CHAPTER V

ACROSS THE WATERS[48]

Twenty-five years ago potatoes were so high in price in certain towns of the Rocky Mountains that the merchants handling them often reserved the right to retain the peelings, which, in turn, were sold, for planting purposes, the eyes of the potatoes thus having a considerable commercial value, obviously in proportion to the distance from the nearest railroad or steamboat line. This situation could not forever endure. There must come a day when we could afford to throw away our peelings, and throw them away cut thick and carelessly. Equally true is it that the time is coming in America when we shall again gather up our potato-peelings and cherish them. There you have the three ages of the West.[49]

The early American life was primitive, but it was never the life of a peasantry. Look ahead into the future, the time of the second saving of the peelings. 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.

For half a hundred years America looked across the Alleghanies. It was nearer to England than to Iowa. Our standards in fashion, in art, in literature, were yet those of an older world. Then came the age of Americanism, when it mattered not to the women of the frontier what were the modes brought in the latest ship from London or Paris. Under the Monroe doctrine of the frontier the women made their petticoats of elkskin, and found it good. Behold now a day when Iowa is as near as England, and England almost as near as New York. Again the contents of the ships are valid matter of curiosity to the women of the West.

We are in the third age, the age of steam. The pack-horse and the sailboat were vehicles of the individual or of the section. Wheeled vehicles afforded a speedier and more flexible intercommunication that made the idea of secession forever impossible, and made us a national America. The common carrier made us and will destroy us as a national entity. The wheels have written epochal record on the surface of the land. Long and devious and delightful, weary and sad and tragic, are the old wheel-tracks of the West, worn deep into a soil red with blood, on paths lined with flowers, and with graves as well.

At the half-way point of the century the early wheels of the West were crawling and creaking over trails where now rich cities stand. The Red River carts from Pembina, their wheels sawn from the ends of logs, and voicing a mile-wide protest of unlubricated axle, crept down to a “St. Paul’s” that had a population of about twelve hundred, mostly halfbreeds.[50] A yard of cloth or a butcher-knife still sold for twenty dollars at old Fort Benton in the beaver country.

The Western railroads were only little spurs of iron thrusting out into the prairies. Indeed, they could not always boast rails of iron, as witness the old wooden-railed road from Chicago to Galena. Still eager, still harkening to the Voices of the West, the men who were to make the West pressed on, taking the railway as far as it went, then the stage-coach and the wagon and the horse and the lone path of the farthest venturer.

The man of Virginia heard that the prairies of Iowa would give him a farm for a price per acre less than one-tenth that commanded by the red clay hills of the Old Dominion. He forsook the land of terrapin and peaches, of honeysuckle and sunshine, and started West by rail across the Alleghanies, across Ohio by the early Pennsylvania railway system, beyond the boom town of Chicago, across the Mississippi, and out into the black mud of the prairies for fifty miles or so. Thence by stage he went, the head of his tearful wife against his breast, but in that breast beating a heart whose one thought was the “better chance.” It was the better chance for these babes that tugged at the skirts of their mother—this was what the father wanted, and this was why the mother went with him, grieving, as she yet must, for the home land that she perhaps would never see again.

One such settler, who went West from Virginia into an agricultural state in 1854, said that he came West in order that he might be able to educate his children. He educated them. To-day one child is buried in California, one in Dakota, three live in Iowa, and one in Illinois. Such is the typical record of an American family.

The man of old New England might cross this trail of the Southern man, and find himself betimes in Kansas or Nebraska, forerunner of that day when it was to be said that Massachusetts was west of the Missouri River, as indeed is true to-day. Boston began to build Chicago, and the first of those men went West that were to make the old Red River cart-towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis little else than New England communities—cities of a state which to-day has a permanent school fund of nearly eight million dollars, and a university fund of nearly one million dollars, in securities largely made up of the bonds of other states, among them a large amount of the funding bonds of the ancient state of Virginia. It was a race into the West—a race in which now the North outstripped the South, the commercial outran the heroic, the ax and the plow outstripped the rifle and its creed.

In 1826 arose one Philip Evans Thomas, sometime known as the father of American railroads, son of a Baltimore banker, and living, as we may thus notice as a curious fact, near to that early abiding-place of the star that marked the center of American population, that Ararat from which the Western civilization started outward. Early in his life Philip Evans Thomas saw how excellent it would be if only water could be made to run up-stream. He had seen the use of railroads in England, and had, moreover, noted the beneficial effects upon the trade of Eastern cities of the traffic that was carried by canals. He had the far-reaching mind of the world-merchant, whose problem is ever that of transportation. He saw that railroads can go where canals can not, and he presently resigned his directorship in the Maryland Canal, because he saw that a canal can not climb a hill, and that mankind could not forever go around the hills or up and down the streams.

