n the region of winter wheat, corn,
oats, and live stock. Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cincinnati are the
sister cities of this zone, which reaches into the grazing country of
the Great Plains. The meeting point of corn and cattle has led to the
development of the packing industries,--large business systems that send
the beef and pork of the region to supply the East and parts of Europe.
The "feeding system" adopted in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, whereby the
stock is fattened from the surplus corn of the region, constitutes a
species of varied farming that has saved these States from the disasters
of the failure of a single industry, and has been one solution of the
economic life of the transition belt between the prairies and the Great
Plains. Under a more complex agriculture, better adapted to the various
sections of the State, and with better crops, Kansas has become more
prosperous and less a center of political discontent.

While this development of the agricultural interests of the Middle West
has been in progress, the exploitation of the pine woods of the north
has furnished another contribution to the commerce of the province. The
center of activity has migrated from Michigan to Minnesota, and the
lumber traffic furnishes one of the principal contributions to the
vessels that ply the Great Lakes and supply the tributary mills. As the
white pine vanishes before the organized forces of exploitation, the
remaining hard woods serve to establish factories in the former mill
towns. The more fertile denuded lands of the north are now receiving
settlers who repeat the old pioneer life among the stumps.

But the most striking development in the industrial history of the
Middle West in recent years has been due to the opening up of the iron
mines of Lake Superior. Even in 1873 the Lake Superior ores furnished a
quarter of the total production of American blast furnaces. The opening
of the Gogebic mines in 1884, and the development of the Vermillion and
Mesabi mines adjacent to the head of the lake, in the early nineties,
completed the transfer of iron ore production to the Lake Superior
region. Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin together now produce the ore
for eighty per cent of the pig iron of the United States. Four-fifths of
this great product moves to the ports on Lake Erie and the rest to the
manufactories at Chicago and Milwaukee. The vast steel and iron industry
that centers at Pittsburgh and Cleveland, with import