next season another break, and still a third, took place in the east channel. These were also temporarily controlled by cofferdams. Four years were now spent in ineffective experiments at outside patching of a deep-seated interior disorder. After consultation with the most expert hydraulic engineers in civil and government service, a plan was at length worked out for a radical and thorough treatment, which might not only remedy the immediate trouble, but forever prevent its recurrence. This plan the United States government at length undertook to execute. There was first constructed a so-called "apron" of timber. cribs loaded with rock and covered with heavy planking, to receive the waters which had been plunging over the brink of the falls and deliver them quietly some four hundred feet down stream. Since the completion of the apron, there has been no waterfall proper. The other part of the scheme was a huge dike or bulkhead, to be built under the limestone, to cut off any streamlets in the body of the underlying sandstone which might invite breaks in the

rises to a close contact with the limestone layer. The sandstone excavated for its construction was removed through a branch of the original tunnel for a tail-race, and the materials for the concrete were sent down in a well and moved right and left by cars. The cost to the government was about $600,000, but the citizens of Minneapolis had previously thrown in the sum of $334,000, largely paid by stockholders in the water-power companies. Thus the "falls were saved," and the wheels of industry actuated by their waters have continued to revolve, and the hopes and expectations of the pioneer settlers have not been disappointed.

The manufacture of lumber was the first considerable industry of the cities, and for a long time held that supremacy. That lumber no longer holds the first place is not due to any decline in that business; its volume and increase would make another city notable. The annual output of lumber for the five years following 1850 (in which year the industry began) was but 1,200,000 feet. By 1870 it had risen

to 118,223,100 feet; in 1880 it stood at 195,45 2,200 feet; while for the past decade the average has been but little below 300,000,000, no account being made of laths or shingles. The cutting and banking of the logs in the vast pineries of the upper Mississippi, the tedious "drive" for hundreds of miles to the seat of manufacture, the sawing, hauling, sorting, and piling of the product, involve the employment of an enormous capital and a large army of men. A great modern sawmill presents a most interesting example of the application of natural forces, and when seen in operation, particularly by night, affords a picturesque and lively spectacle.

There is a fall of one thousand feet in the five hundred miles of the Mississippi River above Minneapolis. Down this slope the force of gravity drags the endless raft of logs to the great storage booms near the mills. As they are needed, the logs are floated to the doors of the mill, where they are underrun by huge chains armed with spikes and hauled on to the platforms. "Steamniggers" seize them and roll them on to the carriages of the circular saws, which fly and flash like the shuttles of a modern loom. In an instant the log is "flatted " and tossed on to a rollway leading to the great" gang" of thirty upright saws strained in a single frame, occupying the centre of the mill. A very huge log may occupy the attention of the gang exclusively for a few

minutes, but commonly two, four, or six logs are piled up and fed to the gang by ingenious and powerful apparatus. The boards and planks issuing from the gang next pass, one by one, but at lightning

speed, over the "edgers," which trim away bark, sap, and doze, and leave the edges parallel. Saws sliding on the arbors of the machines, controlled by hand wheels, effect this with the least possible loss of good lumber. On their way out of the mill the boards and scantling are stopped, each for an instant, to be squared off to standard lengths. Wanes and stumpshots are not. tolerated in the modern lumber market. Edgings and slabs, which may yield a picket or a lath, are cut to proper lengths and shot through slides in the floor to appropriate machines in the basement, a department of the establishment which the visitor must by no means omit to inspect. What is left goes to the wood-pile. A small residuum

The Masonic Temple.

of trash is dumped as "scoots" into the tail-race, to float off to the gulf, twelve hundred miles away. Before it has travelled a mile of the journey, however, the enterprising denizens of the Bohemian flats,

from stagings built out over the rapids, have by means of hoes, rakes, and spears, landed everything which, after drying, will boil a pot or heat a flatiron.

The great sawmills of Saint Anthony and Minneapolis were first built on the brink of the falls and driven under low heads by unlimited water. Since the development of other manufactures has made it desirable to use the water-power with greater economy, the lumber-men have, with two or three exceptions, moved their establishments to points a mile or more above the falls, and are operating them by steam. Fuel costs nothing, sawdust and. offal sufficing. The rent of mill sites and piling ground is much reduced, and shipping facilities are much more accessible. Not a few of the lumbering firms have of late years gone into the manufacture

The West Hotel.

of house material. Any one of them will fill a bill calling for every piece of pine wood, of whatever shape or dimension, needed in the erection of any desired structure. The railways diverging to all quarters of Minnesota, to Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and far toward the Pacific coast, are constantly freighting such "mak

ins" of buildings. The manufacture of hard-wood house-finish and of furniture has increased to the dimensions of a leading industry within a few years, and promises to outgrow that of pine lumber. The pine forests accessible are diminishing in area and product, while the vast stretches of hard-wood lands of Minnesota and Wisconsin have hardly been explored.

