We are getting close to the first of new-American things when we come to

the story of his journey. There had been early Spaniards, there had been

Indians perhaps, who knew the way across, but there was none to pilot

Smith. He started of his own resolve and traveled under his own

guidance. They had not told him, as they had told Kit Carson, of the

excellent beaver country of the Sacramento. The vast country beyond the

Great Salt Lake had been too forbidding for even that later hardy soul

to undertake as yet; and the reaches of the Rockies above and below the

eastern edge of that desert had contented all of Bridger’s hardy

companions. The more reason, therefore, thought Smith, that he and his

little party of fifteen men should cross the desert; and he did so,

quite as though it were a matter of course.

Having no guide, he simply went west as well as he could, clinging to

grass and water as he went. He left the rendezvous near Salt Lake in

1826, crossed the Sevier valley, struck the Virgin or Adams River,

followed the Colorado for a time, and at length broke boldly away over

the awful California desert, until, in such way as we can but imagine,

he reached at length the Spanish settlements of San Diego. This was in

the month of October. Smith crossed the Sierras near the point where

runs to-day the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railroad. He was somewhat

in advance of the engineers.

Although we do not learn that Smith had any guide or any advance

information, it seems that the Spaniards did not appreciate the

difficulties under which he had visited them. They bade him leave the

country at once. Perhaps Smith was not quite candid with the Spaniards,

for, though he promised compliance, instead of starting directly back to

the eastward, he went north four hundred miles, put out his traps and

wintered on the San Joaquin and Merced rivers. He found there a

trapper’s El Dorado.

This information, of course, would be more valuable when imparted to his

friends eastward in the Rockies. Hence we observe Smith leaving his

party, and taking with him only two men, seven horses and two mules,

calmly starting back again to the Rockies, which by this time must have

seemed to him an old and well settled country. In the incredible time of

twenty-eight days he was back again at the southwest corner of Salt

Lake. We can not tell just how he made this journey. Perhaps he crossed

the Sierras near the Sonora Pass, thence went east, far to the south of

the Humboldt River, and south also of what is now called Walker Lake. We

must remember that neither this river nor lake had any name when Smith

was there. Jedediah Smith antedated all names, all maps, all geography!

Yet all this was not so very long ago, if we reflect that it took three

hundred years to find the source of the Mississippi River after its

mouth had been discovered. It is not yet one hundred years back to

Smith.

Jedediah Smith was no man to waste time. He told his friends what he had

found beyond the snowy range. By July thirteenth, 1827, he was ready

with eighteen men of a new party to start back for California. Now he

began to meet the first of his extraordinarily bad luck, the first of a

series of misfortunes that must have stopped any man but himself. The

Spaniards seem to have had some notion of Smith’s intentions, and they

set Indians to watch the trails down the Virgin and the Colorado. These

met Smith near the Colorado River and killed ten of his men. Almost

destitute, Smith reached the Spanish settlements of San Gabriel and San

Diego only to meet with further misfortune. His native guides—for now

he had learned how to secure Indian guides—were imprisoned, and he

himself was thrown into jail at San José. He was released on condition

that he leave the country; which he proceeded to do after a fashion

peculiarly his own. He traveled three hundred miles to the north and

wintered on a stream now called, from that fact, the American Fork.

All this time he was finding good beaver country, and the packs of the

little party grew heavier and heavier. Why he did not now cross the

Sierras and get back home again we do not know; but instead of going

east, he struck northwest, until he nearly reached the Pacific Ocean.

Thence he turned inland, and headed due north,—which meant Oregon. It

is easy to-day, but Smith had no map, no trail, no transportation save

that of the horse and mule train. All the time he and his party

continued to pick up a greater store of beaver.

At last, on July twenty-fourth, 1828, somewhere near the Umpqua River,

they established a temporary camp. On that day Smith left camp for a

time, and as he returned he met Indians, who fired upon him. He got back

to the bivouac, only to find it the scene of one of those horrible

Indian butcheries with which the trapper of that day was all too

familiar. Ten men out of his new party had been killed on the Colorado.

Here, about the camp in Oregon, lay fifteen more of his men, dead,

scalped and mutilated. The horses were gone. Three of his companions had

escaped, but these had fled in a panic, each on his own account. The

discoverer, Smith, was there alone in the mountains, without map,

without guide, without counsel. There was a situation, simple, primeval,

Titanic! There indeed was the West!

Smith was a religious man, a Christian. His was an inner and unfailing

courage not surpassed by that of any known Western man. Perhaps he

sought Divine counsel in this his extremity; at least he lost neither

courage nor calmness. He knew, of course, that there was a Columbia

River somewhere; for this was in 1828, and by that time the Columbia was

an old story. He knew that this great river was north of him, and knew

that there were settlements near its mouth, as we shall presently

understand. He further knew that the North Star pointed out the north.

Alone, with his rifle as reliance, he made that tremendous journey

northward which Frémont, with his full party, made in an opposite

direction, on a parallel line farther to the eastward, only after untold

hardship, though Frémont had men and animals and supplies. Sustained by

Providence, as he believed, Smith at length accomplished his journey and

reached the Hudson Bay post at Fort Vancouver.

We may now see the strange commercial conditions of that time. We say

that Jedediah Smith was the first to cross from the Rockies to the

Pacific; but this, of course, means only that he was the first to cross

at mid-continent. There had been others on the Columbia before Smith.

The Hudson Bay factor, Doctor McLaughlin, a great and noble man, a

gentleman of the wilderness, meets the wanderer as a friend, although he

is in the employ of a rival company. He sends out a party to recover

Smith’s lost packs of beaver at the abandoned camp far to the southward.

Almost incredible to say, these men do find the furs.

McLaughlin gives Smith a draft on London for twenty thousand dollars, it

is said, in payment for these furs! Strange contrast to the treatment

Ashley and his men accorded the Hudson Bay trapper, Ogden, some years

earlier, when the latter was in adversity in the Rockies! Strange story

indeed, this of the adventures of Jedediah Smith! Survivor of thirty of

his men, escaped from a Spanish prison, robbed, nearly killed, after one

of the most perilous journeys ever undertaken in the West, Smith emerges

from this desperate trip across an unmapped country with twenty thousand

dollars, and none of his men left to share it!

In March, 1829, Smith started east from Fort Vancouver to find his

partners, Sublette and Jackson. When he reached the Flathead country he

was much at home, for he had been there before. Thence he headed to the

Snake River, where he met Jackson, “who,” says our historian, naïvely,

“was looking for him!” The ways of that time were, after all, of a

certain sufficiency. Sublette he finds on the Henry Fork on August

fifth, also much as a matter of course. Strange lands, strange calling,

strange restoration after unusual and wild experiences—so strange that

we find nothing in the life of Crockett to parallel it in valor and

initiative, nothing in Boone’s to surpass it, nothing in Carson’s to

equal it, and nothing in the story of any adventurer’s life to cast it

in the shade.

This was indeed authentic traveling, authentic discovering, and upon

this was based the first map of a vast region in what was really the

West. After all this was done, the knowledge spread rapidly, we may

suppose. This was how Carson’s friends learned of the Sacramento. This

is how the discoveries of Frémont were forerun; for the latter, under

Carson’s guidance, simply circumnavigated the vast region which Smith

both circumnavigated and crossed direct. Readers would not receive the

plain story of Jedediah Smith as fit for fiction. It would be too

impossible.

We might pause to tell the end of so great a man as this. At last Smith

and his historic partners found the fur trade too much divided to be

longer profitable. In 1830 the three went to St. Louis to take a venture

in the Santa Fé trade, this being two years before Captain Bonneville

sallied out into the West. Contemptuous of the dangers of the prairies,

after facing so long those of the mountains, these three hardy

Westerners started across the plains with a small outfit of their own.

Far out on the Arkansas they were beset by the Comanches. Fighting like

a man and destroying a certain number of his enemies before he himself

fell, Jedediah Smith was killed. He met thus the logical though long

deferred end of a life that had always been careless of danger.

Gregg, in his “Scenes and Incidents in the Western Prairies” (the book

later known as “The Commerce of the Prairies”), mentions the death of

Smith, but of his life and character he seemed to have had but little

knowledge. The historian of the Santa Fé trade was just starting West

when Smith closed his own career. Smith was dead before Bonneville saw

the Rockies. We see that he antedated Walker and Carson and Frémont. The

fatal prairie expedition of these great fur traders, Smith, Sublette and

Jackson, went on westward up the Arkansas with the mountain trader,

Fitzpatrick, who was bound for a rendezvous far to the north of Bent’s

Fort—the same Fitzpatrick whom Carson met above Bent’s Fort in one of

his own expeditions. Now we may begin to see the trails of our trappers

and adventurers interlacing and crossing, and can understand who were

the real adventurers, who the actual explorers.

Great and satisfying a figure as Jedediah Smith makes, we may not pause

with him too long, and may not believe him to have been at the very

first of things. He was the first to cross over the Rockies and the

Sierras in mid-America, yet he was not the first white man to stand on

the soil of the dry Southwest. Examine the older maps and you shall see

along the Virgin and the Colorado the line of the old Spanish trail from

California to the mission settlements of New Mexico.

It can not accurately be told who first made this trail, crossing the

valley of the Colorado, whose flood drains two hundred and twenty-five

thousand square miles of mountain and desert. In 1781 Father Garcés

built a mission on the Colorado near the mouth of the Gila. But he was

not the first. Cardenas, a fellow-soldier with Coronado, is perhaps the

first man to write of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado; but he was not

the first to discover it nor the first to see that stream. Alarcon, a

member of the party of the sea captain Uloa, was the first man to reach

the Colorado. This was in the year 1540, the ship of Uloa reaching the

Gulf of California in 1539.

This was a small matter of three hundred years before Frémont saw the

South Pass, some three hundred years before Jedediah Smith crossed the

desert to California, and something like three hundred years before the

upper sources of the Mississippi River were known! So thus we may leave

this portion of the West to await the Gadsden Purchase, and the addition

of the land won by Houston and Crockett and Fannin and Travis and other

hero friends to the south and east of the purchased territory.

As for the transportation employed during these early times, we may

repeat a few facts by way of insistence. The Santa Fé trade began with

pack trains, but saw wagons used in 1822. In 1826 General Ashley took

his little wheeled cannon through the South Pass to his fort on Utah

Lake. In 1830 Smith, Sublette and Jackson made the journey from the

Missouri River with mule teams and wagons as far as the Wind River; and

they said they could have gone on over the South Pass with their wagons

had they wished to do so. Poor Bonneville! His distinction of taking the

first wagon through the South Pass is as empty as that of Frémont in

climbing his mountain peak near that same South Pass. Both

accomplishments had been left undone by earlier visitors simply because

they did not want to do these things. We see that, before Carson or

Walker or Smith, the courses and headwaters of the Yellowstone and the

Missouri and the Columbia rivers were all very well known. We have noted

that Smith knew of the Columbia settlements. This he knew because he had

learned it at the rendezvous. How came these settlements on the

Columbia? We shall have to go to New York to find the answer to that

question.

Everybody knows the story of Astoria and the beginning of the American

Fur Company. John Jacob Astor of New York secured a New York charter for

that company April sixth, 1808, very soon after hearing the results of

the Lewis and Clark expedition. He had a great purpose in his mind. He

had fought out and bought out competitors in the fur trade all along the

Great Lakes; had met and gaged the resources of the Northwest Company,

then beginning to rival the ancient Hudson Bay Company in the wild race

across the continent.

It was Astor’s idea to beat the Northwest Fur Company to the mouth of

the Columbia, and hence command what was supposed to be the rich fur

trade of that new and unknown region. He intended to send ships laden

with trading supplies to the mouth of the Columbia River, there to take

on the cargoes of furs caught by his own men or secured in trade with

the Indians. These ships, laden with furs, were to go thence across the

Pacific to China, and were to return from China to New York, laden with

the products of the Orient, which our old-time historian, Henry Howe,

thought must some time come across the American continent by rail. Here,

then, was a commercial undertaking of no small dimensions.

Mr. Astor attached two strings to his bow. He fitted out one expedition

by sea, and one by land, the objective point of each being the mouth of

the Columbia River. He relied largely upon men he had known in the fur

trade of the Great Lakes for the leadership of his land party, but he

made the great mistake of placing three men in practically equal

command. Unfortunately, he made another mistake in establishing the

leadership of his sea expedition. There was but one leader there, the

captain of the ship Tonquin, Thorne by name, a man by no means fitted to

command any company of adventurers. The Tonquin left New York September

sixth, 1810. It reached the mouth of the Columbia River March

twenty-second, 1811. A party was soon thereafter detached for the

erection of the proposed post to be known as Astoria. The Tonquin then

proceeded northward up the coast. Its commander, domineering,

overbearing, not fitted to trade with the Indians, succeeded in exciting

the wrath of the Coast Indians. The latter attacked his ship and

practically destroyed his crew, one of whom, an unknown fighting man,

whose name is lost by reason of events, blew up the ship, killing many

savages and destroying all vestige of the encounter. This was about June

thirteenth, 1811.

