The Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 constitutes Omaha's crowning achievement of recent years. Projected in the period of densest industrial gloom and executed in the face of the war with Spain, the enterprise proved an unexpected and unprecedented success, returning to the stock subscribers ninety per cent. of the money they had advanced. The financial success was, however, subordinate to the success in other directions. A white city of such architectural perfection could not fail to afford an æsthetic stimulus in itself of wonderful educational effect. Participated in by all the trans-Mississippi States and Territories as an exhibition of the resources and products of this vast region, the Exposition served to open the eyes of visitors from both at home and abroad to the limitless possibilities there spread before them. The Indian Congress alone, including as it did representatives of nearly all the remaining tribes of aboriginal inhabitants gathered together under the direction of the Indian authorities of the Federal Government, formed an ethnic object-lesson the like of which had never before been presented. No fitter culmination could have been prepared than the Peace Jubilee, in its closing month of October, attended by President McKinley, members of his Cabinet, and heroes of the armed conflict just concluded, all uniting in acclaiming the end of war typified in the Exposition as a towering triumph of the arts of peace. [Illustration] FOOTNOTE: [14] In this account the directions are misleading, as they thought the river ran east and west instead of north and south at this point. [Illustration] DENVER THE QUEEN CITY OF THE PLAINS BY JOHN COTTON DANA Denver has historic background. Behind its own brief chronicles we note the outline of the story, full of the good work of strong men, of the exploration and civic conquest of the wide country between the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast. To ask of Denver's beginnings is to go back of 1858 and the hopeful Aurarians by the ford at the mouth of Cherry Creek, to government explorations, California gold seekers, Mormon emigrants, trappers and traders, and Spanish pioneers. The incidents which lead up to Denver's origin took place here and there in a great mid-continental area so vast as to make those incidents seem at first sight isolated, unrelated to one another. But there is a simplicity of plan in that great country which, taken with the gold of the west coast and the migrant spirit of the early settlers of the Mississippi Valley, makes the early ventures across the plains seem natural enough and binds them to one another. Given the country and the factors mentioned, and a great central city, at once a focus and distributing point for all that lay across the plains, the Denver of to-day, was foreordained. [Illustration Sources of Territorial Acquisition of Colorado.]