704 Natural resources of the United States. [i860- commands access, as no other country does, to the two great oceans. Its eastern coast-line, indented with splendid harbours, stretches south till it meets the great southern gulf, which itself extends beyond the mouth of the Mississippi to the cotton-fields of Texas. To the north, the great Lakes, connected with the Atlantic seaboard by the St Lawrence and the Erie Canal, reach the wheat-fields and iron supplies of the West, and afford direct water-communication to the seaboard for cities more than a thousand miles inland in the centre of a great productive area. A third of the way across the continent and in the very middle of its most fertile region, the great Mississippi flows from the Canadian border to the Gulf. Into this river flow its vast tributaries, the Ohio, with the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, from the east, the Missouri and Arkansas and Red rivers from the west, forming a single valley, which extends for 1800 miles at its widest part and includes over 1,000,000 square miles, within which lies more than half the arable land of the country. More than half the States drain into this one river. From the Alleghanies on the east a large number of rivers flow to the Atlantic and the Gulf. All told, it is estimated that there are 18,000 miles of navigable rivers in the whole United States. Within the area thus situated is to be found a greater variety of climate, soil, and mineral resources than in any equal area of the world. The arid plains which lie west of the 100th meridian are separated from the Atlantic by three great belts of arable land, broken only by the Alleghany mountains, producing a vast variety of products, and roughly distinguished by their chief crops, the spring wheat-belt in the north, the central belt of winter wheat and Indian corn, and the southern cotton-belt. West of this fertile territory lie the plains which, though called the Great Desert, are the seat of vast cattle and sheep ranches ; and beyond the great basin formed by the Rockies and the Sierras lie the Pacific States with their lumber and wheat and fruits. The mountain States are rich in valuable ores, gold, silver, and copper ; while coal and iron, minerals even more important for industry, are widely distributed within the great belts of arable territory already described, throughout the Alleghany region, and even farther east. The supply of anthracite coal comes exclusively from a small area in north-eastern Pennsylvania; and most of the bituminous coal still comes from the great Alleghany deposit which stretches from western Pennsylvania to Alabama ; but there are coal-beds of vast extent in Illinois and Indiana, in the prairie States beyond the Mississippi, and in the Pacific States of the North-west. Iron ore is also widely distributed, the chief deposits being found in the Alleghany region and on the southern shore of Lake Superior. The full extent of the mineral resources of the country is even yet not known. To the men who began to develop them at the beginning of the new era they may well have seemed inexhaustible, as ever new discoveries were made, not only of new deposits of known
