of the river Missouri, at the bend, and that the notable portion of it
is built upon a series of sharp hills. The hill portion is already a
beautiful city; the flat part, which contains the railway depot and
yards, a considerable portion of the manufactories and wholesale
houses, and much refuse and squatting population (white and black), is
unattractive in a high degree. The Kaw, or Kansas, River would seem to
be the natural western boundary, but it is not the boundary; the city
and State line runs at some distance east of Kansas River, leaving
a considerable portion of low ground in Kansas City, Kansas, which
contains the larger number of the great packing-houses and the great
stock-yards. This identity of names is confusing. Kansas City (Kansas),
Wyandotte, Armourdale, Armstrong, and Riverview (all in the State of
Kansas) have been recently consolidated under the name of Kansas City,
Kansas. It is to be regretted that this thriving town of Kansas,
which already claims a population of 40,000, did not take the name of
Wyandotte. In its boundaries are the second largest stock-yards in the
country, which received last year 670,000 cattle, nearly 2,500,000 hogs,
and 210,000 sheep, estimated worth 851,000,000. There also are half a
dozen large packing-houses, one of them ranking with the biggest in the
country, which last year slaughtered 195,933 cattle, and 1,907,104 hogs.
The great elevated railway, a wonderful structure, which connects Kansas
City, Missouri, with Wyandotte, is owned and managed by men of Kansas
City, Kansas. The city in Kansas has a great area of level ground for
the accommodation of manufacturing enterprises, and I noticed a good
deal of speculative feeling in regard to this territory. The Kansas side
has fine elevated situations for residences, but Wyandotte itself does
not compare in attractiveness with the Missouri city, and I fancy that
the controlling impetus and capital will long remain with the city that
has so much the start.
Looking about for the specialty which I have learned to expect in every
great Western city, I was struck by the number of warehouses for the
sale of agricultural implements on the flats, and I was told that Kansas
City excels all others in the amount of sales of farming implements. The
sale is put down at 815,000,000 for the year 1887—a fourth of the entire
reported product manufactured in the United States. Looking for the
explanation of this, one largely accounts for the growth of Kansas City,
namely, the vast rich agricultural regions to the west and southwest,
the development of Missouri itself, and the facilities of distribution.
It is a general belief that settlement is gradually pushing the rainy
belt farther and farther westward over the prairies and plains, that
the breaking up of the sod by the plough and the tilling have increased
evaporation and consequently rainfall. I find this questioned by
competent observers, who say that the observation of ten years is not
enough to settle the fact of a change of climate, and that, as not
a tenth part of the area under consideration has been broken by the
plough, there is not cause enough for the alleged effect, and that we
do not yet know the cycle of years of drought and years of rain. However
this may be, there is no doubt of the vast agricultural yield of these
new States and Territories, nor of the quantities of improved machinery
they use. As to facility of distribution, the railways are in evidence.
I need not name them, but I believe I counted fifteen lines and systems
centring there. In 1887, 4565 miles of railway were added to the
facilities of Kansas City, stretching out in every direction. The
development of one is notable as peculiar and far-sighted, the Fort
Scott and Gulf, which is grasping the East as well as the South-west;
turning eastward from Fort Scott, it already reaches the iron industries
of Birmingham, pushes on to Atlanta, and seeks the seaboard. I do not
think I over-estimate the importance of this quite direct connection of
Kansas City with the Atlantic.
The population of Kansas City, according to the statistics of the Board
of Trade, increased from 41,786 in 1877 to 165,924 in 1887, the assessed
valuation from $9,370,287 in 1877 to $53,017,290 in 1887, and the rate
of taxation was reduced in the same period from about 22 mills to 14.
I notice also that the banking capital increased in a year—1886 to
1887—from $3,873,000 to $6,950,000, and the Clearing-house transactions
in the same year from $251,963,441 to $353,895,458. This, with other
figures which might be given, sustains the assertion that while
real-estate speculation has decreased in the current year, there was a
substantial increase of business. During the year ending June 30, 1886,
there were built 4054 new houses, costing $10,393,207; during the year
ending June 30, 1887, 5889, costing $12,839,808. An important feature
of the business of Kansas City is in the investment and loan and trust
companies, which are many, and aggregate a capital of $7,773,000. Loans
are made on farms in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa, and also for
city improvements.