As to the land party under its three leaders, we may say that the winter

was spent near St. Joseph, Missouri, but on April twenty-first, 1811,

about a month after the ship Tonquin had reached the mouth of the

Columbia, this land party started out on its long and arduous western

journey. By June twelfth they had traveled thirteen hundred and

twenty-five miles up the Missouri River, being then in the neighborhood

of the Arickaree villages. There they bought horses and started boldly

westward, leaving the waterway of the Missouri, the first of the great

companies of transcontinental travelers to proceed along the cord of the

great bow of the Missouri.

There were sixty-four of these Astorians, and they had with them

eighty-two horses. They must have passed to the north of the Black

Hills. They crossed the Big Horns and on September twenty-ninth were on

the Wind River, a stream later to be so well known by trappers and

traders. They ascended the Wind River about eighty miles, seeking for a

place to cross the Rocky Mountains. They had Crow Indians as guides

through the Big Horns, and west of the Big Horns the Shoshones had

guided them. These Indians detected signs of other Indians on ahead, and

hence did not present to these travelers the natural and easy way,

through the South Pass,—an ascent so gentle that one can scarcely tell

when he has reached the actual summit. The Astorians crossed the

mountains probably at what is now known as the Union Pass, a little to

the north of the South Pass.

On September twenty-fourth they started from the Green River to the

Snake River, and on October eighth, 1811, reached Fort Henry, which, at

the time the Astorians reached it, was an abandoned post. It seems that

even these early travelers found a West in which there had been some one

before them! Thence, scattered and disorganized, on foot and by boat,

this party undertook to go down the Snake River to the Columbia. By

January first, 1812, they reached the valley known as the Grande Ronde.

By January eighth some of them were on the Umatilla River, and some of

them reached the Columbia by January twenty-first. Here they met

Indians, who told them of the destruction of the Tonquin and the loss of

a great number of their associates—an incident that shows well enough

the strange fashion in which news travels in the wilderness.

Some parties under Mackenzie, McLellan and Reed separated, came down the

Clearwater to the Lewis or Snake River, and thence voyaged on

down-stream as best they could. Some of these reached Astoria January

eighteenth, 1812, ahead of others of their scattered companions, who

seem to have wandered aimlessly about the upper tributaries of the

Columbia. The party under Hunt reached Astoria February fifteenth, 1812.

Crooks and Day, others of the expedition, did not come in until May

eleventh. A party of thirteen trappers, who had been left behind to

pursue their calling, did not reach the post until January fifteenth,

1813. The trip, measuring by the time of the first arrivals at the mouth

of the Columbia, had required three hundred and forty days. Thirty-five

hundred miles of country had been covered. The Northwestern Company had

been beaten in the race to the mouth of the Columbia by just three

months. It was beaten by a gait of about ten miles a day! We build

railroads almost as rapidly as that to-day.

Discovering that, ten years before Jedediah Smith made his journey

northward across Oregon to Fort Vancouver, there were well established

lines of travel and well established settlements on the Columbia and its

tributaries, we may think that by this time we are close to the first of

things in Western history. Of course we know that ahead of the Astoria

party was the Lewis and Clark expedition. Before Lewis and Clark came

the Louisiana Purchase, which offered us this territory for exploration;

and the Lewis and Clark expedition will serve as the starting point of

our scheme of the history of the trans-Missouri.

We may, perhaps, reinforce these salient points in memory if we go back

once more well upon this side of our former starting point, and work to

it again upon slightly different lines. For instance, we may ask, who

built Fort Henry, the fort that the Astorians found abandoned, west of

the Rocky Mountains? The answer is, Major Andrew Henry, some time

partner of that energetic early merchant, General Ashley. Henry was at

the Three Forks of the Missouri in 1810. He crossed southward through

the mountains and built Fort Henry in the fall of that year. This was

the first post built west of the Continental Divide. It was erected on

what is now known as the Henry Fork of the Snake River.

But was Major Henry himself the first man to penetrate into the Rockies?

He was not. Who, then, was ahead of Henry? The answer is, Manuel Liza,

that strange character of Spanish, French and American blood, who was

perhaps the first of the Western merchants to catch the full

significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. We have heard of one

William Morrison, of Kaskaskia, Illinois, who sent a representative to

far-off Santa Fé. This same William Morrison was the partner of our

strange genius, Manuel Liza, in the first fur trading venture up the

Missouri. They fitted out one keel-boat for the Northwest trade in the

spring of 1807.

Did Liza and his hardy crew of keel boatmen find an untracked and

uninhabited wilderness? Not altogether such; for, as they were ascending

the ancient waterway, they met coming down one John Colter, that hardy

soul who had left the Lewis and Clark expedition to return to the

Yellowstone River for the purpose of doing a little beaver trapping on

his own account. Colter, it may be remembered, is thought to have been

the first discoverer of the region now included in the Yellowstone

National Park. This country was discovered and forgotten, to be later

officially “discovered” on the same basis that Frémont discovered other

portions of the Rockies. Colter is the last link in this chain. He

brings us back again to Lewis and Clark, the first of the up-stream

adventurers to penetrate the region of the trans-Missouri.

We may all the better strengthen the backward-running chain by one or

two more links extending from comparatively recent dates, to those that

we may consider as marking the beginning of things in the West. For

instance, we have heard much of General Ashley, that enterprising and

fortunate early fur trader, whose success was the first to call the

attention of the capital of the East to the enormous profits of the fur

trade in the West when properly conducted. Ashley’s first partner was

Major Andrew Henry.

The first rendezvous of the mountain men was that arranged in 1824 for

Ashley and Henry’s men. Ashley himself undertook to explore the Green

River, a stream then thought to empty into the Gulf of Mexico, no less

an authority than Baron Humboldt having made this particular error in

Western geography. Shipwrecked, Ashley none the less escaped, and

somewhere near the point where he met his disaster, he cut his name on a

rock, together with the date, 1825. Major Powell, later an official

discoverer, in his expedition down the Colorado River, found the place

where Ashley was wrecked on that stream just forty-four years earlier.

Major Powell read the engraved inscription as 1855 instead of 1825. In

his account he sends some of Ashley’s men, survivors of the wreck, over

to Salt Lake City, and has them go to work upon the Temple! “Of their

subsequent history,” remarks Major Powell, gravely, “I have no

knowledge.”

This, as Mr. Chittenden points out in his admirable work, “The American

Fur Trade,” is one of the jests of Western history, for Ashley was on

the Green River thirty years before the Mormons left Missouri! We shall

need to allow a few years to pass before we come to the transcontinental

migration of the Mormons and the building of their Temple. Ashley

foreran all that. He was at Salt Lake and on the Green River, and quite

across the Mormon country, a short time after the first Astorian party

had passed on west.

Thus, if we begin to study too closely into the early history of the

trans-Missouri, we begin to lose all respect for its mysteries, and come

to think of it as a country that was never new, but was always well

known. Indeed, there is much warrant for this. Witness again the

journeys of that straightforward character, Lieutenant Pike, the first

American officer to reach the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and

to arrange for the proper respect for the American flag in that far-off

country. After Pike had returned down the Mississippi River and had been

ordered to explore the country near the Rockies, around the headwaters

of the Red River, he began to cross the trails of some of these earlier

adventurers of whom we have been speaking. Thus, in 1806, while Pike is

making his way across the plains, he hears of Lewis and Clark’s descent

of the Missouri. On August nineteenth, 1806, he states that he finds the

“place where Mr. Chouteau formerly had his fort.” Chouteau was one of

these same early fur traders, as we shall find if we care to go into the

minutiæ of history. Lieutenant Pike describes this fort as “already

overgrown with vegetation;” so it could not have been new in 1806.

From this point Lieutenant Pike goes to “Manuel Liza’s fort,” which then

marked another advance post of the trans-Missouri travel. Next he heads

westward, touches the Grand and White rivers and reaches the Solomon

Fork. Here he meets the Pawnees, discovers that they are wearing Spanish

medals, learns that the Spaniards have sent an expedition into that

country from the New Mexican settlements, and finds a “very large road”

over which the Spaniards have returned to the westward. Thus it seems

that not even good Zebulon was to have a West all his own.

Forsooth, Lieutenant Pike might have gone back more than two hundred

years, and have bethought himself of the old Spaniard Coronado, who in

the year 1540 journeyed from Mexico across the plains until he stood on

the banks of the Missouri River, from which Pike himself started forth.

And strange enough, if we seek for coincidences, is the fact that

Coronado himself recounts that he met on the Missouri River, that is to

say, on the stream that is now called the Missouri, an Indian who wore a

silver medal that was evidently the work of a white man. There is

something singular for you, if you seek a strange incident! Where did

Coronado’s Indian get his medal? This was closer to the first of things.

It must have come from the settlements of the whites on the lower

Atlantic slope. But by what process of travel? Are we indeed to have any

mysteries in the West, and shall we ever be able to set any date in our

scheme of transportation properly to be called initial?

If we look at a map of the trans-Missouri as it existed in 1840, prior

to the official exploration of the West, we shall indeed find that

“hardly one of the great geographical features was unknown.” We shall

find the Missouri and the Yellowstone rivers dotted thick with the

stockades of the fur traders. We shall find, if we search in the records

of those days, that the whites had long lived among the Indians and had

come to know their ways. We shall discover, if we care to believe such

apochryphal history as that offered by the ostensible Indian captive,

John D. Hunter,[46] that the Indian himself has been something of an

explorer. Hunter tells of plains Indians, dwellers of the prairie

country near the Missouri, who themselves made the transcontinental

journey and saw the mouth of the Columbia. He states that this journey

was traditional at that time, and adds that he himself, with a party of

plains Indians, likewise made this journey to the Columbia, crossing the

Rockies at a different pass in coming back from that met with in the

western journey.

We may believe his story or not, as we like; but we are bound to believe

that these plains Indians antedated the first white men in the discovery

of the South Pass and of many other features of the Rocky Mountains. It

is doubtful, indeed, whether any party of white men in those early days

ever crossed the mountains excepting under the entire or partial

guidance of Indians, who took them over country known to themselves.

We may believe, therefore, that the native Indian savages furnished the

source of original knowledge to our first explorers. If you be familiar

with the Rockies of to-day, you shall now and again see the old Indian

trails, overgrown and unused, sinking back into the earth. In the valley

of the Two Medicine, on the reservation of those same Blackfeet who once

fought the trappers so boldly, the writer once found, high up on the

mountain side, a plainly traceable trail that led down to the summit of

a high ridge, whence one could look far to the eastward, to where the

Sweet Grass hills loomed out of the level sweep of the prairies. There

was a hunter with me, a man married among the Blackfeet, of whom I asked

regarding this trail. “It is the old Kootenai trail,” said he; “and if

you follow this back to the West, it will take you through a pass of the

Rockies and into the country of the Flatheads.”

Here, then, was indeed an ancient and historic pathway, one not used

to-day by any rails of iron, nor followed even by the pack trains of the

“adventurers” of to-day. Here was a pass discovered, no man may tell

when, by Indians who wandered eastward and westward across the upper

Rockies. Perhaps the old trappers also know this trail; though there are

not wanting those who believe that less than a double decade ago the

valleys at the headwaters of the St. Mary’s Lake still lay untouched by

the foot of white man. Here, along this forgotten mountain trail, came

the Kootenais with their war parties against the Blackfeet. Here,

perhaps, came, from the upper Pacific coast, the first horses used by

the plains Indians in the far North. Be that as it may, my companion and

I without doubt stood on one of the original or aboriginal pathways; and

he had been dull indeed who did not find an interest in that fact and in

the surroundings.[47]

“Who made the first Indian trails?” I asked of my friend, as we stood at

the eastern end of this old pathway. He pointed to similar paths

crossing the sides of the ridge near to us, and other little paths

leading up the valley along the sides of the mountains.

“It was the elk and the deer and the mountain sheep,” said he. “They

found the easiest ways to travel; they found the grass and the water.”

-----

Footnote 44:

All of these maps, by the way, must have been at the disposal of

Frémont; yet we do not learn that he believed the east and west course

of the Buena Ventura was an impossibility, although Jedediah Smith had

long since shown the inaccuracy of this old idea, which later was to

cost Frémont so much suffering in the mountains of upper California.

Footnote 45:

Again, remember this significant date of 1834.

Footnote 46:

This story of an alleged captivity among the Indians, extending from

childhood to young manhood, is by some considered unauthentic. The

volume, a curious one, was printed in London, in 1825.

