The Pathway Of The Waters
It is pleasant to dwell upon the independent character of Western life, and to go back to the glories of that land and day when a man who had a rifle and a saddle-blanket was sure of a living, and need ask neither advice nor permission of any living soul. These days, vivid, adventurous, heroic, will have no counterpart upon the earth again. These early Americans, who raged and roared across the West, how unspeakably swift was the play in which they had their part!
No fiction can ever surpass in vividness the vast, heroic drama of the West. The clang of steel, the shoutings of the captains, the stimulus of wild adventure--of these things, certainly, there has been no lack. There has been close about us for two hundred years the sweeping action of a story keyed higher than any fiction, more unbelievably bold, more incredibly keen in spirit.
What Was That West?
Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest may attach to a quest which goes further than a mere summons on the spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West? What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run wider than the West, and, indeed, wider than America.
We are all, here,--Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World or the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,--but the result of that mandate which bade mankind to increase and multiply, which bade mankind to take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken over temporarily that portion of earth and its fullness which was allotted or which was made possible to him by that Providence to which both belong. We have each of us done this along the lines of the least possible resistance, for this is the law of organic life.
The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax, of linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of trolley-cars and self-binder, of purple and fine linen, it must be observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work, and back of all these causes were the original law and the original mandate. The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.
What, Then, Was The First Transportation Of The West?
When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was the Alleghanies, how then did the West-bound travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation?
The answer would seem easy. They traveled in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters.
The Record Of The Average Line Of West-Bound Travel.
Bishop Berkeley, prophetic soul, wrote his line, "Westward the course of empire takes its way." The public has always edited it to read that it is the "star of empire" which "takes its way" to the West. If one will read this poem in connection with a government census map, he will not fail to see how excellent is the amendment. Excellent census map, which holds between its covers the greatest poem, the greatest drama ever written! Excellent census map, which marks the center of population of America with a literal star, and which, at the curtain of each act, the lapse of each ten years, advances this star with the progress of the drama, westward, westward!
Why This Average Line Took The Course It Did.
The first step of this star of empire (that concluded in 1800) barely removed it from its initial point upon the Chesapeake. The direction was toward the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The government at Washington, young as it was, knew that the Ohio River, reached from the North by a dozen trails from the Great Lakes, and running out into that West which even then was coveted by three nations, was of itself a priceless possession. It was a military reason which first set moving the Pennsylvania hotbed of immigrants. The restless tide of humanity spread from that point according to principles as old as the world. Having a world before them from which to choose their homes, the men of that time sought out those homes along the easiest lines. The first thrust of the outbound population was not along the parallels of latitude westward, as is supposed to have been the rule, but to the south and southeast, into the valleys of the Appalachians, where the hills would raise corn, and the streams would carry it. The early emigrants learned that a raft would eat nothing, that a boat ran well down-stream. Men still clung to the seaboard region, though even now they exemplified that great law of population which designates the river valleys to be the earliest and most permanent centers of population. The valleys of Virginia and Maryland caught the wealthiest and most aristocratic of the shifting population of that day. Daniel Boone heard the calling of the voices early, but not until long after men had begun to pick out the best of the farming-lands of North and South Carolina and lower Virginia. The first trails of the Appalachians were the waterways, paths which we do not follow or parallel, but intersect in our course when we go by rail from the Mississippi valley to that first abiding-place of the star.
The real mother of the West was the South. It was she who bore this child, and it has been much at her expense that it has grown so large and matured so swiftly. The path of empire had its head on the Chesapeake. But let us at least be fair. New England and New York did not first settle the West, not because the Chesapeake man was some superhuman being, but because the rivers of New England and New York did not run in the right direction. We may find fate, destiny, and geography very closely intermingled in the history of this country, or of any other. Any nation first avails itself of its geography, then at last casts its geography aside; after that, politics.
Portrait Of The First West-Bound American.
