The trail which in 1871 led west from the Red River ferry, across the level floor of prehistoric Lake Agassiz, is now Front Street, which enters Fargo from the east to be greeted by the city's slum district, where dilapidated, unpainted frame shacks near the river give way westward to better buildings in a wholesaling district, until Broadway is reached. Broadway is the very heart of Fargo, a busy, crowded thoroughfare whose appearance often causes visitors to believe the city larger than it actually is. From its wide south end where it intersects Front, Broadway runs north, flanked for six blocks by two-and three-story store and office buildings. Two of North Dakota's four "skyscrapers" are on Broadway. Fargo first appeared on the horizon in the 1870's as an outfitting point, the last outpost of settlement for those tens of thousands who pioneered in the State, and through the years of its growth has retained its first excuse for being, for it still serves as chief distributing point for a large agricultural area. Farm implements, foodstuffs, petroleum products, automobiles, and automotive equipment to the value of more than $45,000,000 are handled annually. Although from a North Dakota standpoint it is an old city, Fargo is young enough to have a few of its founders still alive to tell of how they first advertised their spindly little city by boasting that its volunteer fire company, the Yerxa Hose Team, was the world's fastest; or of how, in later years, Fargo gloried in being the "Gateway City" to the "bread basket of the world," the fertile Red River Valley which real estate agents compared to the valley of the Nile. The Valley is no longer the intensive wheat-raising area it was, but the Fargo Chamber of Commerce will tell you that this very fertile flat land, through which meanders one of the few rivers that flow north, is literally a land of milk and honey, and others no less cognizant of their surroundings have changed the old slogan to the "food basket of the world."