EXPLORERS AND TRAVELLERS

If one should ask which is the most important river basin in the world,
there is no doubt that the Mississippi would be named, with its million and
a quarter square miles of area and its twenty-five or more billions of
aggregated wealth. Favored in climate, soil, and navigable streams, and
endowed with practically inexhaustible veins of coal, copper, iron, and
silver, feeding the world with its hundreds of millions of bushels of corn
and wheat, and clothing it by other millions of bales of cotton, it is hardly
so astonishing that within years from its discovery by Joliet this greatest of
river basins should be the abiding-place of twenty-seven and a half millions
of people.