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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: abrasion of the river. At one place the course of the river was
nearly in a straight line for about fifteen miles. The banks
sloped gently to its margin, without a single tree, but bordered
with grass and herbage of a vivid green. Along each bank, for the
whole fifteen miles, extended a stripe, one hundred yards in
breadth, of a deep rusty brown, indicating an inexhaustible bed
of iron, through the center of which the Missouri had worn its
way. Indications of the continuance of this bed were afterwards
observed higher up the river. It is, in fact, one of the mineral
magazines which nature has provided in the heart of this vast
realm of fertility, and which, in connection with the immense
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