The things we do!

] Seven hundred years--as long as from the founding of Charlemagne's
new empire of the west to the discovery of the coasts of a still newer
empire of the west.
But in two hundred years from the day that La Salle so miserably perished
on the plains of Texas, in exactly one hundred years from the time when,
under the epoch-making "Ordinance of the Northwest" (as it has been
called), the parcelling of the land began, and in less than half a century
from the year when Andrew Johnson's seven-hundred-year prophecy began to
run, practically the entire domain had been surveyed and sold or given by
the nation to private or municipal or corporate possession. It was the
24th of July, 1687, that La Salle died; it was July 27, 1787, that the
first great sale of a fragment of the domain was made; and it was in 1887,
approximately, that all the humanly available domain was occupied by at
least two persons to a square mile; for in 1890 it was officially declared
by the government of the United States that it had no frontier.


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