It was on February twelfth, 1827, that Thomas called together twenty-five of the leading citizens of Baltimore. Comment of the time says that he seemed touched with the spirit of prophecy as he spoke of the enterprise that was to cast aside the mountains, to unite the streams, and to discover what there might be in that mysterious land, the West—the West that was west of the Alleghanies and in or near the Mississippi valley. Beyond the Mississippi, of course, the mind of man might not go! The minutes of this notable railway meeting are preserved in a pamphlet known as “Proceedings of Sundry Citizens of Baltimore, convened for the Purpose of Devising the Most Efficient Means of Improving Intercourse between Baltimore and the Western States.”

There were two opinions as to the wisdom of Mr. Thomas’s project, and these were the opinions of the North and of the South; for again the South was to be the pioneer into the West, and again the North was to follow. The cities of the North made loud outcry against the Baltimore prophet, and said that this railroad, if built, would divert from them forever the traffic that was then coming to them from the West. This was ever the typical attitude of the upper East toward the West.

None the less the enterprise went on, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company was duly organized, an act for its incorporation being passed on February twenty-seventh, 1827. The stamp of success was upon the idea before the ink had dried on the records. By April twenty-fourth of the same year stock was subscribed to the figure of four million one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars. The first railway planned for the West—planned because there was a West and because that West was wanted as a part of the East—was promptly elevated into one of the most important commercial enterprises of the time. The stock was coveted by all, and the struggle was for first place in the line of purchasers.

It can not be within the present purpose to particularize as to the railroad development of the West, nor to attempt the unimportant chronological record of first one and then another of the multiplying railways that early began to crowd out into the West from the Eastern centers. The important thing is the tremendous expansion of population that now ensued for the Western states, the blackening of the census maps in spaces once barren, the crossing and interweaving of the Northern and Southern populations, which now occurred as both sections pressed out into the West. 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 that such a road must bring to the country at large. Some of these guesses make interesting reading to-day. Thus, in 1855 it was announced as a settled thing that the continental route could not lie across the Northern Rockies, because in that region the heavy snowfall would block all railway travel. It was concluded that there were only four points on the Pacific coast to which the railway might address itself: San Diego, San Francisco, “some spot to be chosen on the navigable waters of the Columbia,” and another “on the borders of the Strait of De Fuca, in the new Territory of Washington.”

The government of the country was so slow in developing this railway project that some capitalists were for building at once a road of their own, and they chose the route from Charleston to San Diego. What would it have meant to this country had this been the first and only railway across the continent? As to the route up the Platte valley and over the mid-Rockies, that was dismissed as quite impracticable. “The absence of timber on most of this route would prove an insuperable objection to its selection, even were it not ineligible from other considerations,” comments one writer of the day. The same writer[51] says that the route from San Francisco to St. Louis would be geographically preferable, but admits that the “formation of the intermediate country, and the character of the mountain-ranges to be crossed, are deemed to present insuperable difficulties to its construction.”

The bearing of these reflections upon the purpose in hand is not so much one of mere literary curiousness as one of commercial comparison. The logic of that time carried a large non sequitur. “The country intervening between the most western limits of civilization and the recently settled territories of the Pacific,” says the same early historian, “is confessedly little known.” The empire of the Middle West was not dreamed of. This is what the new road was to do:

“Instead of weary months of travel around the capes of Africa and South America, less than a month will suffice to transport the teas and silks of China, the coffee and the spices of Java and Ceylon, to the great Atlantic cities, thence to be distributed as from the world’s depot to the nations of Europe. But not only will this new mode of transit take to itself the best and most remunerative part of the traffic now existing between eastern Asia and Christendom, but it will also create a new traffic, compared with which the trade now existing will bear almost no comparison.

“Instead of here and there a seaport in China holding commercial relations with America, this nearness of access to the best markets of the world will stimulate into an unprecedented activity the raising of all agricultural products, the manufacture of all goods and wares, and the disinterring of all the mineral resources which the three hundred millions of China can furnish us, at a cheaper rate than we can obtain them elsewhere. Japan, with a population almost double our own, now shut out from all intercourse with the rest of the world, must soon be forced by the strength of circumstances to welcome to her ports the merchant fleets of other nations, anxious and eager to distribute to the wide world the rich products of her soil, her climate, and her domestic industry. The tropical fruitfulness of the over-populated islands of the Eastern Archipelago will also pour, in increased abundance, the rich spices of their balmy breezes through this new and rapid conduit.”

Not so bad was this flowery prophecy, though its fulfilment was to run over into another century, and to fall subsequent to a still greater industrial phenomenon, the gourd-like maturing of the trans-Missouri region.[52] This rapid development of the interior region of America was not foreseen by the wisest of the prophets of fifty years ago. Yet unspeakably swift and startling as it has been, it was, after all, the product of an arrested growth, of an advancement upon lines substantially different from those on which it was originally and naturally projected.