Footnote 47:

The trail of the white race over the Appalachians was but the trail of

the red men. The Sioux Indians, for generations inhabitants of the

upper plains country of the West, formerly lived east of the

Appalachians. The first settlers of Kentucky and Tennessee simply

followed the ancient ways by which the Indians crossed into the valley

of the Mississippi. And there, as in the West, the Indians but

followed the paths of the wild animals, which clung nearly as possible

to the courses of the streams.—V. “The Indians of To-day;” Grinnell.

CHAPTER V

ACROSS THE WATERS[48]

Twenty-five years ago potatoes were so high in price in certain towns of

the Rocky Mountains that the merchants handling them often reserved the

right to retain the peelings, which, in turn, were sold, for planting

purposes, the eyes of the potatoes thus having a considerable commercial

value, obviously in proportion to the distance from the nearest railroad

or steamboat line. This situation could not forever endure. There must

come a day when we could afford to throw away our peelings, and throw

them away cut thick and carelessly. Equally true is it that the time is

coming in America when we shall again gather up our potato-peelings and

cherish them. There you have the three ages of the West.[49]

The early American life was primitive, but it was never the life of a

peasantry. Look ahead into the future, the time of the second saving of

the peelings. Once there was a time in the West when every man was as

good as his neighbor, as well situated, as much contented. It would take

hardihood to predict such conditions in the future for the West or for

America.

For half a hundred years America looked across the Alleghanies. It was

nearer to England than to Iowa. Our standards in fashion, in art, in

literature, were yet those of an older world. Then came the age of

Americanism, when it mattered not to the women of the frontier what were

the modes brought in the latest ship from London or Paris. Under the

Monroe doctrine of the frontier the women made their petticoats of

elkskin, and found it good. Behold now a day when Iowa is as near as

England, and England almost as near as New York. Again the contents of

the ships are valid matter of curiosity to the women of the West.

We are in the third age, the age of steam. The pack-horse and the

sailboat were vehicles of the individual or of the section. Wheeled

vehicles afforded a speedier and more flexible intercommunication that

made the idea of secession forever impossible, and made us a national

America. The common carrier made us and will destroy us as a national

entity. The wheels have written epochal record on the surface of the

land. Long and devious and delightful, weary and sad and tragic, are the

old wheel-tracks of the West, worn deep into a soil red with blood, on

paths lined with flowers, and with graves as well.

At the half-way point of the century the early wheels of the West were

crawling and creaking over trails where now rich cities stand. The Red

River carts from Pembina, their wheels sawn from the ends of logs, and

voicing a mile-wide protest of unlubricated axle, crept down to a “St.

Paul’s” that had a population of about twelve hundred, mostly

halfbreeds.[50] A yard of cloth or a butcher-knife still sold for twenty

dollars at old Fort Benton in the beaver country.

The Western railroads were only little spurs of iron thrusting out into

the prairies. Indeed, they could not always boast rails of iron, as

witness the old wooden-railed road from Chicago to Galena. Still eager,

still harkening to the Voices of the West, the men who were to make the

West pressed on, taking the railway as far as it went, then the

stage-coach and the wagon and the horse and the lone path of the

farthest venturer.

The man of Virginia heard that the prairies of Iowa would give him a

farm for a price per acre less than one-tenth that commanded by the red

clay hills of the Old Dominion. He forsook the land of terrapin and

peaches, of honeysuckle and sunshine, and started West by rail across

the Alleghanies, across Ohio by the early Pennsylvania railway system,

beyond the boom town of Chicago, across the Mississippi, and out into

the black mud of the prairies for fifty miles or so. Thence by stage he

went, the head of his tearful wife against his breast, but in that

breast beating a heart whose one thought was the “better chance.” It was

the better chance for these babes that tugged at the skirts of their

mother—this was what the father wanted, and this was why the mother

went with him, grieving, as she yet must, for the home land that she

perhaps would never see again.

One such settler, who went West from Virginia into an agricultural state

in 1854, said that he came West in order that he might be able to

educate his children. He educated them. To-day one child is buried in

California, one in Dakota, three live in Iowa, and one in Illinois. Such

is the typical record of an American family.

The man of old New England might cross this trail of the Southern man,

and find himself betimes in Kansas or Nebraska, forerunner of that day

when it was to be said that Massachusetts was west of the Missouri

River, as indeed is true to-day. Boston began to build Chicago, and the

first of those men went West that were to make the old Red River

cart-towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis little else than New England

communities—cities of a state which to-day has a permanent school fund

of nearly eight million dollars, and a university fund of nearly one

million dollars, in securities largely made up of the bonds of other

states, among them a large amount of the funding bonds of the ancient

state of Virginia. It was a race into the West—a race in which now the

North outstripped the South, the commercial outran the heroic, the ax

and the plow outstripped the rifle and its creed.

In 1826 arose one Philip Evans Thomas, sometime known as the father of

American railroads, son of a Baltimore banker, and living, as we may

thus notice as a curious fact, near to that early abiding-place of the

star that marked the center of American population, that Ararat from

which the Western civilization started outward. Early in his life Philip

Evans Thomas saw how excellent it would be if only water could be made

to run up-stream. He had seen the use of railroads in England, and had,

moreover, noted the beneficial effects upon the trade of Eastern cities

of the traffic that was carried by canals. He had the far-reaching mind

of the world-merchant, whose problem is ever that of transportation. He

saw that railroads can go where canals can not, and he presently

resigned his directorship in the Maryland Canal, because he saw that a

canal can not climb a hill, and that mankind could not forever go around

the hills or up and down the streams.

It was on February twelfth, 1827, that Thomas called together

twenty-five of the leading citizens of Baltimore. Comment of the time

says that he seemed touched with the spirit of prophecy as he spoke of

the enterprise that was to cast aside the mountains, to unite the

streams, and to discover what there might be in that mysterious land,

the West—the West that was west of the Alleghanies and in or near the

Mississippi valley. Beyond the Mississippi, of course, the mind of man

might not go! The minutes of this notable railway meeting are preserved

in a pamphlet known as “Proceedings of Sundry Citizens of Baltimore,

convened for the Purpose of Devising the Most Efficient Means of

Improving Intercourse between Baltimore and the Western States.”

There were two opinions as to the wisdom of Mr. Thomas’s project, and

these were the opinions of the North and of the South; for again the

South was to be the pioneer into the West, and again the North was to

follow. The cities of the North made loud outcry against the Baltimore

prophet, and said that this railroad, if built, would divert from them

forever the traffic that was then coming to them from the West. This was

ever the typical attitude of the upper East toward the West.

None the less the enterprise went on, and the Baltimore and Ohio

Railroad Company was duly organized, an act for its incorporation being

passed on February twenty-seventh, 1827. The stamp of success was upon

the idea before the ink had dried on the records. By April twenty-fourth

of the same year stock was subscribed to the figure of four million one

hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars. The first railway planned

for the West—planned because there was a West and because that West was

wanted as a part of the East—was promptly elevated into one of the most

important commercial enterprises of the time. The stock was coveted by

all, and the struggle was for first place in the line of purchasers.

It can not be within the present purpose to particularize as to the

railroad development of the West, nor to attempt the unimportant

chronological record of first one and then another of the multiplying

railways that early began to crowd out into the West from the Eastern

centers. The important thing is the tremendous expansion of population

that now ensued for the Western states, the blackening of the census

maps in spaces once barren, the crossing and interweaving of the

Northern and Southern populations, which now occurred as both sections

pressed out into the West. There were grandfathers in Virginia now,

grandfathers in New England. The subdivided farms were not so large.

There were more shops in the villages. There was demand for expansion of

the commerce of that day. The little products must find their market,

and that market might still be American. The raw stuff might still be

American, the producer of it might still be American. So these busy,

thrifty, ambitious men came up and stood back of the vanguard that held

the flexible frontier. Silently men stole out yet farther into what West

there was left; but they always looked back over the shoulder at this

new thing that had come upon the land.

Thinking men knew, half a century ago, that there must be an iron way

across the United States, though they knew this only in general terms,

and were only guessing at the changes that such a road must bring to the

country at large. Some of these guesses make interesting reading to-day.

Thus, in 1855 it was announced as a settled thing that the continental

route could not lie across the Northern Rockies, because in that region

the heavy snowfall would block all railway travel. It was concluded that

there were only four points on the Pacific coast to which the railway

might address itself: San Diego, San Francisco, “some spot to be chosen

on the navigable waters of the Columbia,” and another “on the borders of

the Strait of De Fuca, in the new Territory of Washington.”

The government of the country was so slow in developing this railway

project that some capitalists were for building at once a road of their

own, and they chose the route from Charleston to San Diego. What would

it have meant to this country had this been the first and only railway

across the continent? As to the route up the Platte valley and over the

mid-Rockies, that was dismissed as quite impracticable. “The absence of

timber on most of this route would prove an insuperable objection to its

selection, even were it not ineligible from other considerations,”

comments one writer of the day. The same writer[51] says that the route

from San Francisco to St. Louis would be geographically preferable, but

admits that the “formation of the intermediate country, and the

character of the mountain-ranges to be crossed, are deemed to present

insuperable difficulties to its construction.”

The bearing of these reflections upon the purpose in hand is not so much

one of mere literary curiousness as one of commercial comparison. The

logic of that time carried a large non sequitur. “The country

intervening between the most western limits of civilization and the

recently settled territories of the Pacific,” says the same early

historian, “is confessedly little known.” The empire of the Middle West

was not dreamed of. This is what the new road was to do:

“Instead of weary months of travel around the capes of Africa and South

America, less than a month will suffice to transport the teas and silks

of China, the coffee and the spices of Java and Ceylon, to the great

Atlantic cities, thence to be distributed as from the world’s depot to

the nations of Europe. But not only will this new mode of transit take

to itself the best and most remunerative part of the traffic now

existing between eastern Asia and Christendom, but it will also create a

new traffic, compared with which the trade now existing will bear almost

no comparison.

“Instead of here and there a seaport in China holding commercial

relations with America, this nearness of access to the best markets of

the world will stimulate into an unprecedented activity the raising of

all agricultural products, the manufacture of all goods and wares, and

the disinterring of all the mineral resources which the three hundred

millions of China can furnish us, at a cheaper rate than we can obtain

them elsewhere. Japan, with a population almost double our own, now shut

out from all intercourse with the rest of the world, must soon be forced

by the strength of circumstances to welcome to her ports the merchant

fleets of other nations, anxious and eager to distribute to the wide

world the rich products of her soil, her climate, and her domestic

industry. The tropical fruitfulness of the over-populated islands of the

Eastern Archipelago will also pour, in increased abundance, the rich

spices of their balmy breezes through this new and rapid conduit.”

Not so bad was this flowery prophecy, though its fulfilment was to run

over into another century, and to fall subsequent to a still greater

industrial phenomenon, the gourd-like maturing of the trans-Missouri

region.[52] This rapid development of the interior region of America was

not foreseen by the wisest of the prophets of fifty years ago. Yet

unspeakably swift and startling as it has been, it was, after all, the

product of an arrested growth, of an advancement upon lines

substantially different from those on which it was originally and

naturally projected.

As once the West had sought to secede, now at length the South,

foster-mother of the West, bethought herself to set up a separate land,

even at the very time when there was in progress a great

transcontinental project that was to make all this country one, forever

and inseparable. It was the Civil War that delayed the construction of

the Pacific railway. Had that road been built, had the roads from the

North into the South been built half a generation earlier, there could

never have been any Civil War. The indissoluble brotherhood of the North

and the South would have been established a generation before, and at

what untold saving of splendid human life! This war, fatally and

fatefully early—early by a quarter of a century, since after that

quarter-century it could never have attained importance, or could never

have been at all—changed history in America more than any written

history has ever shown. Still curiously and intimately connected, it was

the South and the West that were to suffer most in that war, cruel as

this may sound to that splendid East that poured its blood like water

and its treasure with a freedom the West might not equal.

The industrial revolution of the West was subsequent to the Civil War,

and was, to large extent, caused by the Civil War, or, rather, was

dependent upon the same conditions that had part in bringing forth that

war. The vast and virgin West, “confessedly but little known,” lay

waiting for a population. The Eastern portion of the Northern States had

its own population. The South, under the conditions of that day, offered

incalculably more opportunity for crude labor than did the West; but it

offered no security for either capital or labor. Therefore it was that

the Old World was called upon to furnish the raw labor requisite to

subdue this wild land.

