?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
(AMERICAN WEST -- NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD.) The Climate, Soil and Resources of the Yellowstone Valley,with Accurate Maps of the Yellowstone Country, the Transcontinental Route and Connections of the Northern Pacific Railroad and a Plat and Description of the Town of Glendive, at the Junction of the Railroad, with the Steamboat Navigation of the Yellowstone and Upper Missouri Rivers. 3 lithographed folding maps, [10 advertisement], 100, [8 advertisement] pages. 8vo, 9 1/4x6 inches, publishers printed pale green wrappers, minor wear but authentically handsome; maps with small closed tears. St. Paul, MN: The Pioneer Press, 1882
Scarce promotional pamphlet advertising guidance to prospective settlers of the late-nineteenth-century country in eastern Montana: the land and its rivers, climate, soil, information on cattle ranching, viability of crops, and of course how to acquire these lands made reachable by the newly-completed railroad lines.
"Mere theoretical speculation on the agricultural value of a new country is apt to be very wide of the mark, as is perfectly illustrated by the compelled changes of opinion in regard to very much of our great West, and especially the Northwest. Men come into a country which is new to them, with no knowledge of the peculiar methods and means by which nature there makes compensation for what they are accustomed to regard as necessities--with no standard of comparison except the country in which they were born or reared. The country is new, untried, different--novel in every aspect--and it is not strange that much should be at first put down as inhospitable and infertile which subsequent knowledge shows to be more kindly, salubrious and productive--richer in all ways--than the country which has been the ignorant standard of comparison... Such persons have gathered most of their information from the old school maps, which marked "Great American Desert" over all the country the sapient geographer knew nothing of. Filled with the idea that somewhere this "Great American Desert" must exist, because they so recall their boyish learning, and driven year by year, by the hard logic of facts, to move the eastern boundary of it westward, they have run it through Minnesota, Iowa, Dakota and Nebraska; and, because it will not further move for want of space, they say it must be Montana. But "the proof of the pudding lies in the eating thereof." So the mistaken assertions of these people are wholly overthrown by the occular evidence which many ranches and farms and gardens in the last couple of years have produced in crops and cattle" -- page 21/22.
