Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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It is a mighty interesting question and its answer is an epic of human progress in a century unparalleled in the records of the race.

When I was there but a few years before the World War, and again just after the War, Kansas City was elated by a population of less than three hundred thousand. Here today are almost three-quarters of a million; and here tomorrow may be—what? I hesitate to answer—a Berlin, a Paris, a Chicago.

Less than seventy-five years ago, a man and his family with prophetic fore-vision might have sat down on a village lot sold at twenty-five dollars or given to anyone who would build and improve the property, and by sheer persistence in sitting on a little nest-egg without letting it go addled before it hatched, waken up to a fortune that would have left Rip Van Winkle rubbing his sleepy eyes, or King Midas feeling cheap. There are lots in Kansas City today as valuable as the best in New York, or richer far than any principality of the Old World. But the man would have needed more than prophetic fore-vision. He must needs have faith in his vision, faith based on facts.