te to the
Atlantic seaboard. The Ohio, flowing south and west, unwaters the
south-eastern counties, while 5500 miles of completed railroad traverse
the interior of the state. This 5500 miles of iron road is a significant
fact--5500 miles of railway in the compass of a single western state!
More than all Hindostan can boast of, and nearly half the railway mileage
of the United Kingdom. Of this immense system of interior connexion
Chicago is the centre and heart. Other great centres of commerce have
striven to rival the City of the Skunk, but all have failed; and to-day,
thanks to the dauntless energy of the men of Chicago, the garden state of
the Union possesses this immense extent of railroad, ships its own
produce, north, east, and south, and boasts a population scarcely
inferior to that of many older states; and yet it is only fifty years ago
since William Cobbett laboured long and earnestly to prove that English
emigrants who pushed on into the "wilderness of the Illinois went
straight to misery and ruin."

Passing through Chicago, and going out by one of the lines running north
along the shore of Lake Michigan, I reached the city of Milwaukie late in
the evening. Now the city of Milwaukie stands above 100 miles north of
Chicago and is to the State of Wisconsin what its southern neighbour (100
miles in the States is nothing) is to Illinois. Being, also some 100
miles nearer to the entrance to Lake Michigan, and consequently nearer by
water to New York and the Atlantic, Milwaukie caries off no small share
of the export wheat trade of the North-west. Behind it lie the rolling
prairies of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, the three wheat-growing
states of the American Union. Scandinavia, Germany, and Ireland have made
this portion of America their own, and in the streets of Milwaukie one
hears the guttural sounds of the Teuton and the deep brogue of the Irish
Celt mixed in curious combinations. This railway-station at Milwaukie is
one of the great distributing points of the in-coming flood from Northern
Europe. From here they scatter far and wide over the plains which lie
between Lake Michigan and the head-waters of the Mississippi. No one
stops to look at these people as they throng the wooden platform and fill
the sheds at the depot, the sight is too common to cause interest now,
and yet it is a curious sight this entry of the outcasts into the
promised land. Tired, travel-stained, and worn come the fair-haired crowd
of