The Mankato free press. [volume] (Mankato, Blue Earth County, Minn.) 1879-1924, 1892-06-10
"OUR MAGNIFICENT WEST"

What bothers the foreigner on his
visit to this country is the illimitable
space which confronts him at every
turn. He comes here prepared to find
a great country but it seems to him
that he must be flying into never end
less space as he is whirled over our
mountains through our valleys and
across our broad prairies in elegantrail-
way trains. And it is great country,
even beyond the comprehension of
many who have not given the question
much thought. Speaking of it in an
article in LippincOtt's Magazine for
May, Ex-senator ingalls, says:
The Mississippi River has 600 afflu-
ents, whose courses are marked upon
the map, and drainage area of l. PSI
545 square miles.
The traveller embarking upon
steamboat can sail from PittSburg,
1900 miles, to Fort Benton, Mon, and
from Minneapolis, 2,220 miles, to port
Eads, on the Gulf Of Mexico. Should
he choose to extend his voyage to the
head of navigation upon it's forty-five
navigable tributaries, his outward
Journey would exceed 10000 miles,
through twenty-three States and Ter
ritories of the Union.
This stupendous water system is
equivalent to land locked harbor, an
estuary, or an arm of the sea, penetra-
ting into the North American cOnti-
nent farther than from New York to
Liverpool, with coast line of $4,000
miles, having hundreds of populOus
towns and cities and innumerable
ports and Ravens from which the agri-
cultural and manufactured products
of one-third of the arabic surface Of
the United States can be shipped to
all parts of the globe.
The territory which it drains is con-
siderably larger than Central Europe.
From unsurveyed wilderness, in less
than a century, twenty-one States
have been admitted into the Union,
having an area Of eight hundred mil
lion acres, population of more than
thirty-five millions, and wealth be-
yond measurment or computation.
Sparsely inhabited, with rude and I'M
scientific methods, their resource.
hardly touched, the States of the
Mississippi Valley last year produced
more than three-quarters of the sugar,
coal, corn, iron, oats, wheat, cotton,
tobacco, lead, hay, timber, wool. pork,
beef, horses and mules of the entire
country, together with a large frac-
ton of it's gold and silver. Their in
ternal commerce is already greater
than all the foreign commerce OF the
combined nations of the earth.
China supports four hundred mill.
ion people upon an area smaller ano
less fertile.
The delta of the Mississippi, below
its junction with the Ohio, is richer
than the Nile or the Rhine, exceeds
the combined area Of Holland and
Egypt, and is destined under the slim
illus of free-labor and the incentives
of self government to build a fabric Of
society more opulent and enduring
Add to this the ineXhaustible alluvior
of the streams above, and the fertile
prairies from which they descend, ant
the arithmetic of the past has no 10
garithms with which to compute
the problems of the economic an(
commercial future of the West. L
will be predominant in the develop
ment, not of this country alone, but
of the hemisphere. and will give di
rection to the destinies of the human
race.
We stand in the vestibule. w
have not entered the temple.