Our National Defense: The Patriotism of PeaceMaxwell, George Hebard
History
Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace
Maxwell, George Hebard
United States -- Defenses
The period of the year when the men could best be spared from their homes
for an interval of military training would be in the winter time. It would
be found advisable, in training the men of the Colorado River Valley for
military service, to move them once each year under military discipline to
an encampment for field maneuvers at some point in Nevada far enough to
the North to bring them within range of the cold winter climate to be found
in many of the valleys of Nevada. The best possible training these men
could have would be to march them with a full military equipment from the
Colorado River Valley to this winter training ground, and then march them
back again to their homes, once every year. That would be physical service
that would qualify them for the hardest kind of long distance marching that
they might be called upon to do in any event of actual warfare.
The stimulating effect of the cold winter climate of Nevada on men from the
hot climate of the Colorado River Valley would be of immense physical
advantage to them, besides hardening them to campaigning in a cold country,
as they would be hardened already by their home environment to campaigning
in a hot country. A military road should be constructed for such use all
the way from Yuma to Central Nevada, and then extended north to a point
where it would connect with an east and west national highway leading from
Salt Lake City to Reno, Sacramento, and San Francisco.
There are other details which should be worked out to complete the
comprehensive plan for the establishment and maintenance of such an
adequate and efficient citizen soldiery. The most important of these would
be the establishment of Institutions for Instruction--Homecroft
Institutes--which would train not only the children but the parents as
well, in every community subject to this system, in everything relating to
the high type of land cultivation that would be necessary to the success of
the plan. Coöperative methods in the distribution and sale of their surplus
products should also be adopted.
With careful study of all the questions involved relating to physical and
mental stamina and strength and its development in that climate, a racial
type could be developed with as much physical endurance as that of the
Mojave Indians who have lived for centuries in that country. In the old
days, before there were railroads or telegraph lines, their couriers would
run for sixty miles without water over the desert. They have powers of
endurance exceeded probably by no other living race of men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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