OMPHALISM.
Dashing through a grove of cottonwood-trees draped in bignonia and ivy,
we came out suddenly upon a charming scene: a range of huts and forts
crowning a long, low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed ravine,
while the clear stream of the Republican fork wreathed itself about the
woods and bluffs. The block-house, over which floated the Stars and
Stripes, was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which continents are
to measure all their miles; the “capital of the universe,” or “center of
the world.” Not that it has always been so. Geographers will be glad to
learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the center of its
crust also moves: within the last ten years it has removed westward into
Kansas from Missouri--from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest for
centership is no new thing. Herodotus held that Greece was the very
middle of the world, and that the unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the
yet more unfortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of their
poor lives in order that the sun might shine on Greece at noon; London
plumes herself on being the “center of the terrestrial globe;” Boston is
the “hub of the hull universe,” though the latter claim is less
physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley the Western men seem to
have found the physical center of the United States, but they claim for
the Great Plains as well the intellectual as the political leadership of
the whole continent. These hitherto untrodden tracts, they tell you,
form the heart of the empire, from which the life-blood must be driven
to the extremities. Geographical and political centers must ultimately
coincide.
Connected with this belief is another Western theory--that the powers of
the future must be “continental.” Germany, or else Russia, is to absorb
all Asia and Europe, except Britain. North America is already cared for,
as the gradual extinction of the Mexican and absorption of the Canadians
they consider certain. As for South America, the Californians are
planning an occupation of Western Brazil, on the ground that the
continental power of South America must start from the head-waters of
the great rivers, and spread seaward down the streams. Even in the
Brazilian climate they believe that the Anglo-Saxon is destined to
become the dominant race.
The success of this omphalism, this government from the center, will be
brought about, in the Western belief, by the necessity under which the
nations on the head-waters of all streams will find themselves of having
the outlets in their hands. Even if it be true that railways are beating
rivers, still the railways must also lead seaward to the ports, and the
need for their control is still felt by the producers in the center
countries of the continent. The Upper States must everywhere command the
Lower, and salt-water despotism find its end.
The Americans of the Valley States, who fought all the more heartily in
the Federal cause from the fact that they were battling for the freedom
of the Mississippi against the men who held its mouth, look forward to
the time when they will have to assert, peaceably but with firmness,
their right to the freedom of their railways through the Northern
Atlantic States. Whatever their respect for New England, it cannot be
expected that they are forever to permit Illinois and Ohio to be
neutralized in the Senate by Rhode Island and Vermont. If it goes hard
with New England, it will go still harder with New York; and the Western
men look forward to the day when Washington will be removed, Congress
and all, to Columbus or Fort Riley.
The singular wideness of Western thought, always verging on
extravagance, is traceable to the width of Western land. The immensity
of the continent produces a kind of intoxication; there is moral
dram-drinking in the contemplation of the map. No Fourth of July oration
can come up to the plain facts contained in the Land Commissioners’
report. The public domain of the United States still consists of one
thousand five hundred millions of acres; there are two hundred thousand
square miles of coal lands in the country, ten times as much as in all
the remaining world. In the Western territories not yet States, there is
land sufficient to bear, at the English population rate, five hundred
and fifty millions of human beings.
It is strange to see how the Western country dwarfs the Eastern States.
Buffalo is called a “Western City;” yet from New York to Buffalo is only
three hundred and fifty miles, and Buffalo is but seven hundred miles to
the west of the most eastern point in all the United States. On the
other hand, from Buffalo we can go two thousand five hundred miles
westward without quitting the United States. “The West” is eight times
as wide as the Atlantic States, and will soon be eight times as strong.
The conformation of North America is widely different to that of any
other continent on the globe. In Europe, the glaciers of the Alps occupy
the center point, and shed the waters toward each of the surrounding
seas: confluence is almost unknown. So it is in Asia: there the Indus
flowing into the Arabian Gulf, the Oxus into the Sea of Aral, the Ganges
into the Bay of Bengal, the Yangtse Kiang into the Pacific, and the
Yenesei into the Arctic Ocean, all take their rise in the central
table-land. In South America, the mountains form a wall upon the west,
whence the rivers flow eastward in parallel lines. In North America
alone are there mountains on each coast, and a trough between, into
which the rivers flow together, giving in a single valley 23,000 miles
of navigable stream to be plowed by steamships. The map proclaims the
essential unity of North America. Political geography might be a more
interesting study than it has yet been made.
In reaching Leavenworth, I had crossed two of the five divisions of
America: the other three lie before me on my way to San Francisco. The
eastern slopes of the Alleghanies, or Atlantic coast; their western
slopes; the Great Plains; the Grand Plateau, and the Pacific
coast--these are the five divisions. Fort Riley, the center of the
United States, is upon the border of the third division, the Great
Plains. The Atlantic coast is poor and stony, but the slight altitude of
the Alleghany chain has prevented its being a hinderance to the passage
of population to the West: the second of the divisions is now the
richest and most powerful of the five: but the wave of immigration is
crossing the Mississippi and Missouri into the Great Plains, and here
at Fort Riley we are upon the limit of civilization.
This spot is not only the center of the United States and of the
continent, but, if Denver had contrived to carry the Pacific Railroad by
the Berthoud Pass, would have been the center station upon what Governor
Gilpin, of Colorado, calls the “Asiatic and European railway line.” As
it is, Columbus in Nebraska has somewhat a better chance of becoming the
Washington of the future than has this block-house.
Quitting Fort Riley, we found ourselves at once upon the plains. No more
sycamore and white-oak and honey-locust; no more of the rich deep green
of the cottonwood groves; but yellow earth, yellow flowers, yellow
grass, and here and there groves of giant sunflowers with yellow blooms,
but no more trees.
As the sun set, we came on a body of cavalry marching slowly from the
plains toward the fort. Before them, at some little distance, walked a
sad-faced man on foot, in sober riding-dress, with a repeating carbine
slung across his back. It was Sherman returning from his expedition to
Santa Fé.