Springfield Globe Republic

The Garden Spot of the Continent--A More Than Royal Realm-An Enthusiastic Song of Praise-A Modern Eden Described.
[Col. Pat Donan to Philadelphia Clover Club.]

Dakota is the newest, worst treated and grandest of the territories of the Union, the garden spot of the continent, the imperial wheat belt of the globe. It is a more than royal realm, which ten years ago was unexplored and almost unknown, which but five years ago was almost wholly a region of romance and of fable. It is a peerless but modest land, that never sounds the fishhorn of its own fame. It is the world's true wonderland, where no storms and tempests ever blow, and where all the breezes are trained to sing psalms in tunes in pianissimo style and in even better time and rhyme than the rendering of "The Order of Full Moons" I heard just now.

Our wildest blizzards, as unenlightened down-easters sometimes term them, are used by gentle mothers to lull their babes to sleep. The sunshine glows with a mellow splendor that calls to mind the far-famed Happy Valley of "Rasselas," and there is just frost enough in our winters to turn the elm leaves golden. No summer drouths or winter floods spread devastation over the fields and hopes of our husbandmen. No army worms or grasshoppers sweep those fertile plains and valleys with nibbling desolation. No hail-storms rattle their destroying musketry upon the grain; and fruits and plate-glass windows of that elysium-except, now and then, just enough to furnish business to our ambitious young home hail insurance companies.

Bananas bloom in November, and young oranges are picked the day before Christmas. Raisins, striped stick candy, tin horses and india rubber dolls ripen always just in time for Santa Claus' peddler wagon, with his reindeer team and his "little round stomach that shakes when he laughs like a bowlful of jelly." Pineapples and figs grow spontaneously on Canada thistle bushes everywhere, while the cottonwoods and dog-fennel trees yield brook trout, nectarines and persimmons, of large size and flavor, a canalboat-load to the acre. Spring roses blossom on the plain, gentle Annie, for New Year's posies, and potatoes grow as big as beer kegs at the roots of every tuft of prairie grass. Cabbage heads of full congressional and senatorial size give forth the fragrance of the jessamine and honeysuckle to humming-birds as large as canvas-back ducks and clad in all the prismatic glories of the aurora borealis. We hatch our own wild geese of such dimensions that tenderfeet from Pennsylvania, for instance, are liable to mistake them for winged hippopotami on lakes of never-freezing rosewater and cologne.

Blizzards, tempests, tornadoes and rascally political breezes come to that modern Eden only as dimly understood wailings from distant regions and peoples who do not know enough to find their way to the sole remaining quarter section of paradise in all the western world. There no wave of trouble ever rolls across the peaceful breast, and the prosperous people who raise infallibly from twenty-five to seventy-five bushels of No. 1 hard wheat to the acre of land, that costs them nothing and get $1.35 a bushel for it, can calmly smile at Satan's rage and face a frowning, because less fortunate world.