Canadian northwest
are constantly increasing the area and quantity of wheat grown;
while both north and south of Lake Superior are the most
extensive iron mines in the world, from which approximately
55,000,000 tons of ore are shipped annually. The Great Lakes
provide a natural highway for the shipment of all these products.

BUFFALO TO CLEVELAND

439 M. BUFFALO, Pop. 506,775. (Train 51 arrives 5:30p; No. 3, passes
7:15p; No. 41, 11:45p; No. 25, 11:51p; No. 19, 3:55a. Eastbound: No. 6
passes 11:31p; No. 26, 12:27a; No. 16, 4:35a; No. 22, 7:15a.)

French trappers and Jesuit missionaries were the first white men to
visit the site of Buffalo, and near here, on the east bank of the
Niagara River at the mouth of Cayuga Creek, La Salle in 1679 built the
"Griffin," with which he sailed up the Great Lakes to Green Bay, Wis. He
also built Ft. Conti at the mouth of the river, but this was burned in
the following year. Seven years later the marquis of Denonville in
behalf of the French built here another fort, the predecessor of the
various fortifications in this locality which were subsequently called
Ft. Niagara.

[Illustration: Port of Buffalo on Lake Erie, 1815]

Although the neighborhood was the scene of various operations during the
War of Independence, not a single white settler was living on the site
of the present city when the federal constitution was adopted in 1787,
and the town was not laid out till after the second presidency of
Washington. In 1801 Joseph Ellicott, sometimes called the "Father of
Buffalo," plotted the site for a town, calling it New Amsterdam but the
name of Buffalo Creek or Buffalo proved more popular. Ellicott was the
agent of a group of Dutch capitalists called the Holland Land Co., who
purchased a large tract of land for speculative purposes in the
neighborhood of Buffalo (1792).

At an early period (1784) the present site of the city of Buffalo
had come to be known as the "Buffalo Creek region," either from
the herds of buffalo or bison, which, according to Indian
tradition, had frequented the salt licks of the creek, or more
probably for some Indian chief.

During the War of 1812 Buffalo was a frontier town, and, owing to its
position on Lake Erie, very close to an important theater of operations.
The first gun of the war is said to have been fired on Aug. 13, by a
battery at Black Rock, then a rival, now a s