It is the flour manufacture, however, by which Minneapolis is known to the great outside world. The development here of this industry on a scale which has no precedent is due to an interesting combination of causes. First to be named, of course, is the enormous water-power of the Falls of Saint Anthony, available at a trifling cost. Next, the opening of many millions of acres of prairie lands in Minnesota and the Dakotas to the cultivation of

hard spring wheat, rich both in starch and gluten. In the first years of milling at the falls the wheat was brought up river from Iowa in barges and hauled by oxteams from the landings to the mills. Later, Southern Minnesota furnished the supply; but now for many years it has been wholly brought in by the railways running north and west, pouring in the wealth of the Red River Valley and the "Jim" River country of Dakota. Of the crop of 1888, 45,000,000 bushels came to this, the largest primary wheat market of the country, and doubtless of the world.

Another consideration is the situation of Minneapolis, near the head of Lake Superior. From Duluth, only a hundred and sixty miles away, there is continuous water transportation to Montreal and New York. Low lake freights have been a constant and wholesome check on the great railway lines, competing or combining, as the case

Railway (better known as "The Soo"), which, reaching the Canadian border at the Falls of Sainte Marie, delivers its loaded cars to the Canadian Pacific, a thoroughfare not affected by the "long and short haul" paragraphs of the United States interstate commerce law. So long as no combine exists between "The Soo" and the Chicago lines, Minneapolis will continue to enjoy a favorable independence. It must also be remarked that the halfdozen railway lines running south and east will not be likely to forget that but a moderate expenditure is needed to open up to the lower levee of Minneapolis the full navigation of the father of waters and his tributaries. At different times cargoes of cotton, coal, and merchandise have been landed at this port.

Still another cause of the flouring development, to be later remarked upon, is found in the circumstance that the process of purifying middlings in the course of

1872, the ancient process of grinding the cleaned wheat between upper and nether mill-stones remained in vogue. The meal coming from the stones was carried in bulk to a "bolt," which separated it into bran, flour, and a coarser product called "middlings." These middlings were then subjected to a second grinding, and the meal therefrom was sifted in an appropriate bolt, into two and sometimes three grades of inferior flour. It had long been known that the middlings flours contained a large proportion of the gluten of the wheat, and were therefore stronger and richer than the fine flour taken out at the head of the bolt, but no successful devices had been contrived for improving them in point of color and purity. So matters stood at the opening of a second epoch of milling, when one Lacroix, an immigrant French miller, introduced the first rude apparatus for purifying middlings. The "middlings purifier," in its lowest terms, consists of an air

tight box, in which is suspended at midheight a horizontal screen or bolt. On this screen the middlings are spread out and agitated, while a steady draught of air is maintained by means of a suction pipe issuing from the top of the chest. The purifier took in the dull gray middlings meal and turned it out, to the delight of the miller, looking like fine, white sand. This product, when re-ground and bolted, yielded the Minnesota patent and superlative flours, which for some years brought fame to the state and very satisfactory profits to her millers.

Minnesota held a monopoly of these flours for some years, during which eastern millers, presuming that the new process could not be applied to winter wheats, made no experiments to ascertain the facts. When at length it was ascertained that the purification of middlings was as profitable in milling winter as spring wheats, the special advantage of Minnesota was imperilled. Then began a new series of efforts and experiments to recover lost

to local use that all the mills were at length forced to adopt it. This is known as the "roller process." "roller process." Mill-stones, from time immemorial the instrument of mankind for bruising and triturating the cereal grains to fit them for food, have been discarded. Wheat is now ground or rather cracked between rollers geared to run in close contact, having surfaces either smooth or corrugated. The difference in apparatus is not greater than that in the grinding. The old mill-stones took their wheat from the hopper and held it between their ingeniously furrowed surfaces till the grains were broken up and divided to an extreme degree of fineness, before any process of separation began. In the roller process, a first pair of "rolls" breaks the grain into a few pieces; these after a cleaning process go to a second pair of rolls, by which the grist is ground a little and but a little finer; and so the process of gradual reduction" goes through as many as seven "breaks" by as many pairs of rolls. After each break the meal is separated, - bran,

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ground. Every American suggestion was considered, and foreign countries were put under contribution. At length in the kingdom of Hungary was discovered a process of milling hard wheats which, tried at first on a small scale, proved so well adapted

if any, and fine flour going immediately to their proper receptacles, and middlings to be purified and subjected to further breakings. The intermediate purifications and separations of meal prevent minute trituration of the bran, keep fine flour from