Stories of the Great Railroads Author:Charles Edward Russell General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1912 Original Publisher: Charles H. Kerr Subjects: Railroads Transportation / Railroads / General Transportation / Railroads / History Transportation / Railroads / Pictorial Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there ... more »may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. THE ROMANCE OF THE INLAND EMPIRE. And now for the exact way in which this tremendous, incalculable power we bestowed upon Mr. Hill and his friends, "builds up the Northwest" -- also other regions. Take a map of the United States and study attentively the distribution of the large cities. You will observe that after you leave the Atlantic seaboard, the natural population centers are about equidistant. Pittsburg is about as far from the coast as Buffalo is, Cleveland is situated relatively much like Detroit; you go four hundred and twenty miles northwest of Chicago and find the metropolis of St. Paul and Minneapolis, or you go five hundred miles southwest and you find Kansas City, or five hundred miles due west and find Omaha. Denver is as far from Omaha as Omaha is from Chicago; Salt Lake City is another five hundred miles' remove. Portland, Oregon, is about seven hundred miles north, and Los Angeles about five hundred miles south of San Francisco. Cities like Atlanta and Fort Worth, even though inland, are clearly destined to be great central points for production and distribution. Streams of trade head for such places; inevitable markets for vast areas of rich country, they are noted of men as the industrial capitals to be. In the far Northwest the obvious inland center, having not alone the favored situation, but a marvelous combination of natural advantages, is the City of Spokane, Washington. It is about thre...« less