54 KANSAS AND THE COUNTRY BEYOND.

fested in this new and bustling place; yet there was much about it
that did not strike me favorably. To have a superabundance of
saloons, restaurants and billiard-tables, and not a single finished church
edifice or a commodious school-room, is not the way to begin a city.
There is a spirited daily paper published here by a Mr. Martin, a
Pennsylvanian; a gentleman who is probably doing more for Junction
City than any other man init. Of the peculiar building-stone found
here in exhaustless abundance, I have already spoken at length.

SOLOMON CITY.

This new city is situated at the confluence of the Solomon river and
the Smoky Hill, nearly forty miles west of Junction City. I did not
stop at it, and of its prospects I am unable to speak. If it can draw
to it the trade of the fine valley of the Solomon, it will be a prosper-
ous place. d

SALINA.

This is the place where I was flood-bound for a week, and of which
I have already spoken pretty fully. Being the centre and county
seat of a large and very fertile county, and near to the salt springs,
the gypsum beds, and other deposits of valuable minerals, its steady
prosperity is sure.

There are some minor places, and some newly laid-out towns, which
it is not necessary in this place to mention. These (spoken of in this
and the two preceding letters) are all the towns of any importance in
which I have been.

THE NEOSHO VALLEY.

This is the name of what is vlaimed to be the most fertile valley in
Kansas, and, next to that of the Kansas, the most extensive. The
Neosho river is a tributary of the Arkansas. It rises on the southern
slope of a ridge or swell of no great elevation, a few miles south of the
Smoky Hill, about the meridian of Fort Riley, and pursues a south-
eastern course until it reaches the neighborhood of the flourishing
town of Humboldt, one hundred miles south of Lawrence. Thence its
course is due south into the Indian territory and to the Arkansas.
Its length in the State of Kansas is not much less than two hundred
miles. The valley is wide. .

This valley is supposed to be the best wheat land in the United
States. Forty bushels to the acre is not unusual. A farmer at Car-
lisle, in Allen county, raised forty bushels per acre on a field of forty
acres. Allen county lies south of Lawrence. Mr. Ice, of Chase
county, which lies south of Fort Riley, raised in 1866 eight hundred
and twenty bushels of wheat on sixteen acres, being fifty-four and