grinding grain and sawmills, as well. This place of power will
have to be protected, and so you will have there a post which
will eventually be replaced by a city.'' Yet Fort Snelling was
nearly fifty years in the future and St. Paul and Minneapolis
were dreams undreamed.

Jefferson took time to think about it and then wrote Astor
thus, ``Your beginning of a city on the Western Coast is a
great acquisition, and I look forward to a time when our
population will spread itself up and down along the whole
Pacific frontage, unconnected with us, excepting by ties of
blood and common interest, and enjoying like us, the rights
of self-government.''

The Pilgrim Fathers thought land that lay inward from the sea
as valueless. The forest was an impassible barrier. Later, up
to the time of George Washington, the Alleghanies were
regarded as a natural barrier. Patrick Henry likened the
Alleghany Mountains to the Alps that separated Italy from
Germany and said, ``The mountain ranges are lines that God
has set to separate one people from another.''

Later, statesmen have spoken of the ocean in the same way,
as proof that a union of all countries under an international
capital could never exist.

Great as was Jefferson, he regarded the achievement of
Lewis and Clarke as a feat and not an example. He looked
upon the Rocky Mountains as a natural separation of
peoples ``bound by ties of blood and mutual interest'' but