Copyright 1907, by Opportunities of To-day Publishing Company.

IRILE with the strength of a new birth Nevada has awakened from her years of slumber, and refreshed by the rest she has enjoyed, the grand old sage brush state has fallen into a gigantic stride in this new epoch of gold production. With a suddenness that adds to the dramatic side of the situation, the former

premier of the silver producers has brushed aside Colorado and California and is now the acknowledged leader. This land of sun-scorched desert expanse studded with range upon range of ash-gray lava peak has awakened to an era of golden prosperity for which her former condition was but a silver setting. The jewel of her dawning splendor was mined amid heat-cursed, scoriac desert wastes; and the mining was at the cost of human life and human suffering. The tale of the new Nevada reads like a page from romance -a romance where comedy and tragedy, poverty and affluence, apathy and passion, greed and generosity, curiously intermingle. Old camps have quickened into life beneath the impetus of the state's rejuvenation and again are factors. The hum of mining industry has broken the silence of their desolation, and the shrill shriek of the mine whistle is heard in place of the staccato yelp of the coyote. Emerging triumphant from the ruins of their former greatness, these monuments of Nevada's silver age again pulsate with human life and human endeavor; and properties once abandoned are giving again of their treasure store to the world.

Veteran of the Comstock and tenderfoot of yesterday tramp shoulder to shoulder in the march of progress, each is working out his destiny. Drones in the industrial hive are few and soon are relegated to the oblivion of the "has been." Every man is measured by the standard of his deeds; for in this land of promise, action is the chief requisite to success. If he fails in the running, a helping hand is at his elbow, and a grubstake his for the asking.

The aristocracy of Nevada is the aristocracy of labor, and its doors stand hospitably open to the workers of the world. Preeminence comes alone to him who toils, and the leaders are those who have prospered by individual effort. Each person moves upon the broad plain of equality and manhood, and solely on himself depends success or failure. The prize for which they labor is well worth while, for the winning includes that for which men most strivewealth and happiness.

Builders are these sturdy Nevadans, hewing out an empire along the border line of civilization. Coincident with their building, a turgid stream of gold is flowing from the waste places of earth into the main channel of trade. Not every builder will reap the full measure of his effort, but at the end "something accomplished, something done," will have earned his right to repose. History makers are these stalwarts of the desert dunes, writing the record of their self-denial and achievement along frowning hillsides, that men may see and read; tracing the story of their purpose amid arid wastes that become fecundate and blossom beneath their impelling touch. Optimists are these denizens of the wilderness, confident with the consciousness of effort well directed. Sure of themselves and of each other, and imbued with the spirit of the Great Outdoors which makes all men akin. No man so lowly as to be beneath their consideration, and none so high they cannot call him friend.

These are the pioneers who are blazing new trails across sunscorched sands and snow-capped mountain heights, that less venture

some feet may follow in their wake; who are establishing new stations along the highway of civilization, and are cultivating and making fruitful a desert land that a coming generation may garner where they have sown. Courageous pilots upon the uncharted sea of fortune, undaunted by adversity, unspoiled by success, they will press on, and on, and on, and on, until they reach that peaceful anchorage of perfect content. They are guiding their argosies adown the great, white dust rivers to the land of the golden fleece. Sometimes a little heap of whitened bones marks the shipwreck of some unknown, adventurous Jason.

Beneath the resounding tramp of the vanguard of progress, the grim old desert has aroused from lethargy and is shaking off the dust of the centuries. The eternal hills, which for æons past have kept silent vigil over Nature's treasure cache, have been forced to reveal its hiding-place to insistent man. The once somnolent plain, shimmering drowsily in the summer heat, is now spanned by thin bands of steel and seamed with gray-brown roadwaysarteries leading to the pulsating heart of a reclaimed wild.

