtained.  The old custom of forty feet wide is passing away with long-horned stock and sixty feet is the coming fashion.

        Other parishes are adopting modern methods of road work, one man to oversee and graders and teams to be kept at it all the season.

        Water.-We have an abundant supply, fifty-five inches annual rainfall, divided quite evenly among the months of the year as follows:

        Average for seventeen years.-January, four and nine-tenths; February, four and nine-tenths; March, four and six-tenths; April, five and sixth-tenths; May, four and eight-tenths; June, three and five-tenths; July, three and nine-tenths; August, two and one-tenth; September, four and four-tenths; October, four and four-tenths; November, four and eight-tenths; December, five and two-tenths; average yearly fifty-two and four-tenths inches.

        A small cistern costing twenty to twenty-five dollars will keep a good family supply of the sweetest, purest water, always cool enough and always handy.  Well water in abundance at fifteen to twenty-five feet, through a clay soil, generally soft, and about at the best temperature for drinking safely summer or winter, 65º to 70º Fahrenheit.

        For people living near rice fields the cistern is perfectly safe and to be recommended.  We have rivers and lakes with an abundant supply of good water so much needed for all growing crops.  Hundreds of engines and pumps are lifting the water twenty to thirty feet high into flumes which carry it for miles to be used over thousands of acres of growing rice and by and by over our fields of sugar cane, fifteen to twenty-five tons per acre without irrigation.  What yields will be made when an abundant supply of water is given during the driest time-no more short joints in our canes.  There are times in every season when irrigation would pay. 

        For house use, rain water is the best, but most of the farmers use well water, which is abundant and of good quality generally. The springs, creeks and rivers afford abundant stock water.

        Spanish Moss.-Grows along all the river and bayous of Southwestern Louisiana.  In is green state its color is grey (not as bad as a green blackberry, which is red.)  It is an aereophyte attached to trees, feeds upon air.  It grows in great abundance, is easily gathered and cured.  It blooms annually and reproduces itself when gathered from the trees.  Can be gathered for thirty cents per hundred pounds.  Cured and cleaned for one cent a pound and sells at three or four cents per pound in market.  Is used like hair in upholstering and saddlery.  No one need to starve near a moss field.  It reproduces in six months; is said by some to be more profitable than a cotton field ready grown.

        Insects.-There are fewer flies than upon the Northern prairies, and about the same number of mosquitoes and harmful snakes.

        School, Society and Politics.-Schools are not as numerous in the country as in the North, but there are good school laws, and as fast as the country settles schools can be secured.  There are many Northern people in Southwestern Louisiana, and more are coming every day.  The native population are kind and friendly.

        Property is safe.  There are fewer lock and keys in the rural districts then in any country of equal extent in America.  You can vote as you please and every vote will be fairly counted.

Written for the Louisiana Farmer and Rice Journal.

DIVERSIFIED FARMING

S. L. CARY

        The above caption is a very popular heading these days.  Everyone seems anxious to write or say a good word for “diversified farming.”  In fact it is indispensable in a new and undeveloped country.  It represents old times and old things-the days of our childhood.

        I have the greatest reverence for old things-for I am not young myself.  I was born in grandfather’s house eighteen miles from the then small village of Buffalo, N.Y., seventy years ago.  That farm was made during the diversified period.  It was near the cross-roads, where was located a tavern (so-called then) whose sign was “everything kept for the comfort of man or beast.”  One year ago I was its long open shed standing there yet, a monument to the goodness and mercy of those early days.  And there was the general store whose conspicuous sign was:  “If you do not see what you want, ask for it.”

        There was raised on that farm eleven out of thirteen children, besides horses, cattle, sheep and oxen, ducks, geese, turkeys and poultry; 1,000 apple trees, 100 cherry and plum trees, one-quarter mile of currant and gooseberry bushes, a large garden filled with a variety of truck, wheat, corn, oats, potatoes, hay, hogs in great numbers, and bees by the million, at least so we boys thought when in search of sweets.  There was plenty of timber and there was made maple sugar and syrup for home use and some to sell.  There was raised the most celebrated horse of that early period. “Chautauqua Chief,” and sold at three years for $150, soon to be the most famous horse living, whose price would buy three such farms as he was raised upon.

        And what has happened since those old days?  The cross-roads has become a village, stores dealing especially in shoes, clothing, hardware, hats and caps, groceries, and millinery drove the general store out of profitable business.  The tavern became a hotel.  The farm was divided and each branch given a head.  Time passed, and then the village became a city.  The department store is now at the top, representing all the varieties of merchandise in separate departments in charge of experts who do nothing else but look after that department, and, for convenience, all brought under one roof.

        Such has been the history of progress in my old home-from generalized, diffused efforts to a division and specialization of all work.  And such, in truth, is the history of our nineteenth century civilization.  We have made such remarkable progress because we have specialized and given our attention wholly to that specialty. 

        One word more about the farm.  Was its method a money-making one?  No. It meant a bare living, because the man running it was required by the method of farming to be a jack of all trades and master of none.  Still fifty-five years ago that farm paid the largest tax in Erie County, which included the city of Buffalo, N. Y.

        Farming will become the most profitable business, as it already is the safest, in the United States, when we learn, as we will, to take the brightest boys and send then to the best agricultural colleges.  They will return experts in one line with a general knowledge of all.  Then the expert in horses will not let “Chautauqua Chief” pass his hands for $150, but will fully develop his specialty and get all out of it there is in it.

        After his college course he will probably locate in Southwest Louisiana, as he will most likely seek to develop some general product for which there is a home market where products have a long period of growth and mature earlier and later than elsewhere. Located, he will choose his specialty, and to it will devote his time, say eight hours a day, not more.  The banker devotes six hours a day studying how to make money from the interest upon what he owes.  The farmer can do as well.

        A general farmer cannot be progressive.  It precludes the use of machinery.  Besides, none but experts can find a market. Three-quarters of California fruits find no sale.  What market have we for tobacco unless grown and prepared by an expert.  Consequently I am led to say that the diversifying farmer has no market; a very serious allegation-is it true?  Seventy years’ experience says it is.  Out of then strawberry growers one expert has the market; out of ten butter makers one or two experts has the market.  And so it goes; the expert, the specialist is the man who succeeds.  Agricultural camp-meetings have been held for a few years in the north part of our state giving lessons in diversified farming.  The drought came and the specialists of the south half were able and responded nobly and grandly to the call for help. 

        There is a proper way of farming as there is of running any other business.  Suppose you combine in one man lawyer, doctor, preacher, farmer and real estate agent.  We had such a combination at Jennings; he left for Texas between two days.  The expert can reduce the hours of labor.  What about spare time?  He will put it in reading the papers and studying political economy.  If there comes a rainy day step into your reading room, take up the great daily and see the quoted prices for legislators, congressmen and senator, as fixed by the trusts and syndicates who are seeking to put your into their pockets according to law.  Then vote as you shoot-straight at the mark.

