CHAPTER XXIII.

ADMINISTRATION OF CLEVELAND (SECOND-CONCLUDED), 1893-1897.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST.

BY ALBERT SHAW, PH.D.,

_Editor "Review of Reviews," formerly editor of "Minneapolis Tribune."_

Settling the Northwest--The Face of the Country Transformed--Clearing Away the Forests and its Effects--Tree-planting on the Prairies--Pioneer Life in the Seventies--The Granary of the World--The Northwestern Farmer--Transportation and Other Industries--Business Cities and Centres--United Public Action and its Influence--The Indian Question--Other Elements of Population--Society and General Culture.

"Northwest" is a shifting, uncertain designation. The term has been used to cover the whole stretch of country from Pittsburg to Puget Sound, north of the Ohio River and the thirty-seventh parallel of latitude. Popularly it signified the old Northwestern Territory--including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin--until about the time of the Civil War. In the decade following the war, Illinois and Iowa were largely in the minds of men who spoke of the Northwest. From 1870 to 1880, Iowa, Kansas, northern Missouri, and Nebraska constituted the most stirring and favored region--the Northwest _par excellence_. But the past decade has witnessed a remarkable development in the Dakotas; and Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana, with Iowa and Nebraska, are perhaps the States most familiarly comprised in the idea of the Northwest. These States are really in the heart of the continent--midway between oceans; and perhaps by common consent the term Northwest will, a decade hence, have moved on and taken firm possession of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming, while ultimately Alaska may succeed to the designation.

But for the present the Northwest is the great arable wedge lying between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. It is a region that is pretty clearly defined upon a map showing physical characteristics. For the most part, it is a region of great natural fertility, of regular north-temperate climate, of moderate but sufficient rainfall, of scant forests and great prairie expanses, and of high average altitude without mountains. In a word, it is a region that was adapted by nature to the cultivation of the cereals and leading crops of the temperate zone without arduous and time-consuming processes for subduing the wilderness and redeeming the soil.

SETTLING THE NORTHWEST.

This "New Northwest," in civilization and in all its significant characteristics, is the creature of the vast impulse that the successful termination of the war gave the nation. No other extensive area was ever settled under similar conditions. The homestead laws, the new American system of railroad building, and the unprecedented demand for staple food products in the industrial centres at home and abroad, peopled the prairies as if by magic. Until 1870, fixing the date very roughly, transportation facilities followed colonization. The railroads were built to serve and stimulate a traffic that already existed. The pioneers had done a generation's work before the iron road overtook them. In the past two decades all has been changed. The railroads have been the pioneers and colonizers. They have invaded the solitary wilderness, and the population has followed. Much of the land has belonged to the roads, through subsidy grants, but the greater part of the mileage has been laid without the encouragement of land subsidies or other bonuses, by railway corporations that were willing to look to the future for their reward.

It would be almost impossible to over-estimate the significance of this method of colonization. Within a few years it has transformed the buffalo ranges into the world's most extensive fields of wheat and corn. A region comprising northern and western Minnesota and the two Dakotas, which contributed practically nothing to the country's wheat supply twelve or fifteen years ago, has, by this system of railroad colonization, reached an annual production of 100,000,000 bushels of wheat alone--about one-fourth of the crop of the entire country. In like manner, parts of western Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, that produced no corn before 1875 or 1880, are now the centre of corn-raising, and yield many hundreds of millions of bushels annually. These regions enter as totally new factors into the world's supply of foods and raw materials. A great area of this new territory might be defined that was inhabited in 1870 by less than a million people, in 1880 by more than three millions, and in 1899 by from eight to ten millions.