Now and again their sinuous lengths are dotted with the crude habitat of the prospector, and anon with the incongruous architecture of a new mining community. Infant prodigies these latter, all less than a decade old, but several the abiding-place of 10,000 hustling, striving, gold-seeking humans. To-day, as far as the eye can see across the desolation, may be naught to break the dull monotony of endlessly recurring scoriac butte and alkali distance; to-morrow the mad rush to a new El Dorado may be on and the perspective filled by a tented city which has sprung into existence over night.

With the rejuvenation of the state have come the modern and material things incidental thereto, and the pushing aside of the obsolete and the immaterial. Hoisting plants are superseding the old hand windlass at the mines; the suck and throb of air drills supplant the rhythmical chink, chink of double-jack on drill head; up-to-date milling plants are taking the place of the primitive arastras; the mellow glow of the miner's candle becomes fainter and fainter in the brash glare of electrically lighted drifts and cross-cuts.

Business blocks of stone and wood top the lowly dugout and crude shack of the prospector, looking down upon them with an air of superiority and elbowing them into the trail as though annoyed at their nearness; comfortably appointed clubs occupy the place in popular favor once held by gambling-house and saloon; high-class restaurants cater with equal facility to the pampered taste of the epicure or the more democratic appetite of the desert nomad. The primal and the modern are so closely allied here on the desert that neither is an anachronism, but in contradistinction each is a very important factor in the great plan for its redemption.

The Concord stagecoach of the early days of Virginia City, Aurora, Bodie, and other camps of Nevada's silver age is still in commission, and plies daily between such camps as are yet unsupplied with railroad facilities. As the "Hank Monk" of the state's golden era guides his sweating, dust-coated steeds across alkali whitened. plains and over scoriac hillcrest, he and his outfit blend with equal fitness into the perspective of past and present. Not even the picturesque figure of the road-agent is wanting, for on occasion the passengers are thrilled with that deliciously creepy sensation along the corrugations of the vertebræ coincident with the command. "hands up!" And yet no incongruity is presented when, with hoarse toot of horn and noxious smell, the automobile of some mining millionaire dashes past in nebula of dust.

Weaving in and out adown the windings of sun-parched trails, the mule skinners pilot their precious cargoes to mill or railway; a thin, brown line of toilers, men and mules, covered in h thick with the acrid, choking powder wafted upward by the burden of their endeavor. Twelve, eighteen, twenty-mule teams hauling the necessities of life to a striving populace afar back in the hills, the heavily laden wagon and trailers with accompaniment of laboring animals suggesting, by their heaving, sinuous length, the thought that some antediluvian reptile, aroused from the sleep of ages by the tramp. of the fortune-hunter, was seeking escape from the hurry and bustle of it all in flight.

In the foreground, silhouetted against the horizon from the apex of a distant hilltop, the prospector and his packtrain plod their erratic course. Across the expanse of sand dune and crag the raucous whistle of a locomotive reaches his ear, the challenge of the modern to the primitive. Stopping at the sound and shading his eyes with sun-browned hand, he gazes afar to where the Nevada Express hastens southward, punctuating the slow lapse of centuries with the exclamation points of minutes gained in the race against time. Standing thus, surrounded by his burros, he and his outfit. typify much that has been and is conducive to the advancement and prosperity of the commonwealth.

The greatest of Nevada's resources is its mineral wealth. Forty years ago the Comstock lode was first offered to the world as an earnest of the state's mineral promise. To-day, Tonopah, Goldfield, Searchlight, Bullfrog, Manhattan, Fairview, and Round Mountain are redeeming in gold the pledges to the future made by Virginia City, Bodie, Aurora, and the remainder of the old time silver camps. The riches of the Comstock have sustained the credit of a government in time of war and financial stress; have built railways across a continent; have laid transatlantic and transpacific cables; have constructed telegraph systems. The treasures of a later day have aroused a state from the inertia of twenty-five years' decadence; have vitalized latent resources; have populated a desert waste; have made good the promise of forty years' standing.

