make the trip from
St. Louis to New Orleans almost as quickly as the oft-detained
steamboat. The distance has been made between these cities by a tug,
with ten heavily-freighted barges, in six days. The tugs plying on the
Minnesota River carry with good speed barges containing thirty thousand
bushels of wheat, and the freight of a single trip would fill more than
eighty railroad-cars. This transportation is cheap, because the tugs
require less than one-fourth the expense for running and management
required by the steamboats. The carriage of grain from Minnesota to New
Orleans by this method costs no more than the freightage from the same
point to Chicago by rail. A boatload of wheat from St. Paul, taking the
river route, is not once handled until it is put aboard ship at the
Crescent City. The mighty energy of the North-west--"the Germany of
America," as it has been well called by Dr. Draper--has long since
discovered that the Mississippi is the best existing route to European
markets. Grain can be shipped by way of St. Louis and New Orleans to New
York and Europe twenty cents a bushel cheaper than it can be carried by
the other existing routes. As long ago as 1868 the Illinois Central
Railroad took hold of the West India and Southern trade through the
river route, and offered such commercial inducements to Western
importers that "Havana sends her products by this route to the
North-west, instead of by New York."[A] As the North-west expands and
multiplies in resources and population, it will be compelled to transact
its foreign and seaboard commerce through the noble navigable waters of
the Mississippi, unless it can obtain a short and cheap transportation
to New York by some trans-Alleghany water-line. In the event of the
North-western trade being diverted southward along the great natural
artery of the continent, where no tolls, no tariffs and no transhipments
are required, the loss will fall most heavily upon New York and the
seaboard marts. The increasing stream of South American commerce, in the
same event, must inevitably take the short, speedy and entirely
inexpensive route to the North-west (through the broad and free highway
of the "Father of Waters"), rather than encounter the delay, danger and
expense of the Gulf-Stream route to New York, and thence by rail or the
Lakes to its destination. The longer the present trade-status continues,
and the mammoth corporations of the railroads force the transportation
of