It can be only with horror that we reflect that the Old World was called

upon also to furnish us a people to replace the more than half-million

dead of as grand a population as the world ever knew, the flower of

America, North, South, East, and West. It would have been this splendid

army of men that would have settled the West, had it not been for the

war, which a few years later would have been an impossible thing. Could

that half-million dead have arisen from the grave in the decade

following that truly cruel war, the nomenclature of many Western cities

would be different to-day, and the face of the census maps would show a

different story. To-day the whole upper portion of the population chart

of the United States is black with the indication of a foreign-born

population. The only part of this country that the census map dares call

American is a thin, wavering line along the plateaus of Tennessee and

Kentucky,—the land that the first adventurers sought out when they

crossed the Alleghanies. It is the South alone that is to-day American.

It was the South that gave us the new-American, that splendid figure in

the history of the world.

Within two months in the year 1899, fifty-seven thousand foreigners were

brought to this country to be made over into Americans. Among these were

Croatians, Slavs, Armenians, Bohemians, Servians, Montenegrins,

Dalmatians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Moravians, Lithuanians, Magyars,

Jews, Syrians, Turks, Slovaks, with others of the better-known

nationalities, such as English, Germans, French, and Scandinavians. Of

the total number of these immigrants, less than one-tenth had a capital

as great as thirty dollars with which to begin life in the new land.

Many of these immigrants from lower Europe linger in the cities of the

West, and do not become a part of the agricultural communities; but the

indirect tax on the agricultural communities none the less remains. They

become only parasites upon the parasitic middlemen, and all these must

be supported by the farms.

It must be conceded that the new problems assigned to the West in the

way of absorption and assimilation of alien population in these days of

rapid transportation are nothing short of serious and perplexing. These

new people, brought out in swarms by means of the rapid wheels of

steam-locomotion, are like the early Americans who settled first a real

America. They are very poor; their fare must be coarse, their garb mean,

their opportunities for self-improvement but meager. Yet how different

are they, the product of the third age of transportation, from those

Argonauts, the Southern riflemen and the Northern axmen, who toiled with

oar or slow-moving wheel across this land in the days so recently gone

by!

There are three great pictures of the West—one that was, one that is,

and one that might have been. This last picture is a sad one to any

thinking man not concerned in politics. The West of steam-transportation

has not so much impressed itself, and in reason could not be expected so

to impress itself, upon its population as did that West reached by

slow-moving wheels when the natural difficulties to be overcome were so

vastly greater for the individual. The old West begot character, grew

mighty individuals, because such were its soil and sky and air, its

mountains, its streams, its long and devious trails, its constant

stimulus and challenge.

That which was to be has been. The days of the adventurers are gone.

There are no longer any Voices to summon heroes out on voyage of mystic

conquest. It now costs not so much heroism, but so much money, to get

out into the West, and it costs so much to live there. As a region the

West offers few special opportunities. It is no longer a poor man’s

country, nor is any part of America a country good for a poor man. It is

all much alike. Our young men of the West are as apt to go East to seek

their fortunes as to try them near at home. There is no land of the

free. America is not American. Food must digest before it can be flesh

and blood, and our population must digest before it can be called

American.

Twelve years ago money brought two per cent. a month west of the

Missouri River, and it earned it. To-day you can get a barrelful at five

per cent. a year. It is only free men who can afford to pay two per

cent. a month—men who still have open lands to settle, much raw wealth

to dig out of the earth and a future to discount. There are no more

Oklahomas now. We have stolen most of the reservations from the Indians,

and a few men have stolen most of the pine,[53] and nothing short of a

syndicate will do for a mine to-day. You may search far for eagle faces,

such as came from Maine and Carolina, the men that followed the westward

course of the young star of America.

Away with the saddle-blanket! The beaver are gone, and the range cattle

are all fenced in. Hang up the rifle, for our great game is vanishing.

If you seek a pleasant picture, gaze on the accumulating balance-sheets

of some monopolist’s millions. If you wish to hear a soothing sound,

listen to the wheels that go and come. Content yourself with these

things; else you must admit that, however strong, brilliant, and

consistent was our Western drama in the more slowly moving days, history

has made anticlimax in the days of steam. Carry your conclusions out

whimsically if you like, and reflect that in the year 1900 not only our

own Western cow-punchers, but also the samurai of Japan, were riding

bicycles, and the newspapers of Japan were reporting the prize-fights of

America! This is civilization, but the view of it is not altogether

comforting.[54]

Augur of what might have been, but for our Civil War, was that long line

of white-topped wagons that streamed westward across Illinois, Iowa,

across the Missouri River, out into the West, the still glorious and

alluring West, immediately upon the close of the war. This was not an

influx of foreigners, but a hejira of native Americans, a flood-tide

that could not wait for the railroads that were now so swiftly taking up

the new and mighty problems of a convalescent country. “By an impulse,

providential or evolutionary, but irresistible,” said an American

statesman of that decade,[55] “civilization has, during the present

generation, moved all at once and in concert, in a process of

territorial expansion as sudden and inexplicable as that which at the

close of the fifteenth century impelled the nations of Europe to voyages

which, resulted in the discovery and occupation of America. . . . The

United States will command the greatest part of the trade with the

Chinese Orient. We can produce every article that can be sold in this

now and limitless market.” Not bad reiteration, this, of the prophecy of

our historian of 1855. The latter did not foresee our Civil War, nor

could he have foreseen our armies across seas. They are there not so

much by reason of political mistakes or political wisdom as by an

impulse “providential or evolutionary.” In 1865, upon the plains, or in

1900, in the Asian islands, the army was only the escort. It is not our

army that will conquer new provinces and create new opportunities in

place of those with which we have been so sadly careless and so lavishly

generous; it is our railways and our steamships that are to prove our

conquering agencies. Thereby we shall recoup ourselves at the coffers of

the world.

We lose all sentimental regrets and superficial reservations when we

come to examine closely the tremendous revolutions created by the genius

of modern transportation. With the era of steam came a complete reversal

of all earlier methods. For nearly a century following the Revolutionary

War the new lands of America had waited upon the transportation. Now the

transportation facilities were to overleap history and to run in advance

of progress itself. The railroad was not to depend upon the land, but

the land upon the railroad. It was strong faith in the future

civilization that enabled capitalists to build one connected line of

iron from Oregon down the Pacific coast, thence east of the mouth of the

Father of Waters, in all over thirty-two hundred miles of rail. Then

came that daring flight of the Santa Fé across the seas of sand, a

venture derided as folly and recklessness.

The proof you may find by seeing the cities that have grown, the fields

which bear them tribute. North and south, and east and west the prairie

roads run. The long trail of the cattle-drive is gone, and the cattle no

longer walk a thousand miles to pasture or to market. Once, twice,

thrice, the continent was spanned, the dream of Robertson made

manifoldly true, and the path across the continent laid well and laid

forever.[56] In the Middle West the Great American Desert was

cross-hatched with iron lines and dotted full with homes that never

could have been but for those iron lines. In the Northwest lay a land of

almost arctic winters, with little or no shelter, with short and torrid

summers, the land of the Red River carts, where the fur traders were at

last replaced by the raisers of number two hard wheat.

Into this region came a large foreign population, sought out in the Old

World by the diligent agents of a common carrier needing business. The

hard plains of the North were literally stocked with these people. They

came with their tickets bought through to such or such a point in

Minnesota or Dakota. It was foreseen that the mere raising of wheat

could not build up a permanent civilization, and the railway did the

thinking for the blind ones who had taken its word and risked their

lives and fortunes in the removal to that America which had so wide and

various an interpretation. The railway sent out, free and unsolicited,

seed wheat and choice breeding-stock, dropping these contributions

wisely, here and there, into such communities as most needed them. The

railway was explorer, carrier, provider, thinker, heart, soul, and

intellect for this population that in another generation was to be

American. No wonder these folk stand and stare when the railway-train

goes by. It has been Providence to them. It is a Providence that has

given to Europe what America might have had.

To-day towns do not grow merely because of their location, and this

factor of location will become less and less important as the years go

by. St. Louis was a city of location; Chicago is a city of

transportation. Chicago is situated upon the most impossible and

unlovely of all places of human habitation. She is simply a city of

transportation, and is no better than her rails and boats, though by her

rails and boats she lives in every Western state and territory. The same

is true now of St. Louis and the vast Southwest.

One railroad recently planned for a Western extension, and laid out

along its lines the sites of thirty-eight new towns, each of which was

located and named before the question of inhabitants for the towns was

ever taken up. Another railway in the Southwest has named fifty cities

that are yet to build; and still others have scores of communities that

in time are to be the battle-grounds of human lives, the stages of the

human tragedy or comedy. The railways have not only reached but created

provinces; they have not only nourished but conceived communities. Out

of that cold upper land of the Northwest, which was thus fostered and

nurtured into strength, there came, in one year, one hundred and ten

million bushels of wheat to feed the world, and that in a year when the

crop shortage was over one hundred million bushels. This is only a part

of the output of that land, for the railway showed these farmers long

ago that diversified farming was their hope and their salvation.

Past one of those forts which in 1812 the United States erected to

protect her fur traders and to keep out her covetous rivals, there came

in the same year from the far Northwest, once home of the buffalo, the

Indian, and the scout, twenty-five million two hundred fifty-five

thousand eight hundred and ten tons of freight, nearly all of the

long-haul sort, and hence to be taken as showing in part the product of

the far Northwest itself. Three transcontinental roads, the Northern

Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Southern Pacific, in 1899 carried

twenty million one hundred forty-six thousand four hundred and ten tons

of freight, with a haul averaging about three hundred miles in length.

Nearly a thousand millions of dollars is represented in the

capitalization of these roads—far more than is demanded by the free

roadway of the Great Lakes, the modern freight traffic of which is

really a development subsequent to that of the railway exploitation of

the West. This perhaps suggests a day when Chicago may come to be as

closely connected with New Orleans as was the latter city with Kentucky

in the day of Wilkinson.[57] It is impossible to study the industrial

history of the West without studying also that of the South, for though

the two sections are far apart and utterly unlike, they yet have the

intercurrent soul of twins. No part of America is less known and more

misunderstood than the South, and surely it must be one of the most

cheering reflections to conclude that yearly the South comes closer to

the North, and the North to the South. Statesmanship could not in a

century so fully have accomplished this great and desirable result. The

railroads are doing what statecraft could not do.

It is the part of the great captains of transportation to live strenuous

lives, to work out great problems faithfully and patiently, to

accomplish great results mysteriously, to live, to die, and to be

forgotten. The heroes of the hustings, the heroes of our wars, are

remembered and immortalized. The man that makes possible their triumphs

finds no record on the page of time. His obituary is only the passing

chronicle of the daily press, feverishly concerned with what is known as

news.

To-day James F. Joy, the father of the Michigan Central Railroad, is

little known by the general public, though his was a far greater work

than that of seeking public office. John Murray Forbes, father of the

great Burlington and Quincy system, is a man too much forgotten. As

these lines are written comes the news of the death of Henry Villard,

the man that solved so many problems for the Northern Pacific. Dropped

for the time out of sight, he will now shortly follow the fate of his

compeers, and soon be dropped forever. William Henry Osborn died only a

few years ago, yet there are many who make the winter trip to the Gulf

coast that do not know who planned the flight of rails that runs from

the Great Lakes to the Gulf. It is a duty and a pleasure to mention the

names of such great and useful men, if only to ask that their work be

held in understanding memory.

Especially significant now is the memory of Mr. Osborn, and we might

well speak of him as assistant and coadjutor of such men as Lincoln and

Grant, and the statesmen who since the war have sought to unite North

and South. As we find that it was the South that first marched westward,

and a Southern man who first planned a great highway of iron into the

West, we may state with equal pleasure and confidence that it was the

East, and an Eastern man, that made the South a portion of the West, and

both a part of a united America.

William H. Osborn was a native of Massachusetts, and was by birth of no

exalted position in the world. His chief capital was a clear brain and

an unclouded purpose, which later ripened into a farsightedness in large

affairs that has rarely been equaled in the ranks of practical American

men. Sent to the East Indies as the representative of a New York firm,

he got a good insight into the trade in spices, and was successful in

its operation. Later he married the second daughter of that sterling

American merchant, Jonathan Sturges of New York, whose first daughter

was the first wife of J. Pierpont Morgan. Mr. Sturges was heavily

interested in the young Illinois Central Railroad, the first of the

land-grant railways, the original seven hundred and five miles of which

were intended to develop the agricultural lands of the great prairie

state of Illinois, and to bear the products of that state up to the

water-transport of the Great Lakes, which then carried most of the

long-haul business from the West to the East.

The original lines of this road were laid out in the form of a large Y,

one leg of which ran from Dubuque, Iowa, southward, meeting the other

leg, which extended south from Chicago. The two legs of the Y met at

what is now Central City, and thence the line ran south to Cairo. This

road was one of the earliest attempts to parallel the old water-highways

that had once carried the freight of a riparian population. Its first

grant was made in 1850, and its first train was run in 1855. During the

war this line was of much service in transporting troops and material to

the southward.