Nevada's awakening dates from that eventful May day in 1900, when J. L. (Jim) Butler, prospector and desert nomad, located the Mizpah claim near the site of the present town of Tonopah. At that time stretching away on either side was naught but a drear expanse of desolation, over which the cloud-shrouded summit of Mount Oddie brooded in isolated grandeur. Ten thousand people are now foregathered beneath the shadow of that landmark, and Butler is a millionaire. The gross valuation of Tonopah ores per month is upwards of $2,000,000 and this in the face of unfavorable discrimination on the part of the smelter people. That Tonopah is a permanent camp is already well established, as is shown by the fact that Charles M. Schwab, United States Senator Clark, and other eastern capitalists have invested in and are reaping rich reward from its mines.

In the fall of 1902, a discovery of gold was made twenty-three miles south of Tonopah on what is now known as Sandstorm ridge. The announcement of the find in Tonopah resulted in one of the greatest stampedes recorded in the history of mining, and in the birth of Goldfield. The winter of 1903-04 heralded the discovery of the now celebrated Combination, January, and Florence bonanzas. In January 1905, Goldfield had a population of 12,000 and at present the population is in excess of that figure. Goldfield ranks easily first in the list of Nevada's municipalities - not excepting Renoand there seems little question but what it is destined to be the metropolis of a territory almost as large as the whole of New England; an area which, up to 1903, was almost totally devoid of inhabitants. Many of the larger of Goldfield mines are well down into the sulphide zone, where veins are showing well defined and are holding their precious metal values.

On August 10, 1904, the Bullfrog district was first called to the attention of the mining world and the rush to the new "diggins" that followed almost equaled that to Goldfield. Three tented cities Bullfrog, Rhyolite, and Beatty - sprang up amid the mesquite and sagebrush chaparral almost in a night. During the winter of 1904-5, the desert literally swarmed with people, traversing unfrequented trails and traveling in every conceivable sort of manner. Within a period of ninety days from "birth," Bullfrog had an electric light plant, an ice plant, a hotel, and a water system, the material for which was freighted from Tonopah and Goldfield at enormous expense. Less than two years ago, a prospector lost his way on the desert near the California line, and during the ensuing delirium, caused by want of water and the excessive heat, wandered at random until death mercifully ended his suffering. His body was found on the site of the present town of Bullfrog. There are estimated to be 8,000 people in the Bullfrog district to-day. The camp is located about 80 miles southeast of Goldfield. Schwab, Newhouse, the Guggenheims, and other mining and industrial magnates are interested in the development of Bullfrog mines.

Searchlight, away down in the extreme southern point of the state, is the older of the newer mining centers of Nevada. The mines of that section were yelding high-grade gold values several

years prior to the discovery of the precious metal at Tonopah and Goldfield. They passed quickly into the possession of men of capital, however, and their transit was almost unnoticed. With the advent of the railroad the possibilities of the Searchlight country have been called to the attention of the miner, and as a result the section is becoming populated rapidly.

June 24, 1905, Jack Humphrey drove his stakes and posted his notice on the April Fool lode, the first claim located in what is now called the Manhattan Mining district. Subsequently, a number of other locations were made. In August, rumors began to circulate in Goldfield and Tonopah of a section rich in gold values located beyond the San Antonio desert, some 50 miles north of Tonopah. That fall prospectors arrived in Goldfield and Tonopah with free gold specimens of great value and beauty which they stated came from well to the north. The winter of 1905-6 witnessed the Manhattan stampede, in comparison with which all other Nevada gold excitements of recent years pale into insignificance. Across a snow-covered, dreary waste, wind swept and treeless, in the teeth of a biting blast which whipped icy spear-points from the plain and flung them venomously in the face of the traveler, a heterogeneous phalanx fared forth from Goldfield and Tonopah, eager with the gold lust which heeds no obstacle and knows no danger. Within forty-eight hours after the first rush Manhattan had a population of 1,000. The following July the population was variously estimated at from 2,500 to 3,500. High-grade gold values pertain throughout an extensive area, but it is in the enormous deposits of highclass milling ores that the great proportion of the future wealth of the district is secreted.

