bottom lands you enter the immense high plains covered with verdure and inclosed here and there with thickets and forests. The upper region traversed by the Missouri is sterile and arid. The current of the river is rapid and turbid in the greater part of its course. It is a half-mile wide at its mouth; at several other places it is much wider. Although all the waters of this immense region and of so many great tributaries unite in the Missouri, it is notwithstanding so low at certain seasons of the year that steamboats can scarcely find passage. This lack of water is attributed to the dry, open country traversed by the river and to its great evaporation.
The resources which the Mississippi and Missouri may offer to commerce are incalculable and have not yet been sufficiently appreciated. For thousands of years these magnificent American rivers rolled their waters peacefully through the vast forests, fertile prairies and most picturesque mountains, reflecting the varied scenes of a capricious nature; they were then unknown save to the wandering savage of the West or to the animals that fed upon their banks. At last they drew the attention of civilized man and now they have begun to satisfy both their needs and their desires. All parts of this vast region, watered by the main stream and its tributaries, may be penetrated by steamboats, and but for a small district in the plains of the upper Missouri, there is not a single point more than loo miles from a navigable branch. One boat may take its cargo at Lake Chautauqua in the State of New York, another in the interior of Virginia, a third can start from Rice lake, at the source of the Mississippi, and a fourth, laden with the furs of the Rocky Mountains, can descend the Missouri 2,8oo miles, and all meet at the 'mouth of the Ohio, to go down together to the ocean.
Reader, you live in Europe, where the commerce of every seaport, where all interior branches of navigation have been carried to the last perfection: where superior intelligences consume themselves in vain for lack of a career in which