Leaving Spokane, going westward, one enters the great wheat country, a plateau lying between the Rocky Mountains and the coast ranges. Where the railroads run, the country is more or less rough, with here and there formations that suggest “bad lands,” but much of the country is level and productive. It is a vast treeless region; rainless in summer. The mercury rises as high as 100 in the night time. When the wind blows, which it is apt to do, dust fills the air. Much of the soil seems to be as fine as flour and very light when it is very dry. We rode for hours without seeing a drop of water, in creek or lake. What a precious thing water must be to the people--in summer time, when they need it most! There are no homes in these wheat fields. Here and there are scattered hovels which the sowers and the reapers use in their seasons, but no permanent abodes. Wire fences are stretched across the fields, far apart. How different it all is from the farming countries of the Mississippi Valley, with their well fenced farms, the homes of the farmers in the midst of groves and orchards and the grazing herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. Here and there one saw a horseman riding in a pillar of dust. The trails of dust one sees are the only evidences of highways, or of travel. It is a great wheat producing country, when it has been revived by the rains of winter, but the men who grow that wheat ought to be well paid for their labors. It was night when we reached the Columbia River, the mighty stream that wends across these wheat fields, deep down in its channel, so deep that the use of its waters for purposes of irrigation seems almost hopeless. The winds that blow across the plateau may solve the question. Seattle is a marvel in the way of city building. It is growing in every direction and in every way. Located on a great inland sea, in sight of the mountains and blest with a climate of wonderful evenness, at the end of the great transcontinental railways and where the large vessels are loaded and unloaded for the orient and the coastwise trade, the destiny of this city can hardly be overdrawn. Seattle has absorbed the major energies of the American northwest. The men who founded the city laid out its streets in almost impossible places, but modern engineering is cutting down the hills and filling up the hollows. There is no end to the enterprise of the people in these respects. Every breath one breathes in Seattle is a city breath. Men from the prairies of Iowa have become city builders in Seattle. Industrial reverses may overtake them, they likely will, and their winters are said to be atrociously foggy and wet, but they are going to make Seattle a place of which all Americans will be proud, one of the great commercial cities of the Pacific Ocean. VI