Agricultural settlers rapidly took up lands. Battle against it as he would,--and the early history of the border is a piteous tale of man's inhumanity to man,--the dispossessed savage found this army of occupation impregnable. As the frontier moved to the westward of the Mississippi, it was accompanied by the Indians and the fur trade. Territories were erected by Congress out of the lands of the ousted Iroquois and Algonkins, and these political divisions were soon admitted to the Union as states; mines were exploited, forests were depleted, miscellaneous industries were created, and these new interests not only profoundly affected the old towns, but gave rise to a new order of cities. Indianapolis and Madison are examples of town sites staked out in virgin forests by ambitious and imaginative speculators, and, before a house could be built, set aside by statute as capitals of their respective young commonwealths. It is not always that towns thus artificially planted have similarly thriven. Under normal conditions, a successful city is as much a matter of natural growth as a tree, whose germ has chanced to fall in favored soil. Many, perhaps most, Western towns of importance, that were planted before the days of the railroad, when waterways were highways, are upon the sites of early villages of aborigines, who made their stands at natural vantage points--at a river mouth, convenient for transportation, or close to considerable fishing grounds; at a waterfall, because here fish are plenty, and canoes must be carried around the obstruction, so that the villagers are masters of the highway; upon a portage path, because of ease in reaching and controlling divergent water systems; upon a bluff overlooking waterways, for facility of observation and control; upon a fertile river bottom, because of good corn lands. In due time, whites came to such a centre of population and established a trading post; here and there, as at Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Vincennes, and Kansas City (Westport), the post in due time developed into a garrisoned fort; and the surrounding community, at first dependent on the fur trade or the military, under modern conditions became a town of importance. Scores, possibly hundreds, of such examples might be cited; and even when some thrifty towns of the West appear at first sight to have no connection with such a past, antiquarians have not infrequently discovered evidences that substantially the same reasons which before the railway era had led civilized men to select the site, caused its previous occupancy by aborigines--sometimes at so early a day that the only remaining relics are the curious earthworks which the progenitors of our Western Indians, prompted by religious fervor, constructed anywhere from two and a half to ten centuries ago. Minneapolis and Spokane, both of them old Indian sites, are the direct outgrowth of the superb waterpowers which have given them pre-eminence in the industrial world.