Yet, in spite of its well-conceived plan, and in spite of the natural

wealth of the country it traversed, the road as a property was a source

of perpetual anxiety to its shareholders. It needed a great mind to

straighten out its problems, and Mr. Sturges thought that his son-in-law

had that mind. He therefore despatched Mr. Osborn to Chicago, and gave

him full charge of the system. The choice was a wise one. Mr. Osborn

brought the property through the panic of 1857, when all securities were

falling in ruins, and weathered even an assignment, which was made by

the company during his absence in England. He backed his faith in his

judgment by negotiating a personal loan of three million dollars, out of

which he paid the matured coupons that were pressing for payment. He

secured a new loan of five million dollars, paid off all the smaller

debts, established the credit of the company, and set its affairs

thenceforth upon a secure footing.

All these details were such as might perhaps have been accomplished by

another. It was not only in these executive matters that the genius of

this captain evinced itself. He saw at once to the marrow of the

difficulties that had caused this embarrassment. There had now been

built around the foot of Lake Michigan those east-and-west through lines

that killed the lake carriage just as his own road had killed the river

carriage on the Mississippi trail. These roads reached out after their

own business, and did not depend upon the traffic the north-and-south

line carried. It was easy to foresee a failing business, but not so easy

to name a remedy for it. Mr. Osborn found his remedy in the idea of a

north-and-south transcontinental line. Between Cairo and the town of

Jackson, Tennessee, there was a gap over which no railroad passed,

though from Jackson as far south as New Orleans there ran the rambling

lines of a system controlled by H. S. McComb, of Crédit Mobilier fame.

Mr. Osborn secured the immature Southern roads, built the connection

from Cairo to Jackson, and in 1873 had a completed line from the Lakes

to the Gulf.

It all sounds easy, but it took one man’s brain and one man’s life to do

it. The story of the road and of the man that made it is not yet told,

but it will be written in the development of one of the richest sections

of America. It is writing daily in the trains that come from North to

South, from South to North, agencies that daily break down and pass

through any sectional barrier and bring about the better understanding

which makes kin one with the other the sons of the old riflemen and the

old axmen who built the West.

Thus are the trails of the two forever interwoven. Beside this trail of

commerce runs the old trail of the Mississippi, whose tawny flood still

carries its burden of adventure and romance. Robertson, Thomas, Whitney,

Osborn,—these are the names of a few of the prophets, forgotten men of

the early and the modern days, who blazed the intercurrent trails where

now march the feet of those living under a complex civilization.

From these crude studies of early Western history we may gather one very

significant fact, which will mean more a hundred years from now than it

does to-day. It is that America got her territory first, and then her

transportation and her population. She bought on a rising market, and

her purchase was of territory, land, the only thing on earth that can

not be increased or multiplied. Moreover, her land was such as the earth

has never duplicated and can never duplicate. The magnificent American

West was a realm unrivaled, and it was originally settled by men who had

the most priceless of all possessions, a splendid ancestry. Providence

held back the wheels for a hundred years while the Western character was

forming.

Let us, even though by dint of effort, fling away the personal plaint.

It is un-American to snivel, and as the old-time Western men would not

have done so, neither shall we. The West is not dead. It is immortal. We

have come upon a century of force. The conflict is to be the bitterest

the world has ever known; not the conflict of man with beast, or with

savage nature, but the conflict of masses of men, masses of things, one

combination against another, one wedge of impact, head on, against

another. It is too late to call out for an America like that of

Washington or Jefferson; too late to ask for a practical Monroe

doctrine; too late to speak of policies or politics gone by.

With Europe in fear of our Western products, and yet dependent upon

those products; with America coming each day, by causes “providential or

evolutionary,” into the plans of the world, of what possible avail is it

to cry out for a West or for an America that is gone forever? Call back

the armies if you wish, but you can never call back the wheels. The

pathway points now not out into the West, but out into the world. Never

doubt that the sons of the West, sons of this Anak, sons whose fathers

are in Valhalla to-day, will follow that road as far and as fearlessly

as they did the path across the continent. In the veins of these men

runs the riot unconquerable, the distillation of the skies and winds.

Their feet march now to the rhythm of phantom footfalls, those of the

men that marched before from home out into the perilous unknown. Black

men, yellow men, peasant men—all these must take their chances. There

are no longer any vacant lands. Europe, which sent to the West some of

its best and its poorest population, will have more to fear at the hands

of the West than China has to dread to-day. Europe has to combat not

only the West, but all the heredity of the West.

This, then, is where the eagle-faced pioneers of America will find their

last trail. This is how the king will at last come again into his own.

Peoples may pass away, monarchies may fall, but above them there will

stand the only aristocracy fit to survive; not a false democracy that

nominates all men as equal, but the aristocracy of survival. You may

abolish many things, and in the future enact many things of which we of

to-day may not guess; but never shall there utterly perish the strong

blood that got its survival by fitness, and its education by continuous

conflict with mighty things. The largest, the most compact, and the most

closely knit Caucasian population of the world to-day, is that of

America, and to-day America is potentially the most powerful of all the

world-powers. Why? Because her unit of population is superior. The

reason for that you may find yourself if you care to look into the great

movements of the west-bound population of America.

As to the future steps in the development of the West, we may perhaps be

indulged in a hazard of opinion, as our fathers were before us. It would

seem sure that every inch of our agricultural lands must come under the

plow of Belgium, and be tilled inch by inch. The vast Delta of the

Mississippi, from Memphis south, the richest soil the world ever saw,

will be a continuous garden, supporting a great population of its own,

and feeding thousands in the cities, in full verification of the wisdom

of the man who foresaw that the South must be joined to the North, even

as the West to the East. Perhaps some of the more barren steppe country

of the West will ultimately be abandoned in spite of scientific

irrigation, just as some of the slashed-off timber-lands of Michigan,

Wisconsin and Minnesota are now being abandoned, in sequel to the

ruinous American lumbering operations.[58]

In the great river valleys there will be an enormous thickening of the

population; so that it may yet be many years before the center of

population, which in 1900 was near the little town of Columbus, Indiana,

shall have passed the Mississippi River in its west-bound course.[59] We

have yet to learn to save our potato-peelings. We are yet to go more and

more under task-masters, are to learn more and more the value of the

penny, that coin once so bitterly scorned in all the West. We are to

work out the problems bequeathed humanity with the passing years; and in

the end we are to ask, as we ask to-day, that unanswered question, Why?

Policies and politics can not change these things. The wheels have run

too far. Let fall the little words of our talking men; let wave the tiny

swords of those who are called our warriors; and let the writers rage.

Back and beyond their trivial and transient deeds runs the broad, somber

flood of fate. Humanity, not political divisions, is the concern of

time. The individual yields to the section, the section to the nation,

the nation to the world, the world to the plans of fate, of Providence.

There is another, a lighter and more cheerful side to the conclusions

that we may draw from our study of the way in which the West was

made—the side that has to do with the growth of the newer portions of

this country in all the liberal arts, in that noble flowering of the

human imagination, which is most naturally to be expected of an

environment of ease and a time of leisure. Art rests ever upon the

material, the imagination dates ever back to actual deeds. The gentler

days of the West are no better than its ruder times, but the one is as

good as the other, since each came in its proper period. It was the

railway that developed the West in artistic things as well as in

material things. It was as long ago as 1870 that a Western man, Justice

Paine of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, found occasion to speak of the

vast influence of these civilizing agencies. He said:

“They have done more to develop the wealth and resources, to stimulate

the industry, reward the labor, and promote the general comfort and

prosperity of the country than any other, perhaps than all other mere

physical causes combined. There is probably not a man, woman or child

whose interest or comfort has not been in some degree subserved by them.

They bring to our doors the productions of the earth. They enable us to

anticipate and protract the seasons. They enable the inhabitants of each

clime to enjoy the pleasures and luxuries of all. They scatter the

productions of the press and of literature broadcast through the country

with amazing rapidity. There is scarcely a want, wish, or aspiration of

the human heart that they do not in some measure help to gratify. They

promote the pleasures of social life and of friendship; they bring the

skilled physician swiftly from a distance to attend the sick and the

wounded, and enable the absent friend to be present at the bedside of

the dying. They have more than realized the fabulous conception of the

Eastern imagination, which pictured the genii as transporting inhabited

palaces through the air. They take a train of inhabited palaces from the

Atlantic coast, and with marvelous swiftness deposit it on the shores

that are washed by the Pacific sea. In war they transport the armies and

supplies of the government with the greatest celerity, and carry

forward, as it were on the wings of the wind, relief and comfort to

those who are stretched bleeding and wounded on the field of battle.”

He has not read well the history of his country, has not learned the

intricate web of the commercial system of to-day, has surely not studied

the developments of the third age of American transportation, who can

believe that there exists any longer any considerable difference between

the most widely separated parts of America in matters of the gentler

life. The publisher of a noble periodical controls an agency the

influence of which is as valuable and as much desired in the West as in

the East, and which is felt as quickly and as sensitively in the one

region as the other. The art and literature of the time belong to the

West as much as to the East, and in its due time the West will produce

as well as consume in the matters of art and literature. There were

Western artists, Western painters, Western sculptors on the plains

before the buffalo were gone.

It is a matter of wonder that any American literature could ever speak

of the American West in anything but terms of pride and honor. There is

a certain literature, color-crammed, superficial, and transient, because

wrong, that affects to believe that there is still a West that is a land

of crude souls exclusively and of little hope for a hereafter. If the

good folk who so believe lack the great privilege of actual American

travel, they have at least left for them the resources of an American

railroad map. Let them study; and even if they study no deeper than the

map, they must come to see that the West is no more as once it was.

Changed unspeakably and utterly, the old West lies in ruins. To pick

about among those ruins may, indeed, be to find here and there a bit of

local color; but were it not better to reflect that this color may be

only the broken bits of a cathedral pane? Restore that cathedral, in

recollection, in imagination at least, if it be within the skill of art

or literature to do so. Restore it, and write upon its arch the thought

that history may be more than a mere recital of wars and religions; that

the destruction of human life may be nationally not so great as the

development of human character. Give the men of the old West, parents of

the men of the new West, this epitaph: They had character. Let the

heroes have place of honor in their own cathedral; and so may the

Western earth lie light above them, and the Western skies smile over

them rememberingly.

-----

Footnote 48:

The Century Magazine, January, 1902.

Footnote 49:

Another instance of changed standards in the West may be seen in the

revolution as to petty prices. Up to twenty years ago, in most Rocky

Mountain communities, the quarter-dollar was the smallest coin in

circulation. With the railroads came the dime, the nickel, and at last

the penny; but they came to a West that was no more.

A Montana periodical thus comments on these matters as they appeared

at the time when the railroad reached Miles City:

“The advent of the Northern Pacific Railroad, in November, 1881,

brought about a complete change in the methods and manners of the

people. The railroad brought the community at once in touch with the

more concise and narrower life of ‘the States’; the ‘nickel’ displaced

the ‘quarter’ as the smallest coin in use, and prices shrunk

accordingly. . . . This proposed innovation was hotly contested for a

while by the adherents of the ‘two-bit’ theory, resulting finally in a

compromise that established ‘two-for-a-quarter’ as the going rate. It

would be hard to describe the feeling of dejection that overwhelmed

the old-timers when this conclusion was reached. It was accepted by

them as a pronounced and evident sign of decadence.”

Footnote 50:

A settler who moved, in 1854, from Virginia to Iowa complained that

for a whole year in that frontier country he saw no fruit except a

half-peck of crab-apples. It was much the same in Minnesota at that

time; yet, in the year 1900, the city of St. Paul alone used one

thousand dollars’ worth or grapes each day for fifty days, all

imported, and at an average price of only fifteen cents per basket.

This fruit was largely imported from the state of New York.

Footnote 51:

Henry Howe; “The Great West” (1855).

Footnote 52:

In the year 1900 began the great tendency toward consolidation in

railway interests. Nor did the sequence cease at this point. In the

same year there were begun, for use upon the Pacific Ocean in

connection with this same transcontinental route, five giant

ocean-going freight ships, the largest yet known, each to be 750 feet

in length, of 74 feet beam, and with a carrying capacity of 22,000

tons. These ships will carry American cotton to Japan, for use instead

of the short-staple cotton of India, until recently used by Japan.

They will enable the railroad-builders of Japan to figure as exactly

on the price of a ton of rails as can the contractor of Kansas or

Nebraska. They will lay down a barrel of Minnesota flour in China or

the Philippines at a cost for carriage of not over $1.25. All this

shows to what extent American commerce, made active by American

transportation methods, is invading the markets of the world; for, at

this same time, Russia can not lay down a barrel of (an inferior)

flour at the seaboard of China for less than $4.25. Surely our prophet

of 1855 dreamed more wisely than he knew!

