NEBRASKA.*
Mn. CURLEY'S book is a startling innovation. It looks like the prettiest of Christmas volumes, got up in a gorgeous fashion, in scarlet and gold, with gilt leaves, blue lettering, and a magnificent design, which is hardly possible to believe merely represents a railway-bridge, in gold, upon the cover. One's notions of useful information are put to flight by this gay exterior ; we used to have that sort of thing administered in sober brown binding and lesson- book print, and we set ourselves to the perusal of the work with our faith a little shaken perhaps, so tenacious is prejudice, but with our spirits raised. The alliterative facetim of the preface are a little depressing; we need to remember that many men have written wise books, and then damaged them by a silly preface, and to make up our minds that we will not succumb to the torpor-producing effects of such a passage as the following :—"This is the time of trashy travels, consisting of the tittle-tattle of the train, the table, and the tap It is the period of pamphlets on the pre- tensions of Paraguay, the productions of Patagonia, the potable refuse of Pachino, and the ponderous ores of Panicocoli." This, the author tells us, "is the hour of heterogeneous hand-books ; " and of course he means that his Nebraska is not one of them. Nor is it ; for, though we never read a sillier preface, we have nothing to express but satisfaction with the book as a fulfilment of its purpose, which is to tell all about Nebraska to everybody who wants to know. In point of style it leaves a good deal to be desired ; it is indeed as devoid of style as Lady Teazle be- fore she married Sir Peter ; but it is as "chock-full" of infor- mation as the attorney's clerk was Of evidence in the trial of " Bardell v. Pickwick," and as for sense, we may say with Mr. Toots, "there it is, in perfect heaps." To anybody who wants to go to Nebraska, Mr. Curley's book will be invalu- able; to everybody who does not want to go to Nebraska, it ought to be interesting, as an abstract study of the immense results of a short time in a new country of great resources. It is of serious practical value as regards emigration statistics, and the Well-consrdered counsels of the author on that point, to which we shall have to refer presently.
The State, which the author reckons up oddly—" it com- prises," he says, "about 3,000 square miles more than England, Wales, and Denmark put together "—is decidedly a promising child of modern "go-aheadativeness," for Omaha, its chief town, was staked out in 1854, and here it is, at its majority, in bond fide condition to vie with "the City of Eden, as it ap- peared on paper" to the eyes of Martin Chuzzlewit, at Mr. Seadder's office, in the city of New York. Not only is the State of Nebraska easily attainable by the pilgrim thitherward who has got so far as New York, but the mind is bewildered by reading the chapter headed, "How to get there ;" there are so many routes. The author's description of the aspect of the country reads rather tamely, in comparison with that of the wild West in general. Nebraska has the grand and the picturesque for far-off neigh- bours, but seems to be neither grand nor picturesque in any features of its own :—
* Nehrega; Ca Adbantages, Resources, and Draabaots. By Edwhi A. Curley. London : Sampson Low and Co. "In shape it is nearly a parallelogram, its north-east corner rounded off by the Missouri and the Niobrara, while it is robbed of about 7,500 square miles by a jutting corner of Colorado in the south-west. Its- greatest length from east to west is 412 miles, and its greatest width north and south is 208 miles. It is bounded on the east by the Mis- souri River, which separates it from Iowa and from the State of Mis- souri, on the south by Kansas and Colorado, on the west by Colorado and Wyoming, and on the north by Dacota. The surface oonsists mostly of billowy prairies, gentle and somewhat monotonous undulations, with a gradually increased elevation to the westward. There are also ex- tensive table-lands, and valleys which appear to the eye almost per- fectly flat Omaha is 1,000 feet above sea-level, and the western boundary of the State, where it is crossed by the Union Pacific Railway, after a course of 473 miles in the State, is over 5,000 feet high ; yet the incline in the valley of the Platte is so gradual, that the railway does not encounter a single difficulty,—not a tunnel, a fall, a trestle-work, or even a side-cutting of any importance is to be found in the whole of this distance up the slope of the Rocky Mountains, whose eastern sum- mits are to be found a little west of the State line, and out of which a great spur called the Black Hills comes within 20 miles of the State line on the north."
Through this uninteresting land flows the great River Platte, whose course is 1,200 miles. It is grand and wild in the moun- tain districts, but a wide, shallow, sandy stream in Nebraska. We do not gain anywhere in this volume an ecstatic view of the State ; there is none of the charm of the descriptions of Cali- fornia, for instance, about it, but it has many solid advantages ; its climate is fine, if not heavenly, its resources are numerous and sound—not that Mr. Curley writes in a tone to encourage reck- less emigration by any means—its natural products are rich and various, its " Injuns " are suppressed almost to the point of elimination, though Leatherstocking would hardly approve of the process which has led to this happy result. The capital of Nebraska is one of the surprising objects in a hemisphere of surprises. It began to exist in 1854, and it almost ceased to exist in 1867, in the financial crisis caused by the war, when immigration was suspended. In 1865 the population had scarcely reached 4,500 souls, but then came the Union Pacific Railway, when "large sums disbursed at this initial point gave a great im- petus to the growth of the city." Its population is now 20,000, and though that is not equal to the growth of several other American cities, there is a development "all round" about Omaha which makes it specially remarkable. It has three main lines of railway communication with Chicago, a bridge over the Missouri, the Union Pacific stretching westward a thousand miles to meet the Central Pacific, the Burlington, and Missouri in Nebraska ; a North-Western railroad commenced, a North and South line within eight miles on the east bank of the Missouri,. connecting it with Sioux City on the north and the whole valley of the lower Missouri on the south, and steamboat communica- tion through the Missouri with the whole Mississippi valley. This is almost bewildering. Who are the travellers on all these lines-? Are they the ghosts of the people who have been killed everywhere else? The site of Omaha is a fine one, one of the- few beautiful prospects in the State is commanded from the level plateau on which it is built, a " terrace " of the Missouri over- looking a vast extent of rich country, with the river in the near distance. For the natural advantages of the soil the following speaks There are many groves near Omaha where, a few years ago, there was nothing but the bare prairie. The largest comprises some fin:g- ums, and was bare prairie in 1856. Some rows of trees there will average more than a foot in diameter, and sixty feet high, by my own observation. These were cotton-wood cuttings. In numerous un- ploughed hollows there are dense young natural forests of many acres, which have sprung up since the desolating fires have been kept out by the settlement of the country ; and the landscape now presents a striking resemblance to the more rolling parts of Devonshire.'
