Page:Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition (1905).djvu/19

 yet stemmed the current of the Father of Waters, nor, indeed, of the Hudson; not a rod of railway had been laid in the United States nor had a telegraph pole been set up. The plains beyond St. Louis were in the keeping of the Indian and buffalo and the mountain region still beyond was almost a thing of the imagination. The great days of the mountain fur trade were to come—were, in truth, waiting for Lewis and Clark to open the way.

The Puget sound and the lower Columbia river regions were known only from the tales of the old sea-roving explorers and a few traders. There were then no Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Victoria, Everett, Astoria, nor Portland.

The vast empire of civilization, agriculture, mining, and commerce, as we know it, was then but a potentiality, and one, probably, largely unsuspected. In the mutations of time there has been evolved from the region explored by Lewis and Clark, in one century, a collection of States which, under the guidance of Providence, we hope will exert a benign and a controlling influence upon the