In the early 20th century, a writer named Elbert Hubbard wrote a series of volumes titled Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, one of whom was James J. Hill. It may be in reference to these books that this lengthy 1928 booklet is titled A Little Journey Through the Lower Valley of the Rio Grande. The journey turns out to be not so little, and the booklet is made extra weighty by the fact that it has two covers: a slightly oversized outer cover plus an inner cover made from the same heavy green paper but cut to the slightly smaller but still respectable (7.3″x10.4″) size of the interior pages.
Click image to download a 34.4-MB PDF of this 72-page booklet.
Even after deducting these double covers, the booklet still has 64 pages, which is about twice too many. The text was written by Julia Cameron Montgomery (1872-1935), who was born in Alabama but lived most of her life in Texas. She previously wrote a 1913 book about Houston and the Rice Institute (now Rice University) and also wrote a short booklet about Texas’ grapefruit production.
Today’s booklet was supposed to attract farmers and other settlers to the Lower Rio Grande Valley. It contains about a dozen colorized photos whose focus is so soft that they don’t look believable. These are supplemented by dozens of black-and-white photos, most of which show building after bland building — schools, hotels, offices, train stations — that are meaningless to anyone who has never been there and were probably included mainly to show that Texans living on the border of Mexico inhabited more than just mud huts.
A photo is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but all of these photos didn’t stop Montgomery from writing thousands of words about the Lower Rio Grande Valley. If she is to be believed, any farmer who found land in the valley would quickly become rich.
Valley soils, for example, were perfect for asparagus, which grows nine inches a day, whose demand always exceeds the supply, and whose price is always good. Some lemon trees produce thousands of fruits a year and a person could survive on the income from just one acre of citrus trees. Yet the real cash crop was supposed to be cotton, which benefitted from the fact that laborers from across the border in Mexico were “undoubtedly the choice of races for cottonmill service,” which presumably means they didn’t cost much.
All in all, it just seems too hard a sell. If farming in the area was so successful, it seems likely that all suitable farm lands must already have been claimed, leaving only marginal lands for newcomers. If land was available, I suspect it wasn’t good enough to justify someone leaving wherever they were currently located.
Two decades after this booklet was published, a Missouri Pacific timetable bragged that “the world’s best grapefruit” were still being grown in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. That may have been true, but I suspect farmers who were attracted to the region by this booklet had a pretty difficult time in the 1930s.