Facts and Conditions of Progress in the North-West. (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1850 Excerpt: ... Its flocks were feeding on unnumbered hills, and in countless fields its crops sprang up, and ripened, and bowed before the sickle. That subtle Power, which by water had brought its myriads of people to its generous bosom, and borne its rich products away in exchange for what its own soil did not yield, scorned longer to be confined to the rivers and the lakes, and their comparatively slow-moving keels. Springing upon the dry land, and seeking the iron tracks which science and labor had laid on the leveled earth, he clutched the loaded car with his invisible fingers, and bore it from point to point, for hundreds of miles, with an ease and a velocity before unknown--"The beatings of his mighty heart" still sounding through the storm or the calm, and giving the only note of his approach, as he rushed through forest and field, over streams and marshes, and around the bases of many hills, with his gigantic burden. Nor was this enough. For commerce it might have been, and for bodily transit from place to place, but not for thought. And next flashed upon human genius the still more subtle essence of the electric spark; and hither came its whispering wires, stretching from hill to hill and from state to state, crossing mountains, leaping ravines, spanning rivers, and bearing to the depths of this far Interior, in the twinkling of an eye, the message spoken a thousand miles away, on the outer rim of the vast Continent. And the human tide has still rolled on and on--and the remoter forests of this region have been pierced and subdued, till the solitudes that, at the period from which this retrospect started, heard only the eternal chime of the Falls of St. Anthony, and the wild voices of the dark Chippeways, are filling with the homes of civilized man, and becoming ...