Details of business might be multiplied, but enough have been given to
illustrate the material prosperity of the city. I might add a note
of the enterprise which last year paved (mainly with cedar blocks on
concrete) thirteen miles of the city; the very handsome churches
in process of erection, and one or two (of the many) already built,
admirable in plan and appearance; the really magnificent building of the
Board of Trade—a palace, in fact; and other handsome, costly structures
on every hand. There are thirty-five miles of cable road. I am not
sure but these cable roads are the most interesting—certainly the most
exciting—feature of the city to a stranger. They climb such steeps, they
plunge down such grades, they penetrate and whiz through such crowded,
lively thoroughfares, their trains go so rapidly, that the rider is in
a perpetual exhilaration. I know no other locomotion more exciting and
agreeable. Life seems a sort of holiday when one whizzes through the
crowded city, up and down and around amid the tall buildings, and then
launches off in any direction into the suburbs, which are alive with new
buildings. Independence avenue is shown as one of the finest avenues,
and very handsome it and that part of the town are, but I fancied
I could detect a movement of fashion and preference to the hills
southward.
In the midst of such a material expansion one has learned to expect fine
houses, but I was surprised to find three very good book-stores (as I
remember, St. Louis has not one so good), and a very good start for a
public library, consisting of about 16,000 well-arranged and classified
books. Members pay $2 a year, and the library receives only about
$2500 a year from the city. The citizens could make no better-paying
investment than to raise this library to the first rank. There is also
the beginning of an art school in some pretty rooms, furnished with
casts and autotypes, where pupils practise drawing under direction of
local artiste. There are two social clubs—the University, which occupies
pleasant apartments, and the Kansas City Club, which has just erected a
handsome club-house. In these respects, and in a hundred refinements
of living, the town, which has so largely drawn its young, enterprising
population from the extreme East, has little the appearance of a
frontier place; it is the push, the public spirit, the mixture of
fashion and slouching negligence in street attire, the mingling of
Eastern smartness with border emancipation in manner, and the general
restlessness of movement, that proclaim the newness. It seems to me that
the incessant stir, and especially the clatter, whir, and rapidity of
the cable ears, must have a decided effect on the nerves of the whole
population. The appearance is certainly that of an entire population
incessantly in motion.
I have spoken of the public spirit. Besides the Board of Trade there is
a Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Bureau, which works vigorously to bring
to the city and establish mercantile and manufacturing enterprises. The
same spirit is shown in the public schools. The expenditures in 1887
were, for school purposes, $226,923; for interest on bonds, $18,408; for
grounds and buildings, $110,087; in all, $355,418. The total of children
of school age was, white, 31,667; colored, 4204. Of these in
attendance at school were, white, 12,933; colored, 1975. There were
25 school-houses and 212 teachers. The schools which I saw—one large
grammar-school, a colored school, and the High-school of over 600
pupils—were good all through, full of intelligent emulation, the
teachers alert and well equipped, and the attention to literature, to
the science of government, to what, in short, goes to make intelligent
citizens, highly commendable. I find the annual reports, under Prof.
J. M. Greenwood, most interesting reading. Topics are taken up and
investigations made of great public interest. These topics relate to the
even physical and mental development of the young in distinction from
the effort merely to stuff them with information. There is a most
intelligent attempt to remedy defective eyesight. Twenty per cent, of
school children have some anomaly of refraction or accommodation which
should be recognized and corrected early; girls have a larger per cent,
of anomalies than boys. Irish, Swedish, and German children have the
highest percentage of affections of the eyes; English, French, Scotch,
and Americans the lowest. Scientific observations of the eyes are made
in the Kansas City schools, with a view to remedy defects. Another
curious topic is the investigation of the Contents of Children’s
Minds—that is, what very small children know about common things. Prof.
Stanley Hall published recently the result of examinations made of
very little folks in Boston schools. Professor Greenwood made similar
investigations among the lowest grade of pupils in the Kansas City
schools, and a table of comparisons is printed. The per cent, of
children ignorant of common things is astonishingly less in Kansas City
schools than in the Boston; even the colored children of the Western
city made a much better showing. Another subject of investigation is the
alleged physical deterioration in this country. Examinations were made
of hundreds of school children from the age of ten to fifteen,
and comparisons taken with the tables in Mulhal’s “Dictionary of
Statistics,” London, 1884. It turns out that the Kansas City children
are taller, taking sex into account, than the average English child
at the age of either ten or fifteen, weigh a fraction less at ten, but
upwards of four pounds more at fifteen, while the average Belgian boy
and girl compare favorably with American children two years younger.
The tabulated statistics show two facts, that the average Kansas child
stands fully as tall as the tallest, and that in weight he tips the
beam against an older child on the other side of the Atlantic. With this
showing, we trust that our American experiment will be permitted to go
on.
In reaching the necessary limit of a paper too short for its subject, I
can only express my admiration of the indomitable energy and spirit of
that portion of the West which Kansas City represents, and congratulate
it upon so many indications of attention to the higher civilization,
without which its material prosperity will be wonderful but not
attractive.
XV.—KENTUCKY.
All Kentucky, like Gaul, is divided into three parts. This division,
which may not be sustained by the geologists or the geographers, perhaps
not even by the ethnologists, is, in my mind, one of character: the east
and south-east mountainous part, the central blue-grass region, and the
great western portion, thrifty in both agriculture and manufactures.
