THE BEGINNING
Franklin's foot took hold upon the soil of the new land. His soul
reached out and laid hold upon the sky, the harsh flowers, the rasping
wind. He gave, and he drank in. Thus grew the people of the West.
The effect upon different men of new and crude conditions is as various
as the individuals themselves. To the dreamer, the theorist, the man
who looks too far forward into the future or too far back into the
past, the message of the environment may fall oppressively; whereas to
the practical man, content to live in the present and to devise
immediate remedies for immediate ills, it may come sweet as a challenge
upon reserves of energy. The American frontier subsequent to the civil
war was so vast, yet so rapid, in its motive that to the weak or the
unready it was merely appalling. The task was that of creating an
entire new world. So confronted, some sat down and wept, watching the
fabric grow under the hands of others. Some were strong, but knew not
how to apply their strength; others were strong but slothful. The man
of initiative, of executive, of judgment and resource, was the one who
later came to rule. There was no one class, either of rich or of poor,
who supplied all these men. The man who had been poor in earlier life
might set to work at once in bettering himself upon the frontier; and
by his side, equally prosperous, might be one who in his earlier days
had never needed to earn a dollar nor to thrash a fellow-man.
Civilization at its later stages drives the man into a corner. In its
beginning it summons this same man out of the corner and asks him to
rely upon himself for the great and the small things of life, thus
ultimately developing that sturdy citizen who knows the value of the
axiom, "_Ubi bene, ibi patria_." The great deeds, the great dreams
become possible for nation or for individual only through the constant
performance of small deeds. "For it must be remembered that life
consists not of a series of illustrious actions or elegant enjoyments.
The greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in
the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small
inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well
or ill at ease as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is
ruffled by small obstructions and frequent interruptions."
Such philosophy was for Franklin unformulated. Care sat not on his
heart. There were at first no problems in all the world for him. It
was enough to feel this warm sun upon the cheek, to hear the sigh of
the wind in the grasses, to note the nodding flowers and hear the larks
busy with their joys. The stirring of primeval man was strong, that
magnificent rebellion against bonds which has, after all, been the
mainspring of all progress, however much the latter may be regulated by
many intercurrent wheels. It was enough for Franklin to be alive. He
stood straight, he breathed deep. This infection was in his blood.
"Think you, Ned, me boy," said Battersleigh, one day, as they stood at
the tent door--"think you, this old gray world has been inhabited a
million years, by billions of people, and yet here we have a chance to
own a part of it, each for himself, here, at this last minute of the
world's life! Do you mind that, what it means? Never you think a
chance like that'll last forever. Yet here we are, before the law, and
almost antedatin' the social ijee. It's the beginning man, it's the
very beginnin' of things, where we're standin' here, this very blessed
day of grace. It's Batty has travelled all his life, and seen the
lands, but never did Batty live till now!"
"It's grand," murmured Franklin, half dreamily and unconsciously
repeating the very words of his friend, as he had done before.
Yet Franklin was well bitten of the ambition germ. It would serve him
to run only in the front rank. He was not content to dream. He saw
the great things ahead, and the small things that lay between. In a
week he was the guiding mind in the affairs of the odd partnership
which now sprang between him and his friend. Battersleigh would have
lived till autumn in his tent, but Franklin saw that the need of a
house was immediate. He took counsel of Curly, the cowboy, who proved
guardian and benefactor. Curly forthwith produced a workman, a giant
Mexican, a half-witted _mozo_, who had followed the cow bands from the
far Southwest, and who had hung about Curly's own place as a sort of
menial, bound to do unquestioningly whatever Curly bade. This curious
being, a very colossus of strength, was found to be possessed of a
certain knowledge in building houses after the fashion of that
land--that is to say, of sods and earthen unbaked bricks--and since
under his master's direction he was not less serviceable than docile,
it was not long before the "claim" of Battersleigh was adorned with a
comfortable house fit for either winter or summer habitation. Franklin
meantime selected the body of land upon which he proposed to make
settlers' entry, this happily not far from his friend, and soon this
too had its house--small, crude, brown, meagre, but not uncomforting to
one who looked over the wide land and saw none better than his own.
Then, little by little, they got precious coal from the railroad, this
land having but scant fuel near at hand, and they built great stacks of
the _bois des vaches_, that fuel which Nature left upon the plains
until the railroads brought in coal and wood. Each man must, under the
law, live upon his own land, but in practice this was no hardship.
Each must of necessity cook for himself, sew for himself, rely upon
himself for all those little comforts which some men miss so keenly,
and which others so quickly learn to supply. To these two this was but
comfortable campaigning.
There remained ever before the minds of the settlers the desirability
of laying this land under tribute, of forcing it to yield a livelihood.
Franklin had no wish to depart from his original plans. He looked to
see all the ways of the civilization he had left behind come duly
hither to search him out. He was not satisfied to abandon his law
books for the saddle, but as yet there was no possibility of any
practice in the law, though meantime one must live, however simply. It
was all made easy. That wild Nature, which had erected rude barriers
against the coming of the white man, had at her reluctant recession
left behind the means by which the white man might prevail. Even in
the "first year" the settler of the new West was able to make his
living. He killed off the buffalo swiftly, but he killed them in
numbers so desperately large that their bones lay in uncounted tons all
over a desolated empire. First the hides and then the bones of the
buffalo gave the settler his hold upon the land, which perhaps he could
not else have won.