        We can grow a greater variety of products in Southwest Louisiana than anywhere north of us, but with great wisdom we have chosen to develop mostly along two lines, sugar and rice, for which we have an almost unlimited home market.  Our wisdom is shown in the great prosperity and progress of the south of out state.  It is generally agreed that our sugar planters and rice farmers are the peers of any in the Union.  Our progress is beyond any other agricultural community I know of. The assessable wealth (per capita) in rice-growing Calcasieu is larger than any other parish in Louisiana, being over three hundred dollars for each man, woman and child.  The reason for this progress is that in Southwest Louisiana we grow one thing at a time. But perhaps some may say immigration does it.  I’ll admit that, but then immigration goes where people make money, and we make money here because we do one thing at a time.  The strongest inducement we send out is that we have a special product or products upon which money can be made.

        Let the planter instead of growing everything he needs, grow one general crop that everybody needs.  Let a diversity of farmers grow a diversity of crops.

PROF. W. C. STUBBS

ON DIVERSIFIED FARMING

Sugar Experiment Station

Audubon Park, New Orleans, La., June 14, 1899.

Mr. S. L. Cary, Jennings, La.

        My Dear Sir:  In expressing an opinion as to the adaptability of Southwestern Louisiana to diversified agriculture, it is easier to tell what it cannot grow than what it can.  Experiments have demonstrated that, on account of the level contour of your soil and the easy availability of water through your numerous streams, bayous, coolies or artesian wells, rice growing has temporarily monopolized your farmers.  I am informed that there are over 350 miles of canals now flooding the rice fields with water and your people with wealth.  To these can be added nearly one hundred artesian wells which are irrigating from fifty to one hundred acres each annually. This great rice industry in Southwest Louisiana has almost revolutionized the rice industry in the United States.  South Carolina was once the leader in the growing of rice, and Louisiana was second best.  At that time the bulk of the rice grown in this State was upon the banks of the Mississippi River and its outlying bayous.  Now the largest quantity is grown upon the prairies of Southwest Louisiana where extensive irrigation plants, improved implements and excellent and numerous rice machines are fully utilized for the purpose of making this crop intelligently and cheaply.

        But rice is not the only thing that can be grown in this section.  If your lands be well drained and your soils thoroughly broken, thrown into ridges, quarter-drains and ditches properly established, and planted in cane, it is doubtful whether any portion of this State can exceed yours in the profitable growing of this crop.  It has been demonstrated that your soil produces cane exceedingly rich in sugar, and that the ease with which your soil can be cultivated, the presence of a large number of central factories eager to purchase the same by the ton, are all strong inducements for the substitution of this crop, at least in part, for the rice industry now engaged in by nearly every citizen in Southwest Louisiana.

        Again, if your lands be thoroughly drained, which can easily be done, whenever parochial or State authority intervenes for the establishment and condemnation of drainage canals and ditches, there is hardly any crop, either subtropical or temperate, that cannot be successfully grown in this section.  Pears of the oriental type, oranges of the Japanese type, grafted upon citrus trofoliata, figs of every variety, Japanese persimmons, and other fruits, can be grown here to perfection.  Oats of the Rust-proof variety, sown in the fall will produce an enormous crop.  We have every assurance that tobacco of the cigar type, now being grown upon the bluff lands of Central Louisiana, can be grown upon the prairies of this section on account of the similarity of soil and climate conditions. 

        I need not say anything of cotton or corn.  It goes without saying, that every portion of Louisiana can grow both cotton and corn profitably.

        Another industry, which once flourished in an unintelligent manner upon these prairies before they were peopled, is the growing of stock, which can again, under intelligent direction, be made far more profitable than in former years.  With the present price of beef, and the introduction of some of the improved breeds of beef cattle, I know of no section of the country that has such possibilities before it in the growing of beef cattle for market, as yours.

        With “cotton seed meal” so available around you, and with “rice bran and polish” right at your door, all, at what may be called initial prices, supplementing the superior grazing of your section of the country, beef cattle can be grown at large profits.

        Leguminous crops of all kinds, when properly planted and intelligently inaugurated, will materially add to the success of this industry when established.  Alfalfa, now such a wonderful success in all the alluvial lands of this State, can by proper preparation of the soil, fertilization and inoculation, be made a success in your section, and when a field is once established the numerous crops that can be cut there from amply repay the labor and expense involved in establishing it.

        I sincerely trust that your efforts which have accomplished so much in peopling this section, may in the near future reach such a degree of success as to overflow Southwest Louisiana, and aid us in developing the other fertile sections of this State. 

Very truly yours,

Wm. C. Stubbs, Director

MACHINERY

WHAT MACHINERY HAS DONE FOR SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA

        It has made it possible for a few men from the Northwest to capture the rice industry.  It has enabled one man with a machine and four mules to do the work of thirty to forty men in harvest which lasts three months of the year.  The 3,000 twine binding harvesters in use represent for three months an unseen population of 100,000 men, who never strike, ask for no holidays, never hunger, thirst, or get tired.  It gives to one man the productive capacity of thirty.  A good machine is the laboring man’s best friend.  It at first displaces labor, educates, and gives the power to earn better wages.  There is very little or no prejudice against machinery in Southwestern Louisiana.  Threshing is done by the same machine (slightly modified) that is used for wheat North, using a traction engine of ten to twelve horse power, about 150 in use.  The large rice fields are supplied with pumps and engines.  A pump of large capacity, driven by a fifty horse power engine, will flood successfully 300 to 500 acres depending upon the season (wet or dry).  The same engines for running threshing machines are largely used for pumping on smaller fields.  Plows, harrows, cutaways, rollers and pulverizers of most improved pattern are used.  Plowing by steam is being done experimentally, it’s true; but the nature of the soil, the lay of the land, and the enterprise of the people warrant success.

        A very large amount of machinery has been sold, and yet the agents say collections are much better here than elsewhere.

SAFE AND PROFITABLE INVESTMENTS

        Southwestern Louisiana offers a clear field.  Few mortgages, and land titles very short direct from the Government.  Besides, these lands are capable of earning more than ordinary lands, as they grow the most valuable crops-sugar and rice.  All northern products are grown and mature earlier and later than the usual season, making them particularly valuable.  For instance, Irish potatoes ripen in May, strawberries in February, grapes in July, dewberries in April, peaches in May, pears in July, oats in June, corn in July.  The first thirty days of the market is worth more than all the rest of the year.  We have the benefit of climate which costs nothing and adds ninety per cent to values.  At this time, March 1, fruit trees are in full bloom, vegetables of most kinds at and near maturity; those things saved, are of immense value.  The average date of last killing frosts for the past thirty years, for Louisiana, is March 5, and the nearer the coast the less the danger.  Now, along the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad, we have passed the great danger line, while fifty to one hundred miles north, both fruit and vegetables have been killed.  If our products are killed sometimes by late frosts, still we have earlier seeding than anywhere north of us, as we are only liable to same freezes in March that Iowa and Illinois have in May, so that in every way Southwestern Louisiana is a safer place for investment than elsewhere.

WHAT WE WERE TOLD BY “WE TOLD YOU SO,” AND HOW IT CAME OUT.