Following closely in the wake of the rush to Manhattan, came the announcement of the discovery of high-grade gold and silver bearing ledges at Fairview in Churchill county. A stampede of less spectacular interest and proportions ensued and by the latter part of February, in the neighborhood of 500 intrepid gold seekers had pitched their tents on the site of what is now a town of 1,500 inhabitants. Fairview presents promise of becoming one of the big bonanza camps of the state, as is shown by the fact that within a few months from the date of original discovery the first shipment from the camp was made. The ore was mined on the estate of the Nevada Hills Company and the consignment consisted of thirtytwo tons which was settled for by the smelter at $209 per ton.

Round Mountain, the latest addition to the Nevada constellation of gold camps, stands without rival in the beauty, uniqueness, and value of its gold-bearing ores. Clinkers of almost pure gold have been mined in several of the properties, and two shipments sent out which returned values of from $14 to $16 per pound. It was on the property of the Round Mountain Antelope Company that a badger dug his way to a couch of gold through six feet of goldencrusted earth. The specimen taken from the warren of this ground burrowing sybarite is composed of a slab of limestone about 12 x 16 inches, the surface of which is plastered over with gold in much the same manner as a mason spreads mortar with a trowel. Louis D. Gordon, the discoverer of the camp, has amassed a fortune from ore shipments and the sale of mining properties, and his good luck is but a reflection of that enjoyed by many others who are engaged in mining in the Round Mountain section.

A gold camp of promise has been established at Ollinghouse, and the town of Ely is the center of a copper yielding section of great value. The Guggenheims are largely interested in the latter camp and are erecting a 2,500-ton smelter there for the treatment of the copper ores of that section.

Overflow migrations from the newer Nevada camps are pouring into the old and long abandoned districts of Buena Vista, Jefferson Canyon, Silver Peak, Lida, State Line, Palmetto, and Tule Canon. These veterans of the desert are revivifying under the infusion of new blood and again keeping step in the march of mining progress. The new Nevada is great, not alone in its minerals, but in its agricultural resources as well. The Truckee-Carson irrigation project, the first of the government's great reclamation plans to approach completion, has for its object the redemption of three hundred and fifty thousand acres of desert and their metamorphosis into fertile farms. From Lake Tahoe, nestling amid the snowcrowned Sierras, the Truckee River winds its way down into Western Nevada. Below Reno its waters are diverted through a canal into the Carson River, to be utilized for the irrigating of the Carson Sink, whose broad expanse needs but the assuaging of its thirst to change from sterility into one of the richest farming districts of the world.

The call of the awakened Nevada has penetrated afar. The witchery of its insistence has reached the ears of men from every class and clime. Lured by the magic spell of its tale of gold and adventure, the advance guard of a mighty host has penetrated the fastness of what had been considered a God-forsaken land. The thousands who have already taken up their abode in a former wilderness are but as grains of sand upon the bosom of its broad

expanse.

In Nevada, there is wealth and elbow-room for all.

Copyright 1997, by Opportunities of To-day Publishing Company.

HE railroad has been the great opportunitymaker of America. The three forces in the nation's environment which have exerted the most potent influence upon its development and progress have been the natural resources of the country, its form of government, and the railroad.

The patriotic American never tires of boasting of the blessings nature with a lavish hand has bestowed upon the land. He never wearies of contending that the form of government under which he lives is the best on earth. And the same average patriotic American never tires of pitching into the railroads as a chief cause of every political, social, or economic evil that afflicts the country.

There is much truth in many of the allegations made against American railroads. But the abuses for which they have been justly held responsible, like the blessings which they have been enabled to confer, have been due largely to the conditions under which they have come into existence and grown to their present magnitude. More general recognition of this fact is desirable, both to vindicate the public spirit and genius of the great men who have created the American system of rail transportation, and to secure a public sentiment more rational and fairer to the railroads than that which often has prevailed.

The railways of America have been built up under peculiar conditions. Europe was already densely populated when steam was adopted as a motive power for locomotion. It had a large and extensive traffic, passenger and freight, and numerous facilities good roads, canals, rivers which had been navigated for centuries for handling it. The railroad, consequently, was constructed in Europe merely as an additional facility for handling traffic which already existed.

