The proof you may find by seeing the cities that have grown, the fields which bear them tribute. North and south, and east and west the prairie roads run. The long trail of the cattle-drive is gone, and the cattle no longer walk a thousand miles to pasture or to market. Once, twice, thrice, the continent was spanned, the dream of Robertson made manifoldly true, and the path across the continent laid well and laid forever.[56] In the Middle West the Great American Desert was cross-hatched with iron lines and dotted full with homes that never could have been but for those iron lines. In the Northwest lay a land of almost arctic winters, with little or no shelter, with short and torrid summers, the land of the Red River carts, where the fur traders were at last replaced by the raisers of number two hard wheat. Into this region came a large foreign population, sought out in the Old World by the diligent agents of a common carrier needing business. The hard plains of the North were literally stocked with these people. They came with their tickets bought through to such or such a point in Minnesota or Dakota. It was foreseen that the mere raising of wheat could not build up a permanent civilization, and the railway did the thinking for the blind ones who had taken its word and risked their lives and fortunes in the removal to that America which had so wide and various an interpretation. The railway sent out, free and unsolicited, seed wheat and choice breeding-stock, dropping these contributions wisely, here and there, into such communities as most needed them. The railway was explorer, carrier, provider, thinker, heart, soul, and intellect for this population that in another generation was to be American. No wonder these folk stand and stare when the railway-train goes by. It has been Providence to them. It is a Providence that has given to Europe what America might have had. To-day towns do not grow merely because of their location, and this factor of location will become less and less important as the years go by. St. Louis was a city of location; Chicago is a city of transportation. Chicago is situated upon the most impossible and unlovely of all places of human habitation. She is simply a city of transportation, and is no better than her rails and boats, though by her rails and boats she lives in every Western state and territory. The same is true now of St. Louis and the vast Southwest.