corn fifteen, beef and pork one and a half to two and a half cents a pound for store goods, and these were taken in exchange at about double their prices in the east. On the Iowa shore of the Mississippi, in 1841, 1842, 1843 we found a belt of settlements inland for perhaps fifteen miles, log and some board cabins and houses, with the staples of life easy and abundant and prices somewhat better than in Illinois interior. The Indian and the buffalo had the prices of land and of food supplies quite their own way throughout the most of the territory, as they did, till they heard the locomotive, over the river eastward. There lies before me the first map of Iowa ever published-1845. It shows thirty-one counties-there are now ninety-nineclustering on the Mississippi between the Des Moines and the latitude of Prairie du Chien. About eighty towns are located on this map-Iowa now has fifteen hundred and seventy-eight postoffices-and the most of them within a day's ride of the river. Nine of the counties do not show one town. The state embraces about fifty-six thousand square miles, and it would be difficult to find the same amount of land in one body in the world that can furnish more cereal and flesh food for the human family. Yet at the time here named such was the condition of transportation between. the east and the west, or between the supply and the world's market, that a bushel of wheat and an eastern letter were at the same cost in Iowa-twentyfive cents. The railroad had not then crossed the Mississippi. Now postage there is two cents and wheat from seventy

cents to a dollar. The railroad has arrived in Iowa-7478 miles of it.*

Illinois and Iowa are fair illustrations of all our western states prior to the introduction of the railroad system. They from the first had their princely wealth in the cereals and meats, as truly as in the mines, and each staple was awaiting equally development and a market. The wheat and the corn were in the loam, potentially and waiting, as really as the strata of coals and ores underneath. The great pine forests in Washington Territory were worth nothing, except enough for one house for a resident owner till he could have transportation.

"Trees six and seven feet in diameter and two hundred to two hundred and fifty feet high are very common, perhaps rarely out of sight in the forest in Washington Territory; eight feet in diameter and three hundred feet high are rare, but still not at all uncommon; the builder of the telegraph line had hitched his wire, in one case, to a cedar which is fourteen feet in diameter; a monster tree that had fallen-the forests are full of fallen trees-measured three hundred and twenty-five feet long, and another tree, at a distance of ninety feet from its root, was seven feet in diameter."t

An editor at Olympia informed the author in October, 1885, that they were preparing for the New Orleans exposi

*Notes on Iowa Territory with a map. By Willard Barrows, United States deputy surveyor. Cincinnati, 1845.

+'Across the Continent.' By Samuel Bowles. 1865. P. 206.

tion a section from a Washington Territory tree nineteen feet in diameter.

The grains and meats and hides and ores and coals and timber and wool, have, practically, been waiting for their opportunity in the great North American west a thousand years. They were natural values, on deposit, without interest, and subject to draft for all the uses and profits of commerce. I was once offered very heavy timber land on the headwaters of the Connecticut for one dollar an acre, but only the bear and deer and myself seemed able to reach it. A railroad has since made it a piece good property.

of

To state the case briefly, and then expand and illustrate it by items, the board of appraisers or of valuation for the United States consists of three, the highway, the canal, and the railroad. Each rises in valuation on all real estate and local products within accessible distances; the railroads mark highest and last. What is not appraised, as in central Wyoming, where the United States have not yet surveyed the lands, as not yet in demand enough to be put on the market, up in Alaska on the Yukon, or out on the Aleuntian Islands, has no nominal value, that is, value which can be named. The timber and arable lands and fisheries and ores and furs have the same natural value which they would have in central New York, but to assign to them convertible and commercial worth this board of three United States appraisers must go on the ground and fix prices.

In early times our eastern vessels went around Cape Horn to California

for cargos of hides, and agents contracted for the ship load. "The number of cattle required might vary from a thousand to tens of thousands. In some instances they were corraled, and let out by tens and twenties, to be dispatched with sledges, or by other methods. In later years they were sometimes felled in large numbers by bullets, while grazing with the herd on the plains. The hides, tallow, horns and hanks were preserved; but the carcasses were left either in piles or scattered over the plains, to dry away and disappear under the scorching rays of the sun. The bones of the heads were sometimes used for the construction of fences around small lots in the vicinity of their dwellings. In one place, even to this day, there remains such a fence nearly two rods in length. The fence was of the thickness of two heads." Before the Missions were broken up by the government, the padres, anticipating the confiscation of both lands and live stock, slaughtered immense numbers of cattle. "It is estimated that in those three years there were sent from the Missions to the ports three hundred thousand hides with the tallow."*

But the railroad came in and appraised not only the hides and tallow and horns, but the beef and bones also, and even the hair, as worth transportation. After spending a month in 1885 on the ranches and ranges of Wyoming, the writer reads the above account from eastern horror.

California with commercial 'Dana's Two Years Before the

*History of California.' By E. S. Capron. Boston, 1854, pp. 29–31.