Let us imagine a man from the East who has visited the Northwestern States and Territories at some time between the years 1870 and 1875, and who retains a strong impression of what he saw, but who has not been west of Chicago since that time, until, in the World's Fair year, he determines upon a new exploration of Iowa, Nebraska, the Datokas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. However well informed he had tried to keep himself through written descriptions and statistical records of Western progress, he would see what nothing but the evidence of his own eyes could have made him believe to be possible. Iowa in 1870 was already producing a large crop of cereals, and was inhabited by a thriving, though very new, farming population. But the aspect of the country was bare and uninviting, except in the vicinity of the older communities on the Mississippi River. As one advanced across the State the farm-houses were very small, and looked like isolated dry-goods boxes; there were few well-built barns or farm buildings; and the struggling young cottonwood and soft-maple saplings planted in close groves about the tiny houses were so slight an obstruction to the sweep of vision across the open prairie that they only seemed to emphasize the monotonous stretches of fertile, but uninteresting, plain. Now the landscape is wholly transformed. A railroad ride in June through the best parts of Iowa reminds one of a ride through some of the pleasantest farming districts of England. The primitive "claim shanties" of thirty years ago have given place to commodious farm-houses flanked by great barns and hay-ricks, and the well-appointed structures of a prosperous agriculture. In the rich, deep meadows herds of fine-blooded cattle are grazing. What was once a blank, dreary landscape is now garden-like and inviting. The poor little saplings of the earlier days, which seemed to be apologizing to the robust corn-stalks in the neighboring fields, have grown on that deep soil into great, spreading trees. One can easily imagine, as he looks off in every direction and notes a wooded horizon, that he is--as in Ohio, Indiana, or Kentucky--in a farming region which has been cleared out of primeval forests. There are many towns I might mention which twenty-five years ago, with their new, wooden shanties scattered over the bare face of the prairie, seemed the hottest place on earth as the summer sun beat upon their unshaded streets and roofs, and seemed the coldest places on earth when the fierce blizzards of winter swept unchecked across the prairie expanses. To-day the density of shade in those towns is deemed of positive detriment to health, and for several years past there has been a systematic thinning out and trimming up of the great, clustering elms. Trees of from six to ten feet in girth are found everywhere by the hundreds of thousands. Each farm-house is sheltered from winter winds by its own dense groves. Many of the farmers are able from the surplus growth of wood upon their estates to provide themselves with a large and regular supply of fuel. If I have dwelt at some length upon this picture of the transformation of the bleak, grain-producing Iowa prairies of thirty years ago into the dairy and live-stock farms of to-day, with their fragrant meadows and ample groves, it is because the picture is one which reveals so much as to the nature and meaning of Northwestern progress.

CLEARING AWAY THE FORESTS AND ITS EFFECTS.

Not a little has been written regarding the rapid destruction of the vast white-pine forests with which nature has covered large districts of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. It is true that this denudation has progressed at a rate with which nothing of a like character in the history of the world is comparable. It is also true, doubtless, that the clearing away of dense forest areas has been attended with some inconvenient climatic results, and particularly with some objectionable effects upon the even distribution of rainfall and the regularity of the flow of rivers. But most persons who have been alarmed at the rapidity of forest destruction in the white-pine belt have wholly overlooked the great compensating facts. It happens that the white-pine region is not especially fertile, and that for some time to come it is not likely to acquire a prosperous agriculture. But adjacent to it and beyond it there was a vast region of country which, though utterly treeless, was endowed with a marvelous richness of soil and with a climate fitted for all the staple productions of the temperate zone. This region embraced parts of Illinois, almost the whole of Iowa, southern Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and parts of Montana--a region of imperial extent. Now, it happens that for every acre of pine land that has been denuded in Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota there are somewhere in the great treeless region further south and west two or three new farm-houses. The railroads, pushing ahead of settlement out into the open prairie, have carried the white-pine lumber from the gigantic sawmills of the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries; and thus millions of acres of land have been brought under cultivation by farmers who could not have been housed in comfort but for the proximity of the pine forests. The rapid clearing away of timber areas in Wisconsin has simply meant the rapid settlement of North and South Dakota, western Iowa, and Nebraska.

TREE PLANTING ON THE PRAIRIES.