        We were told that Southern people had no enterprise, lacked vigor, were indolent, and that we would become lazy and lose all our energy within two years.  Our sufficient answer is to point to what we have done in the rice crop.  We have outgrown the capacity of the rice mills and commission men of New Orleans, have raised to the full extent of the ability of the great Southern Pacific Railroad to handle.  Commencing a few years ago with a shipment of 2,000,000 pounds, next season 4,000,000, then 8,000,000, then 16,000,000, then 63,000,000, then 180,000,000 1891 and 1892, and now 1892 and 1893 over 300,000,000 pounds, show that our Southern brethren have not been behind us in the race. We were told that we should be ostracized for opinion's sake.  Answer, not so.  We were told that we would be more subject to epidemics.  Answer, not so.  We were told that the climate was enervating.  Answer, if so, how is it that all civilizations have sprung from warm countries.  “Climates that grow oranges have grown all civilizations.”  Yellow fever was the great “scare crow.”  Answer, yellow fever does not originate in the Southern State, is controlled by quarantine, and is more easily cured then many Northern diseases that cannot be quarantined.  Even the gentle grippe has more victims North than yellow fever in same length of time South.  Diphtheria is more fatal, and does nearly all his deadly work north of the Ohio River.  Diphtheria, a Northern disease, is more fatal than any Southern disease. Smallpox is mainly a Northern disease.  We were told that roses had no fragrance, fruits no flavor.  Both are untrue.  We were told that the country was a marsh.  Our prairies are not boggy.  Our lands, some are low, and some are high and rolling, wet and dry on nearly every quarter section, making each farm the more valuable on account of this variety.  The value of the land is enhanced by its varieties, its peculiarities.  If I had the only farm that could grow any particular crop of general use, its value would be immense.

LAKE CHARLES COLLEGE

        October 1890 Lake Charles College opened its doors to furnish first-class training in high school studies and college courses, determined also to receive any who might come to it for a good common English education.

        It is not a sectarian or denominational institution, but one administered by a board of trustees seeking to make it Christian in practice.

        It has three departments, College, Preparatory and Academic, or English.  This last department has three courses, English, Normal and Business, and is designed for those not intending to enter the college proper.  These courses can be taken up at any point when the student is prepared.  Taken from the beginning the business course lasts two years and is intended to prepare for business.  The normal course, extending over three years, provides for a thorough study of the fundamental English branches with a view to teaching.  The English or academic course embraces some of the English studies of the college, with French, German and the sciences.   The preparatory courses (classical and scientific) occupy three years and are followed b the classical and scientific courses in the college, covering four years.

        Free instruction is given two or three times a week in vocal music and free-hand drawing.

        To all studying for the Christian ministry, and to the children of al pastors of churches exclusively engaged in the work of the ministry, tuition is free.

        The endeavor of the college is by means of thoroughly trained teachers to give the best training according to the best methods, at the same time making character and conduct of the first importance.

        Such an institution is of priceless value to any community, and is always worth more than it costs.

        The college is located at Lake Charles, La., on the main line of the Southern Pacific Railroad, 217 miles west of New Orleans and 140 east of Houston, and at the southern terminus of the Kansas City, Watkins & Gulf Railway, and is thus easily accessible from all parts of the State and Texas. 

        It has spacious grounds of sixteen acres enclosed, and two college building, with the promise of a third.

        College Hall has sixteen rooms for recitations.  The beginning of a library occupies one.  The young ladies’ cottage has sixteen large rooms and two smaller ones.  These rooms are furnished all ready for use, excepting a few things brought by each student.

        Till the cottage for young gentlemen is erected, out of town students will be quartered in selected families, who have care for the students and report to the president. 

For catalogue or information address

 Rev. Henry L. Hubbell, D. D.

President of the College.

FEED FOR STOCK

THE PROBLEM OF CHEAP FEED FOR STOCK IN SOUTHWESTERN LOUISIANA

        To this date feed for stock has been brought in from abroad, prices have been high and the drain very heavy.  Rice is proving to be good and cheap feed for all kinds of stock.  Rice can be grown here as cheaply, pound for pound, as any other grain, and for less money than it costs to import other feed stuffs from north of us.  And now we are growing a soft rice, Egyptian, or “bull” rice, yielding well with less water and much better to feed in its whole state.  Corn is a paying crop-twenty to forty bushels per acre, according to cultivation and season.  Sweet potatoes are well adapted to soil and climate here, yield well with little cultivation and grow equally well from vines planted as from slips.   Everything, even to the dog and cat, eats sweet potatoes, but for the Northern market we must grow the Jersey potato, which seems to grow equally as well and is of as good quality or better, than those raised North.  These can be laid down in Northern markets at a cost of three dollar or less per barrel, selling now at four to five dollars.  Rice straw is as good as other straw, or as common prairie hay.  Prairie hay is now selling at from five to seven dollars a ton on track ready for shipment.  We have a very large surplus of either straw or grass that is burned annually.  It has a good feeding value, and this is the best place to feed it.  It takes less feed to make pork or beef in a warm climate, and prices are generally better.  The proper feeding of stock is essential to our greatest prosperity.  The hulling or grinding of rice would add largely to its feeding value.   There is a great variety of feed stuffs that can be grown here, and with good conveniences and care in feeding we can be entirely independent of the feed store, and can not only supply the home, but can have meats for the market.  I am feeding rice and rice straw very satisfactorily.

        Successful farming is reduced to stock raising, even in the Northwest.  There is no good reason why the South should not supply its own markets with all kinds of stock and all kinds of meats.  Even cotton seed hulls are better meat-producing feed than corn fodder, timothy, red clover or potatoes.  Cotton seed hulls cost at the mills two dollars per ton.  Timothy and clover hay cost eighteen to twenty dollars per ton; rice bran, much better feed, as seen by the table, eight to ten dollars per ton.  Cotton seed meal, with ten times the meat-producing power of timothy hay, can be bought at the same price in our markets, and warm weather is the best time to feed stock.  The southern winter along the Gulf coast is perfection for fattening stock.  With shade, grass and good water in summer, and shelter from rains and Southern feed stuffs for winter, stock can be kept ready for the highest and best market with less expense, and, therefore, at better profit than at any place elsewhere that I know of.  I append a table from the Times  Democrat, giving comparative feeding values;

        “The United States Department of Agriculture publishes the results of the very interesting experiments recently made by Professors E. H. Jenks and A. L. Winton, at New Haven Conn., of the American feeding stuffs.  No less than 3,267 feeding stuffs were carefully analyzed to see their food and fat making value.  Among the stuffs analyzed were the green fodder-cereals, grasses and legumes, silage, hay and dry coarse fodder, roots, bulbs, winter and other vegetable, grains and other seeds, mill products and waste material. 

        “The following table giving the protein (or meat-making) and fat value of some of the leading cattle foods analyzed, will be interesting to farmers:

SOUTHERN HOMES

        The following letter from Mr. W. J. Randolph, of Millersville, Louisiana, to a friend in Dakota, is quite interesting, and especially so to hundreds of families in the Northwest now looking southward for Southern homes.  Millersville is only 8 miles north of Jennings, on the celebrated Calcasieu Prairie, that is being settled almost exclusively by Northern people:

Millersville, La.