When railway construction began in the United States, the vastly greater part of the country was entirely unsettled, and the part which was settled was but sparely populated. A few small canals had been built in the East, the federal and state governments had taken some steps toward securing the construction of highways on a large scale, but even between the oldest and most thickly populated portions of the land the facilities of transportation were utterly inadequate and the traffic was extremely small. The people themselves grew and made all they could of the commodities they consumed. What they could not grow in their fields or make in their homes they imported from Europe.

Built through sparsely settled communities and often into almost trackless wildernesses, the railways of America, if they were to exist and prosper, had of necessity to become not merely carriers of traffic, like those of Europe, but also creators of it. The waste places along their lines had to be settled with people. The people had to be aided in developing to perfection the arts of production, and markets had to be built up in which their products could be sold. This was true of all the railroads of the United States. It was especially true of those of the West.

How well the transportation companies have performed the task conditions imposed upon them, the wonderful rapidity of the country's development attests. The amazing material progress made has been due in very large measure to the enterprise, foresight, and energy of the great captains of American transportation.

In exerting themselves to promote the development of the country, railroad men have not been inspired by disinterested motives. They have created traffic in order to reap profit from handling it. But the results to others have been the same

as if the railroads' objects had

been purely philanthropic.

In creating traffic, they

have been creating op

portunities and wealth

for all the millions who have settled along

their lines, and besides for all those who buy

from or sell to those millions. Greatly as the railroads have profited by their own enterprise, others have in the aggregate profited vastly

more.

The railways' work of developing the territory tributary to their lines falls under two heads. First, the country has got to be settled. There must be people to produce and consume commodities before there can be traffic. The settlement of the country is the work of the "colonization" or "immigration" division of the passenger department. Second, the people must be instructed and aided in utilizing the natural resources of the country to the best advantage. The need for this work has been especially felt by the railroads since the practical exhaustion, about fifteen years ago, of the supply of free land in the rain belt, and since at about the same time the United States began rapidly to become less of an agricultural and more of an industrial nation. One result of these changes has been the creation by many railroads, especially in the West, of "Industrial Departments" presided over by "commissioners," who are in a very special sense creators of traffic. Their duties every day grow more important, and their rank in the official hierarchy is consequently becoming rapidly higher.

The railways expend in the work of colonization and in industrial development-in opening up opportunities for others in order that they may themselves gain by the resulting traffic-millions of dollars annually; and no moncy expended in this country is laid out more public spiritedly, more wisely and effectively.

Colonization in one form or another is as old as the railroad business in America. The work, however, has been conducted on the grandest scale since the Civil War period and by the roads west of Chicago. Middle aged persons have a vivid recollection of the wonderfully successful campaigns carried on in the 70's and 80's for the settlement of Kansas and Nebraska. No less remarkable and successful in its way has been the more recent campaign for the settlement of Oklahoma.

To secure settlers along their lines, the roads have used three methods, making low rates, personal solicitation, and advertising. Never have these methods been employed so skillfully and effectively as they are now, for the settlement of the Northwest and Southwest. Throughout the West during the proper season of each year there are run on the first and third Tuesdays of each month from the central states westward" home-seekers' excursions." The round trip rates for these excursions vary from one fare and $2.00 downward to $25.00 from Chicago to the Gulf coast of Texas. Until recently there was in effect a colonist rate of $33.00 from Chicago to San Francisco. This is but 1.3 cents per mile for traveling over railroads that cost as much to construct as any others in America, and over which the regular local rates are from 3 to 6 cents per mile. Hundreds of thousands of people journey to the "new" parts of the country on these extremely low rates, many finding homes there. A single big western system recently in one day sold about 40,000 "home-seekers' tickets."

