closely allied to his territory--and made it hardly second in efficiency
to the Great Northern itself. Both of these great railroads of the
Northwest have never reached farther east than St. Paul, which Hill,
with that fine sentiment which is so important a part of his nature, has
been pleased to maintain as the gateway city of his own part of the
land. But, while he has been a most helpful citizen of St. Paul, he has
not hesitated to dominate her. A few years ago when the Metropolitan
company presenting grand opera came to St. Paul, it was Hill who headed
the subscription list for a guarantee--headed it with a good round
figure. Three days before the opening night of the opera he walked into
the passenger office of the linking railroad that he owned between the
Twin Cities and Chicago. The singers were scheduled to come from
Chicago.
"Are you going to bring the troupe up in extra cars or in a special
train?" he demanded, in his peremptory fashion.
There was confusion in that office, and finally it was explained to him
that a rival line, the M----, had been given the haul of the special
train, as a return courtesy for having placed its advertisement on the
rear cover of the opera programmes. Hill's muscles tightened.
"If the troupe doesn't come up over our road," he said, "I will withdraw
the opera subscription."
The M---- road lost the movement of that opera company.
* * * * *
Hill is an advertiser, a patient, persistent and entirely consistent
user of public print in every form. Of the really big men of the land he
is perhaps the most accessible. His door swings quickly open to any
resident of the Northwest. He is in demand at public dinners in the East
and at every conceivable function in his own territory. And yet those
folk of his own town who come to know Mr. Hill intimately know him
rather as a great publicist, no poor musician, a painter of real
ability, and a kind-hearted neighbor. His house in Summit avenue
contains one of the finest art galleries west of Chicago. In this rare
taste for good art he is not unlike the late Collis P. Huntington, or
Sir William C. Van Horne, the dominating force of the Canadian Pacific.
Hill has a real faculty not only for judging, but for executing oil
paintings. It is related on good authority that, having been a member of
a committee to purchase a portrait of a distinguished western
railroader, he found the picture as it hung in the artist's studio in
Chicago far from his liking.
"He's missed W----'s expression entirely," said the Empire Builder. And
so saying he grasped a palette that was resting on a table, dove his
brush into the soft paints, and before the astonished artist could
recover enough self-possession to protest, Hill was deftly at work upon
the canvas. In five minutes he had convinced the little committee of
which he was chairman, that the expression of the portrait had been
lacking, for it was Hill who made that portrait so speaking a likeness
that the artist received warm and undue praise for the fidelity of his
work.
* * * * *
There is in St. Paul--a city of wealthy men--a man who is even
wealthier than J. J. Hill. His name is Frederick Weyerheuser, and
newspapers have a habit of speaking of him as the Lumber King. Mr.
Weyerheuser does not court publicity, he shrinks from invitations to
speak at public dinners. He has a press agent whose chief work it was
for many years to keep his chief out of the columns of the newspapers.
It is only within a comparatively short time that Weyerheuser consented
to give his first interview to the press.
He is quite typical of the conservatism of St. Paul. Minneapolis snaps
its fingers at conservatism, social and business, and signs of progress.
But Minneapolis mortgages her downtown business property. St. Paul does
not. The two towns are as different as if they were a thousand instead
of but ten miles apart. And St. Paul believes that Minneapolis may do as
she pleases. St. Paul has a reputation to preserve. She is the capital
of the state of Minnesota and as capital her pride and her dignity are
not slight.
Perhaps it was that pride that made her set forth to build a capitol
that should stand through the long years as the Bulfinch State House in
Boston has stood through the long years--a monument to good taste,
restraint, real beauty in architecture. She summoned one of her native
sons to do the work. He was unhampered in its details. And when he was
done and had placed it upon a sightly knoll he must have been proud of
his handiwork. In years to come the Capitol of Minnesota may become
quite as famous as the capitols of older states, and the name of Cass
Gilbert, its architect, may be placed alongside of that of Bulfinch.
