The Greatest Works of Charles Carleton Coffin. Charles Carleton Coffin
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Dakota, and were serenaded by the Germans in our camp on the bank of Rush Lake. It contains 1,288,000 acres, of which 850,000 are held by government. This county is abundantly supplied with timber, — pine as well as oak, and other of the hard woods. There are numerous lakes and ponds, and several fine mill-sites. The soil is excellent. The lakes abound with whitefish. In 1868 the population was 800. Now it may be set down at 2,000.
Wilkin. — This county is on the Red River. It was once called Andy Johnson, but now bears the name of Wilkin. There you may take your choice of 650,000 acres of fertile lands. You can find timber on the streams, or you may float it down from Otter-Tail. The St. Paul and Pacific Railroad will be constructed through the county during the year 1870.
Clay. — North of Wilkin on the Red River is Clay County, containing 650,000 acres of government land, all open to settlement. The Northern Pacific Railroad will probably strike the Red River somewhere in this county. The distance from Duluth will be two hundred and twenty-five miles, and the settler there will be as near market as the people of central Illinois or eastern Iowa.
Polk. — The next county north contains 2,480,000 acres, unsurpassed for fertility, well watered by the Red, the Wild Rice, Marsh, Sand Hill, and Red Lake Rivers. The county is half as large as Massachusetts, and is as capable of sustaining a dense population as the kingdom of Belgium or the valley of the Ganges. The southern half will be accommodated by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Salt springs abound on the Wild Rice River, and the State has reserved 23,000 acres of the saline territory.
Pembina. — The northwestern county of the State contains 2,263,000 acres, all held by government.
Becker. — This county lies north of Otter-Tail We passed through it on our way from the Red River to the head-waters of the Buffalo. (Description, p. 113.) It is a region surpassingly beautiful. The Northern Pacific Railroad will pass through it, and there you may find 435,000 acres of rolling prairie and timbered hills. Probably there are not fifty settlers in the county. A large portion of these northwestern counties are unsurveyed, but that will not debar you from pre-empting a homestead.
"How about the southwestern section of the State?" asked my visitor.
I cannot speak from personal observation beyond Blue Earth County, where the Minnesota River crooks its elbow and turns northeast; but from what I have learned I have reason to believe that the lands there are just as fertile as those already settled nearer the Mississippi, and they will be made available by the railroad now under construction from St. Paul to Sioux City.
"Can a man with five hundred dollars make a beginning out there with a reasonable prospect of success?"
Yes, provided he has good pluck, and is willing to work hard and to wait. If he can command one thousand dollars, he can do a great deal better than he can with half that sum.
If you were to go out sixty miles beyond St Paul to Darsel, on the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad you would see a farm worked by seven sisters. The oldest girl is about twenty-five, the youngest fifteen. They lived in Ohio, but their father and mother were invalids, and for their benefit came to Minnesota in April, 1867, and secured a hundred and sixty acres of land under the Homestead Law. The neighbors turned out and helped them build a log-house, and the girls went to work on the farm. Last year (1869) they had forty acres under cultivation, and sold 900 bushels of potatoes, 500 bushels of corn, 200 of wheat, 250 of turnips, 200 of beets, besides 1,100 cabbage-heads, and about two hundred dollars' worth of other garden products. They hired men to split rails for fencing, and also to plough the land; but all the other work has been done by the girls, who are hale and hearty, and find time to read the weekly papers and magazines. The mother of these girls made the following remark to a gentleman who visited the farm: "The girls are not fond of the hard work they have had to do to get the farm started, but they are not ashamed of it. We were too poor to keep together, and live in a town. We could not make a living there, but here we have become comfortable and independent. We tried to give the girls a good education, and they all read and write, and find a little spare time to read books and papers."
These plucky girls have set a good example to young men who want to get on in the world.
Perhaps I am too enthusiastic over the future prospects of the region between Lake Superior and the Pacific, but having travelled through Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, and Nevada, I have had an opportunity to contrast the capabilities of the two sections. Kansas has magnificent prairies, and so has Nebraska, but there are no sparkling ponds, no wood-fringed lakes, no gurgling brooks abounding with trout. The great want of those States is water. The soil is exceedingly fertile, even in Utah and Nevada, though white with powdered alkali, but they are valueless for want of moisture. In marked contrast to all this is the great domain of the Northwest. For a few years the tide of emigration will flow, as it is flowing now, into the central States; but when the lands there along the rivers and streams are all taken up, the great river of human life, setting towards the Pacific, will be turned up the Missouri, the Assinniboine, and the Saskatchawan. The climate, the resources of the country, the capabilities for a varied industry, and the configuration of the continent, alike indicate it.
I am not sure that Mr. Blotter accepted all this, but he has gone to Minnesota with his wife, turning his back on a dry-goods counting-house to obtain a home on the prairies.
CHAPTER XI
NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD
The statesman, the political economist, or any man who wishes to cast the horoscope of the future of this country, must take into consideration the great lakes, and their connection with the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Columbia Rivers, and those portions of the continent drained by these water-ways.
Communities do not grow by chance, but by the operation of physical laws. Position, climate, mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, arable lands, coal, wood, iron, silver, and gold are predestinating forces in a nation's history, decreeing occupation, character, power, and influence.
Lakes and navigable streams are natural highways for trade and traffic; valleys are natural avenues; mountains are toll-gates set up by nature. He who passes over them must pay down in sweat and labor.
Humboldt discussed the question a third of a century ago. "The natural highways of nations," said he, "will usually be along the great watercourses."
It impressed me deeply, as long ago as 1846, when the present enormous railway system of the continent had hardly begun to be developed. Spreading out a map of the Western Hemisphere, I then saw that from Cape Horn to Behring's Strait there was only one river-system that could be made available to commerce on the Pacific coast. In South America there is not a stream as large as the Merrimac flowing into the Pacific. The waves of the ocean break everywhere against the rocky wall of the Andes.
In North America the Colorado rises on the pinnacle of the continent, but it flows through a country upheaved by volcanic fires during the primeval years. Its chasms and cañons are the most stupendous on the globe. The course of the stream is southwest to the Gulf of California, out of the line of direction for commerce.
The only other great stream of the Pacific coast is the Columbia, whose head-waters are in a line with those of the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Red River of the North, and Lake Superior.
This one feature of the physical geography of the continent was sufficient to show me that the most feasible route for a great continental highway between the Atlantic and the Pacific must be from Lake Superior to the valley of the Columbia.
In childhood I had read the travels of Lewis and Clark over and over again, till I could almost repeat the entire volume, and, remembering their glowing accounts of the country, — the fertility of the valley of the Yellowstone, the easy passage from the Jefferson fork of the Missouri to the Columbia, and the mildness of the winters on the Western slope, the conviction was deepened that the best route for a railway from the lakes to the Pacific would be through one of the passes of the Rocky Mountains at the head-waters of the Missouri.
Doubtless,