GUIDEBOOK OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. 
PART A. THE NORTHERN PACIFIC ROUTE, WITH A SIDE 
TRIP TO YELLOWSTONE PARK. 
By Marius R. Campsey and others. 
INTRODUCTION. 
If his journey to the Pacific coast begins at one of the great cities 
on the Atlantic seaboard, the traveler, when he reaches St. Paul, the 
eastern terminus of the Northern Pacific Railway, will have gone 
nearly halfway across North America. He will have traversed or 
perhaps gone around the Appalachian Mountain region and then 
crossed the prairie States, which, in wealth and population, form in 
themselves an empire. 
St. Paul is in the prairie region, but the boundary between the 
prairies and the Great Plains is vague and undefined, and the tray- 
eler will at no place perceive the change from prairie to plain or from 
the East to the West. On leaving St. Paul he first passes across 
rolling prairies, interspersed with forests of pine and hardwood trees, 
and within a short distance these prairies give place to the vast tree- 
less plains which, stretching a thousand miles west of the Mississippi, 
rise almost imperceptibly to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. 
The annual rainfall diminishes in the same direction from 28 inches 
at St. Paul to only half that amount in central Montana, and the 
traveler, as he goes westward, will note more and more of the features 
that he has habitually associated with the West. Prairie dogs and 
jack rabbits are seen; one by one the flowers and shrubs of the Mis- 
Sissippi Valley disappear and are replaced by those of a semiarid 
country; trees grow only on the moist bottom lands along the streams; 
intensive cultivation is possible only in the valleys, though the up- 
lands are being brought into use by dry farming and are yielding 
fair crops of the more hardy grains. 
Throughout much of the region traversed the face of the country 
has been greatly modified by the vast ice sheets of the glacial period 
which covered the northern part of the continent and left immense 
deposits of loose material on the surface of hard rock in the northern 
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