St. Paul is hardly less proud of her Auditorium. It is really a
remarkable building and perhaps the first theater in the land to be
operated by a municipality, although we have a distinct feeling that the
small city of Northampton, Mass., has also accomplished something of
the sort. But the St. Paul Auditorium is hardly to be placed in the same
class as any mere theater. It is a huge building although so cunningly
constructed that within ten hours it can be changed from a compact
theater into a great hall with some 10,000 seats. And this change can be
effected, if necessary, without the slightest disturbance to the
audience.
To this great hall come grand opera, well-famed orators, conventions of
state and national bodies, drama, concerts of every sort in great
frequency and variety. Perhaps no entertainment that it houses, however,
has keener interest for the entire city than the free concerts that are
given each winter. Last year there were five of these concerts, and it
was soon found that the small-sized auditorium with its three thousand
seats was too small. It became necessary to utilize the entire capacity
of the structure. The concerts were immensely popular from the
beginning.
They were but typical of the high public spirit of the capital city of
Minnesota, a spirit which showed itself in the early adoption of the
commission form of city government, in the establishment of playgrounds
and modern markets, in the buildings of the great public baths on
Harriet island, in the development of a half hundred active and
progressive forms of modern civic endeavor. St. Paul, with all her rare
flavor of history and her great conservatism can well be reckoned in the
list of the modern cities that form the gateways of what was once called
the West and is today rapidly becoming an integral part of the nation.
* * * * *
The first time that we ever came into Minneapolis was at dusk of a July
night two years ago. That is, it might have been dusk in theory. For
while the clocks of the town spelled "eight," the northern day hung
wonderfully clear and wonderfully sharp--a twilight that was hardly
done until well towards ten of the evening. We came out of the somewhat
barn-like Union station, found an unpretentious cab and drove up
Nicollet avenue toward our hotel.
The initial impression that a city makes upon one is not easily
forgotten. And the first impression that Nicollet avenue makes upon a
first-comer to Minneapolis cannot easily be erased. It is with pleasure
that a stranger notes that it has not been invaded by street railroad
tracks. The chief shopping and show-street of the largest city of
Minnesota thereby conveys a sense of breadth and roominess that the
chief streets of some other fairly important American towns lack
utterly. And we distinctly recall that upon that July night the cluster
lights up and down Nicollet avenue each bore a great flower-box, warm
and summerlike with the brightness of geraniums. In the windows of the
large stores that lined the avenue were more window-boxes, up to their
seventh and eighth floors. The entire effect was distinct and different
from that of any other town that we have ever seen. It seemed as if
Minneapolis at first sight typified the new America.
Nor was that impression lessened when a little later we drove out in the
softness of the summer night to see the residence streets of the
city--quiet, shady streets that seem to have been stolen from older
eastern towns; drove into the parks, caught here and there the strains
of bands, saw the canoes darting here and there and everywhere upon the
surface of the park lakes. In other cities they have to build waterways
within their parks and boast to you of the way in which they have done
it. In Minneapolis they can have no such boast. For they have builded
their parks around their lakes, and a man can have a sheet of water
instead of greensward at the door of his home if he so choose. Where a
modern canoe shoots across the waters of Lakes Calhoun or Harriet, the
Indian once shot his birch-bark creation. There are some two hundred
lakes in Hennepin county. But the lake of all lakes--the joy of the
residents of the Twin Cities for a day's outing, Minnetonka--was the
favored gathering spot for the council fires of the Indian tribes for
many miles around. Do not forget that the Falls of St. Anthony were the
making of Minneapolis--and you can go by trolley within the half-hour
from the center of the city to the gentler Falls of Minnehaha and there
recount once again the immortal romance of Hiawatha.
Minneapolis has all but forgotten the Falls of St. Anthony--despite the
fact that they were the very cause of her existence. They are hemmed in
by great flouring-mills, great dusty, unceasing engines of industry with
a capacity of some eighty thousand barrels a day, and even if you steal
your way to them across one of the roadway bridges over the turbulent
Mississippi you will find them lost beneath the artificial works that
turn their energy to the aid of man. The roar of the great Falls of St.
