The advantage to the farmer of rainless harvesting months is obvious.  The wheat is all harvested by headers, leaving the straw on the ground for its enrichment.  Thus binding, hauling, and sacking are largely dispensed with.  The grain, when threshed, is piled on the ground in jute sacks, saving the expense of granaries and hauling to and from them.  These jute sacks cost for each bushel of grain about 3 cents, which is far less than farmers elsewhere are subjected to in hauling their grain to and from granaries and through a system of elevators until it reaches shipboard.

Here, as well as in Western Washington, most vegetables grow to an enormous size, and are of superior quality when compared with the same varieties grown in the East.  Those kinds that require much heat, as melons, tobacco, peppers, egg-plants, etc., grow to great perfection.  The root crops—­beets, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, turnips, etc.—­yield prodigiously on the fertile bottom-land soils, without much care besides ordinary cultivation.  The table beet soon gets too large for the dinner-pot.  It is nothing unusual for a garden beet to weigh ten pounds, and they often grow to eighteen or twenty pounds’ weight.  Mangel wurzel, the stock beet, sometimes grows to forty and fifty pounds’ weight, if given room and proper cultivation.  They may easily be made to produce twenty-five tons per acre on good soil.  All other vegetables, such as parsnips, carrots, peas, beans, tomatoes, onions, cabbages, celery, and cauliflower, are perfectly at home on every farm of Eastern Washington.  Market gardening is becoming quite an important pursuit, and holds out particularly high inducements to the farmer, because of the superb market now afforded by the non-producing mineral and timber regions, easily accessible in this and adjacent Territories.

There are over 2,000 square miles of arable land in this magnificent region, and there has never been a crop failure since its settlement.  Outside of Government lands prices range at from $4 to $10 per acre for unimproved, and from $12 to $20 for improved lands.

[Illustration:  Horse tail falls, ore.  On the Union Pacific Ry.]

Along the line of Union Pacific in this grand new empire will be found many energetic, thriving young towns, all possessing those social and educational facilities which are now a part of every Western village.  Pendleton, on the main line, is a wide-awake, bustling young city, situated in a fine agricultural district.  Walla Walla, Athena, Weston, Waitsburg, Dayton, Pullman, Garfield, Latah, Tekoa, Colfax, Moscow, Farmington, and Rockford are all thriving towns, and are already good distributing centers.  The last-named town enjoys the advantage of being in the center of a fine lumber district, and within a circuit of five miles from Rockford there are ten saw-mills, besides an inexhaustible supply of mica.  Crossing the border into Idaho, rich silver and lead mines are found along the Coeur d’Alene River.