Transportation and the Location of Cities 215 
petitor as an aid to the larger city. In fact the two are really parts 
of one great center of population, just as are St. Paul and Minneapolis, 
New York and Newark, or Boston and Cambridge. Oakland is indeed 
indispensable to the continued growth of its larger neighbor. It receives 
many of the trains coming from the immediate hinterland, as well as 
those from the East. The passengers, fruits, grains, vegetables, oil, 
and lumber brought by the trains are ferried across to San Francisco. 
Only one railroad, the coast line from the south, has a branch to the 
end of the peninsula on which the main city lies between the bay and 
the Pacific. 
The wharves at San Francisco show what the harbor means to the 
city. Here a Japanese steamship is unloading chests of tea, bales of silk, 
and bundles of straw matting. There a vessel is delivering raw sugar 
from Honolulu. Near by a British freighter is making fast to unload 
goods collected at Sydney in Australia, and at Hongkong and Manila. 
French freighters are bringing Belgian coke and pig iron and taking away 
California barley. Over there an American steamer is discharging 
manufactured goods, mainly of steel and iron, that she picked up 
at New York and Philadelphia and brought through the Panama 
Canal. 
Pacific cities on river and sound. Portland in Oregon is like New 
Orleans in being located more than a hundred miles from the mouth of 
a great river. Its mountains and climate make its products very 
different, however. Instead of cotton, it exports lumber; and instead 
of cotton-seed oil and petroleum, it exports salmon, apples, wheat, and 
other kinds of food from the rich Willamette valley. Long break- 
waters have been built at the mouth of the Columbia River so that 
ships may avoid the breaking waves of the great Pacific Ocean and 
easily enter the river. 
Seattle, tucked safely away in Puget Sound, is like Portland in being 
a great meeting place of steamship lines and railroads. The steam- 
ships come from Australia, the Orient, and Alaska, from neighboring 
American ports, and through the Panama Canal from Atlantic ports. 
They bring goods needed by a bustling young city and a busy neighbor- 
hood that have not yet had time to manufacture enough goods even for 
their own needs, so occupied are they in getting lumber out of the 
forests and wheat and fruit out of the soil. 
These steamers also bring from the Orient goods en route for New 
York. Sometimes, when the market is ready for a new supply, such 
goods as silk cannot wait to follow the slow water route via the canal 
to the New World metropolis. They are speedily transferred at