Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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Now ride round Omaha and you will read the whole story in a moving human picture film ticked off by life’s balance wheel. It is a speaking human picture, too; but it ends well; and all’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare says. You see the oozing prosperity of the banking and hotel section, but on the bridges near the packing plants, the prosperity doesn’t ooze quite so noisily as it did. Circle round the stock yards. Not gloomy, but still distinctly disturbing—stock yards being ripped up; miles of little houses for workmen, needing paint if not empty; miles of little shops looking lame and moribund if not dead. Something forced these occupants to move away. It was necessity. The Pacific Coast got many of them and gained as the Middle West lost.

But wait a minute! What is happening now? The live stock beginning to come back is rising in price weekly from ten to twenty-four cents a hundred. Those hinterlands are beginning to ship again from Nebraska and Wyoming. I think of one little German burg of perhaps two hundred people, where a gruff old burly fellow, part farmer, part banker, who is now yearly sending to market for himself and his neighbors, a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of furs and six times that value in cattle and sheep. “What do the farmers chiefly need?” I asked one taciturn old chap. “To be let alone—to cut out the middleman—cheap water rates if we can get ’em.” I have no comment to add to his answer. He hit what is called “a problem” on its head and he hit it with a mallet from annealed experience. Only you must not be surprised if some folks in the Middle West are a little sore on their banking experiences and some politicians perfectly conscientiously a little muddled on remedies.