As once the West had sought to secede, now at length the South, foster-mother of the West, bethought herself to set up a separate land, even at the very time when there was in progress a great transcontinental project that was to make all this country one, forever and inseparable. It was the Civil War that delayed the construction of the Pacific railway. Had that road been built, had the roads from the North into the South been built half a generation earlier, there could never have been any Civil War. The indissoluble brotherhood of the North and the South would have been established a generation before, and at what untold saving of splendid human life! This war, fatally and fatefully early—early by a quarter of a century, since after that quarter-century it could never have attained importance, or could never have been at all—changed history in America more than any written history has ever shown. Still curiously and intimately connected, it was the South and the West that were to suffer most in that war, cruel as this may sound to that splendid East that poured its blood like water and its treasure with a freedom the West might not equal.

The industrial revolution of the West was subsequent to the Civil War, and was, to large extent, caused by the Civil War, or, rather, was dependent upon the same conditions that had part in bringing forth that war. The vast and virgin West, “confessedly but little known,” lay waiting for a population. The Eastern portion of the Northern States had its own population. The South, under the conditions of that day, offered incalculably more opportunity for crude labor than did the West; but it offered no security for either capital or labor. Therefore it was that the Old World was called upon to furnish the raw labor requisite to subdue this wild land.

It can be only with horror that we reflect that the Old World was called upon also to furnish us a people to replace the more than half-million dead of as grand a population as the world ever knew, the flower of America, North, South, East, and West. It would have been this splendid army of men that would have settled the West, had it not been for the war, which a few years later would have been an impossible thing. Could that half-million dead have arisen from the grave in the decade following that truly cruel war, the nomenclature of many Western cities would be different to-day, and the face of the census maps would show a different story. To-day the whole upper portion of the population chart of the United States is black with the indication of a foreign-born population. The only part of this country that the census map dares call American is a thin, wavering line along the plateaus of Tennessee and Kentucky,—the land that the first adventurers sought out when they crossed the Alleghanies. It is the South alone that is to-day American. It was the South that gave us the new-American, that splendid figure in the history of the world.

Within two months in the year 1899, fifty-seven thousand foreigners were brought to this country to be made over into Americans. Among these were Croatians, Slavs, Armenians, Bohemians, Servians, Montenegrins, Dalmatians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Moravians, Lithuanians, Magyars, Jews, Syrians, Turks, Slovaks, with others of the better-known nationalities, such as English, Germans, French, and Scandinavians. Of the total number of these immigrants, less than one-tenth had a capital as great as thirty dollars with which to begin life in the new land. Many of these immigrants from lower Europe linger in the cities of the West, and do not become a part of the agricultural communities; but the indirect tax on the agricultural communities none the less remains. They become only parasites upon the parasitic middlemen, and all these must be supported by the farms.

It must be conceded that the new problems assigned to the West in the way of absorption and assimilation of alien population in these days of rapid transportation are nothing short of serious and perplexing. These new people, brought out in swarms by means of the rapid wheels of steam-locomotion, are like the early Americans who settled first a real America. They are very poor; their fare must be coarse, their garb mean, their opportunities for self-improvement but meager. Yet how different are they, the product of the third age of transportation, from those Argonauts, the Southern riflemen and the Northern axmen, who toiled with oar or slow-moving wheel across this land in the days so recently gone by!

There are three great pictures of the West—one that was, one that is, and one that might have been. This last picture is a sad one to any thinking man not concerned in politics. The West of steam-transportation has not so much impressed itself, and in reason could not be expected so to impress itself, upon its population as did that West reached by slow-moving wheels when the natural difficulties to be overcome were so vastly greater for the individual. The old West begot character, grew mighty individuals, because such were its soil and sky and air, its mountains, its streams, its long and devious trails, its constant stimulus and challenge.

That which was to be has been. The days of the adventurers are gone. There are no longer any Voices to summon heroes out on voyage of mystic conquest. It now costs not so much heroism, but so much money, to get out into the West, and it costs so much to live there. As a region the West offers few special opportunities. It is no longer a poor man’s country, nor is any part of America a country good for a poor man. It is all much alike. Our young men of the West are as apt to go East to seek their fortunes as to try them near at home. There is no land of the free. America is not American. Food must digest before it can be flesh and blood, and our population must digest before it can be called American.

Twelve years ago money brought two per cent. a month west of the Missouri River, and it earned it. To-day you can get a barrelful at five per cent. a year. It is only free men who can afford to pay two per cent. a month—men who still have open lands to settle, much raw wealth to dig out of the earth and a future to discount. There are no more Oklahomas now. We have stolen most of the reservations from the Indians, and a few men have stolen most of the pine,[53] and nothing short of a syndicate will do for a mine to-day. You may search far for eagle faces, such as came from Maine and Carolina, the men that followed the westward course of the young star of America.