Footnote 53:

The desecration of America, in the terrible devastation of her

forests, is something no observant man can face with composure.

Footnote 54:

The time is not one for individual optimism, and the old hopefully

self-reliant spirit of the West must be content to lose its personal

quality in the larger and vaguer, though not less certain, tendencies

of modern life. Bearing upon a theme kindred to the above, James

Bryce, author of “The American Commonwealth,” recently found occasion

to write:

“National ideals to-day tend toward a large and strong state, with

vast external possessions, with a huge army and navy, with an

extending trade, and great consequent wealth; and the ideal of

education is less toward ‘unprofitable culture’ and more toward

subjects that enable men to raise themselves in the world. People now

talk more about capital and labor. Formerly there seemed rather more

faith in the power of reason, rather more hope of progress to be

secured by political change. Altogether there seemed rather more of a

sanguine spirit formerly. Mankind must never cease to cherish and

follow the dream of that golden age, which at one time they believed

to lie in the past, but which for some centuries had been supposed to

glimmer in the future. They must never forget that hope. But the

golden age seemed nearer in 1850 than it does now.”

Footnote 55:

The late Cushman K. Davis, United States senator from Minnesota.

Footnote 56:

In 1902 Canada began to emulate the history of the United States, and

planned for the building of two more transcontinental railways. She

could inflict no greater blow to the United States. V. also Chap. V,

Vol. IV; “The Pathways of the Future.”

Footnote 57:

Engineers disagree as to the possibility of making a ship-canal of the

great highway of the Mississippi; but engineers have always disagreed

about the doing of great things, and then have always done them. It is

likely that the dream of that shrewd merchant-explorer, Louis Joliet,

will eventually be realized, and the Chicago drainage-canal will in

that case attain a great importance.

Indeed, inland-water transportation may be upon the eve of a great

development. Thus, in December, 1900, there was organized a canal

company for the purpose of navigating the Red River of the North, of

improving the channel by dredging, putting in locks and reservoirs, to

regulate that historic stream into conditions virtually those of a

canal. Another curious proposition to reach Congress in the same year

was a bill for the purpose of building a ship-canal between Lake Erie

and the Ohio River, an enterprise which would have great significance

in the coal and iron trade. This canal would follow the course of La

Salle on his first journey from the Great Lakes—the old south-bound

war-trail of the Six Nations. Geography, of all things, seems to

repeat itself. No one may tell what new importance this canal

proposition may attain, though it may be dormant for a time.

Early in the year 1901 the leading journals of Germany were discussing

the prospects of a canal from Chicago to the Atlantic Ocean, and held

the enterprise practicable.

As showing the extent of water-transportation on our Great Lakes, it

may be stated that more tonnage passes Sault Ste. Marie in seven

months of each year than goes through the Suez Canal in three years.

The city of Duluth alone, at the head of the water-trail, has a

tonnage each year of more than 11,500,000 tons.

Footnote 58:

The population of Michigan in the decade 1890-1900 drifted rapidly

toward the cities. Yet the Michigan railroads are bravely trying to

solve the problem of building up a population on the country desolated

by the lumbermen, and with great success are developing resources in

agriculture and manufactures which for a long time lay unsuspected.

Footnote 59:

In this connection the census map offers an unfailing interest.

Investigation shows that our star, denoting the center of population,

has traveled in all only 525 miles since 1790, the greatest west-bound

gains being in the decade 1850-60, 81 miles. At no time has the center

of population moved back toward the East, though it is nearer to doing

so now than ever before—proof that the history of America has been

but the history of a West, and also proof that that wayward West may

soon bend its footsteps homeward after a century of adventure. The

record of the movement of the population center is as follows:

1790, 23 miles east of Baltimore, Maryland; 1800, 18 miles west of

Baltimore, Maryland; 1810, 40 miles northwest by west of Washington,

D. C.; 1820, 16 miles north of Woodstock, Virginia; 1830, 19 miles

west-southwest of Moorefield, West Virginia; 1840, 16 miles south of

Clarksburg, West Virginia; 1850, 23 miles southeast of Parkersburg,

West Virginia; 1860, 20 miles south of Chillicothe, Ohio; 1870, 48

miles east by north of Cincinnati, Ohio; 1880, 8 miles west by south

of Cincinnati, Ohio; 1890, 20 miles east of Columbus, Indiana; 1900, 7

miles north of Columbus, Indiana.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

ACROSS THE PACIFIC

CHAPTER I

THE IRON TRAILS

At the time of the discovery of gold in California, there had been built

up a splendid Western population, hardy, self-confident, able to shift

for itself, wholly distinct from that population that it had for a

generation left behind at the old starting places of the trails. These

trails across the continent, wavering, tortuous, yet practicable, had

been fully established. So far as might be within the horizon of those

days, all was now ready for the epoch-making event that was to change

all the methods of America, that was to make Westerners by wholesale and

to draw them swiftly from every corner of the earth.

The great state of California alone was cause and sufficient reason for

the swift development of the remoter American West. There can not be

denied the tremendous effect produced by the sudden growth of

California, coming as it did hard on the time of the annexation of Texas

and the widening of our national territory in the far Southwest. As to

the discovery of gold and the swift growth of California being unmixed

benefits, there may exist at this later day something of a sober doubt.

California marked the beginning of the feverish, insane, excitable type

of American, who wishes to do everything at once—and does it! Without

California and the Civil War we should to-day still be settling the

West. With California we are settling the islands of the Orient. The

high-geared life of to-day is part of the corollary of washing a year’s

income out of the ground in an hour’s work, of crossing the continent in

a week instead of a season, of tearing down mountains by machinery

instead of building up homesteads deliberately. Stimulation and

destruction do not go so far apart. California gave to the world the

spectacle of a nation drunk with energy, using with maddened zeal for a

time powers made three-fold, employing an imagination under whose

concept naught under Heaven seemed impossible—or was impossible!

This was revolution. There was a demand for revolution of an even pace

in all lines of allied industry. It was time for the railroad, and the

railroad must now perforce come swiftly. We built better steamships to

get out into our new, feverish, golden West. We used the old trails, but

they would no longer serve. We employed the old mountain passes, the old

grazing and watering places, but neither would these serve. No time now

for hoof or wheel, or for the way of the ship upon the sea! No time now

for the wayside ranches along the Platte, for the old posts of Laramie

and Bridger and Hall! The golden country clamored all too strongly.

Therefore, with a leap, the old trails straightened out and shortened.

New passes over the Great Divide were found. The long thin line of rails

connected the East with a West now swiftly grown mightier than itself.

All American morals and manners underwent swift reconstruction. The

United States, plus California, plus the Western railways, became a

different nation.

It is not necessary to take up in detail the chronological or

geographical study of the building of the transcontinental railways.

They have done their work. The commercial history of America is

sufficiently well written to-day on the face of every country of the

globe. We have built our own railroads, and to-day we build and sell

railroads and equipment for the Himalayas and the Sudan. We shall build

the railroads that will make Africa another America. We shall build the

railroads that will at length bring the Anglo-Saxon face to face with

the Slav, in that struggle that shall pit the American West against the

Russian East.

The West of the midway district between the Missouri and Pacific was

largely settled by reflex. The mines of California spilled back men,

great, splendid men, to the eastward again, to exploit all those ranges

of the Rockies whose wealth the trappers had not suspected. Montana,

Idaho, Colorado, Nevada—all these might be called a part of the scheme

of California. New and splendid empires were founded, new standards of

civilization were erected in the recent wilderness. The grand and

alluring story of the West went on apace for yet a little time.

But these times were not to endure. There came swiftly the Western rush

of population, which swept off the map the free lands of all our Western

empire. The vast American public, mad with the lust of land, raped the

Indian reservations from those that had frail title given them in the

honor of a great nation; so that thus one more bar was broken between

the East and the West. Home-building, farm-making man came close on the

heels of trapper and trader and nomad cattle driver. The hordes of the

land seekers held their lotteries even in the desert once dreaded by the

travelers of the old Santa Fé trail. Incipient cities were built in that

waterless waste where Jedediah Smith, the first transcontinental

traveler, lost his life in mid-continent. Never a bit of open land was

left in all the West; or if there were such land remaining, it was of a

quality that would once have been viewed with contempt.

The story of the swift changes wrought by the iron trails is such as not

to afford complete satisfaction in the contemplation; yet we may calmly

review the different stages of that story. First we had the day of

competitive railway building, when there were not enough railroads for

the demands of a vast and unsettled region whose resources appealed to a

population. Then we came rapidly to the time of too many railroads; of

attempts to adjust an unprofitable competition; of combinations, of

arrangements, agreements, mergers; and of popular and governmental

action upon such mergers. To-day all America is districted and divided

among a few great railway systems. Once we were better than our

transportation; now we are not so good. Once we depended upon it; now it

rules us almost without argument. The swiftness with which these

tremendous changes have been brought about furnishes one of the most

remarkable phenomena recorded in the history of the world.

Recently there was erected at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a monument to a

forgotten man, John Fitch, who in the year 1785 was known as one curious

in experiments with steam as a motive power. Fitch built a steamboat,

and had visions of many things in the way of steam locomotion. The life

of this unknown man marks the extent of our backward vision in these

matters; yet Fitch lived little more than a century ago. Indeed, the

growth of the railroads of America has taken place in less than

three-quarters of a century. And yet to-day we have more than two

hundred thousand miles of railway, and as each day rolls by, we build

from ten to twenty-five miles more. Railroading is a profession

perfected in the hard evolution of American necessity. Our first

railways were but attempts, guesses, desires, hopes, purely local

propositions and not always well conceived as such. Yet they grew and

multiplied, and presently, before we had time to think, they had

multiplied over much. Then came the days of the railroad receiver. After

the receiver there came the combiner. This man, in these bubble days of

so-called prosperity, for a time undertakes to do what competition was

not able to do. It is only for a time that any man or combination of men

can escape the workings of the great natural law of competition. Neither

monopolies nor trades-unions, neither the “trust” in capital nor the

“trust” in labor can forever evade it. In time there will again be

change; and meantime, ruin.

To-day there are five great centralizations or combinations of capital

that control the railway situation in America. In these swift times of

change these arrangements may not long remain permanent, and it is

bootless to mention them specifically. The building of these thousands

of miles of railway and the assembling of them together under industrial

truce has been the product of a giant game in commerce, a commerce not

to be confined wholly by the limits of this continent. The great ships

built for the Orient are now an old story, an accepted enterprise that

spells Europe on the one hand and Asia on the other.

As for our own marches, Alaska is to repeat at least in part the story

of California. The Yukon and White Pass Railway is but a hint, a

beginning. It is now upon the question of a railway from Circle City in

Alaska to the Bering Sea, to connect there with a railway which shall

eventually tap both China and Siberia! It is entirely within possibility

that we shall in time see a continuous railway transportation from the

Atlantic to the far-off straits that separate this country from Asia.

Scientists tell us that over these straits there perhaps came once the

ancestors of the aboriginal population of this continent. This

population we have destroyed. There will also be destroyed all those

nomad tribes of northeastern Asia that seem not useful in this great

scheme which we call civilization. Alaska was long thought uninviting;

yet railroad building there is feasible, and Alaska is feasible as

residence for man; and railroad man is concerned with every corner of

this globe that can serve as residence for human beings.

In the course of an address during the year 1901, a modern railway

man[60] spoke in part as follows: “The twentieth century has been

ushered into existence, and at its very dawn we find a struggle, not for

the acquisition of new territory, not for the subjection of foreign

countries, not a crusade to introduce a new and better religion, but a

struggle between the great nations of the earth for supremacy in

industrial pursuits and to supply the markets of the world. The

nineteenth century has frequently been referred to as the Age of

Transportation. Distribution is the handmaid of production. Bacon said:

‘There are three things that make a country great: fertile fields, busy

workshops, easy conveyance for men and goods from place to place.’ The

evolution that has taken place in the transportation of this country

during the nineteenth century has been remarkable and unparalleled in

the history of man. In the year 1800 it cost one hundred dollars to move

a ton of wheat from Buffalo to New York. The regular rate is now a

dollar and a half per ton, and it has been carried for a dollar. One

hundred years ago we paid twenty-five cents per mile, traveling by

stage-coach, without baggage; now we carry home-seekers from the East

into California for approximately one-twentieth of the old rate.

“Our American railroads were, not a very long time since, owned largely

outside the United States, but during the world’s panic that occurred in

1893, our British, German and Dutch friends discovered the necessity of

selling something, and the only things in their strong boxes that they

could sell without too much sacrifice were their American securities.

