Hill calls it) has grown to two hundred
and fifty-four thousand seven hundred and thirty-two miles (in 1911), or
about 40 per cent of the world mileage, of which one hundred and forty
thousand miles are within the Mississippi Valley, carrying with them
wherever they go the telegraph and telephone wires, building villages,
towns, and cities-still bringing the fashions of Paris, as did Perrot, in
the paths of the buffalo.
When the surveyors crossed that prairie, treeless except for the woods
along the Aramoni River (just back of the Rock St. Louis) and along the
Illinois River at the other edge, the wild animals and the Indians had
disappeared westward, the prairie ground was broken and planted in
patches; fences had begun to appear on the silent stretches; houses stood
four to a section, with a one-room schoolhouse every two miles and
churches at long intervals. After the construction train ploughed its slow
way across that same prairie, in the trail staked by the surveyors, a
place was marked for a village; the farmers upon whose land it promised to
trespass wanted each to give it the name of his wife, his queen, as La
Salle of his king; but one day a workman, representing the unsentimental
corporation, without ceremony nailed a strip of board to a post, with the
name "Aramoni," let us say, painted upon it.
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