Away with the saddle-blanket! The beaver are gone, and the range cattle are all fenced in. Hang up the rifle, for our great game is vanishing. If you seek a pleasant picture, gaze on the accumulating balance-sheets of some monopolist’s millions. If you wish to hear a soothing sound, listen to the wheels that go and come. Content yourself with these things; else you must admit that, however strong, brilliant, and consistent was our Western drama in the more slowly moving days, history has made anticlimax in the days of steam. Carry your conclusions out whimsically if you like, and reflect that in the year 1900 not only our own Western cow-punchers, but also the samurai of Japan, were riding bicycles, and the newspapers of Japan were reporting the prize-fights of America! This is civilization, but the view of it is not altogether comforting.[54]

Augur of what might have been, but for our Civil War, was that long line of white-topped wagons that streamed westward across Illinois, Iowa, across the Missouri River, out into the West, the still glorious and alluring West, immediately upon the close of the war. This was not an influx of foreigners, but a hejira of native Americans, a flood-tide that could not wait for the railroads that were now so swiftly taking up the new and mighty problems of a convalescent country. “By an impulse, providential or evolutionary, but irresistible,” said an American statesman of that decade,[55] “civilization has, during the present generation, moved all at once and in concert, in a process of territorial expansion as sudden and inexplicable as that which at the close of the fifteenth century impelled the nations of Europe to voyages which, resulted in the discovery and occupation of America. . . . The United States will command the greatest part of the trade with the Chinese Orient. We can produce every article that can be sold in this now and limitless market.” Not bad reiteration, this, of the prophecy of our historian of 1855. The latter did not foresee our Civil War, nor could he have foreseen our armies across seas. They are there not so much by reason of political mistakes or political wisdom as by an impulse “providential or evolutionary.” In 1865, upon the plains, or in 1900, in the Asian islands, the army was only the escort. It is not our army that will conquer new provinces and create new opportunities in place of those with which we have been so sadly careless and so lavishly generous; it is our railways and our steamships that are to prove our conquering agencies. Thereby we shall recoup ourselves at the coffers of the world.

We lose all sentimental regrets and superficial reservations when we come to examine closely the tremendous revolutions created by the genius of modern transportation. 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 that 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, the dream of Robertson made manifoldly true, and the path across the continent laid well and laid forever.[56] In the Middle West the Great American Desert was cross-hatched with iron lines and dotted full with homes that never could have been but for those iron lines. In the Northwest lay a land of almost arctic winters, with little or no shelter, with short and torrid summers, the land of the Red River carts, where the fur traders were at last replaced by the raisers of number two hard wheat.

Into this region came a large foreign population, sought out in the Old World by the diligent agents of a common carrier needing business. The hard plains of the North were literally stocked with these people. They came with their tickets bought through to such or such a point in Minnesota or Dakota. It was foreseen that the mere raising of wheat could not build up a permanent civilization, and the railway did the thinking for the blind ones who had taken its word and risked their lives and fortunes in the removal to that America which had so wide and various an interpretation. The railway sent out, free and unsolicited, seed wheat and choice breeding-stock, dropping these contributions wisely, here and there, into such communities as most needed them. The railway was explorer, carrier, provider, thinker, heart, soul, and intellect for this population that in another generation was to be American. No wonder these folk stand and stare when the railway-train goes by. It has been Providence to them. It is a Providence that has given to Europe what America might have had.

To-day towns do not grow merely because of their location, and this factor of location will become less and less important as the years go by. St. Louis was a city of location; Chicago is a city of transportation. Chicago is situated upon the most impossible and unlovely of all places of human habitation. She is simply a city of transportation, and is no better than her rails and boats, though by her rails and boats she lives in every Western state and territory. The same is true now of St. Louis and the vast Southwest.

One railroad recently planned for a Western extension, and laid out along its lines the sites of thirty-eight new towns, each of which was located and named before the question of inhabitants for the towns was ever taken up. Another railway in the Southwest has named fifty cities that are yet to build; and still others have scores of communities that in time are to be the battle-grounds of human lives, the stages of the human tragedy or comedy. The railways have not only reached but created provinces; they have not only nourished but conceived communities. Out of that cold upper land of the Northwest, which was thus fostered and nurtured into strength, there came, in one year, one hundred and ten million bushels of wheat to feed the world, and that in a year when the crop shortage was over one hundred million bushels. This is only a part of the output of that land, for the railway showed these farmers long ago that diversified farming was their hope and their salvation.

Past one of those forts which in 1812 the United States erected to protect her fur traders and to keep out her covetous rivals, there came in the same year from the far Northwest, once home of the buffalo, the Indian, and the scout, twenty-five million two hundred fifty-five thousand eight hundred and ten tons of freight, nearly all of the long-haul sort, and hence to be taken as showing in part the product of the far Northwest itself. Three transcontinental roads, the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Southern Pacific, in 1899 carried twenty million one hundred forty-six thousand four hundred and ten tons of freight, with a haul averaging about three hundred miles in length.

