Calico was worth fifty cents a yard at Kaskaskia; it was worth three
dollars a yard in Santa Fé. A beaver-skin was worth three dollars in
New York; it was worth fifty cents at the head of the Missouri. There
you have the problems of the men of 1810, and that, in a nutshell, is
the West of 1810, 1820, 1830. The problem was then, as now, how to
transport a finished product into a new country, a raw product back
into an old country, and a population between the two countries. There
sprang up then, in this second era of American transportation, that
mighty commerce of the prairies, which, carried on under the name of
trade, furnished one of the boldest commercial romances of the earth.
Fostered by merchants, it was captained and carried on by heroes, and
was dependent upon a daily heroism such as commerce has never seen
anywhere except in the American West. The Kit Carsons now took the
place of the Simon Kentons, the Bill Williamses of the Daniel Boones.
The Western scout, the trapper, the hunter, wild and solitary figures,
took prominent place upon the nation's canvas.
This Western commerce, the wagon-freighting, steamboating, and packing
of the first half of this century, was to run in three great channels,
each distinct from the other. First there was the fur trade, whose
birth was in the North. Next there was the trade of mercantile ventures
to the far Southwest. Lastly there was to grow up the freighting trade
to the mining regions of the West. The cattle-growing, farming, or
commercial West of to-day was still a thing undreamed.