        Dear Brother Fasset.-The News still comes to me, forwarded from Spottswood.  Now facts are,  I am not able to take all the news-I am abundantly able to take, but an not able to pay for them.  If you are so interested in my knowing the capacity of the average Dakota newspaper man for expanding the naked truth, you better send the paper here, but for your own safety, and financial success, you better “stop-her.”  I stayed in the banana belt too long to have dollars around loose.  When I read of 30º below zero and no coal, I shudder and wonder if I really was ever there.  We have had a few frosts, the grass is green and cattle and horses on the range are fat and sleek.  I am writing in a room without fire and doors open.  We don’t fear a coal famine; we can go and get enough fuel to last a week in an hour’s time, and it won’t cost a cent.  We live on as beautiful prairie as ever lay out of doors.  Magnificent timber of all kinds on either side within a mile and a half.  Good fence lumber costs $7 per thousand feet, and health is as good as or better than in Dakota.  Abundance of wild fruit from March to August.  Peaches, nectarines, apricots, figs, Japan persimmons are propagated from cuttings and come into bearing in two years.  Pears begin to bear in from 3 to 5 years and this is the home of the best.  These prairies produce grass to beat the world; will average more to the acre than ten acres in Dakota. There have been thousands of tons of hay shipped this fall at prices that net more cash than a Dakota wheat crop.  These are some of the things that strike a Dakota man favorably; could tell you some things not quite so pleasant, but nothing to compare to a straw fire.  This country is filling up with Northern people, property is advancing in price every day, and I have the first Northern settler yet to see who wants to spend the winter in Michigan.  Horace Greely said, “It is easier to raise a steer in Texas than to raise a hen in Maine,” and I am not sure but it is cheaper to raise a whole herd of cattle here than to pull one old cow around by the horns, hunting for water and fresh grass in Dakota.  Do you hear me shout?

        You better stop and put in some more straw, and I will hitch up and take a buggy ride, just for fun, and think of you poor fellows up there, pressing your nose against the window glass wondering when the storm will let up, the weather moderate and the cars will come laden with coal.

        Nothing but extreme poverty drove me out of Dakota, and how I do thank the good Lord for one spell of poverty and that by contrasting this with Dakota, I can the more enjoy the glorious weather, the beauty of the landscape, etc.  How we can laugh at the storm and the coal dealers and the straw pile; how we can luxuriate on the sweet potato, rice, poultry, eggs, sugar and syrup, corn bread, beef at 5 cents per pound, etc., all of home production.

        Here, if we can’t buy shoes, we can be independent and go bare-foot and never think of freezing.

        This is not for publication, and I am not booming the country.  If I were, what a story I could tell.  If the average Dakota newspaper man was down here and should give rein to his imagination as at home, he would be looking for the Great White Throne and the River of Life, and Streets of Gold and the Pearly Gates.  It would be necessary to swathe him in a suit of Dakota winter clothes to keep him from bursting and to put imported ice on his head to remind him of home and enable him to call in his ideas, take his bearings and find out where he really was.  If you don’t believe it come down and try it. 

 Yours, 

W. J. Randolph.

JOSEPH JEFFERSON’S ORANGE ISLAND.

NEAR NEW IBERIA, LA.

S. L. Cary, Esq.               New Iberia, La.

        Dear Sir:-Yours of November 22^nd was received some time since, but no having had the time to answer it has been deferred until now. Your question regarding the depth of the water ways in this country I will answer to the best of my knowledge.  I have not been sailoring on the coast for several years, and storms and the tides may have affected the channels more or less since I quit sailoring.  I will begin at Calcasieu River.  The channel at that bar was from three to six feet; since then it has been dredged, and I do not know the depth now.  Mermentau River bar is from two an a half to five feet, mean tide four feet.  Following the coast eastwardly we come to the southwest pass of Vermillion Bay; outside in the gulf there is twelve feet, inside in the bay there is eight feet, very low tide six feet.  Eastwardly again we go to Cote Blanche Bay, where there is eight to nine feet.  Eastwardly again is Bayou Sale Bay, with from five to seven feet of water. Eastwardly again is Morrison’s cut-off, which is an outlet into Atchafalia Bay, with a depth of eight to ten feet. Atchafalia Bay has a depth of seven to nine feet.  We come next to Atchafalia River, which leads direct to Morgan City, with plenty of water.  From the Atchafalia River through the Atchafalia Bay to the Gulf is a dredged channel made by the Morgan steamship line.

        While speaking of channels and outlets from this part of the country to the Gulf, let me call your attention to one thing:   The whole country from Calcasieu to Vermillion Bay is interspersed with lakes and bayous, upon  which lie a great deal of fine, cultivable lands (in fact, with a little drainage all can be cultivated).  Now, if the Messrs. Watkins & Co. had some one who knew the country as I do he could cut a canal from the Calcasieu River to Vermillion Bay, in a very short time, thus opening those fertile lands to immigration and giving a way for those already there for shipping their produce.  As three-fourths of the proposed canal is already opened by natural lake and bayous, you see it would only require dredging from one to another until we arrive at Vermillion Bay, where it is open to Morgan City.  There are a great many farmers and others who live too far from a railroad anxious to have this canal made, giving them a chance to get their produce to market.

        From circulars received from you I infer you are trying to have people immigrate to this country, and you praise it in the highest terms, to which I not only agree, but can add to.  Here I was born, raised and have had my being for more than fifty-five years (excepting a visit to Cuba and a shot stay in South America and Mexico), yet I feel as young and agile as a boy-seldom or never sick-to which hundreds of others can testify, which certainly proves the healthfulness of the country.  I see hundreds of people here from different parts of the North, and they unanimously say they suffered more from heat in the North than here.  How can it be otherwise when we have during the whole summer a never-ceasing breeze from the Gulf which, laden as it always is with the fragrance of many flowers, makes this place a fit abode for the gods.  Now, at this season, the 28^th of February, our gardens are filled with the finest vegetables.  We have, and have  had during he winter, cauliflower, cabbage, beets, turnips, celery, green peas and many other things, all grown in our open gardens.  We grow most of the fruits of the tropics and nearly all of those of the more northern States.  In fact, this is the country of countries, and all it wants is men to develop its resources.

        I fear I have already written you too lengthy; but in closing I will say, if I can be of any service to you in any way I will with pleasure, and should you ever come to these parts make it convenient to give me a call.  I am managing the stock farm of Mr. Joseph Jefferson.  I will gladly show you the country and tell you all I know, or you can refer any of your friends to me.  In the meantime I would like to hear of you and how you are succeeding regarding this country.  I am with pleasure, 

Yours respectfully,

Joseph Landry.

A REMARKABLE FACT

        Providentially the Southern Pacific holds the key to the situation as regards the sugar, rice and hay industries of the State.  Only twelve years since the Carolinas raised the rice of the United States.  At that time the delta of the Mississippi raised the rice of Louisiana.  All done by colored labor.

        At that time the Southern Pacific Railroad Company put an agent in the field to attract emigration to the prairies of Southwest Louisiana.  We induced the men of the Northwest to come, and these men brought with them the improved farm machinery, with which they cultivated their lands and made a living-“labor saving machinery.”

        There were vast quantities of grass rotting annually.  The mower, stacker, gatherer and hay press were brought into use, and to-day thousands of tons find their way over the Southern Pacific to Texas and Mexico.