Nearly a thousand millions of dollars is represented in the capitalization of these roads—far more than is demanded by the free roadway of the Great Lakes, the modern freight traffic of which is really a development subsequent to that of the railway exploitation of the West. This perhaps suggests a day when Chicago may come to be as closely connected with New Orleans as was the latter city with Kentucky in the day of Wilkinson.[57] It is impossible to study the industrial history of the West without studying also that of the South, for though the two sections are far apart and utterly unlike, they yet have the intercurrent soul of twins. No part of America is less known and more misunderstood than the South, and surely it must be one of the most cheering reflections to conclude that yearly the South comes closer to the North, and the North to the South. Statesmanship could not in a century so fully have accomplished this great and desirable result. The railroads are doing what statecraft could not do.

It is the part of the great captains of transportation to live strenuous lives, to work out great problems faithfully and patiently, to accomplish great results mysteriously, to live, to die, and to be forgotten. The heroes of the hustings, the heroes of our wars, are remembered and immortalized. The man that makes possible their triumphs finds no record on the page of time. His obituary is only the passing chronicle of the daily press, feverishly concerned with what is known as news.

To-day James F. Joy, the father of the Michigan Central Railroad, is little known by the general public, though his was a far greater work than that of seeking public office. John Murray Forbes, father of the great Burlington and Quincy system, is a man too much forgotten. As these lines are written comes the news of the death of Henry Villard, the man that solved so many problems for the Northern Pacific. Dropped for the time out of sight, he will now shortly follow the fate of his compeers, and soon be dropped forever. William Henry Osborn died only a few years ago, yet there are many who make the winter trip to the Gulf coast that do not know who planned the flight of rails that runs from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. It is a duty and a pleasure to mention the names of such great and useful men, if only to ask that their work be held in understanding memory.

Especially significant now is the memory of Mr. Osborn, and we might well speak of him as assistant and coadjutor of such men as Lincoln and Grant, and the statesmen who since the war have sought to unite North and South. As we find that it was the South that first marched westward, and a Southern man who first planned a great highway of iron into the West, we may state with equal pleasure and confidence that it was the East, and an Eastern man, that made the South a portion of the West, and both a part of a united America.

William H. Osborn was a native of Massachusetts, and was by birth of no exalted position in the world. His chief capital was a clear brain and an unclouded purpose, which later ripened into a farsightedness in large affairs that has rarely been equaled in the ranks of practical American men. Sent to the East Indies as the representative of a New York firm, he got a good insight into the trade in spices, and was successful in its operation. Later he married the second daughter of that sterling American merchant, Jonathan Sturges of New York, whose first daughter was the first wife of J. Pierpont Morgan. Mr. Sturges was heavily interested in the young Illinois Central Railroad, the first of the land-grant railways, the original seven hundred and five miles of which were intended to develop the agricultural lands of the great prairie state of Illinois, and to bear the products of that state up to the water-transport of the Great Lakes, which then carried most of the long-haul business from the West to the East.

The original lines of this road were laid out in the form of a large Y, one leg of which ran from Dubuque, Iowa, southward, meeting the other leg, which extended south from Chicago. The two legs of the Y met at what is now Central City, and thence the line ran south to Cairo. This road was one of the earliest attempts to parallel the old water-highways that had once carried the freight of a riparian population. Its first grant was made in 1850, and its first train was run in 1855. During the war this line was of much service in transporting troops and material to the southward.

Yet, in spite of its well-conceived plan, and in spite of the natural wealth of the country it traversed, the road as a property was a source of perpetual anxiety to its shareholders. It needed a great mind to straighten out its problems, and Mr. Sturges thought that his son-in-law had that mind. He therefore despatched Mr. Osborn to Chicago, and gave him full charge of the system. The choice was a wise one. Mr. Osborn brought the property through the panic of 1857, when all securities were falling in ruins, and weathered even an assignment, which was made by the company during his absence in England. He backed his faith in his judgment by negotiating a personal loan of three million dollars, out of which he paid the matured coupons that were pressing for payment. He secured a new loan of five million dollars, paid off all the smaller debts, established the credit of the company, and set its affairs thenceforth upon a secure footing.

All these details were such as might perhaps have been accomplished by another. It was not only in these executive matters that the genius of this captain evinced itself. He saw at once to the marrow of the difficulties that had caused this embarrassment. There had now been built around the foot of Lake Michigan those east-and-west through lines that killed the lake carriage just as his own road had killed the river carriage on the Mississippi trail. These roads reached out after their own business, and did not depend upon the traffic the north-and-south line carried. It was easy to foresee a failing business, but not so easy to name a remedy for it. Mr. Osborn found his remedy in the idea of a north-and-south transcontinental line. Between Cairo and the town of Jackson, Tennessee, there was a gap over which no railroad passed, though from Jackson as far south as New Orleans there ran the rambling lines of a system controlled by H. S. McComb, of Crédit Mobilier fame. Mr. Osborn secured the immature Southern roads, built the connection from Cairo to Jackson, and in 1873 had a completed line from the Lakes to the Gulf.

