ion: Small lake.]
The Irrigating Reservoir at Walnut Grove, Arizona,
showing the Artificial Lake partly filled.

We shall be pardoned for recurring again to Minnesota. So recently as
1838, where St. Paul and Minneapolis now stand, the former with a
population in 1890 of 133,156, the latter with one of 164,738, not a
white man's abode had risen. There were then but three cabins between
St. Paul and Prairie du Chien, a distance of 300 miles down the
Mississippi. Summit Avenue, St. Paul, was, in 1890, the finest street
in America, if not on the globe. West St. Paul, in 1880 a hamlet of a
few huts, had by 1890 20,000 to 30,000 people, with street-cars, large
business blocks, fine houses and stores. The pioneer railway in
Minnesota was laid in 1862, from St. Paul to St. Anthony, the first
shovelful of earth being lifted by a citizen of St. Paul, who probably
lived to see his State gridironed with 5,379 miles of track; his own
firm constructing over 1,100 miles in the single year 1887. Minneapolis
in 1887 turned out 5,000,000 barrels of flour, an average of 100,000
barrels a week.

Duluth had in 1880 but 3,740 people. In 1890, 33,115. The cause of
Duluth's advantage is obvious upon a glance at the map. It is by water
no farther from Lake Erie than Chicago is, while it is some hundreds of
miles nearer the great wheat-field. It is itself the very gate of
this--the gate of Minnesota--which in 1869 brought forth 18,000,000
bushels; in 1886, 50,000,000 bushels. To this enormous yield, that of
the Dakotas, about the same, had now to be added, the one as the other
finding its way out to the hungry world largely through Duluth.

The caravans of people necessary to populate these immense western
ranges were to a very great extent immigrants from Europe. The census of
1880 gave us 6,679,043 inhabitants of foreign nativity. We have no
figures for the exact proportion of the total immigration into the
country which found its home in the West, yet a glimpse at the total
from year to year is interesting at this point. The falling off in and
after 1893 is particularly noticeable. Immigrants arrived as follows:

In
1868 282,189
1869 352,768
1870 387,203
1871 321,350
1872 404,806
1873 459,803
1874 313,339
1875 227,498
1876 169,986
1877 141,857
1878 138,469
1879 177,826
1880 457,257
1881 669,431
1882 788,992
1883 603,322
1884 518,592
1885 395,346
1886 334,203
1890 455,302
1891 560,319
1892 579,663