After the battle of Mission Ridge, Gen. Gordon Granger rode along the lines of his victorious soldiers, whose courage and enthusiasm had carried them, without orders, up the blazing heights, and said, substantially: “Here you are, but how did you get here? You were ordered to take the line of works at the foot of the Ridge, and you have taken those on its summit! You ought to have known you couldn’t take this position! You are here in defiance of all military rules, of tactics, and of orders, and I am going to have every one of you court-martialed!” In very much the same spirit I say to you, people of Finney county and of the Southwest: “Here you are, in defiance of all predictions and hope! The prophets all said the western third of Kansas would never produce crops. Public sentiment agreed that this was a grazing country, unfit for general farming. Yet here you are, holding an agricultural fair, and exhibiting corn and wheat, oats and rye, potatoes and pumpkins, and everything else the farmers of any other section plant and harvest or gather. You have contemned the prophets! You have blotted the ‘Great American Desert’ from the map of the Continent! You have established gardens in the wilderness! You have confounded the scientists! And you should all be court-martialed!” Your triumph over the adverse forces of nature is as marvelous and complete as was that won at Mission Ridge, and, as a Kansan, I rejoice over and am proud of it. There is something splendid in the march of civilization into and over an unpeopled land—something grander, even, than the advance of a victorious army. It is better to build up than to destroy—better to redeem a desert than to make one. The impulse which sent millions of men into the field to defend the honor of our flag, will be celebrated, in song and story, as long as the world shall endure. The march of the armies of industry and peace across the plains, peopling their solitudes, conquering the wilderness, and forcing from a reluctant soil its fatness, is an achievement equally romantic and inspiring. And you, people of Western Kansas, are the heroes of this conquest—the leaders in this great victory of peace, no less renowned than those of war. I congratulate you on your unparalleled triumph; I come here to mingle my rejoicings with yours; to thank you sincerely and heartily for what you have done; and to express my confident belief that your success will be as permanent as it has been brilliant.