[ THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, OMAHA.]

With a firmly established industrial foundation, the progress of the city has gone steadily forward. Commercial expansion, it is true, has been broken occasionally by bursting real-estate booms, grasshopper plagues, drought-stricken crops or general financial depression, but in material welfare and ever-widening public activity the community takes rank with its most wide-awake competitors. Besides its extensive jobbing interests, its manufacturing development has been along the lines of silver smelting and refining, linseed oil mills, white lead works, machine and locomotive shops, and the great live-stock market and meat-packing establishments that have formed the nucleus of the magic city braced against its boundary under the name of South Omaha, and sure, sooner or later, to be one with it in corporate existence, as it is already in life and business. Although not yet past the fiftieth anniversary, Omaha boasts of all those advantages that make an attractive living place—good schools, well-stocked free libraries, substantial churches, art galleries, well-paved streets, with water, light, and rapid transit, fine public parks, imposing public buildings. Above all, it is a city of homes and home owners, thick with modest dwellings though only meagrely supplied with palatial mansions. Omaha's contribution to the world of science, art, and literature is perhaps small, but it has given two presidents to the American Bar Association in James M. Woolworth and Charles F. Manderson, the latter also having filled the position of President pro tem. of the United States Senate; in banking circles Herman Kountze and Joseph H. Millard are known throughout the country; Edward Rosewater and his newspaper, The Bee, occupy a place in the front rank of American journalism; the art gallery of George Whininger is classed among the best private collections on this side of the Atlantic; and the benevolence of John A. Creighton has received recognition in the title conferred on him of Count in the Holy Roman See.

[ OMAHA EXPOSITION, 1898. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF F.A. RINEHART, OMAHA]

The Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 constitutes Omaha's crowning achievement of recent years. Projected in the period of densest industrial gloom and executed in the face of the war with Spain, the enterprise proved an unexpected and unprecedented success, returning to the stock subscribers ninety per cent of the money they had advanced. The financial success was, however, subordinate to the success in other directions. A white city of such architectural perfection could not fail to afford an æsthetic stimulus in itself of wonderful educational effect. Participated in by all the trans-Mississippi States and Territories as an exhibition of the resources and products of this vast region, the Exposition served to open the eyes of visitors from both at home and abroad to the limitless possibilities there spread before them. The Indian Congress alone, including as it did representatives of nearly all the remaining tribes of aboriginal inhabitants gathered together under the direction of the Indian authorities of the Federal Government, formed an ethnic object-lesson the like of which had never before been presented. No fitter culmination could have been prepared than the Peace Jubilee, in its closing month of October, attended by President McKinley, members of his Cabinet, and heroes of the armed conflict just concluded, all uniting in acclaiming the end of war typified in the Exposition as a towering triumph of the arts of peace.

DENVER
THE QUEEN CITY OF THE PLAINS

By JOHN COTTON DANA