10 
Modern Business Geography 
eral, to transport by water than by land. With water transporta- 
tion there is no track to be built and kept in repair and there are no 
heavy grades to climb. 
At the seaports huge storage warehouses line the water front; one 
such warehouse has been built by the city of New Orleans at a 
cost of $3,500,000. Here the cotton may remain for months, waiting 
for the call from the mills. When the call comes, stevedores load the 
bales on trucks and take them to the wharves, whence they are 
lifted by powerful derricks and deposited in the holds of the 
waiting ocean steamships. Then begins the longest part of the 
journey. It is not the most costly part, however, if we consider 
the rate per mile. From the Gulf ports to Liverpool, for instance, 
cotton is carried nearly five thousand miles for not much more than 
two dollars a bale. So cheaply can vessels be propelled on the free 
level highway of the sea, that even at so low a rate the steamship 
companies make good profits. 
Delivery to the factory. Let us imagine that the particular bales 
of cotton that we have been following are carried by water from 
Galveston, the port that ships most of the cotton crop, to Fall River, 
our leading cotton manufacturing city. The steamship delivers the 
cotton at a wharf in the city, and from the wharf it is taken to the 
mill by motor truck. On the well-paved city streets a truck speedily 
transfers a score of bales at a load. More than thirteen hundred 
bales are carried daily to the numerous mills, where they are put into 
storehouses. 
When the time comes for the cotton to be used, each bale is taken 
out of storage and carried to the cleaning room of the factory on a 
hand truck, similar to that used for trunks at railway stations. Thus 
there is transportation by man during the later stages as well as at 
the beginning, when the fiber is carried in baskets by cotton pickers. 
Why methods of transportation differ. The movement of cotton 
from field to factory is an example of the complicated journey that 
most commodities take in reaching the place where they are needed. 
Think of the different means of transportation used in the journey 
and consider why each was used. Take, for instance, the mule team. 
Why are mules used in the first part of the journey, instead of horses 
or motor trucks? It seems that the mule, although his first cost is 
considerably more than that of the horse, is better for the heavy work 
of the South because he can thrive on coarse and scanty food and 
can live longer with less care. He is used partly because the roads 
in most parts of the South are merely wagon roads, quite unfit