They dumped them on the American market; and, notwithstanding the

financial strain and the depression from which we were suffering, our

American financiers mustered pluck, courage and money enough to buy

them. They were bought at bargain prices. The advance in them has been

stupendous, but it is worth a great deal to feel that we are not only

blessed with the most improved and cheapest transportation in the world,

but that our railroads are owned by our own people. The value of the

railroads of the United States amounts to over one-fifth of the total

wealth of the country.”

Another master in transportation,[61] in a public address delivered in

1902, gave yet further details in the vivid story of the extension of

the iron trails of America: “While the railroads may have to answer for

many mistakes of judgment or of intent,” said he, “on the whole the

result has been to create the most effective, useful, and by far the

cheapest system of land transportation in the world. In England the

average amount paid by the shipper for moving a ton of freight one

hundred miles is two dollars and thirty-five cents; in France, two

dollars and ten cents; in Austria, a dollar and ninety cents; in

Germany, where most of the railroads are owned and operated by the

government, a dollar and eighty-four cents; in Russia, also under

government ownership, where the shipments are carried under conditions

more nearly similar to our own than any other country as respects long

haul, a dollar and seventy cents. In the United States the average cost

is seventy-three cents, or less than forty per cent. of the average cost

in Europe.”

From the above comparisons this captain of transportation concludes that

the railroad industries of this country are in a flourishing condition

and that they should not be interfered with. Yet he concludes his

comment with words that contain a corollary inconsistent with his

earlier attitude, as we may later have occasion to note. He says: “For

the first time in the history of this country thousands of our farmers

are seeking homes in the Canadian Northwest, owing to the cheap lands

offered in that country, and to the difficulty of securing such lands in

the United Slates.” Earlier in the same address there is this

epigrammatic statement: “Land without population is a wilderness;

population without land is a mob.” If our Western Americans are leaving

the flag of a republican government to seek land elsewhere, is not the

inference fair that they do so because they have become a population

without land? If this be true, assuredly it is the work of the iron

trails.

We have an overgrowth, or, rather, too sudden and rank a growth, of

transportation in America. It is attended with sudden changes, attended

also with a certain weediness and immaturity, which we should be

entitled to call un-American and undesirable, even were it not for the

graver features that amount to revolutionary changes and to national

menaces. Borne aloft upon a great wave of commercial prosperity, the

American people is at the present time taking itself with entire

seriousness as the greatest nation of the world. Its rapid industrial

expansion has indeed been cause for marvel in the mind of all the world.

There is a certain national comfort in these reflections, without doubt,

and solace in the almost incomprehensible totals of the figures on which

such assertions are grounded. Therefore it must come almost with ill

grace to offer in these days of jubilation any word that might seem to

indicate that perhaps, in spite of all this superficial prosperity, all

may not be well with America as a nation, that all is not really well

with our American man.

We are told that these are good times, the best we ever knew. It is

triumphantly announced to us that we have in one year invested nearly

seventy millions of dollars in foreign securities, largely in railroad

bonds of Russia, in German Treasury bills, and English Exchequer loans.

This is very good; it sounds well. As an offset to it one should

apologize for offering the simple but multifold statements from the

columns of the daily press bearing upon the greater cost of living in

Western states. It is seven per cent. greater, says one dealer in

statistics. It is twenty-five per cent. greater than it ever was, says

another. The housewives of America, the best of all statisticians, say

that in 1902 it cost thirty-three per cent. more to live than it did in

1899. These prices of bare commodities in these days of super-excellent

transportation go well toward comparing with those we have shown as

existing in the far-off mountain communities in the days of pack-horse

and ox-team transportation. If this be so, is all well with America? The

prices are the results of combinations and monopolies. The monopolies

are based largely on non-competitive transportation. The iron trails are

built over the hearthfires of America. The iron trails must do otherwise

than thus.

We are informed that during the last year the balance of trade in favor

of the United States was something like seven hundred millions of

dollars. “Figures up to March twenty-first (1902), just finished,” says

a careful report, “are so stupendous as to be staggering. * * * Nations

have generally measured their prosperity by their foreign trade.”

There might perhaps be other ways of measuring that prosperity. As

against the above imposing aggregation of figures, I offer a simple

newspaper paragraph printed in 1902, which sounds like Kaskaskia, or

Alder Gulch, or the end of the Santa Fé Trail: “Potatoes have been

selling for a dollar and seventy-five cents a bushel in Chicago this

week,” says the item. “A year ago the price was about forty cents. This

enormous advance, coupled with the corresponding rise in the prices of

nearly all vegetables, presents a serious economic problem for large

families with small incomes.” The same paper goes on to say: “The

greatest sufferers from the high price of potatoes are the small

wage-earners. They have learned to depend upon potatoes almost as much

as upon bread. Yet, at a dollar and seventy-five cents a bushel, this

staple food is out of the reach of many. The best thing they can do is

to fall back on rice, which is an excellent substitute for potatoes and

is still reasonable in price. Unfortunately, large numbers of

wage-earners are incapable of making a sudden change in their diet. Many

women that have depended upon potatoes all their lives do not know how

to cook rice or hominy. They are as helpless with these substitutes as

were many of the Irish people with the corn meal that was sent to them

from America during the potato famine, or as Hindus, who are accustomed

to rice, would be when they were given wheat flour to cook. This

scarcity of potatoes is likely to cause a good deal of hardship before

the proper use of the cheaper staples is learned.”

And this is in America, in the zenith of the Age of Transportation! I

fancy my man of pack-horse and cordelle living upon rice! I fancy Daniel

Boone or Davy Crockett or Kit Carson using such diet as backing for his

deeds! Meat and corn are the diet that built America. Good leaders of

America, insist not over-much on this rice fare, as you do at present in

these bubble days. Let weediness and immaturity, imported overmuch, be

overrun and oppressed by organized rapacity, and then, one day, good

leaders, you shall see the American man even yet fall to his

well-learned task of leading himself.

This is in America, and in the Age of Transportation! I read of these

startling changes and can scarcely believe that they have happened

within a lifetime, a part of which was passed in a West where wealth and

poverty, arrogance and self-denial, were alike unknown; where, if one

hungered, he was free to enter the door of any little cabin he found

here or there in the mountains, and to eat freely of whatever food he

found, though the owner of the abode himself might be absent and might

forever remain unknown; where the thought of price did not enter into

the mind of either the uninvited visitor or his unknown host; where

herds, wild or tame, covered a country vast, inviting and hospitable;

where each man was his own leader; and where the thought of any

difficulty in the simple problem of making a living never entered into

the heart of man!

Those were days perhaps of not so great and apparent a national

prosperity, but there comes a catch in the throat at comparing those

days with these. The horror of it, the shameless waste, the destruction,

the change, the ruin of it all—these can leave us little comfort as we

gaze on the glittering picture of to-day. As a nation we are building

for ourselves higher and higher a false castle of prosperity, blowing

for ourselves wider and wider a bubble fragile at heart as any that ever

met collapse in another day. “Give me back my legions!” cried the Roman

general. God grant there may never bitterly rise to the lips of an

American leader the unavailing cry, “Give me back my Americans!” God

grant there come not too late the cry, “Give us back our America!”

“Taking it all around,” says an unprejudiced writer, “the present

generation in the United States reminds one of a young spendthrift just

come into a fine property, accumulated by the thrift and carefulness of

many ancestors. He thinks he is something out of the ordinary, and

intends showing others how things should be done. In the society of

flatterers, speculators and gamblers, he soon parts with his ready money

and bank stock. He then sells the timber off his land. After that is

spent he sells his live stock. Having thus deprived himself of the means

for the proper tillage of his soil, he then sells the hay crop from his

meadows until they are no longer productive. He next mortgages his

property; and the last scene in the final act is the auctioneer’s hammer

at the public vendue.”[62]

Another commentator[63] takes up the same trend of thought: “The cry of

the people of the West,” says he, “is rising almost to the ominous

threat of revolution. The wealth of the country has increased

enormously, but it is becoming concentrated in the hands of a

comparatively few individuals. Only in the days of the early empire and

late republic of Rome was it possible for a few individuals in a few

years to amass such enormous fortunes as they do. Having exploited the

wealth of the great middle class, we are now drifting into the second

stage. Small investments no longer pay. There is no Eastern or Western

state that has not a score of stranded towns and villages once

prosperous in small industries. The small farmer is no longer able to

make a living in the competition which he meets.... All this may be

progress, but it is progress over a precipice.”

Still another observer[64] carries his conclusions yet further, and in a

public address states: “The work of such men as [this monopolist] and

his associates of the big combinations is preparing the minds of our

people for socialism. I am not in favor of socialism, but men like these

so-called captains of industry, who are opposed to socialism, are

preparing the way for the rapid spread of the socialistic idea. Should

some able leader take up that idea and advocate it, we shall see it

spread with tremendous rapidity in America.”

So much for the accomplishments of the Age of Transportation. It has

already shown us the meaning of monopoly and has shown us the

abolishment of the individual. It has taught us, or some of us, to

believe that the establishment of an expensive university may serve as

emendative of an unpopular personal career. It has taught us, or some of

us, obsequiously to worship that form of wealth that soothes its

conscience by the building of public libraries. Whether or not learning

best grows and flourishes that has such foundation heads, library and

university alike must to-day admit their impotence to answer the cry of

the leader, “Give me back my Americans!”

The America of to-day is an America utterly and absolutely changed from

the principles whereon our original America was founded, and wherefrom

it grew and flourished. Never was there any corner of Europe, before the

days of those revolutions that put down kings, worse than some parts of

oppressed America to-day. It is not too late for revolution in America.

There is not justice in the belief that America can to-day be called the

land of the free. The individual is no more. He perished somewhere on

those heights we have seen him laboriously ascending, somewhere on those

long rivers we have seen him tracing. He died in the day of Across the

Waters.

To-day we have labor unions, organizations that in the old West would

have called forth indignant contempt in the mere suggestion. We have

associations of managers to fight the unions; we have monopolies,

combinations, masses, upon the one side and the other, contending, not

working together harmoniously. We have become par excellence the people

of castes and grades and classes. The whole theory of America was that

here there was hope for the individual; that here he might grow, might

prevail. It is degradation to abandon that theory. It is degradation for

the American man to say of his own volition: “I am but one cog of a

wheel, and my neighbor another. I can not change; I can not rise; I can

not progress; I can not grow; I dare not hope.” The degradation of the

industry shares the degradation of the individual. The joint

degradation, if it be accepted as final, spells a national deterioration

and a national ruin which may be gradual and slow, or may, in these

swift-moving days, be rapid and cataclysmic in its nature.

We have departed from the careful intent of that government which

originally abolished for us even the law of primogeniture, a clause

adopted in the state constitutions nearly throughout the Union. Our

general public is more absolutely ruled by a few than is the case in any

portion of the earth. Offsetting this, we boast of our “prosperity”! Let

those that like call this a national prosperity. It is national fate,

but there may be those that do not care to call it by the name of

prosperity. Times are good when all the people are busy. Most of the

people in the South were busy before the war; we called that slavery. It

was as nothing compared to the industrial slavery impending over the

American people to-day. It was simple by comparison as a problem.

Tremendous indeed is the problem this implies, and grave and serious

indeed should he be who attempts to solve it. We need statesmen, not

politicians, to-day. We need men willing to do their duty in office,

without regard to the question of their re-election to office.

We have promised that our study of American transportation should bring

us close to the heart of things in our national life. The promise may be

made good in the review of the work of the iron trails in the Age of

Transportation. It would be but raving to hold the captains of

transportation alone responsible for the deplorable changes that are

taking place in America and the American character; yet only an equal

folly could deny that too little fearless statesmanship, combined with

too much politics and too much ungoverned transportation, has been

responsible for many of these changes. Any candid student of American

transportation and of American politics will find himself irresistibly

arriving at the great question of the unrestricted American immigration.

We Americans have claimed this continent for humanity. We say that

America is not to be used by the Old World as colonization ground, or

for the planting ground of Old World ideas of government; and yet, even

as we speak these words, we vitiate doctrine even wider than the Monroe

doctrine—the doctrine of common sense. We throw open the gates of

America and invite the sodden hordes of worthless peasantry to flock

hither and pillage this country, the choicest of the continent, without

let or hindrance, without requiring of them the first standard of

fitness for American citizenship; without asking of them even the

slightest educational test as to their fitness to enter into and enjoy a

part of the once splendid heritage of this American people. The only

price we ask is a ticket and a vote.

Of a truth, there would be justice in saying that we would better watch

not so much South America as Castle Garden. There is where much of the

degradation and depression of American life is going on. There is where

trades-unionism begins, and indeed must begin. There is where monopolies

begin. There is where, indeed, we are being colonized by the European

peoples. For those that come here to work, to study, to learn and to

grow there may be room yet in this great America. For those that come

here to exist as parasites there should be no longer any room. All this

is to some extent the act of common carriers in search of commerce.

