Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to
answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each
epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living
causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant
sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest
may attach to a quest which goes further than a mere summons on the
spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West?
What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and
why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the
West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run
wider than the West, and, indeed, wider than America.
[Illustration: One of the old-time long-haired men of the West.]
We are all, here,--Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World
or the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,--but the result
of that mandate which bade mankind to increase and multiply, which
bade mankind to take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken
over temporarily that portion of earth and its fullness which was
allotted or which was made possible to him by that Providence to which
both belong. We have each of us done this along the lines of the least
possible resistance, for this is the law of organic life.
The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far
different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax,
of linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of
trolley-cars and self-binder, of purple and fine linen, it must be
observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work,
and back of all these causes were the original law and the original
mandate. The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.