Franklin saw many wagons coming and unloading their cargoes of bleached
bones at the side of the railroad tracks. The heap of bones grew vast,
white, ghastly, formidable, higher than a house, more than a bowshot
long. There was a market for all this back in that country which had
conceived this road across the desert. Franklin put out a wagon at
this industry, hauling in the fuel and the merchandise of the raw
plains. He bought the grim product of others who were ready to sell
and go out the earlier again. He betimes had out more than one wagon
of his own; and Battersleigh, cavalryman, became Batty, scouter for
bones, while Franklin remained at the market. It was Franklin who,
bethinking himself of the commercial difference between hard black horn
and soft, spongy bone, began the earliest shipments of the tips of the
buffalo horns, which he employed a man to saw off and pack into sacks
ready for the far-off button factories. Many tons of these tips alone
he came to ship, such had been the incredible abundance and the
incredible waste; and thus thriving upon an industry whose cause and
whose possibility he deplored, he came to realize considerable sums and
saw the question of subsistence pass rapidly into unconcern. Thus he
had gone to work in his new and untried world with a direct and
effective force. He dropped from him as a garment the customs and
standards of the world he had left behind, and at once took his place
as a factor in a new order of things.
Meantime the little town added building after building along its
straggling street, each of these houses of a single story, with a large
square of board front which projected deceptively high and wide,
serving to cover from direct view the rather humiliating lack of
importance in the actual building. These new edifices were for the
most part used as business places, the sorts of commerce being but
two--"general merchandise," which meant chiefly saddles and firearms,
and that other industry of new lands which flaunts under such
signboards as the Lone Star, the Happy Home, the Quiet Place, the
Cowboy's Dream, and such descriptive nomenclature. Of fourteen
business houses, nine were saloons, and all these were prosperous.
Money was in the hands of all. The times had not yet come when a
dollar seemed a valuable thing. Men were busy living, busy at
exercising this vast opportunity of being prehistoric.
One by one, then in a body, as though struck by panic, the white tents
of the railroad labourers vanished, passing on yet farther to the West,
only the engineers remaining at Ellisville and prosecuting from the
haven of the stone hotel the work of continuing the line. The place of
the tents was taken by vast white-topped wagons, the creaking cook
carts of the cattle trail, and the van of the less nomadic man. It was
the beginning of the great cattle drive from the Southern to the
Northern ranges, a strange, wild movement in American life which
carried in its train a set of conditions as vivid and peculiar as they
were transient. At Ellisville there was no ordered way of living. The
frontier was yet but one vast camp. It was, as Battersleigh had said,
the beginning of things.
Many of the white-topped wagons began to come from the East, not
following the railroad, but travelling the trail of the older
adventurers who had for a generation gone this way, and whose pathway
the railroad took for its own. Some of these wagons passed still
onward, uncontent. Others swerved and scattered over the country to
the south and southwest, from which the Indian tribes had now been
driven, and which appeared more tempting to the farming man than lands
farther to the west and higher up that gradual and wonderful incline
which reaches from the Missouri River to the Rockies. One by one, here
and there, these new men selected their lands and made their first rude
attempts at building for themselves the homes which they coveted and
had come far to win.
Ellisville lay at an eddy in the Plains, and gathered toll of the
strange driftwood which was then afloat. Though the chutes at the
railway were busy, yet other herds of cattle passed Ellisville and
wandered on north, crowding at the heels of the passing Indians, who
now began to see their own cattle to be doomed. The main herd of the
buffalo was now reported to be three or four days' drive from
Ellisville, and the men who killed for the railroad camps uttered loud
complaints. The skin-hunting still went on. Great wagons, loaded with
parties of rough men, passed on out, bound for the inner haunts, where
they might still find their prey. The wagons came creaking back loaded
with bales of the shaggy brown robes, which gave the skin-hunters money
with which to join the cowmen at the drinking places. Some of the
skin-hunters, some of the railroad men, some of the cowmen, some of the
home-seekers, remained in the eddy at Ellisville, this womanless
beginning of a permanent society. Not sinless was this society at its
incipiency. In any social atmosphere good and evil are necessary
concomitants. Sinless men would form a community at best but
perishable. Tolerance, submission, patriotism so called, brotherly
love so named--all these things were to come later, as they have ever
done in the development of communities, builded mainly upon the
foundation of individual aggressiveness and individual centrifugence.
Having arrived, we wave scented kerchiefs between us and the thought of
such a beginning of our prosperity. Having become slaves, we scoff at
the thought of a primitive, grand, and happy world, where each man was
a master. Having lost touch of the earth, having lost sight of the
sky, we opine there could have been small augur in a land where each
man found joy in an earth and sky which to him seemed his own. There
were those who knew that joy and who foresaw its passing, yet they were
happy. Edward Franklin saw afar off the dim star of his ambition; yet
for him, as for many another man in those days, it was enough to own
this earthy this sky, to lie down under his own roof at night to
untroubled dreams, to awake each morning to a day of hopeful toil.