AS the boys of bygone days grew to be men they handed down to other lads in the stories of their adventures the history of the events which had happened to them and the things they had learned from experience.
If it were not for the knowledge thus accumulated and given to us by many past generations the young Americans of these times would still be running about naked, fighting with sharp stones, and eating one another with the appetite and manners of the first savages.
When the United States bought the country called Louisiana she acquired much more than the land; she received also the recorded experiments and the results of the hard work of the French for more than a hundred years.
Their successes and their failures, their romantic struggles, their dauntless spirit, their ideals of fair play, were all a part of the same inheritance.
Wherever a French explorer set his wandering feet there has since followed an American business man to develop the fabulous wealth of those first discoveries.
The iron deposits, north of the sources of the Great River, where the fur traders wandered, when smelted by the coal further south, have yielded the richest ores of the world. Lead- and zinc- and copper-mines have done the same.
Wheat-fields in the Red River region have sent their farmers to mill at St. Anthony's Falls with the heaviest grist ever known.
Water-power has sawed the lumber of countless forests. Prairies have pastured as many domestic cattle as ever were fed in the time of migrating buffalo herds.
Corn- or cane- or cotton-fields border the river everywhere. Orchards flourish in many states.
Each region has its own city which it supplies with products for export and which in turn manufactures vast quantities of necessary and luxurious articles. These cities from source to mouth are strung like precious pearls of wampum on the glistening thong of the Great River's length.
Through the jetties and out across Lake Pontchartrain now go the loaded ships taking supplies to the nation who first planted these shores with food crops.
The semi-barbarous red tribes which onceroamed the whole valley, quarreling so among themselves that they were few in number and often starving and ill housed, now live on smaller areas, cultivating prosperous farms. They are probably more numerous than they were when the continent was discovered. In civilization they grow apace, as the early fathers dreamed they might.
The black races, brought by force to the Mississippi Basin, have marched from savagery to civilization in two centuries. They have added to history the name of one genius world famous.
In an Atlantic harbor of the United States stands the Statue of Liberty, given by France to her sister Republic. The flame of her torch glowing like the spirit of the first explorers is kept forever burning to guide humanity to Freedom!
Transcriber's NotesPage 49, hugh changed to huge (were not as huge as the immense)Standardized the spelling of Ship's IslandSilently corrected punctuation
Transcriber's Notes