        These men say the rice crop, secured with a hook or sickle, for a harvester.  They put a twine-binding harvester into the field, and this season 4,000 machines, capable of harvesting 30,000 to 40,000 acres per day, are in the rice fields of Southwestern Louisiana.  The industry is revolutionized by machinery handled by white men; so that the great rice crop which twelve years ago was grown by the Carolinas and the Mississippi Delta, is now grown in Southwestern Louisiana.

        And now the outlook is the same for the great sugar industry.  The tendency is to leave the low bottoms, subject more or less to overflow, and take the higher lands that are much easier to cultivate and handle.  The first move of importance was made in 1892, when the agent of the company took samples of prairie-grown cane to Audubon Park for analysis, and Professor Stubbs announced that these samples contained 30 to 50 per cent above the average Louisiana cane in sugar, or from 14.4 to 16.4 percent sucrose.  Then thousands of circulars telling these facts were printed by the company and circulated through the Northwest.

        The next great step is the erection of a diffusion sugar house at Lake Charles, by a student of Prof. Stubbs, after learning these facts.  It is proven that cane grows as well on the prairies as on the bottoms, and is sweeter, lands are cheaper, and white men and machinery will make this industry as successful as they do the rice.  And the Southern Pacific Company feel the vast importance and value of these industries to the whole country; having inaugurated this great change, involving questions of national importance, will endeavor to carry it forward to complete success.

        The United States supplies of sugar and rice are involved in this experiment, and all indications point to success.

        There is enough good prairie land along the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad in Louisiana to furnish hay to the State, and sugar and rice for the United States. 

        The price of undeveloped land is $5 to $10 per acre; improved land $10 to $25.

        Will you come and help solve the problem, and develop this new and most valuable country, with the assurance of large profits and of unusually favorable general conditions?

        Successful farming is reduced to stock-raising even the Northwest.  Grass is the best form, and warm weather the best time in which to feed stock.  “Go South, young man, go South.”  And when you go south , GO SOUTH!

READ THIS

        The value of advice is measured mainly by experience.  A man who has traveled from ocean to ocean from Grand Forks, North Dakota, to the Gulf of Mexico, who his lived North in three states fifty-six years and in Southwestern Louisiana fifteen years, and has crossed every belt of production, every month of the year for ten years, should be able to give intelligent and therefore valuable advice to land and home seekers.  And he says, that while there is no paradise on earth, Southwestern Louisiana comes nearer filling the bill for an ideal home than any other country he has ever seen, and if you read carefully the opinions of the many writers in this book, all being experts in the lines written about, that you need not go astray in making your selection of the kind of business to follow and the place to locate your home. 

        The great wants of this country are:  Banking capital, which can be safely and profitably invested, and the better classes of farmers.  I know of no place where intelligent farming, assisted by capital, will pay such dividends as here. Cash, labor and brains are at a premium here and will enrich the owner beyond a doubt.

COTTON

        Cotton is raised to some extent in Southwestern Louisiana, but is not a favorite crop, and of late years, owing to low prices, did not pay.

        The Northern immigrant does not take kindly to cotton growing; perhaps he may when cotton picking is done by machinery.  It undoubtedly pays better than wheat, oats or corn raising in the North.  The yield is a half-bale per acre planted in March, cultivated like corn, picked in September, October and November, costing to grow same as corn until harvesting, which cost fifty cents to one dollar per 100 lbs.  The seed is becoming more valuable year by year, is the best feed for stock and a good fertilizer.

        One thousand pounds of seed with each 500 pounds of lint cotton seed is worth $12 to $20 a ton.  Its uses are numerous; completes with oleo for supremacy in making good dairy butter. 

BIG TIMBER DEAL CLOSED

        Friday’s Times-Democrat contained the following relative to the big timber deal referred to as being in progress, by the American a few weeks ago;

        Mr. J. D. Lacey, of the firm of J. D. Lacey & Co., has just returned from Chicago, where he closed the sale of 160,000 acres of long-leaf pine lands in Calcasieu, Vernon and Rapides parishes.  The deal was closed in Chicago, where the land was owned. It passed into the hands of Michigan capitalists, who have held an option on it for some time.

        Mr. Lacey gave the details of the transaction to a representative of the Times-Democrat last night.  He said that the lands in question lie between the lines of the Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf and Kansas City, Watkins & Gulf railroads, adjoining the holdings of such operating concerns as the Central Coal & Coke Company, the Bradley-Ramsey Lumber Company, the Ludington, Wells, & Van Schaick Company and other Lake Charles and Westlake mills. 

        These lands were owned jointly by N. K. Fairbank, Franklin H. Head, Charles King, the estate of Wirt Dexter, C. E. Perkins, president of the Chicago Burlington & Quincy railroad, and other Chicago capitalists.  They have been on the market for some time, the holders not being operating lumbermen.  They were therefore, inclined to relinquish them at the first favorable opportunity.  It so happened that the Michigan lumbermen were on the lookout for Southern investments to take the place of their Northern holdings which are now about cut out, and it was decided to purchase the tract on joint account.

        The purchasers are A. W. Wright, of Alva, Mich.; C. H. Davis, E. P. Stone and G. M. Stark, of Saginaw, Mich.; Delos A. Blodgett, John W. Blodgett, and Edward Lowe, of Grand Rapids, Mich.; and several other gentlemen who are interested with Mr. Wright.  The terms of the sale have not yet been made public, but it can safely be stated that the deal was one of the largest ever made in southern timber lands.

        The transfer of the lands from non-operative lumber men to young and active timber men will be of great value to the section, in which the lands lie and to Louisiana at large.

        The purchasers are enterprising and will open the lands as soon as possible, erecting mills and beginning the cutting of timber without the least unnecessary delay.  It was their purpose when they made the purchase not to let the land lie idle as it has done so long.  Mills will be erected, thousands of dollars of foreign capital will be paid out in wages to the operatives and hundreds of men will be given employment.

        There are one or two obstacles in the way of the immediate development of the lands.  Both the railroads to which the timber is tributary are in the hands of receivers, and, therefore, it is impossible for the time being to make arrangements for the feeders, which must be of considerable length.  As soon as this obstacle is removed though, Mr. Lacey thinks active operation will be begun, and timber put on the market as fast as economical manufacture will permit.

TIMBER

        Large bodies of excellent timber occupy fully one-half of Southwest Louisiana.  The varieties are almost endless.  The quality the very best.  Hard pine, cypress, oak ash, gum and hickory are leading.  A very large business in lumber and shingles is done the year round.  Men from Michigan are leading.  The timber is well located along the rivers, lakes and bayous, is accessible, and lumbering on a large scale goes on summer and winter.

LAKE CHARLES

BY PROF. S. A. KNAPP

        On the Calcasieu River is the metropolis of Southwestern Louisiana and destined to be the great central city between New Orleans and Houston Texas, a distance of 360 miles.  Look at facts:

1. It has an admirable location on one of the most beautiful lakes in America and upon a river broad, deep and navigable at all times of the year.

   Lake Charles (the lake) is two miles wide by two and one-half miles long and through it flows the Calcasieu River.  The waters of the lake are clear and its banks are bold, except on the north and southwest, where giant semi-tropical forests do battle with the waves.  The Calcasieu River, one thousand feet broad and sixty feet deep, flows from the northeast till within one-fourth of a mile of the lake, where it makes a graceful curve to the west and enters the lake on the western shore.  The city of Lake Charles extends from the river upon the north along the eastern shore of the lake to the river upon the south.  For beauty of location Lake Charles surpasses every city upon the Gulf coast.

