Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/421

Rh them, and the ocean on the east. On the other side of the mountains you find the Valley of the Mississippi and the Mississippi States; to the north the young and free, with free institutions, and an increasing population of Germans and Scandinavians, increasing still more in light and the life of freedom; to the south the Slave States, with two large cities, and in these a showy civilisation, but for the rest much wilderness and much rudeness still, which all their cotton and all their sugar are not able to conceal. West of the Mississippi the distinction between the Northern and Southern States is still continued. The labour of the cultivator has here just commenced. You still meet with the fires and the wigwams of the Indians, around the sources of the Mississippi in the North; and along the Red River in Arkansas and Louisiana, morasses and heathenism.

Westward of these Mississippi States is Texas, with Rio Grande or Rio Bravo as its boundary on the west, and the Gulf of Mexico on the south, an immense territory, upon the fertile banks of whose rivers the flood of emigration is now beginning to settle. The upper portion of Texas elevates itself by degrees into a mountain-range, and unites itself on the north-east, to the latest conquest of the United States, New Mexico, which has beautiful terminal valleys on the east, but which extends itself westward into the Rocky Mountains, and becomes petrified in their arms.

Between these States and the Mississippi States lies the great hunting-ground of the Indians, that mystic Nebraska, a great portion of which, according to what I have heard, is a monotonous stepp-land, which extends northward as far as Canada. The wild Missouri whirls through it with a thousand angular windings; there are also great prairies and great rivers, herds of buffaloes, and tribes of warlike Indians. In one portion of this immense