The settlement of these treeless regions means the successful growth on every farm of at least several hundred trees. Without attempting to be statistical or exact, we might say that an acre of northern Minnesota pine trees makes it possible for a farmer in Dakota or Nebraska to have a house, farm buildings, and fences, with a holding of at least one hundred and sixty acres upon which he will successfully cultivate several acres of forest trees of different kinds. Even if the denuded pine lands of the region south and west of Lake Superior would not readily produce a second growth of dense forest--which, it should be said in passing, they certainly will--their loss would be far more than made good by the universal cultivation of forest trees in the prairie States. It is at least comforting to reflect, when the friends of scientific forestry warn us against the ruthless destruction of standing timber, that thus far at least in our Western history we have simply been cutting down trees in order to put a roof over the head of the man who was invading treeless regions for the purpose of planting and nurturing a hundred times as many trees as had been destroyed for his benefit! There is something almost inspiring in the contemplation of millions of families, all the way from Minnesota to Colorado and Texas, living in the shelter of these new pine houses and transforming the plains into a shaded and fruitful empire.

PIONEER LIFE IN THE SEVENTIES.

The enormous expansion of our railway systems will soon have made it quite impossible for any of the younger generation to realize what hardships were attendant upon such limited colonization of treeless prairie regions as preceded the iron rails. In 1876 I spent the summer in a part of Dakota to which a considerable number of hardy but poor farmers had found their way and taken up claims. They could not easily procure wood for houses, no other ordinary building material was accessible, and they were living in half-underground "dugouts," so-called. There was much more pleasure and romance in the pioneer experiences of my own ancestors a hundred years ago, who were living in comfortable log-houses with huge fire places, and shooting abundant supplies of deer and wild turkey in the deep woods of southern Ohio. The pluck and industry of these Dakota pioneers, most of whom were Irish men and Norwegians, won my heartiest sympathy and respect. Poor as they were, they maintained one public institution in common--namely, a school, with its place of public assemblage. The building had no floor but the beaten earth, and, its thick walls were blocks of matted prairie turf, its roof also being of sods supported upon some poles brought from the scanty timber-growth along the margin of a prairie river. To-day these poor pioneers are enjoying their reward. Their valley is traversed by several railroads; prosperous villages have sprung up; their lands are of considerable value; they all live in well-built farm-houses; their shade trees have grown to a height of fifty or sixty feet; a bustling and ambitious city, with fine churches, opera-houses, electric illumination, and the most advanced public educational system, is only a few miles away from them. Such transformations have occurred, not alone in a few spots in Iowa and South Dakota, but are common throughout a region that extends from the British dominions to the Indian Territory, and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains--a region comprising more than a half-million square miles.

THE GRANARY OF THE WORLD.

Naturally the industrial life of these Northwestern communities is based solidly upon agriculture. There is, perhaps, hardly any other agricultural region of equal extent upon the face of the earth that is so fertile and so well adapted for the production of the most necessary articles of human food. During the past decade the world's markets have been notably disturbed and affected, and profound social changes and political agitations have occurred in various remote parts of the earth. It is within bounds to assert that the most potent and far-reaching factor in the altered conditions of the industrial world during these recent years has been the sudden invasion and utilization of this great new farming region. Most parts of the world which are fairly prosperous do not produce staple food supplies in appreciable surplus quantities. Several regions which are not highly prosperous sell surplus food products out of their poverty rather than out of their abundance. That is to say, the people of India and the people of Russia have often been obliged, in order to obtain money to pay their taxes and other necessary expenses, to sell and send away to prosperous England the wheat which they have needed for hungry mouths at home. They have managed to subsist upon coarser and cheaper food. But in our Northwestern States the application of ingenious machinery to the cultivation of fertile and virgin soils has within the past twenty-five years precipitated upon the world a stupendous new supply of cereals and of meats, produced in quantities enormously greater than the people of the Northwestern States could consume. These foodstuffs have powerfully affected agriculture in Ireland, England, France, and Germany, and, in fact, in every other part of the accessible and cultivated globe.

THE NORTHWESTERN FARMER.

