What of the future? Is the useful purpose of the Missouri River in the up-building of the West already fulfilled? Is its great history a closed book? Such, it must be admitted, is the general view. In popular estimation that river to-day is little more than a vast sewer, whose seething, eddying waters bear down the sands and clay and débris from the far upper country, scattering them along its course, swelling the floods of the Mississippi, and pushing ever seaward the delta of that mighty stream. To the railroads it is a million-dollar obstacle wherever they want to cross it. As a competitive route of commerce it has sunk beneath their notice. To the husbandman along its borders it is a perpetual nightmare, for he knows not what morning he may awake to find his worldly possessions ruthlessly swept away. From all points of view it now seems like one of those things in the economy of nature which could be dispensed with and the world be none the worse for its absence. [Sidenote: PAST AND PRESENT.] Nevertheless the river is still there--a fact, a thing to be reckoned with in some way or other. It will not let its presence be forgotten. In its old-time fashion it carves up the lands, but with vastly greater destructiveness now that they have become so valuable. Its terrible ice gorges pile up as of yore, but are now more dreaded than they used to be on account of the property along the banks. In other respects as well it is the same peculiar stream that it has ever been. The weird sandstorms drive over its illimitable bars, the willows bend to the blast, and the swift-rolling waters are lashed into foam by the prairie gale. In periods of calm its silvery sheen stretches away under the morning and evening sun as when the pilot followed its interminable windings through the prairies; and its resistless tide rushes on, as in the blithe steamboat days, when it carried upon its bosom the commerce of the valley. But here the likeness between the past and present ends. No aboriginal savage now roams upon its borders. The buffalo does not come to its shore to quench his thirst, or to swim its current, or to cross upon its ice. The lonely dwellers of the valley have long since ceased to watch the eastern horizon where the river runs into the sky, for the curling smoke no longer tells them of the approach of those white-winged messengers of civilization, the Missouri River steamboats. They are gone, its greatness and glory, never, in their ancient form, to return. [Sidenote: THE GERM OF EMPIRE.]