38 wester:n" supremacy. 



6. A considerable portion of the 854,865 square miles 

 east of the Mississippi is not arable. In New England, 

 New York and Pennsylvania, there are 94,500 square 

 miles of unimproved lands. ^ It is a fair inference that in 

 the old states where land has long been in demand, so 

 much would not remain unimproved unless generally 

 incapable of improvement. Throughout the many 

 mountain ranges of the entire Appalachian system, there 

 is much waste land and more that is not arable. In the 

 absence of any exact data it would seem from the facts 

 just given, that there must be not less than 50,000 or 

 60,000 square miles of waste land east of the Mississippi, 

 and twice as much that is not fit for the plow. This 

 reduces the arable lands of the East to about 700,000 

 square miles as against 785,000 in the West, with the 

 probable eventual addition to the latter of one or two 

 hundred thousand more. For every acre in the East, 

 bad as well as good, there is another in the West capa- 

 ble of producing food ; and in addition, a timber area of 

 400,000 square miles, not including the magnificent tim- 

 ber lands of Alaska, which William H. Seward said 

 would one day make that territory the ship-yard of the 

 world. And besides all this, the West has grazing lands 

 50,000 square miles broader than the total area of all the 

 Southern States east of the Mississipi^i. In 1880 there 

 were in the West, 61,211,000 head of live stock, and those 

 vast plains are probably capable of sustaining several 

 times that number. The West, therefore, has 1,830,000 

 square miles of useful land (not including mineral lands) 

 against 800,000 in the East, more than twice as much. 



Nor have we finished our inventory of western wealth. 

 Its mineral resources are simply inexhaustible. The 

 precious metals have been found in most of the states 

 and territories of our Western Empire. From the dis- 

 covery of gold to June 80, 1881, California produced 



New England has 28,468 square miles not in farms. 41,500 unimproved. 

 New York " 10,402 " " " " " 20,000 



Pennsylvania " 13.952 " " " " " 21,00(1 



