The Daily Ardmoreite

MODERN SETTLERS
How the old settlers of the West would open their eyes at a caravan now en route from New York state to Idaho! There are 128 families in the party, numbering 650 persons, all going to take up irrigated farms bought at a bargain.

The striking thing about the caravan is its difference from the old-fashioned "prairie schooners" of half a century ago. These modern pioneers are traveling in a train of 135 automobiles, with 230 trailers bearing tents, portable houses and supplies. They are camping along the route at night as their predecessors did, and traveling from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, but there the resemblance ends. They are making the long journey with incomparably more comfort, and covering it in incomparably less time.

It is easy, even for a family with a considerable amount of farming equipment, to get from East to West nowadays, and without the cost and discomfort of railroad trains. In that fact lies the solution of pioneering hereafter. Any unoccupied region of the United States can be reached and settled likewise.

And that is not all. The people who can get to remote places by means of the all-conquering automobile can get away from it by the same means. Thus there is no more remoteness and no more necessary loneliness.

Distances are nothing.
Frontiers are gone for good. In a distant plain or mountain or desert, a family is still part of a community, with accessible friends and accessible markets.

When all this is once realized by the less fortunate folk of the crowded industrial sections, the continued highways will be covered with such caravans.