“From these immense prairies may rise one great advantage to the United States, viz., the restriction of our population to certain limits, and thereby a continuation of the union. Our citizens, being so prone to rambling and extending themselves on the frontiers, will, through necessity, be constrained to limit their extent on the west to the borders of the Missouri and the Mississippi, while they leave the prairies, incapable of cultivation, to the wandering aborigines of the country.”[3] =The Great American Desert.= Another explorer, Major Long, who came in 1819 and 1820, likewise expressed the idea that most of the country was unfit for cultivation, and therefore uninhabitable by an agricultural people. He even went so far as to say the country bore a “resemblance to the deserts of Siberia.” Washington Irving, the great writer, said of this region: “It could be well named, the Great American Desert. It spreads forth into undulating and treeless plains and desolate sandy wastes, wearisome to the eye from their extent and monotony. It is a land where no man permanently abides, for at certain seasons of the year there is no food for the hunter or his steed.” [Illustration: AN INDIAN VILLAGE. The tribes that lived in permanent homes built lodges consisting of an embankment of earth topped with a row of poles brought together at the center and thatched with bark and grass.] The views of these men largely molded public opinion concerning the West. The country out of which has been carved such prosperous agricultural states as Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska was, a hundred years ago, known as the “Great American Desert,” and was so named on the maps of that time. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF AN INDIAN LODGE.]