Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/250

Rh are concerned, include the English colonies in the North. It includes, from the springs of the Mississippi, in the northern Minnesota, to the South, where the great river empties itself into the Mexican Gulf, every climate, with the exception of the most northerly, all productions which this hemisphere brings forth, all people who inhabit her soil. The Indian is still found in prosperity in Minnesota; pine-forests are native there, and winter is vigorous as with us. There are glorious springs of water, rivers and lakes abounding in fish, rich hunting-ground, and good arable land, though as yet untilled. The Norwegian and the Dane have begun to turn it up; but the Colonies proper of these nations and the Swedes are to the south of Minnesota, in the States of Wisconsin and Illinois, where the natural scenery is that of a grand and cheerful pastoral. A new Scandinavia is here growing up by degrees; and it is a joy to me to be able to testify that our countrymen are universally regarded as a valuable, industrious, and good people. They are obliged to work hard and to dispense with many comforts at the commencement; but the more the number of labourers increases, the lighter becomes labour, the richer the harvests, which the universally productive soil yields to them. The Norwegians constitute the agricultural core of the Scandinavian population; the Danes, in comparison with these, are few in number, and I have found here that the Danes more generally devote themselves to trade than agriculture.

The great corn-region proper of North America begins in Wisconsin and Illinois; and that immense corn-district, which is continued on both sides of the Mississippi to the States of Kentucky and Missouri, is said to be capable of producing bread-stuffs for all the States of the Union, that is to say, when it becomes fully cultivated. One sees there indeed, at the present time, vast plains waving with golden maize, but still vaster upon which as yet, only tall grass and wild flowers grow. Germans and the Irish