to unite the Willamette valley and Puget Sound into one State, making another of the entire inland country; again, it was proposed to annex the Walla Walla country to Oregon; to unite northeastern Washington with northern Idaho, and make a separate State of this; to attach southeastern Washington to southern Idaho and eastern Oregon.

The railroads produced a great transformation in almost every respect. The men who were responsible for the construction of these lines were especially anxious to attract emigrants to the Northwest, in order to develop its great resources and thus create business for the roads. Emigration bureaus were formed in cities of the Atlantic coast; pamphlets describing the advantages of the country were distributed broadcast; and Northwestern farm lands were widely advertised in the newspapers. As a result, the population of the region increased with great rapidity, as compared with the period prior to 1870. As already stated, the total for that year was 130,000. In the ten years from 1870 to 1880 there was an addition of 152,500; in the next decade, 465,000; while from 1890 to 1900 the gain was 330,000. It is interesting to note that while California was far in advance of the Northwest when the period began, and continued to lead for another ten years, its increase since 1880 has been very much less.

The growth of cities is yet more striking. In 1870, Portland was the only town approximating a population of ten thousand. It was already flourishing, but from that time its progress was remarkable. The census of 1880 gave the city 17,577; that of ten years later, 46,385; and the last (1900), 90,426. On Puget Sound the village of Tacoma, with 73 inhabitants in 1870, and only 1,100 in 1880, leaped by 1890 to 36,000. During the last ten-year period, however, very little gain was made, the census of 1900 showing only 37,714. Since 1900 its progress has again been rapid. Seattle presents the spectacle of a town that has grown in twenty years from a village of 3,533 people to a city of 80,271. This result is due largely to

the railroads, although Seattle has in recent years gained enormously on account of the trade with Alaska. East of the Cascade Mountains towns have, of course, grown less rapidly; but there has been substantial progress in all three States comprising the Pacific Northwest, so much so that Washington was enabled to gain the rights of statehood in 1889,-admitted on November 11th,—and Idaho in the following year-July 3, 1890. Idaho in 1900 had two cities of over four thousand each, Boise and Pocatello; eastern Oregon had two, Baker City and Pendleton; and eastern Washington two, Walla Walla and Spokane.

Considering that Spokane is an inland town, its history has been an extraordinary one. A few pioneers settled on Spokane Prairie" as early as 1862, and stores were opened near the bridge to supply the wants of miners going east into the mountains. But for some years the place remained very insignificant, and in 1880 it had but three hundred and fifty inhabitants. The rapid growth since that time is due mainly to the fact that the railroad opened up near Spokane one of the most wonderful wheat-raising districts in the world, the so-called "Palouse" country, stretching southward toward Snake River. Having a magnificent water power in its falls, Spokane quickly became a centre for the manufacture of flour, as well as a distributing point both for the rich agricultural region to the south and the mining districts to the north and east.

The development of the agricultural resources of the Inland Empire has been very rapid. That region, which before the advent of the railway could not raise wheat at a profit for shipment down the river, has now superseded the great valley of California as the leading wheat producing section of the Pacific coast. It is this that has made Portland one of the greatest wheat and flour ports in the United States. The area of cultivation each year increasingly encroaches upon the area of pasturage in the three States of the Northwest.

CHAPTER XXII

RUSSIAN AMERICA

ALASKA bears a peculiar relation to the territorial development of the United States. The region between the Atlantic and the Mississippi was an inheritance from the mother country; from France was acquired the Louisiana country; from Spain, directly and indirectly, the two Floridas, Texas, New Mexico, and California. All these nations, as well as Holland, whose interests had earlier been absorbed by Great Britain, held possessions in the New World by virtue of their expansion westward across the Atlantic. Alaska was the only territory acquired by a European power in America as a consequence of expansion eastward across the Pacific.

In Russia, about the middle of the sixteenth century, shortly after the overthrow of the Tartars and the establishment of a true national monarchy, there began a movement toward the interior comparable in some respects to that which followed the Revolutionary War in our own. country. But there were great differences in motives, in the characteristics of the pioneers of the two countries, and in the results obtained. The American pioneer was either a fur trader, a hunter, a missionary, a soldier, or a farmer seeking out new lands for settlement; the original Russian pioneer usually was a fugitive from justice, or a declared convict, sentenced to receive the punishment of exile in some portion of the vast wilds beyond the frontier of the empire.

But commercial and military motives operated in both cases, the merchants becoming as ubiquitous on the northflowing rivers of Siberia as in the valleys of the American West, while every Cossack was by training and disposition a fighting man bent on conquest. It is supposed to have been the exigencies of commerce which induced the first plunge into the trans-Ural country. As the story runs, some English merchants, trading from the White Sea down the Volga and by way of the Caspian Sea to Persia, were attacked by a plundering crew and robbed of ship and goods. This incident, said to have occurred in 1573, caused the czar to send an armed force to the lower Volga and the Caspian for the purpose of freeing these regions of the Cossack pirates, many of whom took refuge in the western portion of Siberia. It was such bands of semibarbarians, men endued with exceptional native energy and with a kind of enterprise having its basis in the love of warlike adventure, who, under chosen leaders, began the process of reducing Siberia to subjection, and adding it, a small portion at a time, to the imperial crown. The trade in furs had long been a leading Russian industry; and when it was found that the new territories were rich in fur-bearing animals, especially in the highly-prized sable, great interest was aroused among the merchants, who hastened to extend their trade eastward as rapidly as the country was made Russian territory.

The first important conquest was on Tobol River, where a petty Tartar king had previously held sway, and there, at a point about midway between the Aral Sea and the Gulf of Obi was founded the city of Tobolsk, which served as a point of departure for new and wider acquisitions. The Cossacks moved eastward from river valley to river valley, cutting a broad path of conquest through the centre of Siberia, and setting up, to mark their progress, a line of fortified cities including Tomsk on the upper waters of the Obi, Yeneseisk on the Yenesei, Irkutsk on lake Baikal, and Yakutsk on the river Lena. As early as 1639 this line