It is a great self-sustaining empire, lying midway in the Union, and
between the North and the South (never having yet exactly made up its
mind whether it is North or South), extending over more than seven
degrees of longitude. Its greatest length east and west is 410 miles;
its greatest breadth, 178 miles. Its area by latest surveys, and larger
than formerly estimated, is 42,283 square miles. Within this area
prodigal nature has brought together nearly everything that a highly
civilized society needs: the most fertile soil, capable of producing
almost every variety of product for food or for textile fabrics;
mountains of coals and iron ores and limestone; streams and springs
everywhere; almost all sorts of hard-wood timber in abundance. Nearly
half the State is still virgin forest of the noblest trees, oaks,
sugar-maple, ash, poplar, black-walnut, linn, elm, hickory, beech,
chestnut, red cedar. The climate may honestly be called temperate: its
inhabitants do not need to live in cellars in the summer, nor burn up
their fences and furniture in the winter.
Kentucky is loved of its rivers. It can be seen by their excessively
zigzag courses how reluctant they are to leave the State, and if they do
leave it they are certain to return. The Kentucky and the Green wander
about in the most uncertain way before they go to the Ohio, and the
Licking and Big Sandy exhibit only a little less reluctance. The
Cumberland, after a wide detour in Tennessee, returns; and Powell’s
River, joining the Clinch and entering the Tennessee, finally persuades
that river, after it has looked about the State of Tennessee and
gladdened northern Alabama, to return to Kentucky.
Kentucky is an old State, with an old civilization. It was the pioneer
in the great western movement of population after the Revolution.
Although it was first explored in 1770, and the Boone trail through the
wilderness of Cumberland Gap was not marked till 1775, a settlement
had been made in Frankfort in 1774, and in 1790 the Territory had a
population of 79,077. This was a marvellous growth, considering the
isolation by hundreds of miles of wilderness from Eastern communities,
and the savage opposition of the Indians, who selw fifteen hundred whilc
settlers from 1783 to 1790. Kentucky was the home of no Indian tribe,
but it was the favorite hunting and fighting ground of those north of
the Ohio and south of the Cumberland, and they united to resent white
interference. When the State came into the Union in 1792—the second
admitted—it was the equal in population and agricultural wealth of some
of the original States that had been settled a hundred and fifty years,
and in 1800 could boast 220,750 inhabitants, and in 1810, 400,511.
At the time of the settlement, New York west of the Hudson, western
Pennsylvania, and western Virginia were almost unoccupied except by
hostile Indians; there was only chance and dangerous navigation down
the Ohio from Pittsburg, and it was nearly eight hundred miles of a
wilderness road, which was nothing but a bridle-path, from Philadelphia
by way of the Cumberland Gap to central Kentucky. The majority of
emigrants came this toilsome way, which was, after all, preferable to
the river route, and all passengers and produce went that way eastward,
for the steamboat bad not yet made the ascent of the Ohio feasible. In
1779 Virginia resolved to construct a wagon-road through the wilderness,
but no road was made for many years afterwards, and indeed no vehicle of
any sort passed over it till a road was built by action of the Kentucky
Legislature in 1700. I hope it was better then than the portion of it I
travelled from Pineville to the Gap in 1888.
Civilization made a great leap over nearly a thousand miles into the
open garden-spot of central Kentucky, and the exploit is a unique
chapter in our frontier development. Either no other land ever lent
itself so easily to civilization as the blue-grass region, or it was
exceptionally fortunate in its occupants. They formed almost immediately
a society distinguished for its amenities, for its political influence,
prosperous beyond precedent in farming, venturesome and active in trade,
developing large manufactures, especially from hemp, of such articles
as could be transported by river, and sending annually through the
wilderness road to the East and South immense droves of cattle, horses,
and swine. In the first necessity, and the best indication of superior
civilization, good roads for transportation, Kentucky was conspicuous in
comparison with the rest of the country. As early as 1825 macadam roads
were projected, the turnpike from. Lexington to Maysville on the Ohio
was built in 1829, and the work went on by State and county co-operation
until the central region had a system of splendid roads, unexcelled
in any part of the Union. In 1830 one of the earliest railways in the
United States, that from Lexington to Frankfort, was begun; two years
later seven miles were constructed, and in 1835 the first locomotive and
train of cars ran on it to Frankfort, twenty-seven miles, in two hours
and twenty-nine minutes. The structure was composed of stone sills, in
which grooves were cut to receive the iron bars. These stone blocks can
still be seen along the line of the road, now a part of the Louisville
and Nashville system. In all internal improvements the State was very
energetic. The canal around the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville was
opened in 1831, with some aid from the General Government. The State
expended a great deal in improving the navigation of the Kentucky, the
Green, and other rivers in its borders by an expensive system of locks
and dams; in 1837 it paid $19,500 to engineers engaged in turnpike and
river improvement, and in 1839 $31,075 for the same purpose.
