St. Paul is situated upon a series of terraces rising from the left bank of the Mississippi River, its site being both commanding and picturesque. Thus built at the head of navigation on a great waterway, it naturally commands a trade of no circumscribed character, besides enjoying the prestige of being the State capital. Were it not for the unlimited facilities of transportation afforded by the grand and beneficent railroad enterprise embraced in the Northern Pacific system, the development of the vast and fertile country which lies between Lake Superior and the Pacific Ocean would have been delayed for half a century or more. It should be remembered that so late as 1850 there was not one mile of railroad in existence west of the Mississippi River. In 1836 there were, at most, but a thousand miles in operation on the entire American continent. This is an epoch of progress. Japan is traversed by railways, even China has caught the contagion, and is now building roads for the use of the iron horse in more than one direction within that ancient and widespread empire, while Russia and India are “gridironed” with rails. It was remarked in a congressional speech in the year 1847 that the Rocky Mountains would be the limit of railroad enterprise across our continent; that the barrier presented by these huge elevations and the extensive “desert tract” beyond them must certainly prevent the development of the Pacific States. “Desert,” indeed! No land on the globe produces such remarkable cereal crops as this very prairie soil is doing each successive year, not only supplying our own rapidly increasing population with the stuff of life, but also feeding the less fortunate millions of Europe, where excessive labor and costly enrichment must make up the deficit arising from an exhausted soil and circumscribed area. The reader who follows these pages will not fail to see how liable legislators are to be mistaken in their predictions, and how apt events are to transcend the weak judgment of the confident and inexperienced declaimer. Even that Titan statesman, Daniel Webster, put himself on record in the United States Senate, while speaking against a proposition to establish a mail route through a portion of the western country, as follows: “What do we want with this vast, worthless area— this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts or those endless mountain ranges, impenetrable, and covered to their very base with eternal snow? What can we ever hope to do with the western coast,—a coast of three thousand miles, rock-bound, cheerless, uninviting, and not a harbor on it? What use have we for this country?”