sippi;[1] that $15,000,000 worth of products come annually down a single tributary of the Vólga—namely, the Káma, a stream of which few Americans have ever heard; and, finally, that the waters of the Vólga River system float annually nearly 5,000,000 tons of merchandise, and furnish employment to 7000 vessels and nearly 200,000 boatmen. It may be that an ordinarily well-educated American ought to know all these things; but I certainly did not know them, and they came to me with the shock of a complete surprise.
On the morning of Saturday, June 6, after having visited the fair-city and the krémlin and made as thorough a study of Nízhni Nóvgorod as the time at our disposal would permit, we embarked on one of the Kámenski Brothers' steamers for a voyage of nearly a thousand miles down the Vólga and up the Káma to Perm.
It has been said that Egypt is the creation of the Nile. In a different sense, but with equal truth, it may be said that eastern Russia is the creation of the Vólga. The ethnological composition of its population was mainly determined by that river; the whole history of the country has been intimately connected with it for more than a thousand years; the character and pursuits of all the east-Russian tribes have been greatly modified by it; and upon it now depend, directly or indirectly, the welfare and prosperity of more than 10,000,000 people. From any point of view, the Vólga must be regarded as one of the great rivers of the world. Its length, from the Váldai hills to the Caspian Sea, is nearly 2300 miles; its width below Tsarítsin, in time of high water, exceeds 30 miles, so that a boatman, in crossing it, loses sight entirely of its low banks and is virtually at sea; it washes the borders of nine provinces, or administrative divisions of the empire, and on its banks stand 39 cities and more than 1000 villages and settlements. The most important part of the river, commercially, is that lying
- ↑ In 1880 there were on the upper and the lower Mississippi 681 steamers. The number on the Vólga and its tributaries is about 700.