Anthony are the roar of the flouring-mills, their energy, the
bread-stuff of the nation.
[Illustration: St. Paul is still a river town]
Minneapolis does not affect to forget entirely her mother river. For a
long time it irritated her that St. Paul should be regarded as the head
of navigation upon the Mississippi, and within the past twenty years she
has put the Federal government to much trouble and incidentally the
expenditure of something over a million dollars, to make herself a
maritime city. A ship-channel has been dredged, locks put in, draws cut
in the railroad bridges but all apparently without a very definite
purpose in mind--save possible holding her own in the expenditure of the
annual rivers and harbors appropriation. For one can hardly imagine
water commerce coming in great volume to the docks of Minneapolis, the
one exclusive glory of St. Paul--passed long ago by her greatest
rival in the commercial race of the Northwest--stolen from the older
town. But one could hardly have driven out from the brisk little city of
St. Paul forty years ago to the straggling mill village at the Falls of
St. Anthony and imagined that in the second decade of the twentieth
century it would have become a city of more than three hundred thousand
souls. The men who are today active in the affairs of the city have seen
her grow from a straggling town into a city of almost first rank.
Here was one of them who sat the other day in the well-ordered elegance
of the Minneapolis Club--a structure instantly comparable with the
finest club-houses of New York or Boston or Philadelphia--who admitted
that he had seen the town grow from eight thousand to over three hundred
thousand population, the receipts of his own fine business increase from
eighty-eight to twenty-two thousand dollars a day. But he was a modest
man, far more modest than many of these western captains of industry,
and he quickly turned the talk from himself and to the commercial
importance of the town with which he was pressing forward. Still he
delighted in statistics and the fact that Minneapolis "was doing a
wholesale business of $300,000,000 a year" seemed to give him an immense
and personal pride.
But do not believe that Minneapolis is all commercial--and nothing else.
A quick ride through those shaded streets and lake-filled parks will
convince you that she is a home-city; a cursory glance of the University
of Minnesota, so cleverly located that she may share it with her rival
twin, together with an inspection of her schools, large and small, would
make you believe that she is a city that prides herself upon being well
educated. The dominant strain of Norse blood that the Swedish immigrants
have been bringing her for more than half a century is a strain that
calls for education--and makes the call in no uncertain fashion. And
when you come to delve into the details of her living you will make sure
that she is a well-governed city. She has not gone deeply into what she
calls "the fads of municipal government" but she is a town which offers
security and comfort, as well as pretty broad measure of opportunity, to
her residents. And in no better way can you gauge the sensible way in
which she takes care of her residents than in the one item of the street
railroad system. It has never been necessary for either St. Paul or
Minneapolis to assume control, actual or subtle, over the street
railroad property which they share. And yet each has a street railroad
service far superior to that of most American towns--with the possible
exception of Washington. The traction company seems to have assimilated
much of the breadth of spirit that dominates the Twin Cities of the
Northwest.
Nor can you assume that Minneapolis is content to be merely commercially
alive, well educated or efficiently governed. Down on one of the quiet
business streets of the city is a printing-shop, so unique and so very
distinctive that it deserves a paragraph here and now. In that printing
shop is published a trade paper of the milling industry which has to
make no apologies for its existence, and a weekly newspaper called the
_Bellman_. Some one is yet to write an appreciation of the new weekly
press of America, the weekly press outside of New York, if you please,
such publications as the _Argonaut_ of San Francisco; the _Mirror_ of
St. Louis, the _Dial_ of Chicago and the _Minneapolis Bellman_. The part
that these papers are playing in the making of a broad and cultured
America will perhaps never be known; but that it is a large part no one
who reads them faithfully will ever doubt. The _Bellman_ holds its own
among this distinguished coterie. Its house is a fit temple for its
soul, and you may gain a little insight into that soul when you are
bidden to join its staff at one of its Thursday luncheons at the
dining-board of the printing-house--a fashion quickly and easily brought
from _London Punch_ halfway across the continent and into Minneapolis.
