Chapter 58

Chapter 58
On the Upper River

THE big towns drop in, thick and fast, now: and between stretch
processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude. Hour by hour,
the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous North-west;
and with each successive section of it which is revealed,
one's surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase.
Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage.
This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are
competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened;
they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought,
they fortify every weak place in their land with a school,
a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law.
Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order.

This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood.
By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast
what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. It is so new
that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it.
For sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the river
between St. Louis and New Orleans, and then gone home and written his book,
believing he had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or that
had anything to see. In not six of all these books is there mention
of these Upper River towns--for the reason that the five or six tourists
who penetrated this region did it before these towns were projected.
The latest tourist of them all (1878) made the same old regulation trip--
he had not heard that there was anything north of St. Louis.

Yet there was. There was this amazing region, bristling with great towns,
projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning.
A score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand people.
Then we have Muscatine, ten thousand; Winona, ten thousand; Moline,
ten thousand; Rock Island, twelve thousand; La Crosse, twelve thousand;
Burlington, twenty-five thousand; Dubuque, twenty-five thousand;
Davenport, thirty thousand; St. Paul, fifty-eight thousand, Minneapolis,
sixty thousand and upward.

The foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of them
in his books. They have sprung up in the night, while he slept.
So new is this region, that I, who am comparatively young,
am yet older than it is. When I was born, St. Paul had a population
of three persons, Minneapolis had just a third as many.
The then population of Minneapolis died two years ago; and when
he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years,
of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons.
He had a frog's fertility.

I must explain that the