Omaha is well ahead as a manufacturing town in other ways- than those connected with the Union Pacific Railway works, whose " shops " cover 30 acres. The smelting works do a large business; the linseed-oil works, breweries, and distilleries flourish exceedingly. Swine are plentiful and remunerative, carriages, agricultural imple- ments, and steam-engines are manufactured on a considerable scale. The vast brick-fields, as they furnish the material for the new world around, hold curious mementoes of a far past, in the shape of fossils of the ancient pine forests, "which consist of fine sand, preserving the grain and general appearance of the wood which it represented, and held in place only by the brick-earth around, them. There are trunks, roots, knots, and fruit." Mr. Curley' adds that they are exceedingly delicate, crumbling to the touch ; but he brought away some small specimens, which hardened some- what on exposure to the air.
The public buildings of Omaha are very handsome and solid- looking, and the houses are constructed on sound principles as regards health and comfort. The profuse illustrations and maps of Mr. Curley's book make his deacriptions very pleasantly intern- gible, and the magnitude of the scale on which the "Omahosses " conduct their affairs, and especially that of public education, strikes us strongly as we study these pictures of huge buildings and enormous "institutions." The Post-Office is a superb edifice, with a roof like the Louvre ; and the High School is a -complete palace of learning, 170 feet long and 80 feet wide, with a spire 185 feet from the ground, finely proportioned, and really beautiful. The city, which is the seat of a United States' District 'Court, derives much advantage from being a port ; as it has the privilege of importing goods in bond by rail and river, from all parts of the world, without paying tribute to the cities of the sea-
) board. We do not think work could be more consistently and thoroughly done than Mr. Curley's has been, and the immense amount of information which he acquired during his journeyings in the State of Nebraska is supplemented by the statements (,f persons who have lived long in the State, by the writings of well- informed individuals, and by carefully-collected statistics. He has examined into everything with the keenness and the exacti- tude of the detective of French fiction, and his book is a aeries of procis-verbaux which put us in possession of the whole ease. He bas even verified the maps, and in the case of any district which be has not heen.able thoroughly to explore, he gives us the state- ments of other writers. Among the most interesting and important of theae contributions to the book is ft chapter on Otoe County- & great agricultural, timber, and fruit-growing district--which contains much valuable information and advice on the subject of emigration. It all comes to this,—the emigrant must have "mode- rate means and ready resources,"—the men who have prospered in the absence of the first are few in number, though the author gives some striking instances ; and "Uncle Sam is rich enough To give us all a farm,"
is a persuasion which does not work practically.
We cannot do more than indicate the number and extent of the subjects on which Mr. Curley gives his readers the fullest possible information, but we must direct special attention to the facts which he has collected relative to public education in Omaha, and to the extravagance of the public-school expenditure, which he censures, we suspect, admiringly, though he adds that no town in England would covet the distinction of paying between 2.13 and 214 per annum for each pupil. The figures will be fotind at page 61; the above is the result. Here is a sketch of the scale of -education provided by this twenty-years—practically, ten-years- old city in the Far West for her rising generation :-- " The High-School bill of intellectual fare comprises a German- English preparatory course of one year, a Latin-English ditto of two years, a classical course of four years (Latin, Greek, higher mathe- matics, natural sciences, English composition, rhetoric, logic, litera- ture, political and social economy, mental and moral philosophy and the ethics of government, chemistry, physics, physiology, zoology, botany, geology, astronomy, mineralogy, history of civilisation, and international law); a Latin-English or a German-English course of four years, very similar to the classical course, languages excepted ; an English course of four years, almost equally ambitions; and a select course, which is very much at the option of students and parents. This, like the bill of fare of an American hotel, comprises too many dishes ; it is extremely difficult for the diner to choose wisely, and he or she runs great risk of destroying the power of mental digestion. The fact that it is entirely free adds somewhat to the danger. There is very properly no distinction of race or colour, and the irrepressible ' darkey ' is to be found in all grades."
There must be a great future for a State which educates its boys and girls equally on such a scale.
The statistical chapters on immigation to Nebraska are full of interest and sound sense. Like most, if not all, disinterested writers, Mr. Curley says, substantially, when his meaning is stripped of phrases, 'do not emigrate if you can get on at home,' and he recommends prudence and some fixed prospect of employ- ment as indispensable. Of course he is right. But for all that, dashing imprudence and adventurous desperation have been large factors in the prosperity of the newly-settled lands of the West, and have counted for something even in the wondrous tale of Nebraska.
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