The Westward Movement. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
population which continued to edge farther outward and farther down-stream. The settlement at Nashville, the settlements of Kentucky, were at touch with the Ohio River, the broad highway that led easily down to the yet broader highway of the Mississippi, that great, mysterious stream so intimately connected with American history and American progress. It was easy to get to New Orleans, but hard to get back over the Alleghanies.
HAVING THE MISSISSIPPI FOR ITS ROAD, THE WEST IS CONTENT.
Meantime the stout little government at Washington, knowing well enough all the dangers which threatened it, continued to work out the problems of the West. Some breathless, trembling years passed by—years full of wars and treaties in Europe as well as in America. Then came the end of all doubts and tremblings. The lying intrigues at the mouth of America's great roadway ceased by virtue of that purchase of territory which gave to America forever this mighty Mississippi, solemn, majestic, and mysterious stream, perpetual highway, and henceforth to be included wholly within the borders of the West. The year which saw the Mississippi made wholly American was one mighty in the history of America and of the world. The date of the Louisiana Purchase is significant not more by reason of a vast domain added to the West than because of the fact that with this territory came the means of building it up and holding it together. It was now that for the first time the solidarity of this New World was forever assured. We gained a million uninhabited miles—a million miles of country which will one day support its thousands to the mile. But still more important, we gained the right and the ability to travel into it and across it and through it. France had failed to build roads into that country, and thereafter neither France nor any other power might ever do so.
The down-river men.
HOW MUCH RICHER WAS THIS WEST THAN DREAMED.
How feeble is our grasp upon the future may be seen from the last utterance. The sum of $15,000,000 seemed "enormous." To-day, less than a century from that time, one American citizen has in his lifetime made from the raw resources of this land a fortune held to be $266,000,000. One Western city, located in that despised territory, during one recent year showed sales of grain alone amounting to $123,300,000; of live stock alone, $268,000,000; of wholesale trade, $786,205,000; of manufactures—where manufactures were once held impossible—the total of $741,097,000. It was once four weeks from Maine to Washington. It is now four days from Oregon. The total wealth of all the cities, all the lands, all the individuals of that once despised West, runs into figures which surpass all belief and all comprehension. And this has grown up within less than a hundred years.
THE WESTERNER RAISES MORE THAN HE CAN EAT.
But now we must conceive of our Western man as not now in dress so near a parallel to that of the savage whom he had overcome. There was falling into his mien somewhat more of staidness and sobriety. This man had so used the ax that he had a farm, and on this farm he raised more than he himself could use—first step in the great future of the West as storehouse for the world. This extra produce could certainly not be taken back over the Alleghanies, nor could it be traded on the spot for aught else than merely similar commodities.
Here, then, was a turning-point in Western history. There is no need to assign to it an exact date. We have the pleasant fashion of learning history through dates of battles and assassinations. We might do better in some cases did we learn the times of happenings of certain great and significant things. It was an important time when this first Western farmer, somewhat shorn of fringe, sought to find market for his crude produce, and found that the pack-horse would not serve him so well as the broad-horned flatboat which supplanted his canoe.
HOW HE MIGHT SELL THIS SURPLUS FAR FROM HOME.
The flatboat ran altogether down-stream. Hence it led altogether away from home and from the East. The Western man was relying upon himself, cutting loose from traditions, asking help of no man; sacrificing, perhaps, a little of sentiment, but doing so out of necessity, and only because of the one great fact that the waters would not run back uphill, would not carry him back to that East which was once his home. So the homes and the graves in the West grew, and there arose a civilization distinct and different from that which kept hold upon the sea and upon the Old World.
WHAT WAS THE WEST AT THIS TIME OF DOWN-STREAM?
UNITED STATES CENSUS 1870.
It may now prove of interest to take a glance at the crude geography of this Western land at that time when it first began to produce a surplus, and the time when it had permanently set its face away from the land east of the Alleghanies. The census map (see page 30) will prove of the best service, and its little blotches of color tell much in brief regarding the West of 1800. For forty years before this time the fur trade had had its depot at the city of St. Louis. For a hundred years there had been a settlement upon the Great Lakes. For nearly a hundred years the town of New Orleans had been established. Here and there, between these foci of adventurers, there were odd, seemingly unaccountable little dots and specks of population scattered over all the map, product of that first uncertain hundred years. Ohio, directly west of the original hotbed, was left blank for a long time, and indeed received her first population from the southward, and not from the East, though the New-Englander Moses Cleveland founded the town of Cleveland as early as 1796. Lower down in the great valley of the Mississippi was a curious, illogical, and now forgotten little band of settlers who had formed what was known as the "Mississippi Territory." Smaller yet, and more inexplicable, did we not know the story of the old water-trail from the Green Bay to the Mississippi, there was a dot, a smear, a tiny speck of population high up on the east bank of the Mississippi, where the Wisconsin emptied. These valley settlements far outnumbered all the population of the State of Ohio, which had lain directly in the path of the star, but the streams of which lay awkwardly on the scheme of travel. The West was beginning to be the West. The seed sown by Marquette the Good, by Hennepin the Bad, by La Salle the Bold, by Tonti the Faithful—seed despised by an ancient and corrupt monarchy—had now begun to grow.
Illustration: UNITED STATES CENSUS 1890.
ANOTHER WEST BEYOND.
Yet, beyond the farthest families of the West of that day, there was still a land so great that no one tried to measure it, or sought to include it in the plans of family or nation. It was all a matter for the future, for generations much later. Compared with the movements of the past, it must be centuries before the West—whatever that term might mean—could ever be overrun. That it could ever be exhausted was, to be sure, an utterly unthinkable thing. There were vague stories among the hardy settlers about new lands incredibly distant, mythically rich in interest. But who dreamed the import of the journey of strong-legged Zebulon Pike into the lands of the Sioux, and who believed all his story of a march from Colorado to Chihuahua, and thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused for the peaceful settlers of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty miles away, by that ancient saga, that heroically done, misspelled story of Lewis and Clark? There was still to be room enough and chance enough in the West.
II. AGAINST THE WATERS
THE UP-STREAM MAN.
In 1810 the Western frontier of the United States slanted like the roof of a house from Maine to Louisiana. The center of population was almost exactly upon the site of the city of Washington.
That mysterious land beyond the Mississippi was even then receiving more and more of that adventurous population which the statesmen of the Louisiana Purchase feared would leave the East and never would return. The fur-traders of St. Louis had found a way to reach the Rockies. The adventurous West was once more blazing a trail for the commercial and industrial West to follow. This was the second outward setting of the tide of