Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/91

 A system of transportation, adjusted to the needs of the Pacific Northwest, can hardly be a counterpart of those developed for the older sections of the country on the opposite and less-folded side of the continent. The specific conclusions with regard to the supplementary functions and to other relations of the rail and the water routes found true throughout the East will probably need modification before being applied here. At any rate, the conditions in the Pacific Northwest that have to be taken into account for determining the features of the most economical and efficient system of transportation for this region are so striking and unique as to warrant a brief reference to them.

The highways over which the productions of the Pacific Northwest must be carried to reach the consumer lie on the Pacific in one direction, and stretch across the backbone of the continent in another. These opposite destinations for fairly equal proportions of its grain, lumber, fish, livestock, wool and fruit affect the features of the transportation system adapted to its needs and differentiate this system from that of the Middle West, whose products almost exclusively find their market in the direction of the Atlantic seaboard.

Again, the striking contrasts between the lay of the land in the Columbia basin and that of the basin of the Mississippi must, in the nature of things, exhibit themselves in contrasting systems of transportation when these have become fully adapted to their respective conditions. On the