THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY.*
YET there is room. Perhaps more than half the interest with which books like the one before us are read, takes its rise from this source, the bracing effect of this one fact. We, in our crowded cities, with their huddled mass of humanity, stowed away in half-lighted alleys or jostling each other roughly in the race for bread, may sit at home and, for that imagination is often remedy as well as disease, may drink in new vigour by meditating only on vast forests where the foot of man has never trod, prairies rich in soil which hardly needs the plough, and unworked mines of un- known wealth waiting only the labourer's hand. It is because it supplies substantial food for such hungering thought as this, that the book before us is invested with an interest it might not at first sight seem to possess. It will well repay careful reading. There is nothing so poetical as fact, and spite of the bare and rugged style in which the author has chosen to cut his somewhat bulky body of facts into pieces, and arrange them again like pages in a student's manual or a geographical epitome for the use of cranuners, there yet remains all the force and almost magical influence of the facts themselves.
Railroads are wont to be wearisome subjects, connected most intimately in our minds with the price of shares and the rise or fall of dividends ; but a railroad from Omaha to Sacramento, or from Lake Superior to the valley of the Columbia, is quite another thing, and our muscles mental and physical are strength- ened as we read of difficulties undertaken or already overcome such as would have been declined by the genii of any Arabian tale. We have before us a brief description of the traveller's onward journey, as starting from Sacramento in June, he finds himself in a few hours suddenly transported from a valley clothed with a semi-tropical vegetation to the cold bleakness of a tem- perature like that of Greenland. At one point "the Sierra Nevada looming up like a great cloud bank, the snow-fields on the summit flashing in the morning sun with opalescent hues, then lost to view as the cars wind round a projecting pro- montory; and far down is seen, like a silver thread, the foaming torrent of some branch of the American river. Still upward the engine climbs, till some 4,500 feat above the sea the traveller finds himself on a track cut through the solid rock, one tunnel alone 1,659 feet in length, and every- where around in the vast desolate region deep snow-banks, glacier- like torrents, and stalactites of ice." It would be easy to follow the details of lines of road constructed through territories rich in yet unclaimed mineral wealth, but it would occupy too much of our space. Among the points touched by our author in this most full description of the Mississippi Valley, one by no means the least interesting is the "typical forms of vegetation." We can only quote one passage on the cypress, "which is first seen near the mouth of the Ohio, and is always found on land subject to
• Tee Mississippi Valley. By T. W. Foster, LL.D. London: Trilbner and Co. 1.813O.
overflow. From a protuberance at the surface, a shaft rises straight to the height of sixty or eighty feet, without a limb, when it throws out numerous branches, umbrella-shaped, which sustain a foliage of short, fine, tufted leaves, of a green so deep as to appear almost brown. They grow so close together, that their branches interlock ; and hence a cypress forest resembles a mass of verdure sustained in the air by tall perpendicular columns. From their branches depend long festoons of moss, which sway to and fro in the wind, like so many shrouds,—communicating to the scene the most dismal aspect. Arranged around the parent stem are numerous cone-shaped protuberances, known as cypress knees,' which enable the roots of the tree to communicate with the air ; a provision of nature which is essential to its vitality." It is one of the most useful of the Southern lumber trees, its straight columns, free from knots and easily wrought, being most valuable for boards, &c. In the vast swamps the magnolia and river-oak find a congenial home, and vegetation flourishes in rank luxuriance in an atmosphere fatal to all the higher forms of life. But it is in the chapter on "Zones of Vegetation" we have the fullest details of the capacities of the great valley. Mr. Foster divides North America into five zones, the results of the influence of climate :—
