The Desert Bloom of Ainsworth

Probably the most forlorn, hopeless-looking place for the agriculturist on the whole line of the railroad is Ainsworth, on the Snake River, in the southeastern part of Washington Territory. The town is an unthrifty collection of sun-tinted shanties. The population largely consists of strangers, roughs, and a few Chinese. The streets are a mixture of dust and sand, ankle-deep except where they are paved with discarded cards and broken whisky bottles. In every direction from the little settlement stretch for miles dreary plains of the same mixture of dust and sand, covered with sage brush. Everything is dry except the river that runs past the town. It was the last day of September when we were in Ainsworth. There had not been a drop of rain since the beginning of May.

A year or two ago it occurred to a German blacksmith named Schunemann, who found it hard to buy raw crops, to plant. 'What did people say?' remarked Schunemann, cutting a watermelon as large as is often sold in Washington Market. 'They said I was a d—d fool.' Out of the sand, stripped of brush, Mr. Schunemann has raised wheat—forty bushels to the acre—or three times the average yield of the whole country. He has raised oats, barley, millet and rye, all of excellent quality. He exhibits pumpkins, squashes, beets, carrots and potatoes, these vegetables being larger and fuller than their kinds we are accustomed to see. His melons are first-rate in flavor. Mr. Schunemann believes that he can add grapes to the long list of products which he cultivates with profit. He dug a well and struck water at twenty-eight feet. He does not irrigate his land, so I asked, 'Where does the moisture come from?' 'I don't know,' said he, 'I think it comes up on the roots from under ground.' All this has been done in almost rainless air, on parallel forty-six, without artificial irrigation, and on soil which the neediest emigrants had looked on with scorn.