Behind this search there often lies all too certainly the intent of

importation of a passive and semi-servile class,[65] content to accept

the hardest conditions of life, and content to accept life barren of all

hope, of all chance for future betterment.

Such life is un-American. Every one of these foreigners comes here with

a vote in his hand. We have long allowed the vote to pay for everything;

and, seeing that he had a vote, the poor foreigner though turbulent and

discontented, has perforce satisfied himself with an America not much

better and not much different from Europe. Assuredly, the time will

come, and perhaps presently, when there must be considered with all

seriousness this question of a mis-chosen and wrongfully used factor in

our commercial fabric. It is not the upper branches of our model system

of commerce which are wrong, nor will pruning those upper branches set

that wrong right. We must go to the root of things.

Surely we have gone forward far enough in our commercial growth to learn

that our country is not exhaustless. Were it so we should not to-day be

considering the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars to

stretch the shrunken acreage of the once boundless West. Once we had

enough for all, but now we no longer have enough for all. Once we could

keep open house, but we can now no longer do so. There comes a time even

in the question of open house when the doctrine of self preservation,

greater than any Monroe doctrine, greater than any constitution, must

have its place.

We, as well as Great Britain and other world powers, must eventually

come to the doctrine of selfishness. Great Britain herself, a land not

offering the inducements held out by America to the penniless settler,

seriously contemplates the restriction of immigration along the severest

lines. She fears becoming the great almshouse of Europe. Shall we in her

stead become the great almshouse of the world? It is suggested by a

foreign-born philanthropist, for instance, that America should forthwith

throw open her doors to the five millions of persecuted Russian Jews.

English authorities cheerfully believe that America could easily

assimilate this great mass of new population. There are many American

captains of politics and captains of transportation who would cheerfully

agree in throwing this task of assimilation upon this country; but this

attitude can not long remain indorsed by fearless men and thoughtful men

unsodden in the mire of modern American politics, or unsmirched in the

grime of headlong and heedless American commerce.

Under all this discussion and all these generalizations there lies, of

course, the great, human, individual question. Back of all stands that

great, pathetic figure, the man about whose neck fate has hung the

destiny of a wife and children. Once there was room in America for that

man. Once there was hope and a chance ultimately to be called his own.

It is this man, this simple, common, plain American citizen who is

to-day most vitally concerned. The man we have with us, the man of

America, who has helped win and make America, is the one that ought to

be protected by America, rather than the one that still has root in the

Old World soil that bore him.

This is selfishness; but it is the only plan that offers hope to

humanity in either world. The glory, the pride of America, the beauty

and the flowering of her growth, have root in her splendid heritage, the

heritage of a virile character born of a magnificent environment; but

there exists no heritage which may not be dissipated, there lives no

blood forever proof against continuous vitiation.

“The American people,” says the governor of a Western state, “will no

more submit to commercial despotism than they would to governmental

despotism, and the tendency in the one case can be, and will be, as

easily thwarted as the tendency in the other.” Let us leave to an

impartial and intelligent judgment of readers the question whether or

not there exists or threatens to exist in America a commercial

despotism; whether or not there exists any American people; whether or

not we have, in the foregoing pages, found any causes for the changes

and tendencies toward change that are to-day unmistakable

phenomena—changes so rapid and elemental that any true American ought

to be ashamed to say, “I belong without thought to this, that or the

other political party.” Perhaps we shall be all the better fortified

with premises if we delve a trifle deeper into the statistics of this

question of foreign immigration; for any writer deals better in

undeniable premises than in ready-made conclusions.

The tables compiled by the United States Commissioner of Labor are

conclusive. At the beginning of the Revolutionary War four-fifths of the

American population could claim English as their native tongue. To-day

not half our population can make such claim. There is interest in the

story of the statistics.

“The number of immigrants coming into this country between 1820 and June

thirtieth, 1900, was nineteen million one hundred and fifteen thousand

two hundred and twenty-one. Prior to 1820 the government did not take

account of immigration, but the generally accepted estimate of the total

immigration between the adoption of the Constitution and 1820 is but two

hundred and fifty thousand. This number is not included in the above

total.

“The character of the immigration has changed in a most interesting way.

From 1821 to 1850, two and three-tenths per cent. of our immigration

came from Canada and Newfoundland; during the next decade, 1851 to 1860,

the percentage was the same, and during the last decade only one-tenth

per cent. of the immigrants was from those sections. From 1821 to 1850,

twenty-four and two-tenths per cent. came from Germany, and in the next

decade thirty-six and six-tenths per cent., this being the highest

percentage reached by the Germans. During the last decade the Germans

supplied only thirteen and seven-tenths per cent. of our foreign

immigration. During the period first named, 1821 to 1850, Great Britain

furnished fifteen per cent. of the immigrants, and in the next decade

sixteen and three-tenths per cent. Then came a large increase from Great

Britain between 1861 and 1870, the percentage being twenty-six and

two-tenths; from 1871 to 1880 it was nineteen and five-tenths, while for

the last decade it was but seven and four-tenths. From 1821 to 1850

Ireland furnished forty-two and three-tenths per cent. of our

immigrants, and between 1851 and 1860 thirty-five and two-tenths per

cent. Since then there has been a rapid decrease, and between 1891 and

1900 Ireland furnished but ten and five-tenths per cent. of our

immigrants. Those from Norway and Sweden constituted only six-tenths per

cent. between 1821 and 1850. The Scandinavians increased in numbers

between 1881 and 1890, when their proportion was ten and eight-tenths

per cent.; during the last decade it was eight and seven-tenths per

cent.

“The immigration from the whole group just named, Canada and

Newfoundland, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, and Norway and Sweden,

shows a marked relative decrease. While the immigrants from these

countries constituted seventy-four and three-tenths per cent. of the

whole number of immigrants during the entire period under discussion,

they furnished between 1821 and 1850 eighty-four and four-tenths per

cent. of the total, and during the next decade ninety-one and two-tenths

per cent., since which time there has been a rapid decrease, this group

of countries during the last decade furnishing but forty and four-tenths

per cent.

“These figures enable us to bring into direct and sharp comparison the

immigration from countries that fifty years ago furnished hardly any

increment to our population. From 1851 to 1860 Austria-Hungary sent no

immigrants to this country, or not enough to make any impression upon

the statistics, but between 1861 and 1870 the immigration from that

country was four-tenths per cent., during the next decade two and

six-tenths per cent., from 1881 to 1890 six and seven-tenths per cent.,

while during the last decade it was sixteen and one-tenth per cent.

“Italy, beginning with two-tenths per cent. during the period from 1821

to 1850, increased to two per cent. between 1871 and 1880, and to nearly

six per cent. during the next decade, while during the last decade that

country furnished seventeen and seven-tenths per cent. of our total

number.

“The proportions for Russia and Poland are almost identical with those

of Italy. Those two countries, taken together, beginning with only

one-tenth per cent. of our total number of immigrants between 1821 and

1850, increased but slightly until between 1881 and 1890, when they

contributed five per cent., and during the last decade sixteen and

three-tenths per cent. These three sections—Austria-Hungary, Italy, and

Russia and Poland—taken together, contributed during the last decade

fifty and one-tenth per cent. of our immigrants, as against forty and

four-tenths per cent., as stated, for the group of five countries first

named; nine and five-tenths per cent. came from elsewhere.

“It is interesting to know how many of the nineteen million one hundred

fifteen thousand two hundred and twenty-one immigrants coming to this

country since 1821 are now living. The recent census, by its

classification of population into native and foreign born, answers the

question, and we find that of the total number of immigrants fifty-four

and seven-tenths per cent. were living in June, 1900. In 1880 sixty-two

per cent. of the whole number of immigrants at that date were living,

while in 1850 forty-four and four-tenths per cent. were still in

existence.

“... The conclusion unfortunately is unavoidable,” says the

statistician, “that our immigration is constantly increasing in

illiteracy, and the immigrants themselves are showing higher percentage

of illiteracy. Nearly one-half of our steerage immigration now presents

an illiteracy of from forty to over fifty per cent. Of the three hundred

eighty-eight thousand nine hundred and thirty-one steerage aliens who

arrived during the year, the following totals are given for the

principal countries”:

Males. Females.

Southern Italian 86,929 24,396

Polish 25,466 12,170

Hebrew 23,343 19,894

German 17,238 12,442

Slavic 19,309 7,622

Northern Italian 16,202 4,158

Scandinavian 12,200 9,981

And fifty per cent. of them are illiterate! Shall we let them come?

Shall we perhaps teach them to eat rice with the rest of us? Shall we

divide our inheritance with them? Shall we remember only that each of

them has a vote? The leveling methods of the Age of Transportation, the

day of the iron trails, have made possible, and have made imperative,

these very questions. Their answer lies in the future, yet perhaps no

very distant future. There are not lacking those, and they constantly

increase in numbers, who believe that the answer must be the putting up

of the bars against all future immigration except of a closely selected

sort, and preferably that bred upon this continent. America has eaten

overmuch; she may yet assimilate, but she must gorge no more. We can now

rear actual Americans enough to feed the world, and to defeat the world

when the time shall come for the fatal shock of arms, and under a system

of rest and recuperation we may become a united and strong America;

while under the system of the past, and the system that now prevails, we

must presently become a warring and divided, hence a weakening, land.

-----

Footnote 60:

Mr. Paul Morton, of the Santa Fé Railroad.

Footnote 61:

Mr. James J. Hill, of the Great Northern Railroad.

Footnote 62:

Wm. F. Flynn, in “Forest and Stream.”

Footnote 63:

Prof. Benjamin F. Terry, of the University of Chicago.

Footnote 64:

Rev. George C. Lorimer.

Footnote 65:

Since the above lines were written the following editorial comment

appeared in a leading American daily newspaper:

“Almost every nation in the world is sending an increasing number of

immigrants to the United States. Last month (April, 1903) the

new-comers numbered 126,200, being 30,000 more than for April of 1902.

The total for the year may reach 1,000,000, or half the population of

Chicago, the second largest city in the country.

“Is so great an influx of foreigners natural or desirable? Many in a

condition to know say that immigration is promoted largely by

mine-owners and railroad managers, who wish to be kept supplied with

cheap labor, and who do not care particularly whence it comes or

whether it will be desirable material out of which to make American

citizens, or whether its presence may not contribute to social or

industrial disorder.

“Many of the great railroad systems approve of unrestricted

immigration because it swells their profitable emigrant business. They

have their agents in Europe soliciting that kind of business. The

greater the number of men and women that can be induced to come to

this country and to buy tickets to interior points, the more money the

roads make. They offer low ocean and rail rates, which tempt the

emigrant and yet are profitable to the roads.

“While some great employers favor unrestricted immigration because it

gives them cheap labor, the labor unions may reach the conclusion that

for that very reason unrestricted immigration must be harmful to their

interests, because it will lead inevitably to a reduction of wages.

When the supply of labor is much in excess of the demand the

maintenance of a high wage scale becomes impossible.

“While a large percentage of the immigration is unskilled labor, it

must be remembered that many unions are composed of men who do that

kind of labor. Moreover, some of them will learn trades and increase

the number of skilled workers. When times grow dull there will be an

excess of workers and wages will go down. The labor organizations

belonging to the American Federation of Labor asked the last Congress

to bar out illiterate immigrants. The object was to keep down the

undesirable cheap labor immigration. The steamship companies, which

make money off their steerage passengers and drum up business

throughout eastern Europe, and some western railroads which are

extending their lines, protested against and defeated the legislation

‘organized labor’ petitioned for. Considering the swelling tide of

immigration, much of it of an undesirable nature, the labor leaders

probably will ask the next Congress in emphatic language to order the

exclusion of illiterates to protect American labor and the high

standard of American citizenship.”

CHAPTER II

THE PATHWAYS OF THE FUTURE

The open and abounding West is no more. From California, from all the

interior regions of the great dry plains rises the same cry, that the

government should take measures to give the people more land; that by

means of irrigation it should restore, in some measure at least, the

opportunities which allured the men who in the old days followed in the

pilgrimage “out West.” This changed and restricted region has problems

entirely different from those of the West that was.

Once we wished a population to embrace the opportunities that abounded

in the West. Now we wish to increase the opportunities for a population

clamoring for a better chance than is offered anywhere in America. It is

demanded that the government shall bring about reclamation of the arid

lands, and their actual settlement in small tracts. “The political party

that shall boldly advocate a great national irrigation appropriation

will receive the support of millions of people, now homeless and

discontented, who desire homes and an opportunity to make a living by

honest labor.” This is the statement of a master in transportation, who

has assisted in the importation of hundreds of thousands of these

homeless and discontented people into an America too suddenly gone

small. He would scarcely care to see our railroads under government

control, but he can suggest a method by which the government could be

immensely helpful to the Western people, and perhaps to the Western

railroads!