No American of taste or appreciation would ever go to Minneapolis and
miss one wonderful shop there--no huge box-like structure rearing itself
from sidewalk edge and vulgarly proclaiming its wares through the
brilliancy of immaculate windows of plate-glass, but a shadowy
structure, set in a lawn and giving faint but unmistakable hints of the
real treasures that it holds. For it is a rare shop, indeed, and a
revelation to folk from the seaboard who may imagine that the interior
of the land is an intellectual desolation.
It may have been one of these who dined a little time ago at a house in
one of these shaded streets of Minneapolis. After dinner the talk
drifted without apparent reason to painting, and the man from the
seaboard found his host in sharp touch with many of the new pictures.
Definitely the talk turned to Walter Graves, London's newest sensation
among the portrait painters, and the possibilities of his succeeding
Whistler.
The Minneapolis man beckoned the guest into the hall, and pointed
silently to a picture hung there. It was a splendid portrait of
Whistler,[F] painted by Walter Graves.
"I never expected to find a picture like that--out here," frankly
stammered the man from the seaboard.
"You will find many things here that you do not expect," was all that
the man from Minneapolis said.
[F] Since writing the above we have been led to believe, by
a gentleman from Rochester that a picture of Whistler by
Graves is no great prize. He says that he can buy them by
the dozen at a certain London shop. Because we claim no wit
as an art critic we take no sides in this matter. The facts
are here. You may choose for yourself. E. H.
* * * * *
If a town that is scarce forty years old can accomplish these things,
how long will it be before the older cities of the land will have to
look sharply as to their laurels? The new cities of America are to be a
force in her intellectual progress not to be under-estimated or
despised.
14
THE GATEWAY OF THE SOUTHWEST
There are three great cities, or rather three groups of great cities,
along the course of the Mississippi. To the north are St. Paul and
Minneapolis, while far to the south is New Orleans, to which we will
come in the due order of things. Between these St. Louis stands, close
to the business center of the land. For nearly twenty miles she sprawls
herself along the west bank of the Mississippi. Throughout her central
portion she extends for a dozen miles straight back from her once busy
levee. She is a great city, a very great city, in wealth, in industry,
in resource. And yet she is a rather unimpressive city to the eye, at
first sight and at last.
It takes even a seasoned traveler some time to get used to that. If he
dreams of St. Louis as a French city and preserving something of the
French atmosphere, as do New Orleans and Quebec, he is doomed to utter
disappointment. Save for a few tatterdemalion cottages down in
Carondolet, at the south tip of the town, there is no trace of the
builders of the city to which they gave the name of one of their kings.
And if he has heard of the great German population and dreams of great
summer-gardens, of winter-gardens, too, with huge bands and huge steins,
he is doomed to no less disappointment. For that sort of thing you go to
Milwaukee. St. Louis has as many Germans as that brisk Wisconsin city,
and the largest brewery in the world, but she has never specialized in
beer-gardens. She is old and yet you could hardly call her quaint.
There are rows of small houses in her older streets, their green blinds
tightly closed as if seemingly to escape the almost endless bath of soot
and cinders that falls upon them, and the flat-bottomed steamboats still
are fastened at the wharf-boats along the levee. But these make a
pitiful showing nowadays when your mind compares them with the tales of
ante-bellum days when there were so many of them that they could only
put the noses of their bows against the levees. But tradition still
rules the hearts of the rivermen, and the Mississippi steamboat has lost
none of those fantastics of naval architecture that has endeared it to
every writer from Mark Twain down to the present day.
