[5] MONTANA. The name is simply descriptive of a mountainous region. Fort Benton was named for Thomas H. Benton. From this point returning trappers or traders were in the habit of floating down the river to St. Louis in canoes before the day of steamboats. Fort Union was a trading-post established with reference to the Yellowstone Valley route to the mountains. THE WORK OF EIGHTY YEARS. Our story closes with the national domain completed within limits grander than even the sagacious Jefferson had hoped for. Though "peace hath her victories," peaceful development, such as has followed the settlement of grave political questions, affords fewer materials for history than the stirring records of war, or the annals of political strife. The West shared with the East in the drain made upon its resources by the Secession War. Its recovery from the effects of that war has, however, been so marked that to-day all traces of it are nearly effaced from its outward and inward life. National unity is no longer a thing of territorial expansion, as with the statesmen of Jefferson's and Benton's time, but now means a perfect union of the whole people in the cause of progress, and for the welfare of mankind. In that peaceful conflict the once hostile sections are now engaged with a praiseworthy emulation. The child who was born when Lewis and Clarke set out for the Pacific, may now be the living witness to what we have called the marvel of the nineteenth century. It is true, much of the rapid progress of the Great West is due to the development of its extraordinary mineral wealth, by which masses of population have been suddenly moved upon particular points, so forcing settlement beyond its legitimate growth. There have been, however, other potent agencies at work to the same end. Foremost among these, always keeping in mind the constantly improving facilities for moving emigrants into the West, come the great improvements made in mechanical arts. And first of all we should class the reaping-machine, invented by Cyrus H. McCormick, which is thought to have advanced the line of civilization westward many miles each year. Without this invention, what was an uninhabited and unproductive region forty years ago would hardly have been converted into the granary of the continent, with its millions of people, its marvellous productiveness, and its growing weight in the nation. In the East small farms are the rule; in the West, the exception. The difference, at least, seems to be largely owing to the grass-mower, and grain-reaping machines that were unknown to agriculturists of a former generation, though allowance must be made for the better conditions of soil, which more generally adapt it for cultivation. Great bodies of fertile lands, such as exist in the States of Kansas and Nebraska, are unknown in the East. [Illustration: REAPING-MACHINE.]