ific, was one vast empire--the empire of the American Fur Company;
and J.J. Astor in New York spoke the words that filled the wilderness
with deeds. Thus democratic America once beheld within her own confines
the paradox of an empire truly Roman in character.

Here and there on the banks of the great waterway--an imperial road that
would have delighted Caesar--many forts were built. These were the
ganglia of that tremendous organism of which Astor was the brain. The
bourgeois of one of these posts was virtually proconsul with absolute
power in his territory. Mackenzie at Union--which might be called the
capital of the Upper Missouri country--was called "King of the
Missouri." He had an eye for seeing purple. At one time he ordered a
complete suit of armor from England; and even went so far as to have
medals struck, in true imperial fashion, to be distributed among his
loyal followers.

Far and wide these Western American kings flung the trappers, their
subjects, into the wilderness. Verily, in the unwritten "Missouriad"
there is no lack of regal glamour.

The ancients had a way of making vast things small enough to be
familiar. They make gods of the elements, and natural phenomena became
to them the awful acts of the gods.

These moderns made no gods of the elements--they merely conquered them!
The ancients idealized the material. These moderns materialized the
ideal. The latter method is much more appealing to me--an American--than
the former. I love the ancient stories; but it is for the modern
marvellous facts that I reserve my admiration.

When one looks upon his own country as from a height of years, old tales
lose something of their wonder for him. It is owing to this attitude
that the prospect of descending the great river in a power canoe from
the head of navigation gave me delight.

Days and nights filled with the singing and muttering of my big brother!
And I would need only to close my eyes, and all about me would come and
go the ghosts of the mighty doers--who are my kin. Big men, bearded and
powerful, pushing up stream with the cordelle on their shoulders!
Voyageurs chanting at the paddles! Mackinaws descending with precious
freights of furs! Steamboats grunting and snoring up stream! Old forts
sprung up again out of the dusk of things forgotten, with all the old
turbulent life, where in reality to-day the plough of the farmer goes or
the steers browse! Forgotten battles blowing by in the wind! And fr