I am not sure that Mr. Blotter accepted all this, but he has gone to Minnesota with his wife, turning his back on a dry-goods counting-house to obtain a home on the prairies. CHAPTER XI. NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD. The statesman, the political economist, or any man who wishes to cast the horoscope of the future of this country, must take into consideration the great lakes, and their connection with the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Columbia Rivers, and those portions of the continent drained by these water-ways. Communities do not grow by chance, but by the operation of physical laws. Position, climate, mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, arable lands, coal, wood, iron, silver, and gold are predestinating forces in a nation's history, decreeing occupation, character, power, and influence. Lakes and navigable streams are natural highways for trade and traffic; valleys are natural avenues; mountains are toll-gates set up by nature. He who passes over them must pay down in sweat and labor. Humboldt discussed the question a third of a century ago. "The natural highways of nations," said he, "will usually be along the great watercourses." It impressed me deeply, as long ago as 1846, when the present enormous railway system of the continent had hardly begun to be developed. Spreading out a map of the Western Hemisphere, I then saw that from Cape Horn to Behring's Strait there was only one river-system that could be made available to commerce on the Pacific coast. In South America there is not a stream as large as the Merrimac flowing into the Pacific. The waves of the ocean break everywhere against the rocky wall of the Andes. In North America the Colorado rises on the pinnacle of the continent, but it flows through a country upheaved by volcanic fires during the primeval years. Its chasms and cañons are the most stupendous on the globe. The course of the stream is southwest to the Gulf of California, out of the line of direction for commerce. The only other great stream of the Pacific coast is the Columbia, whose head-waters are in a line with those of the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Red River of the North, and Lake Superior. This one feature of the physical geography of the continent was sufficient to show me that the most feasible route for a great continental highway between the Atlantic and the Pacific must be from Lake Superior to the valley of the Columbia. In childhood I had read the travels of Lewis and Clark over and over again, till I could almost repeat the entire volume, and, remembering their glowing accounts of the country,--the fertility of the valley of the Yellowstone, the easy passage from the Jefferson fork of the Missouri to the Columbia, and the mildness of the winters on the Western slope, the conviction was deepened that the best route for a railway from the lakes to the Pacific would be through one of the passes of the Rocky Mountains at the head-waters of the Missouri.