So much has been written of late about the condition of the farmer in these regions that it is pertinent to inquire who the Western farmer is. In the old States the representative farmer is a man of long training in the difficult and honorable art of diversified agriculture. He knows much of soils, of crops and their wise rotation, of domestic animals and their breeding, and of a hundred distinct phases of the production, the life, and the household economics that belong to the traditions and methods of Anglo-Saxon farming. If he is a wise man, owning his land and avoiding extravagance, he can defy any condition of the markets, and can survive any known succession of adverse seasons. There are also many such farmers in the West. But there are thousands of wheat-raisers or corn-growers who have followed in the wake of the railway and taken up government or railroad land, and who are not yet farmers in the truest and best sense of the word. They are unskilled laborers who have become speculators. They obtain their land for nothing, or for a price ranging from one dollar and fifty cents to five dollars per acre. They borrow on mortgage the money to build a small house and to procure horses and implements and seed-grain. Then they proceed to put as large an acreage as they can manage into a single crop--wheat in the Dakotas, wheat or corn in Nebraska and Kansas. They speculate upon the chances of a favorable season and a good crop safely harvested; and they speculate upon the chances of a profitable market. They hope that the first two crops may render them the possessor of an unincumbered estate, supplied with modest buildings, and with a reasonable quantity of machinery and live stock. Sometimes they succeed beyond their anticipations. In many instances the chances go against them. They live on the land, and the title is invested in them; but they are using borrowed capital, use it unskillfully, meet an adverse season or two, lose through foreclosure that which has cost them nothing except a year or two of energy spent in what is more nearly akin to gambling than to farming, and finally help to swell the great chorus that calls the world to witness the distress of Western agriculture. It cannot be said too emphatically that real agriculture in the West is safe and prosperous, and that the unfortunates are the inexperienced persons, usually without capital, who attempt to raise a single crop on new land. For many of them it would be about as wise to take borrowed money and speculate in wheat in the Chicago bucket-shops.

The great majority, however, of these inexperienced and capital-less wheat and corn producers gradually become farmers. It is inevitable, at first, that a country opened by the railroads for the express purpose of obtaining the largest possible freightage of cereals should for a few seasons be a "single-crop country." Often the seed-grain is supplied on loan by the roads themselves. They charge "what the traffic will bear." The grain is all, or nearly all, marketed through long series of elevators following the tracks, at intervals of a few miles, and owned by some central company that bears a close relation to the railroad. Thus the corporations which control the transportation and handling of the grain in effect maintain for their own advantage an exploitation of the entire regions that they traverse, through the first years of settlement. Year by year the margin of cultivation extends further West, and the single-crop sort of farming tends to recede. The wheat growers produce more barley and oats and flax, try corn successfully, introduce live stock and dairying, and thus begin to emerge as real farmers.

Unless this method of Western settlement is comprehended, it is not possible to understand the old Granger movement and the more recent legislative conflicts between the farmers of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, on the one hand, and the great transportation and grain-handling corporations on the other. It was fundamentally a question of the division of profits. The railroads had "made" the country: were they entitled to allow the farmers simply a return about equal to the cost of production, keeping for themselves the difference between the cost and the price in the central markets, or were they to base their charges upon the cost of their service, and leave the farmers to enjoy whatever profits might arise from the production of wheat or corn? Out of that protracted contest has been developed the principle of the public regulation of rates. The position of these communities of farmers with interests so similar, forming commonwealths so singularly homogeneous, has led to a reliance upon State aid that is altogether unprecedented in new and sparsely settled regions, where individualism has usually been dominant, and governmental activity relatively inferior.

TRANSPORTATION AND OTHER INDUSTRIES.

But agriculture, while the basis of Northwestern wealth, is not the sole pursuit. Transportation has become in these regions a powerful interest, because of the vast surplus agricultural product to be carried away, and of the great quantities of lumber, coal, salt, and staple supplies in general, to be distributed throughout the new prairie communities. The transformation of the pine forests into the homes of several million people has, of course, developed marvelous sawmill and building industries; and the furnishing of millions of new homes has called into being great factories for the making of wooden furniture, iron stoves, and all kinds of household supplies. In response to the demand for agricultural implements and machinery with which to cultivate five hundred million acres of newly utilized wild land, there have come into existence numerous great establishments for the making of machines that have been especially invented to meet the peculiarities and exigencies of Western farm life.