2. It is upon the Southern Pacific Railroad, 218 miles west of New Orleans.  The Calcasieu, Vernon & Shreveport Railroad, now under construction, will give an air line to Kansas City.

3. It is a city of 7,000 inhabitants, manufactures 650,000 feet of lumber, 329,000 shingles daily; has three banks; four newspapers; nine sawmills; one sugar refinery; the largest rice mill in America; car shops; water works; street railways; electric lights, etc.  It is increasing in population at the rate of two thousand per year. 

4. Appropriation has been made to improve the harbor at the mouth of the Calcasieu, which will give Lake Charles one of the best harbors on the Gulf of Mexico.

5.  It is positively the best location in the South to establish the following lines of manufacture:

   First, furniture; second, wagons; third, chairs; fourth, agricultural implements; fifth, cotton or woolen factories; sixth, iron works, engine building, etc.; seventh, it is a place where investments pay; eighth, it is one of the best winter resorts of the Gulf, and has many Northern visitors every season.

6.  Lake Charles is essentially a Northern city, wide awake, progressive and modern.

7. Much of the growth of Lake Charles is due to the advantages afforded by the Southern Pacific Railroad and its superior service in passenger and freight traffic.

                                                                             WELSH, LA.

            S. L. Cary, Esq.

    Dear Sir:-“In the bend of the bayou she sits snugly ensconced.”   This is the first line of an article from the pen of a well-known writer, and can be most fully appreciated by the stranger as he approaches the town from the north or northeast.  It is a growing town of about 350 inhabitants, and was incorporated under the laws of the State.  Situated on the Southern Pacific Railroad in Calcasieu Parish, 195 miles west of New Orleans, 110 east of Houston, and twenty-three miles east of Lake Charles, the parish seat.  Located in the forks of two lovely wooded streams which afford excellent drainage, and in the center of large timber areas and rich prairies extending many miles in each direction, it is certainly an ideal site, considered both from commercial and picturesque points of view.  From a simple railway station with two small stores and a blacksmith shop, Northern emigration has developed in four years, three large dry goods and grocery store, one hardware and furniture store, two drug stores, one restaurant, a meat market, a livery and feed stable, two neat little churches (Methodist and Congregational) and a public school building of modern design, thirty by sixty feet, two stories high. And all this has come about with rice as the only money-making farm crop.  What it will be when sugar cane, fruit and live stock have been given the same attention is a matter of conjecture.   Men of experience and close observation do not hesitate to predict for the town and country a very bright future.  Along both sides of the larger bayou that runs past the town on toward the Gulf is a strip of magnificent hardwood timber, including several of the oaks, hickory, white holly, Cyprus, sweet gum, and others.  From the church belfry, lines of timber can be seen in the east, the north, and the west, but in no case are they less than twelve miles distant, the prairie like a grand panorama spreading out before you.   These prairies that in early spring time are covered with lovely white flowers, and latter with luxuriant waving grass, formerly supported large herds of horses and cattle.  But as the land has settled up and the farmer fenced in the best grazing lands, and on them planted rice, the stock industry has grown less and less each year.  Many high-grade and thoroughbred short-horn cattle have been brought in by Northern settlers.  Most of them live, and of these, many take well to their new pastures, while others do not seem to thrive.  The Galloways and polled Angus do the best of all the noted beef cattle brought here. They will be fat in a pasture of native green grasses, where on the same feed a short-horn will be poor.  There is very little attention given on the part of farmers, at present, to improving their beef cattle, but there is the most urgent need for better milch stock. Thoroughbred Holsteins or Jerseys are just as easily acclimated as any cattle, and are sure of producing a handsome revenue for their owners.  The time is coming when hogs will be raised here in considerable numbers, but it is not advisable, at present, for a man going on to a new place to bring hogs with him.  This is a good place for chickens.  Either Egyptian or red rice is a cheap and excellent feed.  With a small amount of this feed and a sufficient grass range, hens will lay the whole year, except a short time in midsummer.  More liberal rations will fatten them nicely for market.

        The acreage in rice for the season of 1892 is at least fifty percent larger than the year before, and the yield much above an average. Some experiments this season have shown that $2.50 worth of fertilizer has aided in producing full crops on lands heretofore considered too high for rice.  One man in this vicinity has just threshed over 2,000 barrels from 200 acres of such land.  Corn is grown in a small way, mostly by Creole farmers for their own use.  The average yield is about twenty bushels per acre.  As most of the farming at present is done with oxen, farmers generally buy cotton seed, which is better and cheaper feed.  Two small pieces of oats were  sown near town last fall.  The yield was twenty-two bushels per acre and the quality very good.  The result, though not large, shows that, with proper management, much better can be done, and that every farmer can raise his own horse feed.  The cultivation of sugar cane has been carried on in a small way for many years.  To make syrup and a little sugar for home use has long been thought to be the most that would ever be done in that line.  On the 16^th of November 1892, the first car of cane was shipped from this station to the Calcasieu Sugar Co.  Without doubt this marks the beginning of an industry that will add very largely to the wealth and prosperity of this section.  In fruit raising, little or nothing has been done, except to supply the home table.  One man, living within a half mile of the depot, has set out over five hundred trees, and will plant each more each year, intending, eventually, to make it a special business.  The thrift and vigor of the trees, the color and flavor of the fruits that are grown, is proof that the soil and climate favors horticulture in its highest forms.  Most prominent in the large and growing list are figs, pears, peaches and plums.  Of the latter, the Japanese varieties are very promising.  They are larger in size and better flavored than many of the California plums that have retailed here at five cents apiece.  Oranges are a success under proper conditions. Six miles south of town is an orchard that is now supplying the home market with excellent fruit.  Keep an eye on the fruit industry at Welsh.

Yours truly,            

C. M. Field

JENNINGS, LA.