Let us picture for ourselves this first restless American, this West-bound man. We must remember that there had been two or three full American generations to produce him, this man who first dared turn away from the seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the sun, toward the dark and mysterious mountains and forests which then encompassed the least remote land fairly to be called the West. Two generations had produced a man different from the Old-World type. Free air and good food had given him abundant brawn. He was tall. Little fat cloyed the free play of his muscles, and there belonged to him the heritage of that courage which comes of good heart and lungs. He was a splendid man to have for an ancestor, this tall and florid athlete who never heard of athletics. His face was thin and aquiline, his look high and confident, his eye blue, his speech reserved. You may see this same man yet in those restricted parts of this country which remain fit to be called America. You may see him sometimes in the mountains of Tennessee, the brakes of Arkansas or Missouri, where the old strain has remained most pure. You might have seen him over all the West in the generation preceding our own.
The Equipment Of The Early American--His Skill With It.
This was our American, discontented to dwell longer by the sea. He had two tools, the ax and the rifle. With the one he built, with the other he fought and lived. Early America saw the invention of the small-bore rifle because there was need for that invention. It required no such long range in those forest days, and it gave the greatest possible amount of results for its expenditure. Its charge was tiny, its provender compact and easily carried by the man who must economize in every ounce of transported goods; and yet its powers were wonderful. Our early American could plant that little round pellet in just such a spot as he liked of game-animal or of red-skinned enemy, and the deadly effect of no projectile known to man has ever surpassed this one, if each be weighed by the test of economic expenditure. This long, small-bored tube was one of the early agents of American civilization. The conditions of the daily life of the time demanded great skill in the use of this typical arm, and the accuracy of the early riflemen of the West has probably never been surpassed in popular average by any people of the world. Driving a nail and snuffing a candle with a rifle-bullet were common forms of the amusement which was derived from the practice of arms.
This American, So Equipped, Moves Westward.
When the American settler had got as far West as the Plains he needed arms of greater range, and then he made them; but the first two generations of the West-bound had the buckskin bandoleer, with its little bullets, its little molds for making them, its little worm which served to clean the interior of the barrel with a wisp of flax, its tiny flask of precious powder, its extra flint or so. The American rifle and the American ax--what a history might be written of these alone! They were the sole warrant for the departure of the outbound man from all those associations which had held him to his home. He took some sweet girl from her own family, some mother or grandmother of you or me, and he took his good ax and rifle, and he put his little store on raft or pack-horse, and so he started out; and God prospered him. In his time he was a stanch, industrious man, a good hunter, a sturdy chopper, a faithful lover of his friends, and a stern hater of his foes.
How He Finds The Waterways Easy As Paths Westward.
In time this early outbound man learned that there were rivers which ran not to the southeast and into the sea, but outward, across the mountains toward the setting sun. The winding trails of the Alleghanies led one finally to rivers which ran toward Kentucky, Tennessee, even farther out into that unknown, tempting land which still was called the West. Thus it came that the American genius broke entirely away from salt-water traditions, asked no longer "What cheer?" from the ships that came from across the seas, clung no longer to the customs, the costumes, the precedents or standards of the past. There came the day of buckskin and woolsey, of rifle and ax, of men curious for adventures, of homes built of logs and slabs, with puncheons for floors, with little fields about them, and tiny paths that led out into the immeasurable preserves of the primeval forests. A few things held intrinsic value at that time--powder, lead, salt, maize, cow-bells, women who dared. It was a simple but not an ill ancestry, this that turned away from the sea-coast forever and began the making of another world. It was the strong-limbed, the bold-hearted who traveled, the weak who stayed at home.
Other Distances, Other Customs, Other Values.
This was the ancestral fiber of the West. What time had folk like these for powder-puff or ruffle, for fan or jeweled snuff-box? Their garb was made from the skin of the deer, the fox, the wolf. Their shoes were of buffalo-hide, their beds were made of the robes of the bear and buffalo. They laid the land under tribute. Yet, so far from mere savagery was the spirit that animated these men that in ten years after they had first cut away the forest they were founding a college and establishing a court of law! Read this forgotten history, one chapter, and a little one, in the history of the West, and then turn, if you like, to the chapters of fiction in an older world. You have your choice.
In those early days there were individual opportunities so numerous in the West axes and two cow-bells. Be sure it was not politics that made corn worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel, and sold a mile of ground for the tinkle of a bell. The conditions were born of a scanty and insufficient transportation.