The story of early Kentucky reads like a romance. By 1820 it counted
a population of over 510,000, and still it had scarcely wagon-road
communication with the East. Here was a singular phenomenon, a
prosperous community, as one might say a garden in the wilderness,
separated by natural barriers from the great life of the East, which
pushed out north of it a connected, continuous development; a community
almost self-sustaining, having for his centre the loveliest agricultural
region in the Union, and evolving a unique social state so gracious and
attractive that it was thought necessary to call in the effect of the
blue-grass to explain it, unaided human nature being inadequate, it
was thought, to such a result. Almost from the beginning fine houses
attested the taste and prosperity of the settlers; by 1792 the
blue-grass region was dotted with neat and commodious dwellings, fruit
orchards and gardens, sugar groves, and clusters of villages; while,
a little later, rose, in the midst of broad plantations and park-like
forests, lands luxuriant with wheat and clover and corn and hemp and
tobacco, the manorial dwellings of the colonial period, like the stately
homes planted by the Holland Land Company along the Hudson and the
Mohawk and in the fair Genesee, like the pillared structures on the
James and the Staunton, and like the solid square mansions of old New
England. A type of some of them stands in Frankfort now, a house which
was planned by Thomas Jefferson and built in 1796, spacious, permanent,
elegant in the low relief of its chaste ornamentation. For comfort, for
the purposes of hospitality, for the quiet and rest of the mind,
there is still nothing so good as the colonial house, with the slight
modifications required by our changed conditions.
From 1820 onward the State grew by a natural increment of population,
but without much aid from native or foreign emigration. In 1860 its
population was only about 919,000 whites, with some 225,000 slaves and
over 10,000 free colored persons. It had no city of the first class, nor
any villages specially thriving. Louisville numbered only about 68,000,
Lexington less than 15,000, and Frankfort, the capital, a little over
5000. It retained the lead in hemp and a leading position in tobacco;
but it had fallen away behind its much younger rivals in manufactures
and the building of railways, and only feeble efforts had been made in
the development of its extraordinary mineral resources.
How is this arrest of development accounted for? I know that a short
way of accounting for it has been the presence of slavery. I would not
underestimate this. Free labor would not go where it had to compete with
slave labor; white labor now does not like to come into relations with
black labor; and capital also was shy of investment in a State where
both political economy and social life were disturbed by a color line.
But this does not wholly account for the position of Kentucky as to
development at the close of the war. So attractive is the State in most
respects, in climate, soil, and the possibilities of great wealth by
manufactures, that I doubt not the State would have been forced into the
line of Western progress and slavery become an unimportant factor long
ago, but for certain natural obstacles and artificial influences.
Let the reader look on the map, at the ranges of mountains running from
the north-east to the southwest—the Blue Ridge, the Alleghanies, the
Cumberland, and Pine mountains, continuous rocky ridges, with scarcely a
water gap, and only at long intervals a passable mountain gap—and notice
how these would both hinder and deflect the tide of emigration. With
such barriers the early development of Kentucky becomes ten times a
wonder. But about 1825 an event occurred that placed her at a greater
disadvantage in the competition. The Erie Canal was opened. This made
New York, and not Virginia, the great commercial highway. The railway
development followed. It was easy to build roads north of Kentucky, and
the tide of settlement followed the roads, which were mostly aided
by land grants; and in order to utilize the land grants the railways
stimulated emigration by extensive advertising. Capital and population
passed Kentucky by on the north. To the south somewhat similar
conditions prevailed. Comparatively cheap roads could be built along
the eastern slope of the Alleghanies, following the great valley from
Pennsylvania to Alabama; and these south-westwardly roads were also
aided by the General Government. The North and South Railway of Alabama,
and the Alabama and Great Southern, which cross at Birmingham, were
land-grant roads. The roads which left the Atlantic seaboard passed
naturally northward and southward of Kentucky, and left an immense area
in the centre of the Union—all of western and southwestern Virginia and
eastern Kentucky—without transportation facilities. Until 1880 here was
the largest area east of the Mississippi impenetrated by railways.
The war removed one obstacle to the free movement of men desiring work
and seeking agreeable homes, a movement marked in the great increase
of the industrial population of Louisville and the awakening to varied
industries and trade in western Kentucky. The offer of cheap land,
which would reward skilful farming In agreeable climatic conditions,
has attracted foreign settlers to the plateau south of the blue-grass
region; and scientific investigation has made the mountain district in
the south-east the object of the eager competition of both domestic
and foreign capital. Kentucky, therefore, is entering upon a new era of
development. Two phases of it, the Swiss colonies, and the opening
of the coal, iron, and timber resources, present special points of
interest.