tion, diplomacy,
politics, economic development, or social structure, have been
fundamental problems in shaping the nation. It is not a narrow, not even
a local, interest which determines the mission of this Association. It
is nothing less than the study of the American people in the presence
and under the influence of the vast spaces, the imperial resources of
the great interior. The social destiny of this Valley will be the social
destiny, and will mark the place in history, of the United States.

In a large sense, and in the one usually given to it by geographers and
historians, the Mississippi Valley includes the whole interior basin, a
province which drains into nearly two thousand miles of navigable waters
of the Mississippi itself, two thousand miles of the tawny flood of the
Missouri, and a thousand miles of the Ohio--five thousand miles of main
water highways open to the steamboat, nearly two and a half million
square miles of drainage basin, a land greater than all Europe except
Russia, Norway, and Sweden, a land of levels, marked by essential
geographic unity, a land estimated to be able to support a population of
two or three hundred millions, three times the present population of the
whole nation, an empire of natural resources in which to build a noble
social structure worthy to hold its place as the heart of American
industrial, political and spiritual life.

The significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history was first
shown in the fact that it opened to various nations visions of power in
the New World--visions that sweep across the horizon of historical
possibility like the luminous but unsubstantial aurora of a comet's
train, portentous and fleeting.

Out of the darkness of the primitive history of the continent are being
drawn the evidences of the rise and fall of Indian cultures, the
migrations through and into the great Valley by men of the Stone Age,
hinted at in legends and languages, dimly told in the records of mounds
and artifacts, but waiting still for complete interpretation.

Into these spaces and among the savage peoples, came France and wrote a
romantic page in our early history, a page that tells of unfulfilled
empire. What is striking in the effect of the Mississippi Valley upon
France is the pronounced influence of the unity of its great spaces. It
is not without meaning that Radisson and Groseilliers not only reached
the extreme of Lake Superior but also, in all probabil