Every large western railroad has traveling passenger agents scattered through the central and eastern states, whose chief duty it is to induce individuals and parties to travel westward, to locate along the lines of the railway by which the agents are employed. James J. Hill has secured much of the foreign population along his lines, by sending agents to Europe to induce immigrants to buy tickets direct to the American Northwest, and Mr. John Sebastian, passenger traffic manager of the Rock Island-Frisco system, recently spent three months in Europe working out plans for inducing a high class of immigrants to locate along his railways' lines in the Southwest. The western railways have carried on their books about 50,000 land and immigrant agents scattered all over the West who were not in the regular employ of any road, but received

free transportation when they desired to conduct a party of home-seekers to some point on the line issuing it. The new rate law makes "land and immigration" transportation illegal and thereby destroys an agency which has contributed largely to the upbuilding of the country.

But in order to secure the maximum of traffic it is not enough merely to get people located along the line. They must be taught and aided to make the best possible use of the available natural resources. This is the task of the industrial department. The president of one of the great western systems recently declared this task destined to become the most important work of the railroad. That the importance attached to it by railway officials is rapidly increasing is shown by the character of the men now being selected as industrial commissioners and the salaries they are being paid. Mr. C. R. Richards, industrial commissioner of the Southern Railroad, it is understood, receives $10,000 a year, and several other commissioners are, in the matter of salary, close upon if not even with him. Mr. W. H. Manss, of the Burlington, one of the younger men in the service, is an "A. M." of Wittenberg College. He took a post-graduate course of two years at Yale, and spent three months at Oxford, and two years and a half in Berlin University, making special studies of organic chemistry, history, and economics. This is the type of men the railroads are getting for a work which requires not only native capacity but acquired knowledge.

The office of the industrial commissioner is a museum containing exhibits of the agricultural products grown and the minerals discovered along his line. The number and variety of these exhibits illustrate the scope of his labors.

The most important part of the work of the commissioner up to the present time has been that of stimulating and aiding farmers to increase the quantity and value of their productions. With this object six of the western roads, the Burlington, Rock Island, Illinois Central, Chicago Great Western, Northwestern, and Missouri Pacific, have every year for years, after harvest, sent over their lines "seed and soil" trains. With the trains go expert lecturers on agricultural subjects furnished by the various state agricultural societies and the National Department of Agriculture. The places where stops will be made are widely advertised, and the farmers flock in from miles around to listen to the gospel of good farming, to see the exhibits the train bears of corn, wheat, etc., which have been raised from good seed, and by the employment of scientific methods; and to get the free literature which is distributed broadcast.

$15 per acre. Similar

illustrations showing the ad

vantages that have been derived from the

planting of crops suited to the soil and climate could be cited from all parts of the West and South. Diffusion of knowledge of the adaptation of alfalfa to the arid West and rice to large portions of the Southwest, for example, has enriched thousands of men who otherwise in comparative poverty would have continued for years, or permanently, to cultivate unprofitably crops which do well enough in some parts of the country, but are unsuited to others.

In a large portion of the West the rainfall is inadequate to the growth of crops of any kind. Here the railroads began encouraging irrigation long before the government took the work in hand. They interested capital in irrigation projects, giving unlimited quantities of free transportation, and hauling for nothing thousands of tons of materials in order to encourage the work. When ditches have been dug either by the government or by private enterprise, branch lines speedily have been built to give the farmers an outlet for their crops. Seven million acres of land which have been redeemed by irrigation along the lines of a single western system and chiefly at its instance, are now affording homes for thousands of prosperous farmers.

A good example of what has been going on throughout the West is afforded by what has been accomplished in the Big Horn valley in Wyoming. A great deal of irrigation work has been done in this valley by both the government and by private capital, the latter having been interested in the work mainly by the Burlington railroad. In order to furnish an outlet for the crops of the Big Horn, this road recently built a line from Frannie to Worland, a distance of 91 miles. When the irrigation work was begun all the land was practically worthless except for range purposes. Now it is estimated that 2,000,000 acres of it will afford farms for 300,000 people and that with the railroad facilities it possesses it in four years will be worth $120,000,000.

Largely through the work of the Santa Fe a remarkable transformation has been wrought in the Arkansas valley in Kansas and