As showing the extent of water-transportation on our Great Lakes, it may be stated that more tonnage passes Sault Ste. Marie in seven months of each year than goes through the Suez Canal in three years. The city of Duluth alone, at the head of the water-trail, has a tonnage each year of more than 11,500,000 tons. Footnote 58: The population of Michigan in the decade 1890-1900 drifted rapidly toward the cities. Yet the Michigan railroads are bravely trying to solve the problem of building up a population on the country desolated by the lumbermen, and with great success are developing resources in agriculture and manufactures which for a long time lay unsuspected. Footnote 59: In this connection the census map offers an unfailing interest. Investigation shows that our star, denoting the center of population, has traveled in all only 525 miles since 1790, the greatest west-bound gains being in the decade 1850-60, 81 miles. At no time has the center of population moved back toward the East, though it is nearer to doing so now than ever before—proof that the history of America has been but the history of a West, and also proof that that wayward West may soon bend its footsteps homeward after a century of adventure. The record of the movement of the population center is as follows: 1790, 23 miles east of Baltimore, Maryland; 1800, 18 miles west of Baltimore, Maryland; 1810, 40 miles northwest by west of Washington, D. C.; 1820, 16 miles north of Woodstock, Virginia; 1830, 19 miles west-southwest of Moorefield, West Virginia; 1840, 16 miles south of Clarksburg, West Virginia; 1850, 23 miles southeast of Parkersburg, West Virginia; 1860, 20 miles south of Chillicothe, Ohio; 1870, 48 miles east by north of Cincinnati, Ohio; 1880, 8 miles west by south of Cincinnati, Ohio; 1890, 20 miles east of Columbus, Indiana; 1900, 7 miles north of Columbus, Indiana. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ACROSS THE PACIFIC CHAPTER I THE IRON TRAILS At the time of the discovery of gold in California, there had been built up a splendid Western population, hardy, self-confident, able to shift for itself, wholly distinct from that population that it had for a generation left behind at the old starting places of the trails. These trails across the continent, wavering, tortuous, yet practicable, had been fully established. So far as might be within the horizon of those days, all was now ready for the epoch-making event that was to change all the methods of America, that was to make Westerners by wholesale and to draw them swiftly from every corner of the earth.