gmertca, , ?|emp, an& JUapoleon - Vote Hemp

America, Russia, Hemp, and NapoleonMoscow, St. Petersburg, Reval, and Riga. 14 Russia had hercattle drives, cowboys, rustlers, stampedes, and all the rest thatw e consider so distinctively American.Russia's main commercial problem was, as it was with contemporaryAmerica, one of internal transportation: cattle couldwalk to market, but ho w to transport goods like hemp ,flax, andiron, whose weight and bulk are so great in proportion to theirvalue, across the practically interstellar distances of Russia? Itwas done as it had been done for a thousand years and probablyten times that: by taking advantage of Russia's rivers, herrelative lack of mountain chains, and her plentiful cheap labor.The Dnieper, Don, Volga, Dvina, Volkhov were the arteries ofRussia and—to strain an analogy—caravans of wagons andsledges were her capillaries. B y the utilization of these, goodswere carried amazing distances from producer to customer. A nexample came to the incredulous notice of British merchantstrading British woolens to China for tea. They discovered thatthey were in competition with fellow Britons shipping woolensto St. Petersburg. These woolens were being landed at St.Petersburg, then carried to Mosco w to Tobolsk to Irkutsk toKiakta, and exchanged there for Chinese tea, which traveled toSt. Petersburg by the same route. 15In the winter Russia was alive with lines of horse- or cattledrawnsledges sliding and crunching along the hard whitehighways nature had provided. These caravans distributedimports throughout the interior and carried goods to be exportedeither to the ports or to places on the rivers calledpristans, where freight was gathered in the winter to be floateddow n to the ports in the spring. 16 George Coggeshall, captainof an American vessel frozen in for the winter of 1810-11 at3 2