1. The Region of Mosses and Saxifrages.
2. The Densely-wooded Region.
3. Alternate Wood and Prairie.
4. Vast Grassy Plains, where the Trees are restricted to the immediate Banks of the Streams.
5. Vast Arid Plains, often bare of Vegetation, and covered to some extent with Saline Efftorescences.
The great point he insists upon in considering these zones is, in how much greater a degree the forms of vegetable life are deter- mined by moisture than even by temperature, or the mechanical and chemical composition of the soil, the white pine, the most use- ful of all American trees and the monarch of its forests, taking root in a soil which contains but two per cent, of organic matter. But the extreme range of climatic conditions, both as to tempera- ture and moisture, renders the Valley of the Mississippi capable of bearing an almost inexhaustible supply of food-producing plants, the tropical elements in the American summer, as Mr. Foster observes, enabling the peach and apple to ripen, the Indian corn and tobacco plant to mature, in a way they will not do in England, though the mean temperature of the year here be con- siderably higher. And he goes on to trace the effects on the soil caused by subjacent formation, and on the effects of trans- plantation, Indian corn, for instance, exhibiting for every few degrees of latitude a different variety ; and we have a sketch of the principal plants cultivated in the great valley, with the unconscious influence which their cultivation may have on the population, as, for instance, in the case of maize, to which as an indirect cause he ascribes, not without some justice, much of the ancient civilization of Peru, the ease and cheapness with which they obtained food from this plant leaving them so much surplus labour to expend on the structures which excited the admiration of their Spanish conquerors, but that this would be by no means a universally just deduction it would be superfluous to prove. Still, it is not a small thing that in a considerable portion of a land where human energy is likely to have its severest strain in other directions, the labour of procuring mere sustenance should be com- paratively light. Where the rivers to be bridged are as wide as seas, and tunnels miles in length must be cut through solid rocks, it is well that "a man and a boy should be more than equal to the tending of forty acres of maize, to be harvested at leisure." This plant attains its full perfection in the region between the isotherms 72° and 77°, which includes the central and southern portions of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, nearly all Kentucky, Ten- nessee, Missouri, and Kansas, and the great plains north and south between the Canadian source of the Missouri; and Mr. Foster ascribes the great geographical range of this plant in the United States to the virgin soil, rich in nitrogen, on which it grows, and to the intense heat of the summers ; while on the far less favoured soils of Utah and Colorado abundant wheat crops are produced, the aridity of the soil yielding to the splendid irriga- tion. We find in a sketch given of the cotton plant a confirma- tion of some of the philosophical deductions made years ago by De Tocqueville when studying it in its connection with the slave trade, deductions which have now the weight of fulfilled pro- phecies. Mr. Foster states that, so far as the sanitary conditions of soil and climate are concerned, there is nothing to prevent the cultivation of cotton by free labour. We have some interesting notes on grasses found in the prairies east of the Mississippi. Those indigenous to the soil are being supplanted, first, by white
clover, which in turn gives way to the Kentucky blue grass (pea compressa). "The native grasses are retreating before the cul- tivated grasses, as the red man retreats before the white man. Wherever a waggon-track is made or path beaten, the white clover comes in ; wherever a track is appropriated to pasturage, the blue grass becomes dominant."
That these vast prairies have been redeemed and rendered profitable farms is one, and not by any means the least, of the triumphs won by the iron horse ; in traversing the apparently illimitable prairie with the connecting rails, stations grew up along the line, and the pioneer's work was done. Things get themselves accomplished quickly in America, but the rapid working of Anglo- Saxon effort, which within two centuries planted cities like New York and Montreal, on sites rescued from the forest and the wild Indian, has been slow when compared with the rapid colonization of the States which occupy the upper valley of the Mississippi. In 1778, within the memory of living men, writes Mr. Foster,—
" The first colonists of English extraction, under the leadership of Rufus Putnam, entered this region, and established themselves at Marietta, where the Muskingum unites witfi the Ohio. This was the. origin of that colonization which, in ninety years, has peopled this region with more than twelve millions of souls ; has subdued and brought under cultivation an area nearly twice as great as the cultivated land of England ; has connected together the principal commercial points by a network of railroads more than 12,000 miles in extent, and has built up a domestic:- industry whose annual value is in excess of 300,000,000 dollars, giving origin to an internal trade far greater than the external trade of the whole country."
Mr. Foster believes he has abundant evidence to prove the former existence in the Mississippi Valley of a race long since passed away, who enjoyed a far higher degree of civilization and different manners and customs-from those traceable in the tribes who occupied the country when it first became known to Europeans. Ile says the geologist and the antiquary have agreed that the abundant monuments in the form of high circular mounds, parallel roads, and far-reaching embankments are not, as had been thought, the result of the singular yet, as it were, chance work of Nature, but the evidences of human skill. If so, probably much more remains to be discovered, and the field of inquiry in this direction seems likely to prove fruitful.
Our author believes great areas of the prairie region now deemed too arid for cultivation are as well watered and possess as productive a soil as those regions round the Mediterranean which were formerly sites of mighty cities in the midst of a densely popu- lated country, and suggests that if the desolation of those regions was brought about by the agency of man, whether it be not in the power of the same agency to restore their fruitfulness ; in answer to which inquiry we have some valuable observations from Mr. G. P. Marsh on the present physical condition of the countries bordering the Mediterranean, and see in their present desolation, quite apart from all the moral evil which helped their ruin, the stern retributive justice of Nature, not without its warning to the eager builders of the large cities in the great valley. The ruthless and undiscriminating destruction of forests and trees generally has worked more mischievous effects than we have opportunity now to detail: those who are interested in the subject will find these pages give much useful practical information, and furnish abundant material for thought. It may be necessary for the rest- less, eager settlers of the United States, over-eager to make forests disappear before the rising city or widening farm, to take counsel in due time. The information contained in this volume is presented in so highly concentrated a form, it is somewhat difficult „to analyze any portion of it without feeling how much is left untouched ; if we turn from the vegetable to the mineral kingdom, we are met with the same sense of almost inexhaustible wealth. Here, iu this great valley at least, there is iron enough and to spare even for an age of iron. The chapters devoted to geological research are among the ablest in the book. We commend it to the attention of those whose minds may be injured by studying the American through the minifying gleam of political or intellectual antipathy ; they will scarcely realize the simple facts of the physical aspect of this enormous territory with the results already attained before them in hard figures, without a new sense of the capacities of the subduer and the subdued.
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