It is a big country, sprawling all the way from the Alleghenies to the Rockies, and it puts its mark on the people who live in it. Its climate tends to be uncompromising— baking heat in the summer, hostile cold in the winter—and it has never done anything by halves. Where it had forests, they rolled for hundreds of miles, great stands of hardwood, green twilight under their branches; its open prairies were like the sea itself, rolling west in an unbroken treeless groundswell.

When white men came to break this wilderness for settlement it smote them with Indian warriors, plagued them with malaria, put its enormous rivers in periodic destructive floods; then, as they persevered, it enriched them beyond their hopes, with wealth from its forests and its minerals and its fertile soil.

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