October, 1858 4,429,055 bushels. " 1859 5,523,448 " " 1860 6,500,864 " " 1861 12,483,797 "
In 1860, from the opening to the close of navigation, 30,837,632 bushels of grain and flour passed through Buffalo. In 1861 the amount received up to the 31st of October was 51,969,142 bushels. As the navigation would be closed during the month of November, the above figures may be taken as representing not quite the whole amount transported for the year. It may be presumed the 52,000,000 of bushels, as quoted above, will swell itself to 60,000,000. I confess that to my own mind statistical amounts do not bring home any enduring idea. Fifty million bushels of corn and flour simply seems to mean a great deal. It is a powerful form of superlative, and soon vanishes away, as do other superlatives in this age of strong words. I was at Chicago and at Buffalo in October 1861. I went down to the granaries, and climbed up into the elevators. I saw the wheat running in rivers from one vessel into another, and from the railroad vans up into the huge bins on the top stores of the warehouses;--for these rivers of food run up hill as easily as they do down. I saw the corn measured by the forty bushel measure with as much ease as we measure an ounce of cheese, and with greater rapidity. I ascertained that the work went on, week day and Sunday, day and night incessantly; rivers of wheat and rivers of maize ever running. I saw the men bathed in corn as they distributed it in its flow. I saw bins by the score laden with wheat, in each of which bins there was space for a comfortable residence. I breathed the flour, and drank the flour, and felt myself to be enveloped in a world of breadstuff. And then I believed, understood, and brought it home to myself as a fact, that here in the corn lands of Michigan, and amidst the bluffs of Wisconsin, and on the high table plains of Minnesota, and the prairies of Illinois, had God prepared the food for the increasing millions of the Eastern world, as also for the coming millions of the Western.
I do not find many minds constituted like my own, and therefore I venture to publish the above figures. I believe them to be true in the main, and they will show, if credited, that the increase during the last four years has gone on with more than fabulous rapidity. For myself I own that those figures would have done nothing unless I had visited the spot myself. A man cannot, perhaps, count up the results of such a work by a quick glance of his eye, nor communicate with precision to another the conviction which his own short experience has made so strong within himself;--but to himself seeing is believing. To me it was so at Chicago and at Buffalo. I began then to know what it was for a country to overflow with milk and honey, to burst with its own fruits, and be smothered by its own riches. From St. Paul down the Mississippi by the shores of Wisconsin and Iowa,--by the ports on Lake Pepin,--by La Crosse, from which one railway runs eastward,--by Prairie du Chien the terminus of a second,--by Dunleath, Fulton, and Rock Island from whence three other lines run eastward, all through that wonderful State of Illinois--the farmers' glory,--along the ports of the great lakes,--through Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and further Pennsylvania, up to Buffalo, the great gate of the western Ceres, the loud cry was this--"How shall we rid ourselves of our corn and wheat?" The result has been the passage of 60,000,000 bushels of breadstuffs through that gate in one year! Let those who are susceptible of statistics ponder that. For them who are not I can only give this advice:--Let them go to Buffalo next October, and look for themselves.