It all sounds easy, but it took one man’s brain and one man’s life to do it. The story of the road and of the man that made it is not yet told, but it will be written in the development of one of the richest sections of America. It is writing daily in the trains that come from North to South, from South to North, agencies that daily break down and pass through any sectional barrier and bring about the better understanding which makes kin one with the other the sons of the old riflemen and the old axmen who built the West.

Thus are the trails of the two forever interwoven. Beside this trail of commerce runs the old trail of the Mississippi, whose tawny flood still carries its burden of adventure and romance. Robertson, Thomas, Whitney, Osborn,—these are the names of a few of the prophets, forgotten men of the early and the modern days, who blazed the intercurrent trails where now march the feet of those living under a complex civilization.

From these crude studies of early Western history we may gather one very significant fact, which will mean more a hundred years from now than it does to-day. It is that America got her territory first, and then her transportation and her population. She bought on a rising market, and her purchase was of territory, land, the only thing on earth that can not be increased or multiplied. Moreover, her land was such as the earth has never duplicated and can never duplicate. The magnificent American West was a realm unrivaled, and it was originally settled by men who had the most priceless of all possessions, a splendid ancestry. Providence held back the wheels for a hundred years while the Western character was forming.

Let us, even though by dint of effort, fling away the personal plaint. It is un-American to snivel, and as the old-time Western men would not have done so, neither shall we. The West is not dead. It is immortal. We have come upon a century of force. The conflict is to be the bitterest the world has ever known; not the conflict of man with beast, or with savage nature, but the conflict of masses of men, masses of things, one combination against another, one wedge of impact, head on, against another. It is too late to call out for an America like that of Washington or Jefferson; too late to ask for a practical Monroe doctrine; too late to speak of policies or politics gone by.

With Europe in fear of our Western products, and yet dependent upon those products; with America coming each day, by causes “providential or evolutionary,” into the plans of the world, of what possible avail is it to cry out for a West or for an America that is gone forever? Call back the armies if you wish, but you can never call back the wheels. The pathway points now not out into the West, but out into the world. Never doubt that the sons of the West, sons of this Anak, sons whose fathers are in Valhalla to-day, will follow that road as far and as fearlessly as they did the path across the continent. In the veins of these men runs the riot unconquerable, the distillation of the skies and winds. Their feet march now to the rhythm of phantom footfalls, those of the men that marched before from home out into the perilous unknown. Black men, yellow men, peasant men—all these must take their chances. There are no longer any vacant lands. Europe, which sent to the West some of its best and its poorest population, will have more to fear at the hands of the West than China has to dread to-day. Europe has to combat not only the West, but all the heredity of the West.

This, then, is where the eagle-faced pioneers of America will find their last trail. This is how the king will at last come again into his own. Peoples may pass away, monarchies may fall, but above them there will stand the only aristocracy fit to survive; not a false democracy that nominates all men as equal, but the aristocracy of survival. You may abolish many things, and in the future enact many things of which we of to-day may not guess; but never shall there utterly perish the strong blood that got its survival by fitness, and its education by continuous conflict with mighty things. The largest, the most compact, and the most closely knit Caucasian population of 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.

As to the future steps in the development of the West, we may perhaps be indulged in a hazard of opinion, as our fathers were before us. It would seem sure that every inch of our agricultural lands must come under the plow of Belgium, and be tilled inch by inch. The vast Delta of the Mississippi, from Memphis south, the richest soil the world ever saw, will be a continuous garden, supporting a great population of its own, and feeding thousands in the cities, in full verification of the wisdom of the man who foresaw that the South must be joined to the North, even as the West to the East. Perhaps some of the more barren steppe country of the West will ultimately be abandoned in spite of scientific irrigation, just as some of the slashed-off timber-lands of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota are now being abandoned, in sequel to the ruinous American lumbering operations.[58]

In the great river valleys there will be an enormous thickening of the population; so that it may yet be many years before the center of population, which in 1900 was near the little town of Columbus, Indiana, shall have passed the Mississippi River in its west-bound course.[59] We have yet to learn to save our potato-peelings. We are yet to go more and more under task-masters, are to learn more and more the value of the penny, that coin once so bitterly scorned in all the West. We are to work out the problems bequeathed humanity with the passing years; and in the end we are to ask, as we ask to-day, that unanswered question, Why? Policies and politics can not change these things. The wheels have run too far. Let fall the little words of our talking men; let wave the tiny swords of those who are called our warriors; and let the writers rage. Back and beyond their trivial and transient deeds runs the broad, somber flood of fate. Humanity, not political divisions, is the concern of time. The individual yields to the section, the section to the nation, the nation to the world, the world to the plans of fate, of Providence.

