Excerpt from The Golden Northwest

The wondrous and unparalleled growth of the country to which the well deserved title of the "Golden Northwest" has been applied, although the development of railroad enterprise has brought it, or a greater portion of it, within a day's ride of Chicago, is even yet scarcely realized by those who dwell upon its borders. Chicago, the commercial entrepot of this great region, which as the converging point of many thousand miles of railroad and the great grain, lumber and provision mart of the world, has so vital an interest in the prosperity of this later Empire, knows but little of its resources and capabilities, its rich prairies and fields of waving grain, of the forests and rivers, the mining and agricultural wealth with which beneficent Nature has endowed the fairest and richest section of the whole United States. Thirty years ago a wilderness untrodden save by the trappers and hunters or the aboriginal owners of the soil whose tepees were doomed to give place first to log huts, then to substantial buildings and barns - whose hunting grounds were fated to resound with the shriek of the steam-whistle, and whose rude stone implements were to be supplanted by steam-plows and cultivators - the land which we call to-day Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, Dakota and Montana, has a history not only within the ken of living men but of men whose beards are yet untouched with the silver whiteness of age. In the rapid progress of the century, in spite of our newspapers and general literature, the telegraph to bear the news and the power press to print it, the march of empire presses steadily on comparatively unnoticed and unrecorded. Modern Americans are too busy making history to stop on their way to inscribe the records of their achievments in aught less ephemeral than the quotidian press of their country, and thus the most interesting facts, knowledge which to the student of a new generation will be of incalculable value, are in danger of going unrecorded altogether. It is to convey to the reader, who has not the time at his command in which to search through many books, such facts of interest are not readily accessible and may prove of real value, that this sketch of the resources of the Golden Northwest has been prepared.

Nothing in history can compare with the rapidity of the growth of this magnificent country. Two hundred years served to extend the settlements of Massachusetts and Virginia over a strip of sea-board territory which to-day forms only a tithe of this vast Union. One-tenth of that time has given to civilization a new field larger than the whole territory occupied by white men at the time of the Revolutionary War. Nothing but the immense strides made by science during the past half-century has rendered this result possible.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.