Pioche Daily Record

ARIZONA
MILITARY
TRANSPORTATION
AGAIN.

In an article, written by us two or three weeks ago, which ventilated the fact that the General Government annually throws away nearly a half a million of the people's money by having supplies shipped around by the Gulf of California, instead of being transported direct by Pioche, either from the Union Pacific or Central Pacific, we estimated the amount of freight to be moved at ten millions of pounds. Proposals to furnish supplies to the Arizona posts for the next year are advertised in the San Francisco Chronicle, and by the advertisement we learn that our estimate was at least one-half too low. Three routes are specified to be carried over by the advertisement, two of which are continuations of the old tardy and expensive Gulf route; while the third, or only land route throughout, makes it imperative that the freight shall be delivered at Camps McDowell and Apache from the terminus of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Apache and McDowell can be reached from the Union Pacific or Central Pacific in much less traveling distance than from the Southern Pacific Railroad, and through a much better, safer and cheaper country. Verily, it looks as if studied robbery of the tax-payers were the aim and object of public men in these degenerate days. Talk about the abuses of the franking privilege, over which a thousand newspapers have been incessantly howling for half a generation! Here, far away in the wilderness, the public plunderers go on, from year to year, taking from the treasury hundreds of thousands of dollars without returning anything like an equivalent, and the robbery is unnoticed by the sharp-scenters of gratuitous mail transportation to the amount of a few thousand dollars annually, by means of which valuable information was disseminated and we were benefitted as a nation.