Our Kin Across the Sea
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. GREAT CITIES. AMONGST the features which most attract the notice of a traveller in the ' Great West' of the United States (to which my remarks will be mainly directed) are its great cities. The cities I visited are monuments of American energy and enterprise. The streets of some of them might have been wider, and many of them, especially those of San Francisco, might be better paved; but when it is remembered that these cities of the West, now numbering from 100,000 to 700,000 inhabitants, were, forty years ago, either mere villages or did not exist at all; that in the city of Minneapolis, with its 150,000 people, the oldest person born in it is not yet thirty-two years old ; and that in one of the streets of Chicago, with its 700,000 inhabitants, there still stands a tree,which marks the site
...of an Indian massacre of the early settlers on the shores of the noble Lake Michigan ; and that men now living picked in their boyish days, from the rugged bark of this memorial tree, the arrow-heads of the shafts sent by Indian warriors against the tortured fathers of the future city: we may well be amazed that so much has been done, and, in the main, so well done,' in so short a time. Generally speaking, these great cities of the West are well laid out. In many of them long avenues, lined with deciduous trees, stretch far into the level country, affording grateful shade and remarkably pleasant drives in every direction. Though I regretted the general absence of open squares within the city limits, the handsome parks outside provided abundant breathing-places for the crowded toilers of the city. The splendid parks, avenues, and boulevards which surround the city of Chicago, bear honourable testimony to the munificent and far-seeing spirit of its citizens, both private...
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