58 TRANSACTIONS OF THE [FEB. 9, 
can be run at so moderate an expense compared with other 
lines... . And so the Great Northern is building, dividing 
the great territory between the Northern Pacific and Canadian 
Pacific roads, from St. Paul on the east to Fairhaven, on Puget 
Sound, on the west ; and the surveys show a route not only the 
shortest by two hundred miles, but on which the average grade 
will be very much less than by any other transcontinental line, 
and the maximum grade about one-third of its most favorably 
situated competitor. . . 
The trip upon which I made the observations that I am to 
outline this evening was taken with a view of examining and 
reporting upon the resources of the country through which the 
Great Northern is to run, and I have selected two points which 
are of geological as well as economic interest for this evening’s 
talk. 
All along the main line, from St. Paul to Great Falls, towns 
and ranches and herders’ corrals are springing up with the usual 
Western push and promise, Great Falls itself being the most con- 
spicuous example. Six years ago there were a dozen houses at 
this point, scattered along the banks of the Missouri, and perhaps. 
the most stupendous and “available water power on the continent 
was only looked upon as one of nature’s curiosities. Land was: 
worth two dollars an acre. ‘To-day there is a city of about five 
thousand inhabitants, with electric railway, electric lights, sewers, 
good hotels, five banks, and all the elements of a commercial cen- 
tre. Over a million dollars are being expended in the erection of 
great smelting establishments, and a dam costing nearly a quar- 
ter of a million of dollars has been built to furnish a great water 
power for other manufacturing industries in process of devel- 
opment. 
Within about two miles of old Fort Assinniboine, the new line 
now building to the coast leaves the Great Falls branch and 
starts westward. About eighty miles northwest of Assinniboine 
are the Sweet Grass Hills, serving as the source of the Sage and 
Cottonwood creeks, and surrounded on three sides by the Milk 
River—the latter a considerable stream, which, rising in Ameri- 
can territory, flows north into the British possessions, and, after 
running some two hundred miles parallel with the border, returns 
to United States territory just east of the Sweet Grass country. 
On our maps the Sweet Grass Hills are represented as a range 
running east and west just south of the Canadian boundary, and 
as they are approached from the direction of Assinniboine this 
view seems to be justified; but on a nearer view they subdivide 
into three separate buttes, distant about thirty miles from the 
Great Northern extension, and locally known as the North, Mid- 