Through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, Indian corn has become a greater product in quantity and value than wheat; while in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North and South Dakota the wheat is decidedly the preponderant crop. Although in addition to oats and barley, which flourish in all the Western States, it has been found possible to increase the acreage of maize in the northern tier, it is now believed that the most profitable alternate crop in the latitude of Minneapolis and St. Paul is to be flax. Already a region including parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas has become the most extensive area of flax culture in the whole world. The crop has been produced simply for the seed, which has supplied large linseed oil factories in Minneapolis, Chicago, and various Western places. But now it has been discovered that the flax straw, which has heretofore been allowed to rot in the fields as a valueless product, can be utilized for a fibre which will make a satisfactory quality of coarse linen fabrics. Linen mills have been established in Minneapolis, and it is somewhat confidently predicted that in course of time the linen industry of that ambitious city will reach proportions even greater than its wonderful flour industry, which for a number of years has been without a rival anywhere in the world.

THE "TWIN CITIES."

The railroad system of the Northwest has been developed in such a way that no one centre may be fairly regarded as the commercial capital of the region. Chicago, with its marvelous foresight, has thrown out lines of travel that draw to itself much of the traffic which would seem normally to belong to Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth on the north, or to St. Louis and Kansas City on the south. But in the region now under discussion, the famous "Twin Cities," Minneapolis and St. Paul, constitute unquestionably the greatest and most distinctive centre, both of business and of civilization. They are beautifully situated, and they add to a long list of natural advantages very many equally desirable attractions growing out of the enterprising and ambitious forethought of the inhabitants. They are cities of beautiful homes, pleasant parks, enterprising municipal improvements; advanced educational establishments, and varied industrial interests. Each is a distinct urban community, although they lie so near together that they constitute one general centre of commerce and transportation when viewed from a distance. Their stimulating rivalry has had the effect to keep each city alert and to prevent a listless, degenerate local administration. About the Falls of St. Anthony, at Minneapolis, great manufacturing establishments are grouping themselves, and each year adds to the certainty that these two picturesque and charming cities have before them a most brilliant civic future.

UNITED PUBLIC ACTION AND ITS INFLUENCE.

The tendency to rely upon united public action is illustrated in the growth of Northwestern educational systems. The universities of these commonwealths are State universities. Professional education is under the State auspices and control. The normal schools and the agricultural schools belong to the State. The public high school provides intermediate instruction. The common district school, supported jointly by local taxation and State subvention, gives elementary education to the children of all classes. As the towns grow the tendency to graft manual and technical courses upon the ordinary public school curriculum is unmistakably strong. The Northwest, more than any other part of the country, is disposed to make every kind of education a public function.

Radicalism has flourished in the homogeneous agricultural society of the Northwest. In the anti-monopoly conflict there seemed to have survived some of the intensity of feeling that characterized the anti-slavery movement; and a tinge of this fanatical quality has always been apparent in the Western and Northwestern monetary heresies. But it is in the temperance movement that this sweep of radical impulse has been most irresistible. It was natural that the movement should become political and take the form of an agitation for prohibition. The history of prohibition in Iowa, Kansas, and the Dakotas, and of temperance legislation in Minnesota and Nebraska, reveals--even better perhaps than the history of the anti-monopoly movement--the radicalism, homogeneity, and powerful socializing tendencies of the Northwestern people. Between these different agitations there has been in reality no slight degree of relationship; at least their origin is to be traced to the same general conditions of society.

The extent to which a modern community resorts to State action depends in no small measure upon the accumulation of private resources. Public or organized initiative will be relatively strongest where the impulse to progress is positive but the ability of individuals is small. There are few rich men in the Northwest. Iowa, great as is the Hawkeye State, has no large city and no large fortunes. Of Kansas the same thing may be said. The Dakotas have no rich men and no cities. Minnesota has Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Nebraska has Omaha; but otherwise these two States are farming communities, without large cities or concentrated private capital. Accordingly the recourse to public action is comparatively easy. South Dakota farmers desire to guard against drought by opening artesian wells for irrigation. They resort to State legislation and the sale of county bonds. North Dakota wheat-growers are unfortunate in the failure of crops. They secure seed-wheat through State action and their county governments. A similarity of condition fosters associated action and facilitates the progress of popular movements.