The streets aroundabout the levee are mean and dirty, and nowadays as
silent as the Sabbath. Those convivial resorts, the Widow's Vow and the
Boatman's Thirst have long since ceased to exist. As this is being
written the Southern Hotel has closed its doors. Cobwebs are growing
through its wonderful office, and the glorious marble stair up which a
regiment might have marched is silent, save for the occasional halting
steps of a watchman. The old Planters'--than which there was no more
famous hostelry in the Mississippi valley, unless we choose to except
the St. Charles down at New Orleans--is long since gone, torn away
twenty years ago to make room for a new Planters', which has already
begun to get grimy and aged. The Lindell went its way a dozen years ago.
The St. Louis of the riverman is dead. They are tearing away the old
warehouses from the levees, and no one looks at the Mississippi any more
save when it gets upon one of its annual rampages and makes itself a
yellow sea.
[Illustration: The entrance to the University--St. Louis]
But do not for an instant think that St. Louis herself is dead. There
are other hotels, and far finer than those of the war-times and the
river-trade. And you have only to walk a few squares back from the levee
to find industry flourishing once again, solid squares of solid
buildings, grimy, commercial, uncompromising, but each representing
commerce. St. Louis is still the very center of the world to the great
Southwest and to her it pays its tribute, in demands for merchandise of
every sort. That is why she builds shoe-stores and dry-goods stores and
wholesale stores of almost every other conceivable sort, and builds them
for eight or ten or twelve stories in height, closely huddled together,
even through unimportant side streets. That is her reason for existence
today--when the river-trade, her first reason for growth and expansion,
is dead. But the railroad is a living, vital force, when the rivers are
frozen and dead, and railroads slip out from St. Louis in every possible
direction. Their rails are glistening from traffic, and there at the
city from whence they radiate Commerce sits enthroned.
For you must look upon St. Louis, yesterday and today, as essentially a
commercial city. She is not a cultured city, although she has an
excellent press, including a weekly newspaper of more than ordinary
distinction. Still you will find few real bookshops in all her many
miles of streets, she has never leaned to fads or cults of any sort; but
she measures the percentage which a business dollar will earn with a
delightful accuracy. She is a commercial city. That is why she is to the
casual traveler an unimpressive city, although we think that her lack of
a dignified main street in her business section is responsible for much
of this impression. In other years Broadway--Fifth street upon her city
plan and a fearfully long thoroughfare running parallel to the
river--ranked almost as a main street and had some dignity, if little
beauty. But today St. Louis, like so many other of our American towns,
is restless and she has slipped back and away from Broadway, leaving
that thoroughfare somewhat forlorn and deserted and herself without a
single great business thoroughfare--such as Market street, San Francisco
or State street, Chicago. Her downtown streets are narrow and as much
alike as peas in a pod.
And yet even a casual traveler can find much to interest him in St.
Louis. Let him start his inspection of the levee, let romance and
sentiment and memory work within his mind. Let his fancy see the
riverboats and then he, himself, inspect one of them. Here is one of
them, gay in her ginger-bready architecture. Her stacks rise high above
her "Texas" but they are placed ahead of her wheel-house, a fancy
peculiar to the old naval architects along the Mississippi. She is
driven by sidewheels and if our casual traveler goes upon her he will
find that each sidewheel is driven by a separate engine, a marvelous
affair painted in reds and blues and yellows. With one engine going
ahead and the other reversed a really capable Mississippi pilot--and who
shall doubt that a Mississippi river pilot, even in these decadent days,
is ever anything less than capable--could send the boat spinning like a
top upon the yellow stream. That pretty trick would hardly be possible
with one of the flat-bottomed stern wheel boats, and there still are
hundreds of these upon the Father of Waters and his tributaries, moving
slowly and serenely up and down and all with a mighty splashing of dirty
water.
If you are a casual traveler and upon your first visit to the
Mississippi valley, you will make a mental reservation to ride upon one
of the old boats before you leave St. Louis. They may not be there so
very many more years. The steel barges have begun to show themselves,
and commerce is looking inquiringly at the idle stream to see if it
cannot be brought into real efficiency as a transportation agent. And
before you leave that levee, with the grass growing up between its
ancient stones, you will find a very small and a very dirty sidewalk
that leads from it up into and upon the great Eads bridge.