Excerpt from Through the Fertile Northwest, Over the Scenic Highway
At Staples, also, branch line service for Fergus Falls, and a rich section thereabout, diverges, the branch leaving the main line at Wadena.
Passing through the beautiful Lake Park region, with Perham, F razee and Detroit as outing centers, we soon reach the Red River Valley. This great valley, from twenty-five to seventy miles wide, and more than three hundred miles long, was once the bed of a vast postglacial lake, to which scientific men have given the name Lake Agassiz. The lake existed for more than a thousand years, was almost seven hundred miles in length, and covered an area larger than Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior combined. As there are almost no fences to be seen, the whole val ley appears as one vast wheat field as far as the eye can range; in the early summer a sea of waving green, in later summer an ocean of mottled gold, in harvest time an army of reaping machines ex tending to the horizon. The valley is about half and half in Min nesota and North Dakota, the Red River being the dividing line between the states. This valley produces on an average from forty to sixty million bushels of wheat yearly, besides much flax, corn and other cereals. This vast grain section is traversed by a line of the Northern Pacific from Manitoba Junction to Winnipeg, Mani toba, which passes through the important cities of Crookston, Minn., and Grand Forks, Grafton, Drayton and Pembina, N. D.
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