Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/408

Rh for the rest, that here the subject is not exactly asmall thing.

Mr. Allen, the Senator of Missouri, from whose writings on the Trade and Navigation of the Mississippi-valley in the year 1850, I have extracted the above, proceeds to give the statistics of the various Mississippi States, and the trade and increase of their cities, a perfectly practical and statistical treatise, but which produces a certain poetical impression, not only by the wealth of the products which he enumerates, but also by the almost fairy-tale-like increase of cultivation and population of cities, and traffic on the rivers, the wealth of the whole of this region.

The senator sent to Congress by Missouri, Colonel Benton, as well as Mr. Allen, who is eminently a practical man, becomes a poet when he glances at this subject, and exclaims,—“The river-navigation in the Great West is the most wonderful in the world, and possesses, by means of steam, all the properties of ocean-navigation—rapidity, immense distance, low prices, and large freightage, all is there. The steamboat is the ship of the river, and finds on the Mississippi and its tributaries the most perfect theatre for its application and its powers. Wonderful river! United to vast seas at its source, and at its mouth—extending its arms towards the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans—flowing through a stretch of valley which extends from the Mexican Gulf to Hudson's Bay, deriving its earliest waters, not from sterile mountains, but from a plateau of lakes in the centre of the continent, and in connection with the sources of the St. Lawrence, and those rivers which take their course northward to Hudson's Bay; flowing the greater part of its way through the richest meadow-land, conveying on its bosom the productions of every climate, even ice from the frigid zone, which it transports to the great market of the sunny south! Hither are brought the products of the whole