Page:Don Coronado through Kansas.djvu/245

■280 SOD HOUSES IN KANSAS. couats of their customs, laws, wars, Idiigs, otc, and ' so hipfh a*<dass of books are contained in the libraries of this dust to dust past, that it far excels our own preseiit systein of printing on paper, for if a book was buried four or five thousand years as were the baked books of the ancients, there would be nothing to indicate its being a book. Again in the populous vicinity of Naples, and in that country where in the year A. D. 79 was situated the most powerful country in the world (Rome), and although in that year the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii were buried in lava and ashes, yet the awful calalnity was completely forgotten and there was no record of the town, and it was not till the year 1748 that the ruins of Pompeii were accidentally discover- ed. The streets of the disinterred Pompeii having been traversed, naturally causes interest therein. But last, and to the point, thirty years ago men erected houses, stables, chicken houses, water closets, smoke houses ajid fences aJl over the western part of Kansas, made by laying up the natural sod into walls, and mind you, they compared with the adobe houses of the Egyptians and Chaldeans, and as now used in Mexico, yet when the men abandoned their home- steads by reason of grasshoppers and drought the structures in a few years crumbled, and now you oould not possibly tell that the mounds they have Ixiade on the prairie were once the habitation of fami- ne, and this only takes ten or fifteen years to bring about. While on this subject, a very interesting theme (Jong the line just discussed is the experience of the