CHAPTER ONE 

 THE LAND 



To the train of adventurers who came in the wake of Co' 

 lumbus, America was a barrier thrown across the route 

 to the fabulous Indies. To the early colonists who gained a 

 first foothold on the continent, America was the Atlantic sea' 

 board backed by an unknown and unknowable wilderness. To 

 men like Daniel Boone, Jim Bridger, and Kit Carson, America 

 was the wilderness, endless forests and plains. To Marcus 

 Whitman and those who followed him on the Oregon Trail, 

 America was two rich and living coastal lands bounding a 

 dead middle. To James G. Hill and the railroad builders, 

 America was a great central plain out of which would come 

 food for the whole world. For the industrialists who flourished 

 at the end of the last century, men like Rockefeller, Frick, Car- 

 negie, America was a vast storehouse of minerals waiting to be 

 used. To most Americans of today, this country is still either 

 a land of factories, or of cities, or of plains, or of farms, or of 

 forests, or of mines, depending simply on where they happen 

 to live. They are just beginning to realise that their America 

 is really no one of these things, but all of them fitted together 

 into a whole. This book is to show how this whole is made up 

 of many parts, delicately balanced, one depending on the other, 

 and why it is necessary to keep this balance. 



Think of the geography of America. East of the Mississippi 

 the land was not strange to the early colonists. There was 

 enough rainfall for the usual crops. The soil, a product of a 

 climate similar to that of Europe, was like that which they had 



