"Perhaps you have beheld such sublimity in dreams, but surely never in daylight." So began an installment in a New York Times 1854 account of a 1,200-person riverboat expedition from Rock Island, IL to St. Paul, MN. Was this correspondent's description of the Northern plains a tad grandiose? Perhaps, but within a few years, sleepy St. Paul became a booming railroad hub, and neighbor Minneapolis sprang up at St. Anthony Falls, the end of the navigable Mississippi River. Much has changed since President Franklin Pierce's era. The Twin Cities today are a major economic and cultural force in the Midwest-the metro area is home to more than a dozen Fortune 500 company headquarters, including General Mills and 3M, as well as four major professional sports franchises, a thriving music and theater scene, and the Mall of America, the nation's largest indoor shopping mecca.