In such a society the spirit of action is intense. If there are few philosophers, there is remarkable diffusion of popular knowledge and elementary education. The dry atmosphere and the cold winters are nerve-stimulants, and life seems to have a higher tension and velocity than in other parts of the country.

THE INDIAN QUESTION.

The Northwest presents a series of very interesting race problems. The first one, chronologically at least, is the problem that the American Indian presents. It is not so long ago since the Indian was in possession of a very large portion of the region we are now considering. A number of tribes were gradually removed further West, or were assigned to districts in the Indian Territory. But most of them were concentrated in large reservations in Minnesota, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. The past few years have witnessed the rapid reduction of these reservations, and the adoption of a policy which, if carried to its logical conclusion with energy and good faith, will at an early date result in the universal education of the children, in the abolition of the system of reservations, and in the settlement of the Indian families upon farms of their own, as fully enfranchised American citizens.

OTHER ELEMENTS OF POPULATION.

The most potent single element of population in the Northwest is of New England origin, although more than half of it has found its way into Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, by filtration through the intermediate States of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois. But there has also been a vast direct immigration from abroad; and this element has come more largely, by far, from the northern than from the central and southern races of Europe. The Scandinavian peninsula and the countries about the Baltic and North Seas have supplied the Northwest with a population that already numbers millions. From Chicago to Montana there is now a population of full Scandinavian origin, which, perhaps, may be regarded as about equal in numbers to the population that remains in Sweden and Norway. In Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, as well as in northern Iowa and in some parts of Nebraska, there are whole counties where the population is almost entirely Scandinavian. Upon all this portion of the country for centuries to come the Scandinavian patronymics will be as firmly fixed as they have been upon the Scotch and English coasts, where the Northmen intrenched themselves so numerously and firmly about nine hundred or a thousand years ago. The Scandinavians in the Northwest become Americans with a rapidity unequaled by any other non-English-speaking element. Their political ambition is as insatiate as that of the Irish, and they already secure offices in numbers. Their devotion to the American school system, their political aptitude and ambition, and their enthusiastic pride in American citizenship are thoroughly hopeful traits, and it is generally believed that they will contribute much of strength and sturdiness to the splendid race of Northwestern Americans that is to be developed in the Upper Mississippi and Missouri Valleys. The Northwestern Germans evince a tendency to mass in towns, as in Milwaukee, and to preserve intact their language and national traits.

SOCIETY AND GENERAL CULTURE.

The large towns of the Northwest are notable for the great numbers of the brightest and most energetic of the young business and professional men of the East that they contain. While they lack the leisure class and the traditions of culture that belong to older communities, they may justly claim a far higher percentage of college-bred men and of families of cultivated tastes than belong to Eastern towns of like population. The intense pressure of business and absorption of private pursuits are, for the present, seeming obstacles to the progress of Western communities in the highest things; but already the zeal for public improvements and for social progress in all that pertains to true culture is very great. Two decades hence no man will question the quality of Northwestern civilization. If the East is losing something of its distinctive Americanism through the influx of foreign elements and the decay of its old-time farming communities, the growth of the Northwest, largely upon the basis of New England blood and New England ideas, will make full compensation.

Every nation of the world confronts its own racial or climatic or industrial problems, and nowhere is there to be found an ideal state of happiness or virtue or prosperity; but, all things considered, it may well be doubted whether there exists any other extensive portion, either of America or of the world, in which there is so little of pauperism, of crime, of social inequality, of ignorance, and of chafing discontent, as in the agricultural Northwest that lies between Chicago and the Rocky Mountains. Schools and churches are almost everywhere flourishing in this region, and the necessities of life are not beyond the reach of any element or class. There is a pleasantness, a hospitality, and a friendliness in the social life of the Western communities that is certainly not surpassed.