[ MRS. JAMES GARFIELD ]
[ THE WHITE HOUSE ]
THE STORY OF GARFIELD.
CHAPTER I.
THE FAR WEST.
The United States Sixty Years ago—The "Queen City" of the West—The Rush for New Lands—Marvellous Growth of American Cities.
Go to Liverpool or Glasgow, and embark on one of the great ocean steamers, which are constantly crossing the Atlantic. Sail westwards for about a week, and you will reach the eastern shores of the New World.
If you land at New York, you will find yourself in one of the largest cities on the face of the globe. You will also find the country largely peopled by the same race as yourself, and everywhere you will be addressed in your own language. You may travel for weeks from town to town, and from city to city, until you are lost in wonder at the vast and populous empire which English-speaking people have founded and built up on the other side of the Atlantic.
Where is the New World of fancy and fiction so graphically described in Indian stories and tales of backwoods life? And where are the vast prairies and almost boundless forests of sober fact, where the bear, the wolf, and the buffalo roamed at will—the famous hunting-grounds of the Red Indians and the trappers of the Old World?