CHAPTER II
THE STORY OF THE NORTH
Nature has not put upon the face of the globe any region
more fit or more inviting for human occupancy than the
temperate zone of North America. The soil is fertile, producing
with fair tillage all the forms of food needful for
the full development of the human species. The climate is
precisely that which calls for sufficient human exertion in
the unescapable battle of life, but not enough to debar men
from a rich surplus of things beyond the mere living, which
in the tropics is all a man asks, or in the Arctics is all a man
may hope. Lastly, its natural transportation is easy and
abundant. The rugged, virile, enterprising and successful
population of that region is Nature's offering to the problems
of the world's future, and it is safe prophecy that in
this region of America always will be produced many of the
world's greatest thinkers and greatest doers; because here,
surely, is a splendid human environment.
But man, like other species, is a product of two forces, environment and heredity. What was the heredity of the temperate zone? Of the best, the strongest, the most enterprising. The Colonies, New England and the upper South, sent their strongest sons west in the early days. Later, the restless populations of Europe, of Irish, Teutonic and Scandinavian stock, began to swarm into that favored region, a good part of which, then known as our West, lay unoccupied. The Civil War prevented what we might call the Americanization of the Northwest, which attracted heavy immigration of North-European stocks. But all the men moving out along the forty-second parallel as a meridian line of latitude were of strong, well selected human stock. That was the original ancestry of what we might call our "North."
We rudely may group this region as that lying along the Mississippi, the Missouri and their upper tributaries. Here