There is another, a lighter and more cheerful side to the conclusions that we may draw from our study of the way in which the West was made—the side that has to do with the growth of the newer portions of this country in all the liberal arts, in that noble flowering of the human imagination, which is most naturally to be expected of an environment of ease and a time of leisure. Art rests ever upon the material, the imagination dates ever back to actual deeds. The gentler days of the West are no better than its ruder times, but the one is as good as the other, since each came in its proper period. It was the railway that developed the West in artistic things as well as in material things. It was as long ago as 1870 that a Western man, Justice Paine of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, found occasion to speak of the vast influence of these civilizing agencies. He said:

“They have done more to develop the wealth and resources, to stimulate the industry, reward the labor, and promote the general comfort and prosperity of the country than any other, perhaps than all other mere physical causes combined. There is probably not a man, woman or child whose interest or comfort has not been in some degree subserved by them. They bring to our doors the productions of the earth. They enable us to anticipate and protract the seasons. They enable the inhabitants of each clime to enjoy the pleasures and luxuries of all. They scatter the productions of the press and of literature broadcast through the country with amazing rapidity. There is scarcely a want, wish, or aspiration of the human heart that they do not in some measure help to gratify. They promote the pleasures of social life and of friendship; they bring the skilled physician swiftly from a distance to attend the sick and the wounded, and enable the absent friend to be present at the bedside of the dying. They have more than realized the fabulous conception of the Eastern imagination, which pictured the genii as transporting inhabited palaces through the air. They take a train of inhabited palaces from the Atlantic coast, and with marvelous swiftness deposit it on the shores that are washed by the Pacific sea. In war they transport the armies and supplies of the government with the greatest celerity, and carry forward, as it were on the wings of the wind, relief and comfort to those who are stretched bleeding and wounded on the field of battle.”

He has not read well the history of his country, has not learned the intricate web of the commercial system of to-day, has surely not studied the developments of the third age of American transportation, who can believe that there exists any longer any considerable difference between the most widely separated parts of America in matters of the gentler life. The publisher of a noble periodical controls an agency the influence of which is as valuable and as much desired in the West as in the East, and which is felt as quickly and as sensitively in the one region as the other. The art and literature of the time belong to the West as much as to the East, and in its due time the West will produce as well as consume in the matters of art and literature. There were Western artists, Western painters, Western sculptors on the plains before the buffalo were gone.

It is a matter of wonder that any American literature could ever speak of the American West in anything but terms of pride and honor. There is a certain literature, color-crammed, superficial, and transient, because wrong, that affects to believe that there is still a West that is a land of crude souls exclusively and of little hope for a hereafter. If the good folk who so believe lack the great privilege of actual American travel, they have at least left for them the resources of an American railroad map. Let them study; and even if they study no deeper than the map, they must come to see that the West is no more as once it was.

Changed unspeakably and utterly, the old West lies in ruins. To pick about among those ruins may, indeed, be to find here and there a bit of local color; but were it not better to reflect that this color may be only the broken bits of a cathedral pane? Restore that cathedral, in recollection, in imagination at least, if it be within the skill of art or literature to do so. Restore it, and write upon its arch the thought that history may be more than a mere recital of wars and religions; that the destruction of human life may be nationally not so great as the development of human character. Give the men of the old West, parents of the men of the new West, this epitaph: They had character. Let the heroes have place of honor in their own cathedral; and so may the Western earth lie light above them, and the Western skies smile over them rememberingly.

Footnote 48:

The Century Magazine, January, 1902.

Footnote 49:

Another instance of changed standards in the West may be seen in the revolution as to petty prices. Up to twenty years ago, in most Rocky Mountain communities, the quarter-dollar was the smallest coin in circulation. With the railroads came the dime, the nickel, and at last the penny; but they came to a West that was no more.

A Montana periodical thus comments on these matters as they appeared at the time when the railroad reached Miles City:

“The advent of the Northern Pacific Railroad, in November, 1881, brought about a complete change in the methods and manners of the people. The railroad brought the community at once in touch with the more concise and narrower life of ‘the States’; the ‘nickel’ displaced the ‘quarter’ as the smallest coin in use, and prices shrunk accordingly. . . . This proposed innovation was hotly contested for a while by the adherents of the ‘two-bit’ theory, resulting finally in a compromise that established ‘two-for-a-quarter’ as the going rate. It would be hard to describe the feeling of dejection that overwhelmed the old-timers when this conclusion was reached. It was accepted by them as a pronounced and evident sign of decadence.”

Footnote 50:

A settler who moved, in 1854, from Virginia to Iowa complained that for a whole year in that frontier country he saw no fruit except a half-peck of crab-apples. It was much the same in Minnesota at that time; yet, in the year 1900, the city of St. Paul alone used one thousand dollars’ worth or grapes each day for fifty days, all imported, and at an average price of only fifteen cents per basket. This fruit was largely imported from the state of New York.

Footnote 51:

Henry Howe; “The Great West” (1855).