        Jennings received its name and location from the building of the Southern Pacific Railroad, its name from a builder of the road, Jennings McComb, and its location by virtue of a divide on the high rolling prairie, giving the town a high dry and commanding position on the largest prairie in the State.  The first station agent was S. L. Cary, from Howard County, Iowa, who came to Jennings Feb. 7, 1883, and took the office April 1.  Jennings then consisted of four buildings, depot, section house, one dwelling house and store, owned by A. D. McFarlain.  The prairie around in all directions was either United States or State land.  The station business was from $250 to $400 a month.  This was the beginning of immigration from the North and Northwest, amounting to fully 10,000 people at this time.  Cary was a station agent about four years, putting in all his spare time in advertising this country by sending letters, circulars and books to his Northern friends, and was so successful that the Southern Pacific Company promoted him to Northern Immigration Agent for the company, with headquarters at Manchester, Iowa.  He has given full information, has accompanied all excursions, distributed millions of circulars, maps and books, has seen all the prairie region taken by home seekers, most of whom are from Iowa, giving the settlement the name of the “Iowa Colony,” of which he is president.  Jennings to-day has nearly 2,000 inhabitants, a freight and passenger business of $13,000 to $14,000 monthly.  Will ship 1,000 carloads of rice of 20,000 pounds each, 1895-96 (see table published herewith).  Has two banks with $100,000 capital.  Two newspapers, graded high school, eight churches, two sawmills, (capacity 20,000 feet daily), two planning and two shingle mills, rice mill, sash and door factory and novelty works, feed mill, two drug-stores, two shoe stores, restaurant, three millinery stores, three butcher shops, two liveries, three variety stores, three groceries, three general stores, five hotels, and over three hundred buildings of all kinds.  More attention has been paid to fruit growing here then elsewhere in Southwestern Louisiana.   10,000 pear trees and as many more divided among figs, peaches, plums, oranges, olives, persimmons, and many nut bearing trees, pecans, English walnuts, as well as berries and fine gardens.  The city is head-quarters for the Iowa Colony, being a Northern village on Southern soil.  It puts on Northern style, and on its streets you can shake hands with people from every and any state north of Mason and Dixon’s line, and they like to meet you, and are, if possible, more agreeably social since breathing Southern air.  They seem to be on better terms with God and themselves since landing in this genial clime of easy conditions.  The history of Jennings is the history of Southwestern Louisiana.  All its towns and cities have partaken of the same general thrift and spirit.  There has been no boom, and we hope there will be none.  The country is a marvel of success, and wherever our hands have touched has prospered.  The assessed value of our Calcasieu Parish has risen from $1,000,000 to $7,283,475, and a large industry has been secured to this Southwestern Louisiana by the introduction of a twine-binding harvester to the rice fields, by an Iowa-Jennings farmer, Maurice Bryne.  The health of the place is remarkable, as a visit to our beautiful cemetery will show.  We are a church-going people, enterprising, wide awake, progressive.  Our wants are capital, a sugar mill, cannery, a wagon factory, furniture factory.  A movement has commenced to divide Calcasieu Parish; the prospect is good for making Jennings the Parish site for East Calcasieu.

LAKE ARTHUR, LA.

        The Lake Arthur region deserves special mention.  Four years ago it was only a wide prairie, covered with stock, no a single Northern man south of Jennings.  To-day the town has inhabitants enough to incorporate, and will do so this winter.  It has good schools and churches, will build a high school building at once, has good business houses, a live newspaper and the best hotel in Southwestern Louisiana.  A railroad is all they need to make it a splendid town, and their prospects for that are very encouraging.  Large farms have been opened up all along the lake, clear to Bayou Lacassine, and for miles north and west large orchards of pears, plums and peaches have been planted and are doing extremely well. Beautiful homes, surrounded with all kinds of fruit trees and shrubbery, that would take from eight to ten years to build up in the North, now cover the prairie, the effort of only from three to four years.  This year there have been raised within a radius of ten miles from the lake, over 10,000 acres of rice, averaging twelve barrels to the acre.  Sugar cane is being cultivated to a considerable extent. Corn, Irish and sweet potatoes do well.  Land is selling at from $7 to $10 per acre.  Parties visiting the South should not return without going to Lake Arthur and looking over this beautiful section.

Yours truly,          

E. L. Lee, Lake Arthur, La.

GUEYDAN, LA.

        Gueydan is situated in Hamilton Parish, and is the center and shipping point of that most fertile prairie region bounded on the North by Bayou Queue de Sortue, whose waters serve to irrigate the rice fields on the south by the open sea-march whence comes the salubrious salty Gulf breeze, on the east by the deep and navigable Vermilion River that empties into the Gulf, and on the west by the most beautiful Lake Arthur.  This section of Southwest Louisiana is about 35 miles in length by about 10 miles in width and forms part of the famous Bayou Teche country whose lands raise bountifully sugar cane, rice, corn, oats, potatoes, tobacco, vegetables of all kinds and a great variety of fruit.  Shade trees do very well.

        The prairie, still uncultivated, is well adapted to stock raising.  Rice is a good paying crop and is the one most extensively raised.  The lands are suitably level and are easily irrigated by surface canals.  A sure crop is thus assured.

        The Vermilion Development Co. Ltd., is the most important rice-irrigating concern in operation here, in fact the largest in the United States.  In 1897 this Company irrigated 10,000 acres of rice lands; in 1898, 15,000 acres, and 1899 is irrigating 22,000 acres. The supply of water is inexhaustible, and the area of the lands that can be reached with these canals runs into the hundreds of thousands of acres.  A conservative estimate of the rice crop for 1899, around Gueydan, places it at 200,000 sacks.

        The town of Gueydan is the terminus of the Midland Branch of the Southern Pacific R. R., and has mail, express, telegraph and telephone facilities.  Although as a new town it is fast increasing, and now counts with two large hotels, a wide-awake newspaper (The Gueydan News), two large rice warehouses, one of which is 300 feet long, two lumber yards, several general merchandise stores, a public hall, feed store, saloons, blacksmith shops, livery stable, butcher shops, etc.  The high school is located on its own block and is well attended.  The public park is fenced and was planted last year with umbrella china trees well laid off. The Gulf breeze makes this one of the most healthy of locations.

        Nowhere in the State is there a better opening for a large rice mill.  A small bank would do well.  A paper mill would find rice straw for the hauling.  Lands range from $8 to $50, according to location.  

J. P. Gueydan.

ACADIA PARISH, LA.

SOME FACTS ABOUT ACADIA PARISH, THE CENTER OF THE GREAT RICE

RAISING DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA, AND THE BUSTLING, BUSY AND GROWING CAPITAL, CROWLEY,
THE TOWN THAT IS KNOWN ALL OVER THE   UNITED STATES
AS THE “QUEEN CITY OF SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA” 
IT HAS EARNED THIS DISTINCTION AND WILL KEEP IT.

        Seldom in the history of any state outside of a mining district has a town had such rapid, substantial and sure growth as this town has experienced.   Seldom in the history of any agricultural section has a country or parish made such rapid strides as Acadia Parish in the last five years.  Seldom in the history of any country has its residents found themselves so suddenly and surely lifted from poverty to affluence as have the people of Acadia Parish and the residents of Crowley, La.

        To one who has not marked its progress, step by step, the results of five years of labor by its founders, W.W. Duson & Bro., in developing this country and building up this town seems almost beyond belief.  Eight years ago the parish of Acadia had never been heard of, having been created from the undeveloped portion of St. Landry Parish in October 1886, and not until two or three years after did its founders, W. W. and C. C, Duson, conceive the idea of building what is the present city of Crowley.  How well they have succeeded is shown by the following facts:

        Previous to the founding of the new parish this section of the country was held in very poor repute.  Lands were of no value-from twelve and one-half cents to one dollar per acre-and money was almost unknown quantity, groceries and supplies being purchased by cypress pieux, Creole ponies, etc.            

        The native settlers here lived in small houses built from logs or lumber split from the trees by their own hands, and a stove or window in the house was never heard of.  A man that owned 500 acres of land was considered to be worth $250.

        But a wonderful change has taken place in five years, and a still more wonderful transformation will be seen in the next five years to come.  These same people whom you saw living in houses with mud chimneys and board shutters for windows, many of them to-day have modern residences, productive farms under a high state of cultivation and supplied with all modern improved machinery, ride in their carriages, have money in the bank and yearly dispose of from one to four and five thousand dollars worth of products from their farms.

