184 The National Geographic Magazine 



looking for some very desirable pre- 

 emption claim on which to begin farm- 

 ing. When the steamer finally stuck 

 in the mud he said to himself : " It is 

 right here that I want my 160 acres." 

 He filed his claim and farmed the land 

 till he sold it about ten years later for 

 $25,000 to be divided into lots for the 

 town of St. Peter which was rising at 

 the head of navigation. 



No great country, however extensive 

 its railroad facilities may be, can afford 

 to neglect its water highways. Not- 

 withstanding our river and harbor bills 

 and our Mississippi Commission we 

 know little as yet of the scientific de- 

 velopment of waterways for commercial 

 purposes as it is understood in all the 

 countries of northwestern and north- 

 central Europe where boats freighted 

 on the Vistula in Russia may reach, 

 through rivers and canals, all the lead- 

 ing ports of the Baltic and North Seas. 

 Increasing density of population and 

 towns and cities more thickly scattered 

 over our domain will impress us, as 

 Europe has been impressed, with the 

 absolute necessity of supplementing our 

 railroads with the fullest possible de- 

 velopment of our water routes. In the 

 past few years we have seen the Missis- 

 sippi transforming New Orleans into 

 one of the great wheat ports as well as 

 the greatest cotton port of the world. 

 We see the Ohio and the Mississippi 

 carrying coal, iron and lumber 2,000 

 miles at a cost very little in excess of 

 ocean freights ; and though the Erie 

 Canal, which provides the port of New 

 York with a continuous waterway to 

 Duluth is antiquated and inadequate, it 

 has made the Hudson River, with its 

 18,000,000 tons of freight a year, the 

 largest commerce carrier among the 

 rivers of America : it was the leading 

 factor in giving to New York a com- 

 mercial movement nearly equal to that 

 of London. We have witnessed the 

 development of our marine on the Great 

 Lakes where marvelously cheap freights 



have helped us to compete with the 

 world in iron and steel goods though 

 we carry most of our iron ore nearly 

 1,000 miles to the coke and limestone 

 required to smelt it. 



OUR TOPOGRAPHY FACILITATED RAIL- 

 ROAD DEVELOPMENT 



A country as vast as ours and with as 

 small a density of population could not 

 so early have attained its present devel- 

 opment if our enormous sj*stem of com- 

 munications had not afforded the lowest 

 land freight routes in the world. A 

 good topographic map shows us that the 

 topography of the country was very 

 favorable for the building of the vast 

 systems of railroads whose mileage, ex- 

 tending to the neighborhood of most of 

 our farms, would stretch nearly from the 

 earth to the moon. There are gateways 

 through our mountain ranges so that 

 none of them is a barrier to commerce. 

 We have no obstacle like the Pyrenees 

 which so completely walls France from 

 Spain that the land traffic between them 

 must be deflected from straight lines to 

 circumvent the extreme ends of the 

 mountains at the edge of the seas. The 

 comparatively level surface of our plains 

 and plateaus, the predominating easy 

 gradients and the mountain passes have 

 helped to cheapen railroad construction 

 and transportation so that commodities 

 may be cheaply moved. Argentina 

 raises its export wheat within fifty miles 

 of tidewater. We send our export wheat 

 1,000 miles to tidewater but the price 

 of freight has been so cheap that we are 

 able to compete with any nation in the 

 world in exporting this commodity. 



What a reservoir for future harvests 

 of breadstuff s is our hard wheat region 

 of Minnesota and the Dakotas, a part 

 of the central plain of North America 

 that is twice as large as Great Britain 

 and Ireland or as New York and New 

 England together, and larger than the 

 German Empire. These three states 

 are producing much more than one-half 