Footnote 52:

In the year 1900 began the great tendency toward consolidation in railway interests. Nor did the sequence cease at this point. In the same year there were begun, for use upon the Pacific Ocean in connection with this same transcontinental route, five giant ocean-going freight ships, the largest yet known, each to be 750 feet in length, of 74 feet beam, and with a carrying capacity of 22,000 tons. These ships will carry American cotton to Japan, for use instead of the short-staple cotton of India, until recently used by Japan. They will enable the railroad-builders of Japan to figure as exactly on the price of a ton of rails as can the contractor of Kansas or Nebraska. They will lay down a barrel of Minnesota flour in China or the Philippines at a cost for carriage of not over $1.25. All this shows to what extent American commerce, made active by American transportation methods, is invading the markets of the world; for, at this same time, Russia can not lay down a barrel of (an inferior) flour at the seaboard of China for less than $4.25. Surely our prophet of 1855 dreamed more wisely than he knew!

Footnote 53:

The desecration of America, in the terrible devastation of her forests, is something no observant man can face with composure.

Footnote 54:

The time is not one for individual optimism, and the old hopefully self-reliant spirit of the West must be content to lose its personal quality in the larger and vaguer, though not less certain, tendencies of modern life. Bearing upon a theme kindred to the above, James Bryce, author of “The American Commonwealth,” recently found occasion to write:

“National ideals to-day tend toward a large and strong state, with vast external possessions, with a huge army and navy, with an extending trade, and great consequent wealth; and the ideal of education is less toward ‘unprofitable culture’ and more toward subjects that enable men to raise themselves in the world. People now talk more about capital and labor. Formerly there seemed rather more faith in the power of reason, rather more hope of progress to be secured by political change. Altogether there seemed rather more of a sanguine spirit formerly. Mankind must never cease to cherish and follow the dream of that golden age, which at one time they believed to lie in the past, but which for some centuries had been supposed to glimmer in the future. They must never forget that hope. But the golden age seemed nearer in 1850 than it does now.”

Footnote 55:

The late Cushman K. Davis, United States senator from Minnesota.

Footnote 56:

In 1902 Canada began to emulate the history of the United States, and planned for the building of two more transcontinental railways. She could inflict no greater blow to the United States. V. also Chap. V, Vol. IV; “The Pathways of the Future.”

Footnote 57:

Engineers disagree as to the possibility of making a ship-canal of the great highway of the Mississippi; but engineers have always disagreed about the doing of great things, and then have always done them. It is likely that the dream of that shrewd merchant-explorer, Louis Joliet, will eventually be realized, and the Chicago drainage-canal will in that case attain a great importance.

Indeed, inland-water transportation may be upon the eve of a great development. Thus, in December, 1900, there was organized a canal company for the purpose of navigating the Red River of the North, of improving the channel by dredging, putting in locks and reservoirs, to regulate that historic stream into conditions virtually those of a canal. Another curious proposition to reach Congress in the same year was a bill for the purpose of building a ship-canal between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, an enterprise which would have great significance in the coal and iron trade. This canal would follow the course of La Salle on his first journey from the Great Lakes—the old south-bound war-trail of the Six Nations. Geography, of all things, seems to repeat itself. No one may tell what new importance this canal proposition may attain, though it may be dormant for a time.

Early in the year 1901 the leading journals of Germany were discussing the prospects of a canal from Chicago to the Atlantic Ocean, and held the enterprise practicable.

As showing the extent of water-transportation on our Great Lakes, it may be stated that more tonnage passes Sault Ste. Marie in seven months of each year than goes through the Suez Canal in three years. The city of Duluth alone, at the head of the water-trail, has a tonnage each year of more than 11,500,000 tons.

Footnote 58:

The population of Michigan in the decade 1890-1900 drifted rapidly toward the cities. Yet the Michigan railroads are bravely trying to solve the problem of building up a population on the country desolated by the lumbermen, and with great success are developing resources in agriculture and manufactures which for a long time lay unsuspected.

Footnote 59:

In this connection the census map offers an unfailing interest. Investigation shows that our star, denoting the center of population, has traveled in all only 525 miles since 1790, the greatest west-bound gains being in the decade 1850-60, 81 miles. At no time has the center of population moved back toward the East, though it is nearer to doing so now than ever before—proof that the history of America has been but the history of a West, and also proof that that wayward West may soon bend its footsteps homeward after a century of adventure. The record of the movement of the population center is as follows:

1790, 23 miles east of Baltimore, Maryland; 1800, 18 miles west of Baltimore, Maryland; 1810, 40 miles northwest by west of Washington, D. C.; 1820, 16 miles north of Woodstock, Virginia; 1830, 19 miles west-southwest of Moorefield, West Virginia; 1840, 16 miles south of Clarksburg, West Virginia; 1850, 23 miles southeast of Parkersburg, West Virginia; 1860, 20 miles south of Chillicothe, Ohio; 1870, 48 miles east by north of Cincinnati, Ohio; 1880, 8 miles west by south of Cincinnati, Ohio; 1890, 20 miles east of Columbus, Indiana; 1900, 7 miles north of Columbus, Indiana.

ACROSS THE PACIFIC