The West Continued To Grow Down Stream, Not Up.
There was a generation of this down-stream transportation, and it built up the first splendid, aggressive population of the West--a population which continued to edge farther outward and farther down-stream. The settlement at Nashville, the settlements of Kentucky, were at touch with the Ohio River, the broad highway that led easily down to the yet broader highway of the Mississippi, that great, mysterious stream so intimately connected with American history and American progress. It was easy to get to New Orleans, but hard to get back over the Alleghanies.
Having The Mississippi For Its Road, The West Is Content.
Meantime the stout little government at Washington, knowing well enough all the dangers which threatened it, continued to work out the problems of the West. Some breathless, trembling years passed by--years full of wars and treaties in Europe as well as in America. Then came the end of all doubts and tremblings. The lying intrigues at the mouth of America's great roadway ceased by virtue of that purchase of territory which gave to America forever this mighty Mississippi, solemn, majestic, and mysterious stream, perpetual highway, and henceforth to be included wholly within the borders of the West. The year which saw the Mississippi made wholly American was one mighty in the history of America and of the world. The date of the Louisiana Purchase is significant not more by reason of a vast domain added to the West than because of the fact that with this territory came the means of building it up and holding it together. It was now that for the first time the solidarity of this New World was forever assured. We gained a million uninhabited miles--a million miles of country which will one day support its thousands to the mile. But still more important, we gained the right and the ability to travel into it and across it and through it. France had failed to build roads into that country, and thereafter neither France nor any other power might ever do so.
How Much Richer Was This West Than Dreamed.
How feeble is our grasp upon the future may be seen from the last utterance. The sum of $15,000,000 seemed "enormous." To-day, less than a century from that time, one American citizen has in his lifetime made from the raw resources of this land a fortune held to be $266,000,000. One Western city, located in that despised territory, during one recent year showed sales of grain alone amounting to $123,300,000; of live stock alone, $268,000,000; of wholesale trade, $786,205,000; of manufactures,--where manufactures were once held impossible,--the total of $741,097,000. It was once four weeks from Maine to Washington. It is now four days from Oregon. The total wealth of all the cities, all the lands, all the individuals of that once despised West, runs into figures which surpass all belief and all comprehension. And this has grown up within less than a hundred years.
The Westerner Raises More Than He Can Eat.
But now we must conceive of our Western man as not now in dress so near a parallel to that of the savage whom he had overcome. There was falling into his mien somewhat more of staidness and sobriety. This man had so used the ax that he had a farm, and on this farm he raised more than he himself could use--first step in the great future of the West as storehouse for the world. This extra produce could certainly not be taken back over the Alleghanies, nor could it be traded on the spot for aught else than merely similar commodities.
Here, then, was a turning-point in Western history. There is no need to assign to it an exact date. We have the pleasant fashion of learning history through dates of battles and assassinations. We might do better in some cases did we learn the times of happenings of certain great and significant things. It was an important time when this first Western farmer, somewhat shorn of fringe, sought to find market for his crude produce, and found that the pack-horse would not serve him so well as the broad-horned flatboat which supplanted his canoe.
How He Might Sell This Surplus Far From Home.
The flatboat ran altogether down-stream. Hence it led altogether away from home and from the East. The Western man was relying upon himself, cutting loose from traditions, asking help of no man; sacrificing, perhaps, a little of sentiment, but doing so out of necessity, and only because of the one great fact that the waters would not run back uphill, would not carry him back to that East which was once his home. So the homes and the graves in the West grew, and there arose a civilization distinct and different from that which kept hold upon the sea and upon the Old World.
What Was The West At This Time Of Down-Stream?
It may now prove of interest to take a glance at the crude geography of this Western land at that time when it first began to produce a surplus, and the time when it had permanently set its face away from the land east of the Alleghanies. The census map (see page 30) will prove of the best service, and its little blotches of color tell much in brief regarding the West of 1800. For forty years before this time the fur trade had had its depot at the city of St. Louis. For a hundred years there had been a settlement upon the Great Lakes. For nearly a hundred years the town of New Orleans had been established. Here and there, between these foci of adventurers, there were odd, seemingly unaccountable little dots and specks of population scattered over all the map, product of that first uncertain hundred years. Ohio, directly west of the original hotbed, was left blank for a long time, and indeed received her first population from the southward, and not from the East, though the New-Englander Moses Cleveland founded the town of Cleveland as early as 1796. Lower down in the great valley of the Mississippi was a curious, illogical, and now forgotten little band of settlers who had formed what was known as the "Mississippi Territory." Smaller yet, and more inexplicable, did we not know the story of the old water-trail from the Green Bay to the Mississippi, there was a dot, a smear, a tiny speck of population high up on the east bank of the Mississippi, where the Wisconsin emptied. These valley settlements far outnumbered all the population of the State of Ohio, which had lain directly in the path of the star, but the streams of which lay awkwardly on the scheme of travel. The West was beginning to be the West. The seed sown by Marquette the Good, by Hennepin the Bad, by La Salle the Bold, by Tonti the Faithful,--seed despised by an ancient and corrupt monarchy,--had now begun to grow.
Another West Beyond.
Yet, beyond the farthest families of the West of that day, there was still a land so great that no one tried to measure it, or sought to include it in the plans of family or nation. It was all a matter for the future, for generations much later. Compared with the movements of the past, it must be centuries before the West--whatever that term might mean--could ever be overrun. That it could ever be exhausted was, to be sure, an utterly unthinkable thing. There were vague stories among the hardy settlers about new lands incredibly distant, mythically rich in interest. But who dreamed the import of the journey of strong-legged Zebulon Pike into the lands of the Sioux, and who believed all his story of a march from Colorado to Chihuahua, and thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused for the peaceful settlers of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty miles away, by that ancient saga, that heroically done, misspelled story of Lewis and Clark? There was still to be room enough and chance enough in the West.
The Up-Stream Man.
In 1810 the Western frontier of the United States slanted like the roof of a house from Maine to Louisiana. The center of population was almost exactly upon the site of the city of Washington.
That mysterious land beyond the Mississippi was even then receiving more and more of that adventurous population which the statesmen of the Louisiana Purchase feared would leave the East and never would return. The fur-traders of St. Louis had found a way to reach the Rockies. The adventurous West was once more blazing a trail for the commercial and industrial West to follow. This was the second outward setting of the tide of West-bound travel. We had used up all our down-stream transportation, and we had taken over, and were beginning to use, all the trails that led into the West, all the old French trails, the old Spanish trails, the trails that led out with the sun. No more war parties now from the Great Lakes to the Ohio, from the Great Lakes to Mississippi. This was our country. We held the roads.
Steam Helps The Up-Stream Journeyings.
But now there were happening yet other strange and startling things. In 1806, at Pittsburg, some persons built the first steamboat ever seen on the Ohio River.
Kaskaskia: The Turning Of The Tide.
Thanks to the man who could go up-stream, corn was no longer worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel anywhere in America. Corn was worth fifty cents a bushel, and calico was worth fifty cents a yard, at the city of Kaskaskia, in the heart of the Mississippi valley. Kaskaskia the ancient was queen of the down-stream trade in her day.
The Commerce Of The Trans-Mississippi West.
Calico was worth fifty cents a yard at Kaskaskia; it was worth three dollars a yard in Santa Fé. A beaver-skin was worth three dollars in New York; it was worth fifty cents at the head of the Missouri. There you have the problems of the men of 1810, and that, in a nutshell, is the West of 1810, 1820, 1830. The problem was then, as now, how to transport a finished product into a new country, a raw product back into an old country, and a population between the two countries. There sprang up then, in this second era of American transportation, that mighty commerce of the prairies, which, carried on under the name of trade, furnished one of the boldest commercial romances of the earth. Fostered by merchants, it was captained and carried on by heroes, and was dependent upon a daily heroism such as commerce has never seen anywhere except in the American West. The Kit Carsons now took the place of the Simon Kentons, the Bill Williamses of the Daniel Boones. The Western scout, the trapper, the hunter, wild and solitary figures, took prominent place upon the nation's canvas.
This Western commerce, the wagon-freighting, steamboating, and packing of the first half of this century, was to run in three great channels, each distinct from the other. First there was the fur trade, whose birth was in the North. Next there was the trade of mercantile ventures to the far Southwest. Lastly there was to grow up the freighting trade to the mining regions of the West. The cattle-growing, farming, or commercial West of to-day was still a thing undreamed.
Causes For Growth Of Self-Reliant Western Character.
In every one of these three great lines of activity we may still note what we may call the curiously individual quality of the West. The conditions of life, of trade, of any endurance upon the soil, made heavy demands upon the physical man. There must, above all things, be strength, hardihood, courage. There were great companies in commerce, it is true, but there were no great corporations to safeguard the persons of those transported. Each man must "take care of himself," as the peculiar and significant phrase went. "Good-by; take care of yourself," was the last word for the man departing to the West. The strong legs of himself and his horse, the strong arms of himself and his fellow-laborers, these must furnish his transportation. The muscles tried and proved, the mind calm amid peril, the heart unwearied by reverses or hardships--these were the items of the capital universal and indispensable of the West. We may trace here the development of a type as surely as we can by reading the storied rocks of geology. This time of boat and horse, of pack and cordelle and travois, of strenuous personal effort, of individual initiative, left its imprint forever and indelibly upon the character of the American, and made him what he is to-day among the nations of the globe.
The Adventurous West.
There was still a West when Kaskaskia was queen. Major Long's expedition up the Platte brought back the "important fact" that the "whole division of North America drained by the Missouri and the Platte, and their tributaries between the meridians of the mouth of the Platte and the Rockies, is almost entirely unfit for cultivation, and therefore uninhabitable for an agricultural people." There are many thousands of farmers to-day who cannot quite agree with Major Long's dictum, but in that day the dictum was accepted carelessly or eagerly. No one west of the Mississippi yet cared for farms. There were swifter ways to wealth than farming, and the wild men of the West of that day had only scorn and distrust for the whole theory of agriculture. "As soon as you thrust the plow into the earth," said one adventurer who had left the East for the wilder lands of the West, "it teems with worms and useless weeds. Agriculture increases population to an unnatural extent." For such men there was still a vast world without weeds, where the soil was virgin, where one might be uncrowded by the touch of home-building man. Let the farmers have Ohio and Kentucky, there was still a West.
The West Of The Fur Trade.
There was, in the first place, then, the West of the fur trade. For generations the wild peddlers of the woods had traced the waterways of the far Northwest, sometimes absent for one, two, or more years from the place they loosely called home, sometimes never returning at all from that savagery which offered so great a fascination, often too strong even for men reared in the lap of luxury and refinement.
Transportation Of The Fur Trade.
Steam was but an infant, after all, in spite of the little steamboat triumphs of the day. The waters offered roadway for the steamboats, and water transportation by steam was much less expensive than transportation by railway; but the head of navigation by steamboats was only the point of departure of a wilder and cruder transportation. One of the native ships of the wilderness was the great _canot du Nord_ of the early voyageurs, a craft made of birch bark, thirty feet long, of four feet beam and a depth of thirty inches, which would carry a crew of ten men and a cargo of sixty-five packages of goods or furs, each package weighing ninety pounds. This vessel reached the limits of carrying capacity and of portability. Its crew could unload and repack it, after a portage of a hundred yards, in less than twenty minutes. Thousands of miles were covered annually by one of these vessels. The crew which paddled it from Montreal to Winnipeg was then but half-way on the journey to the Great Slave and Great Bear country, which had been known from the beginning in the fur trade.
The Ultimate Trails.
Beyond the natural reach of the canot du Nord, the lesser craft of the natives, the smaller birch barks, took up the trail, and passed even farther up into the unknown countries; and beyond the head of the ultimate thread of the waters the pack-horse, or the travois and the dog, took up the burden of the day, until the trails were lost in the forest, and the traveler carried his pack on his own back.
The Fur Trade Showed Us Also The Southwest.
The fur trade taught us something of our own geography upon the North and Northwest, but it did more. It was a fur-trader who first developed the possibilities of the Spanish Southwest for the second expansion of our Western commerce. In 1823 General William H. Ashley, of the American Fur Company, made an expedition up the Platte, and is credited with first reaching from the East the South Pass of the Rockies, which was soon to become recognized as the natural gateway of the great iron trail across the continent. In the following year Ashley penetrated to the Great Salt Lake, and later reached Santa Fé, situated in territory then wholly belonging to Mexico.
Details Regarding Southwestern Wagon-Trains.
The story of the Santa Fé trail has been told by many writers, and its chief interest here is simply as showing the eagerness with which the men of that day seized upon every means of transport in their power, and the skill and ingenuity with which they brought each to perfection. The wagon-freighting of the Southwest was highly systematized, and was indeed carried on with an almost military regularity. The route was by way of the Council Grove, then the northern limit of the Comanches' range, and it was at this point that the organization of the wagon-train was commonly completed. A train-master or captain was chosen, and the whole party put under his command, each man having his position, and each being expected to take his turn on the night-watch which was necessary in that land of bold and hostile savages. During the day the train moved in two columns, some thirty feet or so apart, each team following close upon the one immediately preceding it in the line. In case of any alarm of Indians, the head and rear teams of the two parallel columns turned in toward each other, and thus there was formed upon the moment a long parallelogram of wagons, open in the middle, and inclosing the loose riding-animals, and closed at the front and rear. The wagons were loaded, to a great extent, with cotton stuffs in bales, and these made a fair fortification. The Indians had difficulty in breaking the barricade of one of these hardy caravans, defended as it was by numbers of the best riflemen the world ever knew. Small parties were frequently destroyed, but in the later days a train was commonly made up of at least one hundred wagons, with perhaps two hundred men in the party, and with eight hundred mules or oxen. The goods in convoy in such a train might be worth half a million dollars. The time in transit was about ten weeks, the out trip being made in the spring and the return in the fall.
The Santa Fé trade lasted, roughly speaking, only about twenty years, being practically terminated in 1843 by the edict of Santa Anna. These difficulties in our Western commerce all came to an end with the Mexican War, and with the second and third great additions to our Western territory, which gave us the region on the South as well as the North, from ocean to ocean.
The Gold-Bearing West.
This time was one of great activity in all the West, and the restless population which had gained a taste of the adventurous life of that region was soon to have yet greater opportunities. The discovery of gold in California unsettled not only all the West, but all America, and hastened immeasurably the development of the West, not merely as to the Pacific coast, but also in regard to the mountain regions between the Great Plains and the Coast. The turbulent population of the mines spread from California into every accessible portion of the Rockies. The trapper and hunter of the remotest range found that he had a companion in the wilderness, the prospector, as hardy as himself, and animated by a feverish energy which rendered him even more determined and unconquerable than himself. Love of excitement and change invited the trapper to the mountains. It was love of gain which drove the prospector thither. Commercial man was to do in a short time what the adventurer would never have done. California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana--how swiftly, when we come to counting decades, these names followed upon those of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio!
Pack-Trains Make New Cities.
New cities began to be heard of in this mountain trade, just as there had been in the wagon days of the overland trail to Santa Fé. Pueblo, Cañon City, Denver, all were outfitting and freighting-points in turn, while from the other side of the range there were as many towns,--Florence, Walla Walla, Portland,--which sent out the long trains of laden mules and horses. The pack-train was as common and as useful as the stage line in developing the Black Hills region, and many another still less accessible.
Early Wheeled Transportation--The Stage-Coach.
The transportation of paddle and portage, of sawbuck saddle and panniers, however, could not forever serve except in the roughest of the mountain-chains. The demand for wheeled vehicles was urgent, and the supply for that demand was forthcoming in so far as human ingenuity and resourcefulness could meet it. There arose masters in transportation, common carriers of world-wide fame. The pony-express was a wonderful thing in its way, and some of the old-time stage lines which first began to run out into the West were hardly less wonderful. For instance, there was an overland stage line that ran from Atchison, on the Missouri River, across the plains, and up into Montana by way of Denver and Salt Lake City. It made the trip from Atchison to Helena, nearly two thousand miles, in twenty-two days. Down the old waterways from the placers of Alder Gulch to the same town of Atchison was a distance of about three thousand miles. The stage line began to shorten distances and lay out straight lines, so that now the West was visited by vast numbers of sight-seers, tourists, investigators, and the like, in addition to the regular population of the land, the men who called the West their home.
We should find it difficult now to return to stage-coach travel, yet in its time it was thought luxurious. One of the United States Bank examiners of that time, whose duties took him into the Western regions, in the course of fourteen years traveled over seventy-four thousand miles by stage-coach alone.
Difficulties Of Wagon-Trains.
One who has never seen the plains, rivers, rocks, cañons, and mountains of the portion of the country traversed by these caravans can form but a faint idea from any description given of them of the innumerable and formidable difficulties with which every mile of this weary march was encumbered. History has assigned a foremost place among its glorified deeds to the passage of the Alps by Napoleon, and to the long and discouraging march of the French army under the same great conqueror to Russia. If it be not invidious to compare small things with great, we may assuredly claim for these early pioneers greater conquests over nature than were made by either of the great military expeditions of Napoleon. A successful completion of the journey was simply an escape from death.
Living Expenses Governed By Transportation.
"In 1865," comments Mr. Langford, "we note that the principal restaurant, 'in consequence of the recent fall in flour,' reduced day board to twenty dollars per week for gold. The food of this restaurant was very plain, and dried-apple pies were considered a luxury. At that time I was collector of internal revenue, and received my salary in greenbacks. I paid thirty-six dollars per week for day board at the Gibson House, at Helena. During the period of the greatest scarcity of flour, the more common boarding-houses posted the following signs: 'Board with bread at meals, $32; board without bread, $22; board with bread _at dinner_, $25."
The early American life was primitive, but it was never the life of a peasantry. Once there was a time in the West when every man was as good as his neighbor, as well situated, as much contented. It would take hardihood to predict such conditions in the future for the West or for America.
Beginning Of Western Railway Travel--The American Émigré.
At the half-way point of this century the early wheels of the West were crawling and creaking over trails where now rich cities stand.
First Western Railway.
The wagon-wheels had overrun the West before the wheels of steam began the second conquest of the West. Wagons were first used on the Santa Fé trail in 1824, but it was not until three years later that there was begun the first of the Western iron trails.
There were grandfathers in Virginia now, grandfathers in New England. The subdivided farms were not so large. There were more shops in the villages. There was demand for expansion of the commerce of that day. The little products must find their market, and that market might still be American. The raw stuff might still be American, the producer of it might still be American. So these busy, thrifty, ambitious men came up and stood back of the vanguard that held the flexible frontier. Silently men stole out yet farther into what West there was left; but they always looked back over the shoulder at this new thing that had come upon the land.
Thinking men knew, half a century ago, that there must be an iron way across the United States, though they knew this only in general terms, and were only guessing at the changes which such a road must bring to the country at large.
This rapid development of the interior region of America which is a matter of common knowledge to all of us to-day was not foreseen by the wisest of the prophets of fifty years ago.
The Railways Change And Build The Commercial West.
With the era of steam came a complete reversal of all earlier methods. For nearly a century following the Revolutionary War the new lands of America had waited upon the transportation. Now the transportation facilities were to overleap history and to run in advance of progress itself. The railroad was not to depend upon the land, but the land upon the railroad. It was strong faith in the future civilization which enabled capitalists to build one connected line of iron from Oregon down the Pacific coast, thence east of the mouth of the Father of Waters, in all over thirty-two hundred miles of rail. Then came that daring flight of the Santa Fé across the seas of sand, a venture derided as folly and recklessness. The proof you may find by seeing the cities that have grown, the fields which bear them tribute. North and South and East and West the prairie roads run. The long trail of the cattle-drive is gone, and the cattle no longer walk a thousand miles to pasture or to market. Once, twice, thrice, the continent was spanned, and the path across the continent laid well and laid forever.
The largest, the most compact, and the most closely knit Caucasian population in the world to-day, is that of America, and to-day America is potentially the most powerful of all the world-powers. Why? Because her unit of population is superior. The reason for that you may find yourself if you care to look into the great movements of the West-bound population of America.