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."