        You ask:  What has brought about this change, and what is it that will enhance the possession of these people and make them the envy of a continent in the next five years?  What is it that has raised the value of lands in and around Crowley from twelve and one-half cents to fifteen and twenty dollars per acre?  We answer, the culture of rice.  And why should the farmer of Acadia Parish who raises rice receive so much larger returns for his labor than the farmer of Dakota who raises wheat and oats?   The question is answered by the law of supply and demand.

        Why are diamonds so valuable?  Because they are scarce and are produced in a very limited section of the country.  Rice also can only be produced in a limited area of the United States.  Few diamond fields and few rice fields.  The demand for this cereal is constantly on the increase, and will be for the next fifty years.  Compared to wheat, oats, barley, beans, potatoes, meat, or any other staple article of food, rice at the present price is 33 1/3 percent cheaper than any other food, and as its value as an article of food becomes known, so will its consumption and its demand increase.

        But never, until the Gulf Stream changes its course and runs up the Mississippi River, will the extent of country in which it can be raised be extended, so we need never fear an overproduction of this cereal.

        Facts taken from the most carefully compiled statistics bear us out in saying that is every acre of land in the United States that will produce rice was planted with this cereal and an average crop raised and milled, with fair milling and shipping expenses added, and then the product placed on the markets of the United States on a basis of three dollars per barrel for rough rice, it would not be as much as we consume; in other words, the United States can never supply its own demands.

        Now, when the consumption of this article doubles, does it not stand to reason that if the supply is not increased the article itself must increase in value, and at a corresponding rate the lands that produce the rice will be enhanced in value?  Hence we say that Acadia’s lands are bound to keep increasing in value, and the man who buys these lands at from seven to twenty dollars per acre, their present price, has bought a gold mine that he knows not the value of.

        If lands in the State of Illinois that produce fifteen bushels of wheat per acre, valued at $1.00 per bushel, are worth $45 per acre, they have produced 33 1/3 percent of their value.  Then the lands of Acadia Parish that produce fifty dollars’ worth of rice per acre are worth, according to the same figures, $150 per acre, instead of from seven to twenty; but this is the difference in farming in Acadia Parish and some of the Middle and Northern States. 

        In the State of Ohio they raise wheat on lands that are worth from fifty to sixty dollars per acre, and get from twelve to fifteen dollars’ worth of wheat, while we in Acadia raise rice on lands that are worth from twelve to fifteen dollars, and get from fifty to sixty dollars’ worth of rice.   With one-fourth of the capital invested we get four times the returns.  While they are frozen up six months in the year, eating up they earned the other six months, we work the whole year round with no loss of time, under the most genial skies and balmy climate known to man. It is a fact that lands are worth whatever they will pay a reasonable rate of interest on after the expense of raising the crop is taken off.

        The American people are not slow to take advantage of a good thing when they see it; neither are they slow in catching the spirit of the times, and it has just dawned upon them that in these rice lands of Southwest Louisiana lies the greatest bonanza in the way of agricultural lands on the American continent to-day.  In no section of the United States can a man buy land and engage in farming with so small an outlay and reap such large and sure returns as here.  In no section of the United States can the capitalist find so promising a field for the investment of his money as here.

        Men of capital and energy are needed to develop the wonderful resources and industries of this country.  Men with business experience and energy are needed to carry out the good work already begun.  Factories and manufacturing establishments are wanted to work up the raw material that is produced in abundance here and will some day prove a mine of wealth to the party establishing such industries; and, above all, farmers with brains, muscle and money are needed to buy up and till our vacant lands, and they are coming too.  Realizing that the earlier they come, the better chances they will have for investments, they are coming from the North, the East, the West-coming faster than they ever poured into any agricultural section before.

        As an index of how rapidly this country is filling up it is only necessary to say that five years ago there was hardly a farm fenced in in the parish.  In the year 1889 Crowley shipped 12,000 barrels of rough rice, at an average value of three dollars per barrel, making $36,000.  Of the year 1890 we are unable to furnish the exact amount, but it was more than doubled.  In 1891 Crowley shipped 80,000 barrels of rice, or 420 car loads, valued at $240,000.  For the first four months of the shipping year of 1892 Crowley’s shipments of rice were at as follows:  September, 4,999 barrels; October, 36,925; November, 60,793; December, 53,859.  Total number of barrels shipped to January 1, 1893, 156,576, or 740 cars.  A conservative estimate places the balance of this year’s crop still on hand and ready to be shipped at 100,000 barrels, making a grand total of 1,240 cars, or 256,576 barrels.  At an average of three dollars per barrel this would give the enormous sum of $769,728; and this from Crowley along, which five years ago was an unbroken prairie.  The town of Rayne, six miles east, has shipped about half as much.  This wonderful increase in the rice industry is fully equaled by every other branch of business.

        The following careful and liberal estimate will show something of the profits to be derived from rice culture:

        Now as to the results, 160 acres of rice at fifteen barrels to the acre would be 2,400 barrels, at $3.00 per barrel this would be worth $7,200.  This would leave the farmer, after paying for the land and fencing it, building his house and buying his team and machinery, paying for his seed, and all other expenses possible on a farm of this size, $2,220 in clear money.  This is not farming on paper but is actual results as shown by hundreds of different men who have come here and engaged in this industry in the past five years.

        A few words in explanation of how rice is raised would not be amiss.  We know so many living in the North the words rice farming conveys the idea of living in a swamp or marsh; this is far from true, and could they see some of our rice plantations with rice growing in one field, and just across the fence, or perhaps the road, another field of cotton, sugar cane, corn or perchance an orchard of peaches, figs or oranges, this idea would no longer exist.

        Rice is raised on any level land, the land is plowed and fitted as for wheat or any other small grain, after the rice is sown, then commences the work of leveling the land, which is done with team, and large plows having long mould-boards with which the land is thrown up in ridges from one to two feet high all the way around the field; this is done to hold water on the young rice while growing.  In ordinary seasons the rainfall is sufficient for this purpose, but farmers usually provide against a drought by storing up a supply of water in the gully, streams and ponds.  When rice is fully grown and maturing, these levees are cut and the water allowed to run off, so land will become dry and hard by harvest.

        Rice is harvested with self-binding machines, and then sacked and shipped to the rice mills.  Rice is always sold and handled by the barrel-162 pounds makes a barrel of rice.  From twelve to twenty barrels are usually raised on an acre; the average price for the past four years has been $3.00 per barrel, oftentimes going as high as $4.50 to $5.00; thus it may  be seen that an acre of rice will, under favorable conditions, produce from $35 to $80, say an average of $50.  We have known a great many instances where men have raised twenty barrels to the acre and sold at $5.00 per barrel, thus producing $100 per acre, and that, too, where the land was valued at only $5.00 per acre; but these cases are exceptions.

        Freight and passenger receipts at Crowley, not including prepaid freight that was delivered at Crowley, or rice that was shipped away, was as follows:

            The real estate firm of W. W. Duson & Bro. has done a business during the year aggregating $500,000.  Below we give the business of four of our largest dealers:

            Below we give some crop statistics of Acadia Parish for the year 1892: