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 THE 
 
 UNITED STATES OF YESTERDAY 
 
 AND OF TO-MORROW.
 
 THE 
 
 UNITED STATES OF YESTERDAY 
 
 AND OF TO-MORROW. 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM BARROWS, D.D., 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 'twelve nights in the hunters' camp;" " OREGON : THE STRUGGLE FOR 
 
 possession;" "the Indian's side of the Indian question;" etc. 
 
 Out of old Books, new Writings, and much Meditation not of yesterday, 
 lie will endeavor to select a thing or two ; and from the Past, in a circuitous 
 way, illustrate the Present and the Future. — Carlyle. 
 
 Whoever would do his duty, and his whole duty, in the councils of the 
 Government, must look upon the whole country as it is, in its whole length 
 and breadth. He must comprehend it in its vast extent, its novel character, 
 its sudden development, its amazing progress, confounding all calculations, and 
 almost overwhelming the imagination. — Webster. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1888.
 
 Copyright, 1887, 
 By E. a. Barrows. 
 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 Chaptek 
 
 I. How Large is the West ? 9 
 
 II. Surprising Distances in the United States 18 
 
 III. The Six Growths of the United States . 27 
 
 IV. Growth in Settlements 42 
 
 V. Ancient Chicago 53 
 
 YI. The "Great American Desert" .... 93 
 VII. Large Landholdings in the United States . 138 
 
 VIII. Wild Life on the Border 169 
 
 IX. Pioneering in Education 200 
 
 X. Lynch Law 221 
 
 XL Eastern Jealousy and Neglect of the 
 
 West 263 
 
 XII. The Railway System of the West . . . 314 
 
 XIII. The Empire of the Future 355 
 
 XIV. Conclusion 404 
 
 INDEX 421
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 'T^HIS book has been written to answer ques- 
 -^ tions. As the author in earlier days liad 
 spent several years beyond the Mississippi, and 
 much time and travel there since in official work, 
 during which he made ten tours over the border, 
 and in the East had devoted much labor to public 
 addresses and lectures on our new country, it was 
 quite natural that a miscellaneous information 
 should be solicited from him concerning the terri- 
 tory between the Alleghanies and the Pacific. 
 
 For various reasons it has seemed best to let 
 this information group itself into topics, and so it 
 stands classified under headings and in chapters. 
 
 If it seem that many authors have been cited 
 or quoted, with volume and page given, the reason 
 is obvious. They were better informed on the 
 matters in hand than the writer, and therefore 
 support his statements and observations with a 
 wider authority.
 
 Vm INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The author hopes that the candid reader will 
 not allow the magnitude of some of the facts and 
 statements to mar their credibility. Such vast- 
 ness must be both expected and tolerated in 
 speaking faithfully of a domain much larger 
 than all Europe, whose growth in all the ele- 
 ments of a nation has been without precedent 
 or parallel. 
 
 WILLIAM BARROWS. 
 Reading, Mass., 
 
 October, 1887.
 
 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 OF 
 
 YESTERDAY AND OF TO-MORROW. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 HOW LARGE IS " THE WEST " ? 
 
 NEAR the close of the last century France 
 was making wonderful growth in imperial 
 territory and power. Her increase M-as so great 
 and convulsive as to jar every throne in Europe. 
 Edmund Burke anxiously turned the attention 
 of Great Britain to her colossal rival, and spoke 
 of ambitious France as " something which awed 
 and commanded the imagination." 
 
 How large, territorially, would the France of to- 
 day be in this country ? Suppose Texas to be a 
 circular lake and France a circular island ; the 
 island could be anchored centrally in the lake 
 out of sight of land, twent3-two miles from any 
 point on the encircling shore. The vastness of 
 this State of Texas — equal to the capacity of 
 England five times, and of Massachusetts thirty-
 
 10 now LARGE IS " THE WEST " ? 
 
 four — is not so very much overstated by the 
 bold figure of Mr. Webster iu his 7th of March 
 Speech : " So vast that a bird caunot fly over it 
 in a week." One accurate statement in arithmet- 
 ical figures is so startling as at first to provoke 
 an honest disbelief. Nevertheless it is true that 
 if the entire living population of the globe — 
 fourteen hundred millions — were divided into 
 families of five persons each, all tliose families 
 could be located in Texas, each family having a 
 house-lot of half an acre, and then leave more 
 than seventy millions of family lots untaken.^ 
 
 Such surprises are constantly recurring if one 
 follows up an ordinary school geography with 
 questions of comparison. In the days of the con- 
 troversy with England over Oregon, some thought 
 it too small an item for so great a peril of the peace 
 and blood of the two countries. The item puts 
 on ampler and more important extent and issue 
 to-day, when our portion of the territory then 
 in dispute — Oregon, Washington Territory, and 
 Idaho — is equal in extent to Great Britain and 
 Ireland twice told, with a remnant nearly as large 
 as Connecticut. 
 
 If Colorado M^ere crowded into the map of 
 Europe it would crowd out almost as much as 
 Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, 
 Greece, and Wales. If we were able to take 
 
 1 We have followed Donaldson as to the area of Texas = 
 274,356 sc[uare miles.
 
 HOW LARGE IS "THE WEST"? H 
 
 iinuiigraiton of acres, and nationally, we could 
 locate in Dakota, acre for acre. Great Britain, Ire- 
 land, Belgium, and the Netherlands. 
 
 Suppose a parallelogram be made to corner on 
 Milwaukee, with a line due west to tlie Pacific, 
 and by the ocean shore north to our northwestern 
 corner, and thence on our boundary line due east, 
 and to Lake Superior and down to the point of 
 starting, — that enclosure, being about three hun- 
 dred and fifty-seven miles by seventeen hundred 
 and fifty-six, would cut up into one hundred and 
 twenty-nine Connecticuts. 
 
 Yet another illustration from that region will 
 serve to impress on us the magnitude of our 
 interior and Western areas. In 1864 Abraham 
 Lincoln signed th.e bill granting the Northern 
 Pacific Eailroad. As a trunk road it might be 
 assumed to open up a belt of wild laud four hun- 
 dred miles wide and eighteen hundred long. This 
 amount of unsettled country the charter proposed 
 to take from its prehistoric occupants — Indians 
 and buffaloes — and give it to agriculture, manu- 
 factures, commerce, schoolhouses and churches, 
 voters and jurors. That belt would contain Eng- 
 land, Scotland, and Ireland ; Spain and Portugal ; 
 Belgium and the Netherlands ; Norway, Den- 
 mark, Sweden, and eight Palestines. And yet the 
 most eastern depot of that road is fifteen hundred 
 miles west of New England tide-water. A man 
 visits those eleven States of the Old World, and is
 
 12 HOW LAKGE IS " THE WEST " ? 
 
 gone a year on the long tour, and after liis return 
 he perhaps lectures or publishes a book on his 
 travels. The next generation may travel as far 
 in the cars on that belt and see as many marvels 
 of growth as he would hoary wonders abroad, and 
 not leave home. 
 
 It may enhance the force of this illustration of 
 area to add that the amount of land granted to 
 this road by the Government in its original char- 
 ter was equal to all New England and an extra 
 Massachusetts. 
 
 Probably few Americans, even scholarly ones, 
 and certainly very few of those whose benevolence 
 works in the extension of education and Chris- 
 tianity for the world, realize how much the Amer- 
 ican Union was enlarged by the Mexican War and 
 the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that closed it in 
 1848, and the Gadsden Purchase. That treaty for- 
 mally included and conceded Texas, previously an- 
 nexed, and the total addition to the territory of 
 the United States was equal to one hundred and 
 four States as large as Massachusetts ; it was one 
 hundred and fifty times larger than the Holy 
 Land of Israel, the Palestine of marvellous record. 
 Patriotism, philanthropy, and Christianity have 
 been singularly tardy in going in where our sword 
 went out ; and the most of this land has won but 
 little interest, though under our own flag, com- 
 pared with the interest given by us to lands 
 under the Crescent, and to the territory and home
 
 now LARGE IS "THE WEST"? 13 
 
 missionary fields of the English Crown. It is 
 one of the peculiarities of benevolence in the 
 United States, that so much of the foreign field 
 of the American church is the home field of the 
 British Crown and of the Established Church of 
 England. 
 
 I shall never recover from the overwhelming 
 impressions of the vastness of our great valley 
 lying between the Alleghanies and the Eocky 
 Mountains, as they came on me when I first went 
 down the eastern slope of it. It was in the au- 
 tumn of 1840, when our steamer swung into the 
 Ohio at Guyandotte, and we were seven days of 
 fair running to St. Louis. Current and steam for 
 a week to go down one side of this valley ! Since 
 then I have seen more of it, and only to deepen 
 the thought of its immensity. Its northern rim is 
 perpetually fringed by arctic lichens and mosses 
 and firs around their ice-beds, and its southern is 
 perpetually fragrant with the rose and magnolia 
 and orange-blossom. 
 
 If you are familiar mainly \A'ith the valley 
 of the Thames or Tweed or Merrimac or Hudson, 
 struggle a moment with your fancy to measure this 
 great valley of a continent. As aid and stepping- 
 stones, recall your reading of Roman history when 
 that Empire had its greatest extent. Consider 
 how beyond the horizon in all directions Eoman 
 legions swarmed, capturing the great cities of the 
 world and then returning to the Eternal City
 
 14 now LARGE IS " THE WEST " ? 
 
 leading processions of kings and nobles as cap- 
 tives and suitors. Yet this valley bas capacity 
 for tbe entire lloman Empire in tbe days of its 
 broadest expanse, and half another ! Tiie sword 
 of a CjBsar could never point so far over ter- 
 ritory it claimed and awed as tlie peaceful band 
 of an American President is extended to receive 
 tbe votes and congratulations of the Itepublic. 
 Gibbon gives tbe greatest area of the Eoman 
 Empire at 1,000,000 square miles, and our valley 
 is 2,450,000. 
 
 Europe is cut up into twenty areas, with as 
 many governments. They range from imperial 
 Eussia to tlie principality of Monaco, embracing 
 six square miles, — about one fourth of the extent 
 of a Yankee township. The twenty, realms of 
 Europe, the entire continent, could be located 
 within the United States, and then there would 
 remain uncovered all New England, New York, 
 New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West 
 Virginia. This statement will not surprise any 
 one who considers that the United States is nine- 
 teen times larger than France, twenty times larger 
 than Spain, and seventy-eight times larger than 
 England. 
 
 Our Pacific margin is worthy of measuring and 
 considering by one who would speak correctly 
 of the West. Its exact length, according to tbe 
 United States Coast Survey, from the corner post 
 on Mexico to British Columbia, is seventeen
 
 HOW LAKGE IS " THE WEST " ■? 15 
 
 hundred and forty-three miles, measuring and 
 reckoning in, as is usual in such work, coast 
 indentations. The shore line of the Territory of 
 Alaska, measured from headland to headland, 
 without regard to coast indentations and exclu- 
 sive of all islands off the coast and beyond Ooni- 
 mak Pass, is forty-three hundred and sixty-five 
 statute miles. This includes the northern or Arc- 
 tic coast line beyond Behriug Strait and up past 
 Point Barrow to Demarcation Point. Here is a 
 United States coast line of sixty-one hundred and 
 eight statute miles ; and its extent will be more 
 justly estimated in comparison with the total At- 
 lantic coast line of Europe, which is only eighty- 
 four hundred and eighty miles. 
 
 This coast fact contrasts strikingly, and for the 
 United States pleasantly, with the very English 
 assumption and prediction of Sir George Simpson 
 in his narrative of " A Journey Pound the World 
 in 1841-42." The Oregon Question was then 
 warming toward its conclusion, and Sir George, 
 Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, doubled 
 his cruise on the northwest coasts in his interests 
 in fur and English dominion. Evidently feeling 
 and fearing the rivalry of the United States on 
 that coast, and having said that our acquisition 
 of Louisiana " nursed into life the marauder's plea 
 of contiguity," he proceeds to add : " The United 
 States will never possess more than a nominal 
 jurisdiction, nor long possess even that, on the
 
 16 HOW LARGE IS " THE WEST " ? 
 
 west side of the Eocky Mountains ; and supposing 
 the country to be divided to-morrow to the entire 
 satisfaction of the most unscrupulous patriot in 
 the Union, I challenge Congress to bring my pre- 
 diction and its power to the test by imposing the 
 Atlantic tariff on the posts of the Pacific. . . . 
 England and llussia, whether as friends or foes, 
 cannot fail to control the destiny of the human 
 race, for good or for evil, to an extent which com- 
 paratively confines every other nation within the 
 scanty limits of its own proper locality." 
 
 This cannot now be so interesting reading to the 
 English and to Hudson's Bay men, when Eussia 
 has sold out wholly in the northwest of America 
 to the United States, and England holds there only 
 about three hundred miles of sea-coast, while the 
 United States owns sixty-one hundred and eight. 
 
 Some are unconscious of the vast area of our 
 country, and so are in an amusing fault some- 
 times and provincial when putting the "West" 
 nigh at hand, and great cities and sections in it 
 near together. 
 
 In his " Famous Americans " Parton thus speaks 
 of Webster : " He liked large things, — mountains, 
 elms, great oaks, mighty bulls and oxen, wide 
 fields, the ocean, the Union, and all things of mag- 
 nitude. He liked great Eome far better than re- 
 fined Greece, and revelled in the immense things 
 of literature, such as ' Paradise Lost ' and the Book 
 of Job, Burke, Dr. Johnson, and the Sixth Book of
 
 HOW LARGE IS " THE WEST " '? 17 
 
 the ^neid." Herein lies a broad hint that geog- 
 raphy as well as law gave Webster stimulus in liis 
 marvellous and varied defence of the American 
 Union. He rose to the height of his great argu- 
 ment under continental as well as constitutional 
 inspirations. In making up great Americans much 
 use must be made of American geography. In 
 our vastness of realm there is much danger that 
 the East- and the West and the North and the 
 South will produce provincial men.
 
 18 DISTANCES IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 SURPllISING DISTANCES IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 " T TOW far is it to Chicago?" Our young 
 -L J. English friend made the inquiry when 
 that city was suggested as convenient headquarters 
 while he might be running up and down the 
 country on a tour of observation. When the 
 answer was given, " Something over a thousand 
 miles," he was amazed ; for he was fresh from 
 England, whose longest meridian diameter is only 
 three hundred and sixty-five statute miles, from 
 Berwick to St. Alban's Head, and whose narrowest 
 measure is sixty-two, from the head of the Solway 
 to Wandsbeck on the German Ocean. 
 
 Perhaps it is expecting too much that one should 
 know tolerably the travelled lengths and breadths 
 in his own United States ; and indeed it would be 
 expecting a great deal. Yet if one has completed 
 a course of common-school or higher study, and 
 can give a fair analysis of any one of Dickens's 
 novels, or outline the status of the unfinished 
 stories in the magazines, or give the prices on 
 stocks or at the best hotels in Europe, one has a 
 right to expect that he can locate leading cities in
 
 DISTANCES IN THE UNITED STATES. 19 
 
 the Union within a thousand miles of their true 
 position. 
 
 When I once spoke to an intelligent friend 
 of having been recently in Omaha, he inquired, 
 with all the simplicity of one of Mark Twain's 
 Innocents Abroad, " Well, did you see the Mor- 
 mons ? " He was surprised that I had not " run 
 out" to Salt Lake City, "just back of Omaha," 
 to interview those peculiar Saints. My answer 
 surprised him more, — that having seen that whole 
 conglomerate when they constituted Nauvoo, this 
 side the Mississippi, I did not care to go a thou- 
 sand miles out of my way to visit Salt Lake City. 
 "A thousand miles ! Why, I thought it was just 
 back of Omaha ! " " It is just back, as they say 
 out West, where there is room to say such things." 
 His question was as if one had proposed some 
 morning, in Boston, to run down to Fort Sumter 
 and see the ruins, or to run up from London 
 to Stockholm, or down to Rome, in a cheap and 
 temporary curiosity ; for the distances in these 
 cases are the same. 
 
 Parties start from Bangor overland for San 
 Francisco, and the most of them are surprised to 
 learn that when at St. Louis they will be only about 
 one third of their journey. Yet then they have 
 travelled as far as from Washington to Teluian- 
 tepec, air line, or from London, by water, to St. 
 Petersburg. The completed trip is half a thousand 
 more miles than from Loudon to Monrovia, Africa.
 
 20 DISTANCES IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 Such parties may well be grateful that they were 
 not called to the excursion in old emigrant times. 
 
 The trip to Oregon in those days is suggestive 
 of distances and discomforts too, — from the sea- 
 board to St. Louis (about fifteen hundred miles), 
 and thence, with the comforts of a Missouri 
 steamer, four hundred and fifty more to Westport. 
 Here come the overhauling and packing and 
 starting of the families and wagons and herds 
 for Fort Hall, thirteen hundred and twenty-three 
 miles farther, through wild lands and wilder 
 Indian tribes. This Fort Hall was on the Lewis 
 Fork of the Columbia, about one hundred miles 
 north of Salt Lake, a trading-post of the Hudson's 
 Bay Company, and for a long time their Gibraltar 
 against the entrance of the American traders and 
 immigrants into Oregon. From this post, of so 
 mucli historic interest in frontier affairs, to Van- 
 couver, another English trading-post and fort, was 
 eight hundred and fifty miles, and then down the 
 Columbia to the sea ninety, — a total of more than 
 four thousand miles. Thus hardy and noble men 
 and women went over the continent and founded 
 Oregon. 
 
 The impression is common, and not altogether 
 unnatural, that on the northwest coast American 
 cities and business centres lie quite closely to- 
 gether. Yet from Vancouver, where the Columbia 
 is a mile wide, though at that point ninety miles 
 from its mouth, it is six hundred miles up to Fort
 
 DISTANCES IN THE UNITED STATES. 21 
 
 Colville ; and from San Francisco to Sitka, tlie 
 capital of our last purchase, it is twelve liundred 
 and ninety-six miles, — as far as from New York 
 to Havana. 
 
 It was in the autumn of 1870, — the Kansas 
 Pacific had been opened through to Denver the 
 summer before, — and I was passing New Fort 
 Hays on Big Creek. The willows marked the 
 watercourse as their line disappeared in the in- 
 finite prairie, and the conductor advised me to 
 take a good look at those willows, if I were pleased 
 with woodland views, for it would be a long time 
 before I should see more trees. We ran west to 
 Denver, three hundred and fifty miles, without 
 passing tree or shrub as large as a currant-bush 
 or fair-sized switch for a needy boy. To a New 
 Englander, where the farms appear to a Western 
 man as snug gardens walled in, this seemed a 
 large pasture. The clumsy buffalo-herds tumbled 
 off right and left like the waves of a chopped 
 sea, and timid graceful antelopes, in little bands, 
 would run parallel to the cars, and neck and neck, 
 for three or four miles, in their triplet leaps, and 
 as airy and easy as thistle-down on the wind. 
 Acres of prairie dogs would stand like kangaroos 
 to make observations on us, dodge down through 
 the openings in the tops of their beehive mounds, 
 and instantly show head and neck again for a new 
 look. As twilight approached over the grassy and 
 rolling expanse, gangs of coyotes would settle back
 
 22 DISTANCES IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 on their haunches beyond rifle range, and with 
 stretched neck and wolfish manner howl at us. 
 
 At Salina, where we spent the night, the stock- 
 men gave us some most impressive ideas of 
 distances in tliat immense interior. Salina, with 
 Brookville a dozen miles away, was then the 
 nearest and great shipping-point for live-stock 
 from that unfenced and infinite Southwest. The 
 estimate for Salina that season was seventy thou- 
 sand head. The owners, purchasers, and cow- 
 boys made that a lively night at the lonely 
 station. We arrived in the evening, and the 
 morning revealed the little shanty cluster of 
 railroad buildings as a St. Helena in an unlim- 
 ited expanse of grass. In all directions were 
 masses of cattle, like islands outlying far to sea. 
 Making questions, and notes too, of numbers and 
 weights and girths and prices, I began to ask 
 about the distances that some of the herds had 
 been driven. Pointing to different ones with my 
 questions, the answers came back easily and care- 
 lessly, as if a few hundred miles in the saddle for 
 the cow-boy were a slight matter : " Four hundred 
 miles ; " " Six hundred and more ; " " From Beck's 
 rancho on the Pecos, about six hundred ; " " Well, 
 Fort Ringgold way, on the Rio Grande, nigh on 
 to nine hundred." Amazed at these replies, I 
 said : " Why, how far do you drive cattle here ? " 
 " Stranger, that herd this away yonder has come 
 a right smart thousand. Six months on the trail,
 
 DISTANCES IN THE UNITED STATES. 23 
 
 and the Redskins touched them at a levy a head 
 for crossing the Indian Territory." 
 
 This was the nearest route, in 1870, for those 
 ranchmen on the dim borders of American life 
 and civilization as they started their Texan or 
 New Mexican steers for the New York market. 
 It was as if Webster's fat oxen were driv^en on the 
 higliway from Franklin or INIarshfield to Chicago, 
 and thence taken seven hundred and fifty miles 
 by cars, that they might furnish the sirloin of the 
 merry king who gave the name to it. 
 
 From those more southern and southwestern 
 grazing-grounds the ranchmen started their herds 
 for the North on the tender grass of January, and 
 kept pace with the travelling spring, and so came 
 upon the cattle-trains at Salina in early summer. 
 But now, with the locomotive at San Antonio, 
 Santa F^, TuQon, and Fort Yuma, the steers are 
 ticketed through, and find a much easier and 
 speedier way to the slaughter. So soon following 
 in the trail of buffalo and antelope have come 
 compass and chain and warrantee deeds, and farms 
 and city plots ; acres of prairie dogs have been 
 ploughed in for so much wheat to the acre ; and 
 planted groves break the monotonous and treeless 
 expanse, and throw grateful shade over frolicking 
 children, and anvils so musical of thrift, and over 
 family altars so prophetic and insuring of " what- 
 soever things are true, whatsoever things are hon- 
 est, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things
 
 24 DISTANCES IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, and what- 
 soever things are of good report." 
 
 The time is not far gone by when similar 
 prairies, smaller and more broken by timber, held 
 their primitive sway between Chicago and Cairo. 
 When in the saddle in early days on those plains, 
 and often without a trail, and only a compass for 
 a guide, another horseman like myself could be 
 seen for hours before our converging lines brought 
 us within hail, like two ships speaking each other 
 in mid-ocean. Pleasant memories linger still 
 around our deer-camp on the edge, or rather in 
 the suburbs, of Girard City. Probably it is larger 
 now ; but then it consisted of a huge pile of 
 crumbling brick, a roofless log-cabin, and rows of 
 stakes running off very regularly into the prairie. 
 The deer jumped them easily as they struck out 
 across five denominational church-lots, the court- 
 house grounds, and the college square. The city 
 was peopled with the fancies of Eastern specu- 
 lators and owners of blocks and corner lots, with 
 now and then a living man as a spectator of 
 prospects. 
 
 In planning an easy and interesting tour into 
 the West seven years ago, he of the Eastern sea- 
 board would naturally and very properly wish to 
 see three of the most interesting cities in the upper 
 interior, — St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul. Yet 
 how many would arrange for more than a thousand 
 miles of travel in completing the triangle of the
 
 DISTANCES IX THE UNITED STATES. 25 
 
 three ? In the order named the distances by rail 
 would be 280, 420, and 3G8 miles, — now very 
 much less. 
 
 Our railroad from Chicago to San Francisco is 
 about twenty-tliree hundred and fifty miles, and 
 the daily trains starting out from each terminus 
 with full coaches indicate that the road is an 
 American necessity. The distance traversed by 
 it will be better understood by a European and 
 by those Americans who travel mainly in foreign 
 lands, and so the United States will be more intel- 
 ligently measured if we take this road to Europe 
 for a measuring illustration. Suppose, therefore, 
 that we place the Chicago terminus on London as 
 a turn-table, and sweep the road round, as the 
 hand on the dial of a clock, and thus see where 
 the San Francisco terminus would rest. For con- 
 venience, an air line is assumed between its two 
 real termini and between the illustrating ones that 
 are about to be named. Giving it a northerly 
 direction from London, its San Francisco terminus 
 will rest in the extreme north of Iceland, Moving 
 off to the right, it will extend almost to the head of 
 the Gulf of Bothnia, and just reach St. Petersburg, 
 opening communication between those two grand 
 capitals in air line, as the crow flies. One third 
 of the Black Sea will be shadowed by the moving 
 index which, passing on, cuts its circle midway 
 through the deserts of Barca and Sahara and enters 
 the Atlantic among the Canary Islands. Thence, in
 
 26 DISTANCES IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 its home curve, taking in the Azores and two thirds 
 of the Atlantic between London and Newfoundland, 
 it will close its circle in northern Iceland. 
 
 On this topic of distances within the dominion 
 of the United States we introduce but one more 
 illustration to aid the fancy in finding facts. 
 If one will take an air line from Quoddy Head, 
 in Lubec, the most eastern point of Maine, to tlie 
 mouth of the Straits of San Juan de Fuca, where 
 they empty into tlie Pacific on the southern coast 
 of Vancouver, he will find that he is on the true 
 air line to the most western of the Aleutian Islands. 
 The line thus indicated measures the distance 
 between tlie extreme eastern and western points 
 of United States territory. Not speaking exactly 
 as if casting the transit of Venus, tlie half-way 
 point in this line is about two hundred miles to 
 the west of the mouth of these straits on the 
 Pacific coast. So far, therefore, beyond Vancouver 
 one must go " out West " before he will be half- 
 way over the American limits. After leaving 
 Maine on this air line he will trespass on the 
 Queen's dominion till he arrive at Eainy Lake, 
 above Lake Superior, beyond which till he enter 
 Pacific waters he will be on American soil.
 
 THE SIX GROWTHS OF THE UNITED STATES. 27 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 THE SIX GROWTHS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 " T NEED not remark to you that the flank and rear of 
 X the United States are possessed by other powers, 
 and formidable ones too. ... If the Spaniards on 
 their right and Great Britain on their left, instead of 
 throwing stumbling-blocks in their way, as they now 
 do, should hold out lures for their trade and alliance ! 
 When they gain strength, which Avill be sooner than 
 most people conceive. . . . The Western States hang 
 upon a pivot; the touch of a feather would turn them 
 any way." 
 
 Thus wrote Washington to Governor Harrison 
 of Virginia in 1784, after he had made a tour 
 of the border over the Alleghanies. 
 
 Of course, increase of territory by the United 
 States was indispensable, inevitable, and irresisti- 
 ble. "To have more land "ran in English blood, 
 and through the colonial veins into tlie body politic 
 of the infant Eepublic. The English fathers had 
 crowded back the Spanish, in their arrogant claims, 
 from Virginia to Florida, and the Dutch from New 
 York, and the French from the continent. In 
 1754, and at the early age of twenty-two. Colonel
 
 28 THE SIX GROWTHS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 Washington planted the first British banner oil 
 the Western waters, and in the still struggling 
 days of the Eepublic the region beyond the Ohio 
 of the Upper jMississippi was organized into the 
 " County of Illinois, State of Virginia." So early 
 the new-born Eepublic took possession where the 
 mother country had driven out the French for 
 quite another purpose a few years before. 
 
 This inherited Saxon hunger for land showed 
 itself signally when the colonies and their allies 
 and the mother country met to adjust boundary 
 lines after the Eevolution. Spain would exclude 
 the Eepublic from the Lower Mississippi, and she 
 drew from Franklin the sharp remark : " Spain 
 has taken four years to consider whether she 
 w^ould treat with us or not. Give her forty, and 
 let us in the mean time mind our own business." 
 In his excellent " History of the Mississippi "Val- 
 ley," Monette says that " during the greater part 
 of the negotiations preceding the treaty Mr. 
 Oswald, the British commissioner, persisted in his 
 demands that the Ohio Eiver should form the 
 northwestern boundary of the United States ; and 
 it v/as only after every effort had failed to move 
 Mr. Adams and Mr. Jay that he consented to 
 adopt the present boundary through the middle 
 of the Great Lakes." ^ As conditions of peace that 
 
 1 History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley 
 of the Mississippi. By John W. Monette, M.D. In two vol- 
 umes. Vol. ii. pp. 212, 213.
 
 THE SIX GROWTHS OF THE UNITED STATES. 29 
 
 could not be departed from, Franklin named tlie 
 Great Lakes and the Mississippi as boundaries, and 
 in reply to the diplomatic Vergennes, who was 
 urging the demands of Spain, Jay said : " We shall 
 be content with no boundaries short of the Missis- 
 sippi." At times when Oswald the Scotchman so 
 insisted that the boundary should be the watershed 
 that separates the streams for the Atlantic from 
 those for the lakes and the great valley, it did 
 seem as if they might adjourn the dispute to a 
 second Yorktown. 
 
 Of course such a people, when their new gov- 
 ernment was tolerably consolidated, would find 
 increase of territory not only desirable but indis- 
 pensable, especially if adjoining lands were lying 
 in a wild and crude state. 
 
 The temptation and necessity and offer were not 
 long in coming. The United States of 1783 owned 
 no acre of land on the Gulf of Mexico or beyond 
 the Mississippi, nor a rood on the entire eastern 
 bank of the Mississippi below latitude thirty-one, 
 near the mouth of Eed Eiver, After the fatal fall 
 of France in North America on the Plains of 
 Abraham, she secretly conveyed to Spain the 
 western half of the great valley, that it might not 
 fall into English hands — as the eastern half did 
 and very much other territory — at the coming 
 council table. Overrun by explorers, cavaliers, and 
 marauders, and with few settlements and a starve- 
 ling development, it furnished a poor national
 
 30 THE SIX GROWTHS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 neighbor, and one that might become troublesome. 
 For a working hand and a fostering government 
 great possibilities lay beyond that river. 
 
 In 1800 that ancient Louisiana was reconveyed 
 to France, and it was a great ambition with 
 Napoleon to plant there an American-French em- 
 ]jire. A code of government was drafted, officers 
 appointed, and an army of twenty-five thousand 
 held in readiness to convey the whole to that 
 valley. But Europe was too stormy and English 
 fleets were too many ; so Napoleon did not dare 
 the venture, and sold the magnificent property to 
 the United States, the conveyance being in 1803. 
 
 Very much of what we now call " out West " 
 lies in that first and imperial real-estate invest- 
 ment of our fathers ; or, as Napoleon said to Liv- 
 ingstone, the American minister : " A magnificent 
 bargain ; an empire for a mere trifle." The " trifle " 
 was fifteen million dollars, and assumption by the 
 United States of the claims of American citizens 
 for French spoliations not to exceed twenty mil- 
 lion francs. The franc value was fixed at five 
 livres and eight sous to the dollar. Up to June 
 30, 1880, the United States had paid for those 
 spoliations, $3,738,268.98. That Louisiana Pur- 
 chase exceeded the original area of the Eepublic 
 by forty-five States like Massachusetts, if we con- 
 cede that it extended to the Pacific, according to 
 Donaldson's " Public Domain." Beginning on the 
 Mississippi, the boundary ran up the Eed Piiver
 
 THE SIX GROWTHS OF THE UNITED STATES. 31 
 
 from its mouth to what is now the southwestern 
 corner of the Indian Territory, thence due north 
 to the Arkansas and up to its head, and then be- 
 yond to latitude forty-two, and on that line to 
 the Pacific, following the Pacific coast to latitude 
 forty-nine, and on that parallel eastward to the 
 Lake of the Woods, and thence to the head of the 
 Mississippi, and down that river to the starting- 
 point.i It will be noted that this embraced all 
 that the Government owned west of that river 
 prior to the acquisition of Texas, with the excep- 
 tion of the southern half of Louisiana. The origi- 
 nal domain of the Eepublic was equal to one 
 hundred and two States as large as Massachusetts. 
 This addition was equal to one hundred and forty- 
 seven, or forty-five more than the original. 
 
 The treaty of sale was signed by the French 
 Commissioners April 30, 1803 ; and by a special 
 Congress convened by Jefferson the treaty was 
 ratified October 19, 1803, and the papers of ratifi- 
 cation were exchanged October 21. As yet the 
 territory had not been formally reconveyed by 
 Spain to France, and this was done before the 
 City Hall in New Orleans on the last day of the 
 November following. The Spanish flag was then 
 slowly lowered, imder a salute of artillery, and the 
 French flag was run up in the same way. 
 
 The French now held again, and for twenty 
 
 ^ Later and eminent authorities limit the Louisiana Purchase 
 on the West by the Rocky Mountains. See note, page 32.
 
 32 THE SIX GROWTHS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 days, this " empire." JNIeanwhile American troops 
 arrived, and on the 20th of December the tri- 
 colored flag of France slowly descended, meeting 
 midway the rising Stars and Stripes. Salvos of ar- 
 tillery and shouts of the people were followed by 
 the band with " Hail Columbia," and so the young 
 Eepublic with that music started for the Pacific. 
 
 From the Louisiana Purchase we have all of 
 Alabama west of the Perdido and on tlie Gulf 
 below 31° north ; all of Mississippi west of Ala- 
 bama, on Louisiana and the Gulf, south of 31° 
 north ; Louisiana ; Arkansas ; Missouri ; Kansas, 
 all but the southwest corner ; Iowa ; Minnesota, 
 all of it west of the Mississippi ; Nebraska ; all of 
 Colorado east of the Eocky Mountains and north 
 of the Arkansas River ; Oregon ; and the Territo- 
 ries Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Wyo- 
 ming, — excepting a portion in the southern part, 
 — and the Indian Territory.^ 
 
 ^ As to the boundaries and area of the Louisiana Purchase, I 
 have followed "The Ninth Census," by Francis A. Walker, and 
 "The Public Domain," by Thomas Donaldson. In the Oregon 
 controversy with Great Britain the United States based her 
 claim in part on the Louisiana Purchase. (Oregon : the Strug- 
 gle for Possession. By William Barrows. Chaps, xxi. xxii., 
 and note in the fourth edition, page 211.) Greenhow states 
 quite fully the opposite opinion, that the Louisiana of France 
 and of Spain and of the United States Purchase did not extend 
 to the Pacific. (The History of Oregon and California. By 
 Kobert Greenhow. 1846. Chap. xiii. ) It is still a question sub 
 lite among good scholars. Decision either Avay will not vary the 
 statement of areas above given for the national domain. .
 
 THE SIX GROWTHS OF THE UNITED STATES. 33 
 
 The next addition to the domain of the Union 
 was Florida, — an area of seven States like Mas- 
 sachusetts, — and it was made not only in the 
 interests of the Kepublic, but of humanity, civil- 
 ization, and Christianity. From its earliest his- 
 tory it had been a field of international jealousy, 
 struggle, and blood. The Spanish, French, Eng- 
 lish, and Indians had made it a raiding-ground for 
 plunder, conquest, and revenge. It was in miser- 
 able condition, undeveloping, decivilizing, and bar- 
 barous ; a prey to Indians, negroes, and Sjianiards, 
 and subject to the marauding invasions of Euglish 
 and American adventurers till it came into the 
 Union by the treaty of Feb. 22, 1819. Spain was 
 allowed five millions of purchase-money, but was 
 charged the same amount for Spanish spoliations 
 on American commerce. 
 
 In this assumption of Florida one of those mer- 
 cies was shown which an established and fostering 
 government is able to bestow on a people and re- 
 gion struggling through a natural and crude state 
 into a civilized one. From 1512, when Ponce de 
 Leon, as the first European, began with cavaliers 
 and priests to flounder through its everglades and 
 astonish and anger its simple natives, that region 
 was without government or development or much 
 increase of population. It is true, wdien her flag 
 was lowered at St. Augustine for the American, it 
 had floated over that old city since 1565, with 
 intervals of omission ; and yet, so near the close 
 3
 
 34 THE SIX GKOWTIIS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 of two hundred and fifty years, but little more 
 land was occupied tLan at the beginning. The 
 interior was as wild as ever, and the total Euro- 
 pean jiopulalion was only six or seven thousand. 
 Elsewhere and at times it had sported English and 
 French colors, as well as the nameless banners of 
 invaders from the colonies and States on the north. 
 Generals Gaines and Jackson, for the American 
 side, mingled at last in the fray where three otlier 
 nations kept up discord and uncertainty ; and 
 finally the battle was closed by a purchase of 
 tlie field, and so the fruits of peace came under 
 cultivation. 
 
 The case of Texas did not vary much from that 
 of Florida in its civil and developing condition. 
 It was anotlier unknown section of the N"ew 
 World overrun by discoverers, invaders, and free- 
 booters. For long generations property, person, 
 and conscience had but faint recognition, and its 
 government was despotic, insurrectionary, or revo- 
 lutionary, as suited the whim of the place and 
 the hour. The home government of Mexico 
 was more nominal than real over distant Texas, 
 and this border territory of New Spain waited 
 long in the dawn of the coming day from the 
 North. Her independent entrance into the Amer- 
 ican Union of States was Dec. 29, 1845 ; and 
 her formal and full one by the consent of INfex- 
 ico was in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 
 Feb. 2, 1848, A»d so the equivalent of thirty-
 
 THE SIX GROWTHS OF THE LWITED STATES 35 
 
 four States as large as Massaeluisctts enlarged 
 the Union. 
 
 The admission of Texas into the American Union 
 was a case of mutual favor, and in the long re- 
 sults as seen so far, and in the failure of some 
 provincial schemes then warm and divisive, the 
 consequences have assumed a national and most 
 gratifying magnitude. It was very much to con- 
 fer law and order on so extensive a region and nat- 
 urally so rich in the staples that are the basis of 
 national wealth ; and into wluit a civil chaos our 
 act of annexation introduced government may be 
 inferred from one fact. At the date of admission 
 it was an open question whether Texas ought not 
 to have been included in the Florida treaty of 1819 
 as a part of the French territory of Louisiana, and 
 some of our statesmen — as Benton — criticised 
 others — as Adams and Calhoun, parties to the 
 negotiation of the Florida treaty — for not then 
 includintr Texas on the American side as against 
 Mexican claims. In so rude a condition and so 
 little removed was that region then from primi- 
 tive nature, that even its nationality was a mat- 
 ter of doubt among diplomatists and statesmen, 
 although it assumed independence of Mexico in 
 1835, and was recognized by the United States 
 in 1837. To these inorganic elements additions 
 had been made by emigrants from the States, 
 the loss of many of whom on the one side of 
 the boundary and gain on the otlier were equally
 
 36 THE SIX GKOWTIIS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 equivocal. Texas was admitted to the American 
 Union in 18-i5. 
 
 The addition of California and New Mexico to 
 the domain of the United States was but an elon- 
 gation and termination of the Texan scheme. In 
 the logic of war, and especially with the irre- 
 pressible American people on the one side and 
 the Mexican on the other, the addition was a 
 result inevitable, and indeed foreordained. The 
 general condition of things, as found in Louisi- 
 ana and in Florida and Texas, was inviting and 
 tempting in those two Mexican States, California 
 and New Mexico. They were rich in natural 
 resources, sparsely peopled, low in civilization, 
 poorly developed, and under the changing shadows 
 of a distant and mostly nominal government. 
 
 In the acquisition there was thrown on the 
 American people and Government this expanse 
 of wild border land, whose scattered inhabitants 
 knew civil law mostly as a law of force, which 
 each man carried with him somewhat as in the 
 stirrup. The blood was three fourths native and 
 prehistoric Mexican or Aztec, tinged with In- 
 dian, and with European, direct by immigration 
 or through the border American. Much of this 
 blood, and the more energetic portion of it, was 
 half-breed, coming indifferently from somewhere. 
 
 The addition to the Union of such an expanse 
 of territory, and so rich naturally, with the Spanish 
 civilization of the seventeenth century creeping
 
 THE SIX GUOWTHS OF THE UNITED STATES. 37 
 
 over it, presented a new and very serious problem 
 to the old United States. How much of tlie 
 seventeenth century, as Old Spain exported it to 
 New Spain, could we cany on one fourth of the 
 entire country ? How could we digest and assimi- 
 late so much crude material in wealtli and mixed 
 population and medieeval society ? Possessing only 
 vaguely the rudiments of law, social life, Chris- 
 tianity, and education, how long a time would be 
 needed for the spelling-book and New Testament 
 and marriage ceremony to prepare this new land 
 for the ballot and jury box of our popular govern- 
 ment ? It might be worthy of an investigation by 
 our benevolent societies to ascertain which process 
 has been the more successful for the first twenty- 
 five years within our new border, — the American- 
 izing or the Mexicanizing. In such an investi- 
 gation persons and papers could not be used to 
 any great extent, since our benevolent energies 
 have worked in other directions and filed reports 
 on other fields. Business could report, if benevo- 
 lent education cannot; and the Government can 
 tell how many more Indians it lias shot than the 
 Church has converted. The American adminis- 
 tration of Christianity for the world is preparing 
 material for some amazing and humiliating chap- 
 ters of history on the home field, under the sub- 
 heads of Indian, African, and Mexican. 
 
 Following the acquisition of California and New 
 Mexico in the treaty of 1848, there came into the
 
 38 TilK SIX GUOWTIIS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 national aiul public domain additional territory 
 from Mexico by what is called the Gadsden Pur- 
 chase. This consisted of 45,535 square miles, — 
 equal to five States like Massachusetts, — now 
 constituting the southern portions of New Mexico 
 and Arizona. The treaty was made in 1853. The 
 reasons for the purchase are not made perfectly 
 obvious by the official papers. In " The Public 
 Domain " Donaldson says : " This purchase was 
 for the purpose of more correctly defining and 
 making a more regular line and certain boundary 
 between the United States and Mexico." Forty- 
 five thousand square miles would seem to be more 
 than ample for correcting, straightening, and de- 
 fining a boundary of five hundred miles, more or 
 less. However, after this was all done by ten 
 millions of purchase-money, — " to strengthen and 
 more firmly maintain the peace which happily 
 prevails between the two Eepublics," — exception- 
 ally rich mines, even for Mexico, were said to be 
 found in ample measure on the United States side 
 of the corrected and peaceful line. 
 
 " si angxilus ille 
 Proxiinus accedat qui nunc deformat agelluui." 
 
 The last addition, and the sixth, that has been 
 made to the territory of the United States was 
 Alaska. The treaty of purchase was concluded 
 March 30, 1867, ratified May 28, and the terri- 
 tory was formally conveyed to the United States
 
 THE SIX GROWTHS OF THE UNITED STATES. 39 
 
 October 18 of the same year. The price paid was 
 $7,200,000, and the area bought was 577,390 
 square miles, being a little less than two cents for 
 an acre. In the Louisiana Purchase the cost was 
 a little less than three cents for an acre. The 
 area equals seventy-one States like Massachusetts. 
 Mr. Secretary Seward negotiated the purchase, 
 and at a public dinner given when he retired to 
 private life he remarked that he regarded the act 
 as the most important in his official life, and he 
 added, " But it may take two generations before 
 the purchase is appreciated." 
 
 Of its entire area the islands are estimated to 
 make about thirty-one thousand square miles, and 
 their water edge, with the shores of the mainland 
 and bays, aggregates a coast line of about twenty- 
 five thousand miles, — the circumference of the 
 earth. This is by estimation and not measure- 
 ment, as the Coast Survey of the Government has 
 not yet run out and reported the shore indentations 
 of the Alaskan purchase. 
 
 As to the natural and staple products of Alaska, 
 it can supply ice for the universal Pacific trade. 
 It may, however, sound strange to say that it 
 must be harvested inland mainly, since the aver- 
 age cold of the shore will not uniformly insure a 
 crop. For the last forty-five years the mercury 
 has been below zero only four times at Sitka, and 
 not once under four below. Immense rains mark 
 the winter, sometimes to the amount of eighty-one
 
 40 THE SIX GlIOWTIIS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 inches a year, and tlie spring opens so early that at 
 Sitka the wikl gooseberry has been found in blos- 
 som on the 17th of March. The winter average 
 zero line leaves the continent at Behring's Strait, 
 and in the neighborhood of the Aleutian Mountains 
 and on the southwest coast the mercury rarely 
 goes down to zero. The country is ample in good 
 timber for the navies of the world, and hemlock, 
 cedar, and the yellow pine extend over thousands 
 of miles. Coal, iron, and copper are found in rich 
 deposits, and on the Columbian edge of the ter- 
 ritory the English are reported as taking out a 
 million of gold annually. And what will be more, 
 by and by, for the tourists from the hot zone, 
 Alaska has three hundred moving glaciers and 
 ice-fields. But it is too early to speak confidently 
 on the products of the interior. When the Yu- 
 kon Valley, navigable fifteen hundred miles by 
 steam, has been as w^ell examined as the Colorado, 
 and when the whole territory is as well described 
 as Colorado is by Hayden's splendid Geological 
 and Geographical Atlas of it in twenty maps, 
 Seward's two generations will probably have gone 
 by in one, and then the wisdom of his purchase 
 will be verified and confirmed. 
 
 At present we can content ourselves with the 
 fact that for international commerce its fishing- 
 grounds are not surpassed for area, variety, and 
 quality in the world ; while its seal-fisheries, con- 
 fined to two or three of its fifty-five islands over
 
 THE SIX GKOWTIIS OF THE UNITED STATES. 41 
 
 tlireu miles long, are paying four per cent on the 
 cost, and have already paid off three million dol- 
 lars of the principal. 
 
 It is to be regretted that we have not kept up 
 the civilizing institutions that the Kussiau Gov- 
 ernment had established among the sixty thousand 
 natives, but iiave allowed them to fail. Should 
 it not niodify our Protestant criticism of the Greek 
 Church, that they carry their form of Christianity 
 and the school with their national flag ? I have 
 referred to the humiliating chapters that must by 
 and by go into the history of our popular admin- 
 istration of Christianity under the subheads of 
 Indian, African, and Mexican. It is not too late 
 to prevent the addition of an Alaskan. Of the 
 quality of the Alaskans — including under that 
 term the natives of both the mainland and the 
 islands — Hon. A'incent Colyer, special Indian 
 commissioner to that Territory, says: "I do not 
 hesitate to say that if three fourths of them were 
 landed in New York as coming from Europe, they 
 would be selected as among the most intelligent 
 of the many worthy immigrants who daily arrive 
 at that port."
 
 42 GROWTH IN SETTLEMENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 GROWTH IN SETTLEMENTS. 
 
 WHEN the Revolution was accomplished, the 
 occupied territory of the thirteen Colonies 
 constituted an Atlantic belt about nine hundred 
 miles long, and of an average breadth of one hun- 
 dred miles. Tliey were, in proportion to the magni- 
 tude of the whole continent, but a small area, only 
 as a civil fringe on its eastern shore, and some 
 thought they hung quite as loosely as the sea-weed. 
 The nations of Europe were looking to see them 
 tossed asunder by some of those great tidal waves 
 of society which had torn adrift and swamped all 
 preceding republics. Daring men, true to the Re- 
 public, had passed the watershed and built tlieir 
 rough cabins on the Ohio and its head-streams, 
 and on some of the rivers of Kentucky. Here and 
 there in the Great Valley the French trapper and 
 trader and emissary, without a country or a home, 
 lingered and wandered between the lost Canadas 
 and the sold Louisiana. The Spanish hunters and 
 explorers and cavaliers, who a half-century before 
 had penetrated from Santa Fe to tlie Arkansas and 
 Missouri and Mississippi, were looking with a
 
 GROWTH IN SF.TTLE.MEXTS. 43 
 
 jealous eye on these intrusions of the English 
 colonists. As they had come up into New INIexico 
 ninety years before Jamestown was settled, and 
 had their five hundred academies and training 
 schools in New Spain when the Pilgrims landed, 
 and owned both banks of the Mississippi as far up 
 as the present northern boundary of Louisiana, — 
 on the east near the mouth of Ked Eiver, — they 
 were a willing and formidable obstacle to the 
 westward growth of the young and seaboard Ee- 
 public. Moreover, Spain occupied and defended 
 both banks of the Mississippi below the Ohio, 
 though much in violation of treaty, and with well- 
 arranged annoyances exacted duties on all goods 
 passing down the river. This was felt the more 
 severely since settlements were advancing in a 
 remarkable manner ; and indeed, as Monette says, 
 " The whole country appeared in motion for the 
 Mississippi." 
 
 In a preceding chapter the growth of the United 
 States in territory has been outlined under its six 
 additions, by which the original area has been 
 increased about five-fold. In this chapter it is 
 proposed to illustrate by specific local growths 
 how the population during the same time has 
 been increased fully twelve-fold, and the area of 
 settlement in vastly greater proportions. 
 
 The increase of settlements in the wilds of 
 America had been stimulated by the Crown, and 
 was well under way when the era of independence
 
 44 GROWTH IN SETTLEMENTS. 
 
 opened. In 1749 there was a royal grant to the 
 fust Ohio company of five hiuuh'ecl thousand acres, 
 which afterward came mostly into the Dinwiddie 
 and Washington families, and finally into the 
 latter. This tract lay between the Monongahela 
 and the Kenawha, and the company became obli- 
 gated to locate on it one hundred immigrant 
 families within seven years. Five years later, 
 and after Braddock's defeat, the Crown ordered a 
 grant of lands about the Ohio to those wishing to 
 settle there, and in quantities of not more than 
 one thousand acres to a person, in order to re- 
 possess the country and expel the French. Grants 
 were made on the head-waters of the Kentucky, 
 the Cumberland, Clinch, Ilolston, and elsewhere in 
 eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Thus under 
 the royal regime the passion for wild laud and a 
 farther frontier and daring exposure in the wilder- 
 ness and among Indians was cultivated and grati- 
 fied, and the young Eepublic inherited it. 
 
 As independence became more certain wdiile the 
 painful years of the Eevolution wore away, Vir- 
 ginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York 
 began to think more definitely of their charter 
 claims to the wild country lying between the Ohio, 
 Mississii^pi, and the Lakes. In mature judgment 
 and with much patriotism the State rights were 
 finally yielded, and these land claims, with certain 
 reservations, were made over to the United States 
 for the conmion good. But the reservations were
 
 GROWTH I\ SETTLEMENTS. 45 
 
 ])ut on the market by the individual States and 
 by the United. States. Here, tlierefore, were five 
 parties in the American land market offering bor- 
 der hemes to all and any daring adventurers. 
 
 Virginia, with much foresight, moved off in 
 schemes of emigration. One of her laws " allowed 
 to each emigrant as a settlement right four hun- 
 dred acres of land, besides a preference right to one 
 thousand more acres contiguous. The boundary 
 lines between any contiguous settlement rights 
 were generally adjusted amicably by the parties in- 
 erested, before actual survey was made. In these 
 adjustments they were guided chiefly by the ridges 
 or watercourses, or some other natural boundary. 
 In this manner much of the country of western 
 Pennsylvania and Virginia was parcelled out 
 among settlers, and subsequently nearly all the 
 country between the Muskingum and tlie Ohio 
 on the east."^ Wliat Virginia retained lay between 
 the Scioto and the Little Miami, and was called 
 the Virginia Military District. The Connecticut 
 Reserve was bounded on the north by Lake Erie, 
 and was about one hundred and twenty by sixty- 
 eight miles in extent. The Government also set 
 apart a large tract on the east side of the Scioto 
 to liquidate the claims of Eevolutionary soldiers, 
 which was called the United States Military Dis- 
 trict. These lands were offered in large quantities 
 for fifty cents an acre, more or less, payable in 
 
 1 Monette's History of the Mississippi Valle)-, vol. ii. p. 9.
 
 4G GROWTH IN SETTLEMENTS. 
 
 Government certificates if tlie lands were purchased 
 of the United States. The Western-land fever ran 
 high in those days, — perhaps as high as it ever has 
 in later and speculative days. " Public attention 
 in the interior," says Monette, " notwithstanding 
 occasional instances of Indian hostilities, seemed 
 wholly engrossed in the acquisition of land, as 
 if it were the only subject of interest, the only 
 great business of life." 
 
 Of course the large grants obtained were de- 
 signed for speculative purposes, and various ex- 
 pedients were used to effect sales and induce 
 immigration ; and thus the border settlements 
 were carried farther and farther west. 
 
 Judge John Cleaves Symmes, of New Jersey, 
 bought of the United States six hundred thousand 
 acres between the Great and Little Miami, at sixty 
 cents an acre, payable in the military warrants 
 and other paper of the Government. This tract 
 was sold in divisions, and again resold in small 
 parcels, and so came into the possession of actual 
 settlers. Major Benjamin Stiles purchased ten 
 thousand acres of this Symmes tract, and so 
 tempted immigration and extended the settled 
 frontier. The cases cited are sufficient to illus- 
 trate the passion and practice of those earlier days 
 in regard to emigration. 
 
 This fever for wild land, now so prevalent and 
 especially so contagious along all the new railroads 
 into wild country, is sometimes regarded as a
 
 GIIOWTH IX SETTLEMENTS. 47 
 
 modern epidemic; wliile it is really as old as the 
 Government, and three quarters of a century ago 
 was carrying off as many, in proportion to tlie 
 entire population, as are carried off to-day. More- 
 over, the front of this crude civilization then pressed 
 westward against most adverse circumstances. It 
 was not nntil 1784 that a regular stage was run 
 between Boston and Hartford. Mail service be- 
 tween the leading cities was rare, irregular, and ex- 
 pensive, and of the nature of an express. Charges 
 for single letters from Boston to New York were 
 sometimes very high ; the first mail line from 
 Portsmouth to Savannah was opened in 1786, 
 and in 1790 there were only seventy-four post- 
 offices in the entire United States. 
 
 The original expresses in America, — for per- 
 sons, not packages, — the public stages, were slow 
 in opening their lines, and so kept emigration in 
 waiting. At the same time the question of mili- 
 tary roads and national highways was engaging the 
 attention of the General Government; and as time 
 and enterprise glided along into the first quarter of 
 the present century, this became a warm question. 
 In its discussion the conservative East and the pro- 
 gressive West began to show the pleasant rivalry 
 that has since become a constant element in na- 
 tional politics. Especially were real estate and tide- 
 water interests in tlie old thirteen States fearful 
 lest a broad and wild frontier, and at low rates, 
 should depress the land market, and an interior
 
 48 GKOWTll IN SETTLEMENTS. 
 
 river commerce lesson the foreign trade. Ocean 
 trade and travel and benevolence were inclined to 
 go together into foreign lands ; while the nation 
 was led by a popular impulse to a westward move- 
 ment, and an interior growth, and an emigrating 
 centre that would not wait for auxiliary legislation 
 or be obedient to what was thwarting. The East 
 was slow in learning what Washington said as 
 early as 1784, after returning from the country 
 beyond the Alleghanies : " Smooth the road and 
 make easy the way for them, and tlieu see what 
 an influx of articles will be poured upon us, how 
 amazingly our exports will be increased, and how 
 amply we shall be compensated for any trouble and 
 expense we may encounter to effect it."^ Like 
 other Western pioneers, Washington had little in 
 response but rebuff, and men continued to emi- 
 grate much after the manner of Al^raham and Ja- 
 cob, until Oct. 26, 1825, when " Clinton's Ditch " 
 was formally opened, and the first boat went 
 through from Albany to Lake Erie, — ninety- 
 nine years after its general route had been re- 
 commended by Cadwallader Golden, surveyor 
 general for the Colony. 
 
 New England had too much land of its own on 
 the market to favor actively tliis westward move- 
 ment. The Bay State was holding much of tlie 
 wild land in the Province of Maine, and was 
 anxious to sell and settle it. By a lottery scheme 
 
 ^ Letter to Govei'iior H.iri'ison, 1784.
 
 GROWTH IN SETTLEMENTS. 49 
 
 it put a large number of townships on the public, 
 hoping that those who drew a prize would immi- 
 grate to it, and so colonies be founded. The plan 
 failed to a large extent. Those who obtained land 
 declined to take titles, or were unwilling to occupy, 
 and lottery land gorged the market. 
 
 When, therefore, the Rev. Dr. Cutler was nego- 
 tiating with Congress on tlie purchase for the 
 second Ohio company, he met with much oppo- 
 sition, and says of the delegates from Massachu- 
 setts : " I thought they would not be very warm 
 advocates in my favor . . . when she is forming 
 the plan of settling the Eastern country ; . . . and 
 I dare not trust myself with any of tlie New York 
 delegates with whom I am acquainted, because that 
 Government is wisely inviting the Eastern people 
 to settle in that State." ^ 
 
 With such home interests in the old States, 
 Western enterprise gained but little Government 
 patronage either from Congress or the State legis- 
 latures, and it was left to more private and indi- 
 vidual hands. This was well in the end, for it 
 left these Western trails to be opened by men 
 of will and force and energy who did not need 
 State aid, and could safely fall back on themselves 
 to see their purposes carried out. The men who 
 blazed the forest trees for the bridle path and 
 found the best ford with their own feet were men 
 of sterling worth, and elect of tlie times, and did 
 
 1 Walker's History of Athens County, OMo, pp. 38, 39. 
 4
 
 50 GROWTH IN SETTLEMENTS. 
 
 not leave their superiors behind them. Sacrifice 
 of old homes, opposition, and hardships secured 
 their numbers of first quality. He who has not 
 energy and enterprise enough to be an emigrant 
 M'ould make but an indifferent colonist ; and it is 
 well for the country that such continue now in 
 the comforts and luxuries of the old East, and 
 enjoy being nursed by institutions that their 
 pioneer fathers planted. Much of the marvel 
 of frontier growth disappears when the superior 
 character of the persons who immigrated to those 
 new centres comes to be understood. 
 
 Conservative Eastern men in comfortable home- 
 steads among ancestral elms, with little thought 
 of planting trees and opening fountains for the 
 coming generations, as their ancestors did for 
 them, call these pioneers visionary men. Better 
 call them men of vision. They saw farther, as 
 they saw more, tlian those who preferred old trees 
 and wells and acres. Another eleventh chapter 
 of Hebrews on the secular side might be written, 
 headed by such names as Boone, Kenton, Harrod, 
 Putnam, and George Rogers Clarke. Those and 
 their kind made bridle paths into the West, and 
 planted block-houses and fenced towns and cities 
 and States, while their brethren tarried to plant 
 corn in the pilgrim fields of Virginia and New 
 England. Those pioneers "all died in faith, not 
 having received the promises, but having seen 
 them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and
 
 GKOWTII IN SETTLEMENTS. ol 
 
 embraced them." And they also had cruel iiiock- 
 ings and scourgings and bonds and imprisonments; 
 and were stoned and sawn asunder and slain with 
 the tomahawk ; and wandered about destitute, al- 
 fiicted, and tormented. They were men of great 
 foreknowledge in their dim border-land, because 
 they were men of immense foreordination. An in- 
 cident here, with its many features, will be as good 
 as a chapter to illustrate the points now asserted. 
 
 In 1782, while the struggle on the east of the 
 Alleghanies between the Colonies and the Crown 
 weakened toward the treaty of peace in the year 
 following, the English with their Indian allies 
 made it more desperate and bloody west of the 
 mountains. The sorrowful disaster at Blue Licks 
 had moved General Clarke to a campaign for the 
 relief of the border settlers in the region of the 
 coming Cincinnati. His work was well done, as al- 
 ways with him, from whom a word was enough for 
 his splendid volunteers from frontier cabins. On 
 their triumphant return, the dying McCracken, a 
 gallant captain, was borne along on his litter toward 
 his rude home. Wlieu they ascended the crest of 
 hills which now overlooks Cincinnati, his eyes, 
 growing dim, took in a grand panorama. The Lick- 
 ing Valley opened up toward Cumberland Gap, 
 the Kentucky hills showed a magnificent amphi- 
 theatre, and the beautiful Ohio moved majestically 
 across the enchanting landscape. The view to the 
 dying man became as an inspired vision and ran
 
 52 GROWTH IN SETTLEMENTS. 
 
 into prophecy; and lie asked his comrades to make 
 a halt and gather about him. When the glitter- 
 ing bayonets were quieted, and the borderers had 
 patted their horses into restfulness, he took solemn 
 promise of his companions in arms that fifty years 
 from that day so many of them as survived and 
 could do it should re-gather on that spot and make 
 a second view of the landscape. The first dwell- 
 ing-house of Cincinnati, the log-cabin of General 
 Clark, was then two years old. When the 4th of 
 November, 1832, arrived, the survivors of fifty 
 years and of so many Indian skirmishes kept their 
 promise to their dying captain. What a reality 
 in the place of his vision ! The half-century had 
 caught up with what he saw. If now we make 
 the time a round century, and stand in 1882 where 
 that border soldiery gathered sadly around the litter 
 and its dying man, we shall be better prepared to 
 pay a just tribute to the men who have gone West 
 and have made the United States out of the thir- 
 teen Colonies.
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO.^ 
 
 AND not yet fifty years old ! The title of tliis 
 chapter must seem jocose to a foreigner. 
 It is very well for Layard or Eawlinson to write 
 of ancient Nineveh, or for some Old Mortality to 
 work up the Roman Chester of England or London 
 Town or Santa Fe or Boston Town. The relics 
 and skeletons, dust, cobwebs, and broken slumbers 
 make very entertaining reading, with no violence 
 to our respect for chronology or denial of our 
 notions about antiquity. We rise up before the 
 hoary head of those old human centres. But this 
 Chicago is an affair of last week with an anti- 
 quary, — the growth of some stray seed from Jo- 
 nah's gourd. The persons are alive, and yet have 
 business in them, who attended the meeting in 
 1833 for incorporating this town, and saw the city 
 charter for Chicago granted in 1837 by the Illinois 
 legislature. They can stand yet in the doorways 
 of their memories, if not of their original log- 
 cabins, and correct the proof-sheets of this chapter 
 on Ancient Chicago. 
 
 1 Magazine of American History, Ajiril, 1885.
 
 54 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 With a little free play backward and forward 
 we propose to keep beyond those two dates of 
 incorporation in this historical study.^ 
 
 This volume is in no sense offered as a history, 
 but only a carefully selected collection of illustra- 
 tions of a marvellous national growth. For this 
 purpose thirteen topics are taken to sample the 
 general and magnificent movement. To set forth 
 the rise and growth of cities, Chicago is selected. 
 It is beyond all parallel in the founding and 
 developing of the cities of the world. Inferior 
 ones have been established — as Alexandria, Con- 
 stantinople, and St. Petersburg — by the will of 
 sovereigns ; but Chicago is due to the personal will 
 of a sovereign people combining voluntarily their 
 individual interests. The surprise over its growth 
 would be much enhanced if we could set it forth 
 solitary for exhibition ; but in the same historical 
 picture a score of others take their place of a hun- 
 dred thousand population and more each, whicli 
 have sprung up in a similar way. Nor has this 
 city ever made such great increase in brief periods 
 as some later and eminent cities. In the first five 
 years after the census of 1880 Minneapolis and 
 
 1 Since this article appeared in the " Magazine of American 
 History," in April, 18S5, the first volume of a valuable History 
 of Chicago, to be published in three volumes, has come to hand. 
 With its aid this article has been revised, and credit has been 
 given in the cases of new information. The work of Mr. 
 Andreas is eminently elaborate, and must have cost much 
 patient, painful, and expensive research.
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 55 
 
 St. Paul almost trebled their population, going to 
 about 125,000 and 112,000 each. 
 
 Moreover, we are still building Chicagoes in tlie 
 West. The United States is not driven to the 
 defence of the lioness, — Unum, sed leoneni; she is 
 muciparous in her progeny of cities. Their number 
 and growth can be appreciated only by frequent 
 tours to the borders. Chicago is selected and set 
 forth in commonplace details to illustrate the 
 every-day work which is now going on in our new 
 country. So broad has been the ground-plan of 
 our structure, and necessarily so far apart the work- 
 men, and each so intent on his own, that we hear 
 and know but little of all this national upbuilding. 
 No doubt some force must be recognized in what 
 is said of the demonstrative quality of the Ameri- 
 cans as they have been coming up to the front in 
 i\\Q procession of the nations. Considering, how- 
 ever, the work accomplished in these one hundred 
 years the silence has been almost sublime. A 
 decennial census, with its unrhetorical, cold col- 
 umns of figures, has been the jDrincipal speaker for 
 America. 
 
 "Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung : 
 Majestic silence ! " 
 
 When Marquette, in his Christian mission, lay 
 ill in his cabin, at the Portage de Chicagau and 
 mouth of the Calumet, in the winter of 1674-75, 
 the fur traders came to his relief. They were
 
 56 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 usually in advance of the explorer and the priest, 
 and they early opened what in railroad parlance is 
 now called the " Chicagou route" between Canada 
 and Louisiana. It was in 1718 when Governor 
 Keith of Pennsylvania sent out James Logan to 
 explore for routes westward to the Mississippi ; 
 and of one line he reports thus: "From Lake 
 Huron they pass by the Strait of Michilimakina 
 four leagues, being two in breadth, and of a great 
 depth, to the Lake Illinoise ; thence one hundred 
 and fifty leagues to Fort Miamis, situated at the 
 mouth of the River Chicagou. This port is not 
 regularly garrisoned." 
 
 Of the history of this fort there are no extant 
 records yet found, and at the council for the treaty 
 of Greenville, 1795, no Indian could give informa- 
 tion concerning its origin.^ 
 
 In 1773 one William Murray, an Englishman, 
 residing at Kaskaskia, then so eminent, held a 
 council there with the chiefs of the Illinois tribe, 
 and purchased of them two immense tracts of land. 
 One of these tracts embraced the most of the grand 
 delta between the Illinois and the Mississippi, with 
 a very Lirge area farther north, and had substan- 
 tially these boundaries — quite generous, consid- 
 ering the price : from the mouth of the Illinois 
 and up it " to Chicagou or Garlick Creek," about 
 two hundred and seventy-five miles ; thence north- 
 erly "to a great mountain to the northward of the 
 
 1 Andreas, vol. i. p. 79.
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 57 
 
 White Buffalo plain," about two hundred and 
 eighty miles ; and thence direct to the place of be- 
 ginning, about one hundred and fifty miles. The 
 outline of the other tract is not at hand. For the 
 two tracts INIurray says that the purchase was 
 made "to the entire satisfaction of the Indians, in 
 consideration of the sum of five shillings to them 
 in hand paid," together with some goods and mer- 
 chandise. Before the contract was consummated 
 other Englishmen united with him under the title 
 of " the Illinois Land Company." The whole affair 
 carries a very modern air, especially with that addi- 
 tion of " other Englishmen," and illustrates some 
 of the broader processes of to-day in civilizing and 
 Americanizing the Indians. But five years later 
 Gen. George Rogers Clark put that magnificent 
 quadrant between the Ohio and the Mississippi 
 under the American flag, and so swept the acres 
 and Indians of IMurray, with his English associates, 
 into the young Union. In 1781 the Company 
 pressed their claims for ratification by Congress, 
 and the Senate entered this opinion in the words 
 of the committee, which became a precedent : " In 
 the opinion of the conmiittee deeds obtained by 
 private persons from the Indians, without any 
 antecedent authority or subsequent information 
 from the Government, could not vest in the gran- 
 tees mentioned in such deed a title to the lands 
 therein described." These primitive " Indian Con- 
 tractors " worked their " ring " around Congress
 
 58 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 until 1707, and then abandoned their project for 
 civilizing the North i^merican Indian. But 
 they made another point in history for Ancient 
 Cbicago.i 
 
 The earliest trace of any occupant at Chicago 
 i.s that of Guarie, a Frenchman, tlie corn-hills of 
 whose cabin patch were traceable in 1818, though 
 overgrown with grass. He located there prior to 
 1778, and had his hut on the river-bank, near 
 where Fulton Street now meets it.^ 
 
 This was the year in which General Clark, under 
 the sovereign instruction of Virginia, and with a 
 commission signed by Patrick Henry, Governor, 
 conquered from the English the region between 
 the Ohio, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi. 
 In October of that year Virginia erected the same 
 into the "County of Illinois in the State of Vir- 
 ginia." Then tlie laws of the Old Dominion were 
 as sacred at the mouth of the Chicago as at the 
 mouth of the Potomac, and Chicago, equally with 
 Eichmond, was in Virginia. 
 
 But we have yet to find the first settler in 
 Chicago, though the whole region is occupied by 
 the Pottawatomies. After the treaty of Eyswick, 
 1697, which divided Hayti and gave the eastern 
 shore to Spain, the colony there languished. The 
 French negroes in it, many of whom were free, 
 
 ^ Andreas, vol. i. pp. 69, 70. 
 
 ^ The Discovery and Conquest of the Northwest. By Paifus 
 Blauchard.
 
 ANCIKNT CHICAGO. 5.9 
 
 educated in France, wealthy, but denied political 
 privileges, grew uneasy, and crossed over to the 
 Louisiana, where they were welcomed by the French 
 and became readily assimilated to the Indians. 
 One of these made his home at Chicafjo, amono- 
 the Pottawatomies, in 1779, and remained there 
 till 1796. His name was Baptiste Point de Saible. 
 He was " a handsome negro, well educated, and 
 settled at Eschikagou, but much in the French 
 interest." So runs the old record of Colonel De 
 Peyster, then (1779) British commander at Macki- 
 naw. Another record says : " At a very early pe- 
 riod there was a negro lived there, named Baptiste 
 Point de Saible. My brother, Perrish Grignon, 
 visited Chicago about 1794, and told me that 
 Point de Saible was a large man ; that he had a 
 commission for some office, but for what particular 
 office, or from what government, I cannot now 
 recollect. He was a trader, pretty wealthy, and 
 drank freely." " 
 
 So far as yet appears, De Saible was the sole 
 settler of Chicago for seventeen years, when he 
 sold his cabin and other local interests to Le Mai, 
 a French trader. Other fur traders were there 
 meanwhile, but only transient ; for Burnett, trading 
 on the Kankakee in 1790-91, says: "The Potta- 
 watomies at Chicago have killed a Frenchman 
 about twenty days ago. They say there is plenty 
 
 1 "Wisconsin Historical Society Collections, vol. iii. p. 292.
 
 60 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 of Frenchmen." ^ As a dwelling-place, therefore, 
 with historic germs, this cabin is the embryo of 
 Chicago, and her history proper dates from it. 
 
 Yet only in his last years there was Baptiste on 
 ground fully and absolutely owned by the United 
 States ; for the Indian title was not extinguished till 
 the treaty of Greenville, 1795, From the opening 
 of the French war, 1754, the northwestern fron- 
 tier liad been sorely tried and wasted by Indian 
 wars. When General Wayne assumed command 
 over that district, he moved with so much rapidity 
 and force as to gain from the Indians a name 
 translated The Tempest, or Big Wind ; they prob- 
 ably meant Cyclone. He soon bore down all op- 
 position and brought twelve of tlie subdued tribes 
 to the council of Fort Greenville, by the treaty 
 of which an immense region west of the Ohio and 
 south of the Lakes was ceded, as well as a large 
 square embracing each of the military posts, not 
 included in the general cession. This treaty ex- 
 tino;uished the Indian title to Chicago and its 
 environs by these words : " One piece of land six 
 miles square, at the mouth of the Chekajo River 
 emptying into the southwest end of Lake Michi- 
 gan." Soon after that region came into American 
 hands by the treaty of Greenville there were antici- 
 pations and rumors of a garrison at Chicago ; and 
 an energetic and adventurous trader thus writes to 
 a Mr. Porthier, a merchant at Mackinaw: — 
 
 ^ Chicago Antiquities, p. 57.
 
 AN'CIENT CHICAGO. 61 
 
 " I have reason to expect that they [the garrison] 
 will be over there this fall; and should it be the 
 case, and as I have a house there already and a 
 promise of assistance from headquarters, I will have 
 occasion for a good deal of liquors and some other 
 articles for that post. Therefore, should there be 
 a garrison at Chicago this fall 1 will write for an 
 addition of articles to my order." 
 
 The garrison was not long in coming, and no 
 doubt "a good deal of liquors" soon followed. 
 In 1803, Capt. John Whistler, of the army at De- 
 troit, was ordered to build and occupy a post at 
 Chicago. From the mouth of the St. Joseph the 
 officers, father and son, with their wives, came 
 down the lake in a row-boat, and so the first two 
 white women entered Chicago. The settlement 
 then consisted of four traders' cabins, the occu- 
 pants of which were Canadian French, with their 
 Indian wives. The post was named Fort Dear- 
 born, in honor of Gen. Henry Dearborn, then Sec- 
 retary of War. 
 
 The year following, tlie first white family moved 
 into Chicago. This w^as John Kinzie, wife, and 
 infant sou, John H., from the vicinity of Niles, 
 Michigan. He bought of Le Mai the old cabin 
 of De Saible, which he enlarged and improved, 
 aud for many years it was the only dwelling of 
 white men in that settlement of now three quar- 
 ters of a million of people. He was properly
 
 62 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 called the Father of Chicago, and yet lie died as 
 recently as 18:^8 ; nor as a city father did he live 
 long enough to see great results. Tlu-ee years be- 
 fore he died tlie village consisted of only fourteen 
 houses, — all log-cabins, — with a total town tax 
 of $90.47. The ilrst frame building for business 
 was not built till he had been gone four years. 
 
 When Fort Dearborn was built, the Government 
 also established under its guns an Indian Agency 
 and trading-house for the four nearest tribes, 
 with the purpose that all business between them 
 and the United States, and questions of trouble 
 between the Indians and other parties, might there 
 be peaceably and justly disposed of. It was also 
 the plan of the Government to draw, through such 
 agencies, the Indian trade under its own control, 
 and shield the Indians from the corruptions and 
 abuses of the Indian traders. But the system 
 failed. The agents, selected from the East in the 
 way of favor, ignorant of Indian and border life, 
 proved no match for the old border traders and 
 wily half-breeds. An extract from one report will 
 sample the results : — 
 
 " An intelligent gentleman who has just visited 
 Chicago informed me, July, 1820, that there were 
 goods at that place to the value of twenty thousand 
 dollars, which cost more at Georgetown than the 
 traders ask for their goods at the post of delivery, 
 and that the goods are inferior in quality and
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. Go 
 
 selected with less judgment than tliose of the 
 traders ; that only twenty-five dollars' worth of 
 furs was sold by the factor at Chicago ; that the 
 Government makes no profit on its capital, and 
 pays the superintendents, factors, and sub-factors, 
 and their clerks out of their funds." ^ 
 
 The citation takes us back three quarters of a 
 century, yet we need not go back the tenth of a 
 decade to find appointments to the border as inapt 
 for tlie good of the Indian or of the United States. 
 A civil service reform in our time, with competi- 
 tive examination of candidates for salaries and 
 chances there, and on such topics as Indian his- 
 tory, Indian nature, habits, and present condition, 
 the scalp dance, green-corn feast, and drunken rows 
 around smuggled whiskey, and plots of speculators 
 for breaking treaties and seizing reservations, would 
 set aside many tide-water applicants " totally 
 unacquainted with the Indian country." And an 
 extension of this "service reform" to benevolent 
 organizations and offices might stay some from 
 rashly assuming official and public work and hon- 
 ors beyond the Mississippi, who had never yet 
 seen the waters of that river, nor even Cincinnati 
 and Chicago. 
 
 The early years of this century moved on with 
 a weary sameness by Fort Dearborn. A morning 
 
 ^ Report on Indian Affairs to John C. Calhoun, Secretary of 
 War, from a Tour made 1820. By Jedidiah Morse, D.D, p. 48.
 
 64 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 and evening gun could wake the primeval still- 
 ness of that far northwest village, where now 
 human voices and the locomotive and mill-whis- 
 tles and the rattling industries of an immense 
 city are making a perpetual riot of civiliza- 
 tion. Indian bands came and went stealthily and 
 in absolute silence, with moccasin and paddle ; 
 packs of peltry and fur made no noise as red 
 trappers and white traders laid them down on the 
 mud levee of the North Branch and South Branch ; 
 Pottawatomies, Sacs and Foxes, and Kickapoos 
 came in, early and unfailing, for their payments, 
 and the "good deal of liquors" of Porthier strength- 
 ened their patience in waiting; rarely an immi- 
 grant or traveller was challenged by the sentinel 
 at this extreme point of American life, and much 
 more rarely the birth of a white child varied the 
 monotony. But the commotion of a storm was 
 soon to put an end to sameness. 
 
 Prior to the War of 1812 there was a growing and 
 hostile uneasiness among the Indians of the North- 
 west of that day. They regarded with anxiety the 
 approaching and constantly aggressive power of the 
 whites, while English influences over the border 
 turned this toward an embittered hostility. Te- 
 cumseh, a Shawneese, with his brother the Prophet, 
 sought to organize a great Indian confederation 
 against the white movement into tlie Northwest. 
 To this end he visited all the tribes on the borders 
 of the lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior, and
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. G5 
 
 in the South, the Choctaws, Cherokees, and Creeks, 
 as well as the tribes bordering on the west bank 
 of the Mississippi. His success was not perfect, 
 but it was formidable ; and had not the Propliet 
 precipitated the result, it must have proved most 
 disastrous to our whole frontier. While Tecumseli 
 was in the South, his brother brought on the bat- 
 tle of Tippecanoe, Nov. 7, 1811, in which Gen- 
 eral Harrison decidedly gained the day ; and if 
 the English had not come to the rescue with aid 
 and comfort, the confederacy would probably then 
 have come to an end. War with England was 
 declared the next June, Fort Mackinaw was sur- 
 rendered to the Englisli, and orders were received 
 to abandon Fort Dearborn, which was done on the 
 15th of August. In conference with the Indians 
 then surrounding the Fort, it was agreed that this 
 should take effect in mutual peace and safety. 
 But the Indians proved treacherous, and when the 
 garrison and outside families had proceeded but a 
 mile or more, the five hundred Pottawatomies, who 
 had agreed to be escorts, fell murderously upon the 
 small band. Of the company there were sixty- 
 eight soldiers, but a large number were on the 
 sick-list, leaving perhaps forty fighting men. With 
 these were ten or twelve women and twenty chil- 
 dren, — about one hundred souls. It was hardly 
 an hour's bloody work, and twenty-five of the 
 soldiers and eleven women and children remained 
 and surrendered. The fight, after the first onset, 
 5
 
 66 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 was hand to liand and tevribly earnest, even the 
 women doing their full share. Hopelessness cre- 
 ated desperation, and al)out fifteen Indians paid 
 the penalty of their faithlessness. 
 
 The months were long and painful before it was 
 known who were saved, and who the captives 
 were, and much longer before they were redeemed 
 and restored to kindred and friendly hands. The 
 next day the Fort and the Indian Agency were 
 burned. The day of the massacre was marked 
 also in the dark calendar of the frontier by the sur- 
 render of Detroit to the English by General Hull. 
 
 For four years the cliarred remains of the Gov- 
 ernment buildings lay untouched, and the iive 
 cabins — all there was of Chicago as a settle- 
 ment — stood vacant, and only the wolves cared 
 for the bodies and bones of the men, women, and 
 little ones who perished, — more than sixty in all. 
 Fort Dearborn was rebuilt in 1816 and garrisoned 
 with two companies of infantry. One of the first 
 pious acts of the commandant. Captain Bradley, 
 was to gather tenderly such remains of the massa- 
 cred ones as the elements and wild animals had 
 left, and give them a Christian and sacred rest. 
 One by one the fugitives came back, timidly and 
 nervously, as on bloody ground and among graves. 
 Kinzie led the way, and took his old cabin again, — 
 the house of Le Mai and of De Saible. 
 
 Very little is to be said of changes in Chicago 
 between the rebuilding of the Fort and 1830. At
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 67 
 
 the latter date Chicago was not born, nor did it 
 by incorporation and organization enter the list 
 of American towns till 1833. Meanwhile a stray- 
 explorer or adventurer and a fugitive fact enable us 
 at this late day to keep trace of the IVontier waif, 
 yet much as a handful of ashes in the drifting sands 
 tells where the Arabs camped once or twice. In 
 1817 the Hon. Samuel A. Storrow, Judge-Advo- 
 cate of the Army, visited Fort Dearborn, where, he 
 says, " Major Baker and the officers of the garrison 
 received me as one arrived from the moon." 
 
 Strangers arriving in that city now do not so 
 surprise it, nor is it as difficult to find it as in 
 those earlier days, when one was liable to miss 
 the trail and pass the town without seeing it, as 
 one incident will show. In 1827 Col. Ebenezer 
 Childs contracted to supply Fort Howard, Wis- 
 consin, with beef, and left for Illinois or Missouri 
 to purchase cattle, and he says : " We started for 
 Chicago, took the wrong trail, and went too far 
 west. . . . We got out of provisions the fourth 
 day. I found an Indian Mdio had a large quantity 
 of muskrats ; I bought a number, and had a fine 
 feast. We got the Indian to take us and our bag- 
 gaq;e across the Eau Plaine in his canoe, making 
 our horses swim alongside. We learned that we 
 had passed Chicago, having gone some fifteen 
 miles to the west. The Indian put us on the 
 right track, and we arrived at Chicago the next 
 morning pretty well used up."
 
 68 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 Tliree years later Schoolcraft found four or five 
 families there, and among thein our old friend 
 John Kinzie, whom, in 1822, Charles C. Trow- 
 bridge met there. Kinzie was then the agent of 
 the American Fur Company, — that is, John Jacob 
 Astor. The year following is marked by a more 
 distinct and emphatic record. Colonel Long, of 
 perpetual memory on Long's Peak, then spoke 
 of the place as consisting of three log-cabins 
 " inhabited by a miserable race of men scarcely 
 equal to the Indians from whom they had de- 
 scended ; " their cabins were " low, filthy, and dis- 
 gusting, displaying not the least trace of comfort," 
 and the place "affording no inducement to the 
 settler." 
 
 Ebenezer Childs, of La Crosse, speaks of Chicago 
 as he saw it in 1825 : — 
 
 "At that time Chicago was merely an Indian 
 agency. It contained about fourteen houses, and 
 not more than seventy-five or one hundred inhab- 
 itants at the most. An agent of the American 
 Fur Company, named Gurdon S. Hubbard, then 
 occupied the Fort. The staple business seemed 
 to be carried on by the Indians and runaway sol- 
 diers, who hunted ducks and muskrats in the 
 marshes." 
 
 As to the number of the houses and of the 
 population about this time there are apparent dis- 
 crepancies in the authorities. The statements of
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 69^ 
 
 Mr. Cliikls apply to 1825, and yet we are iiifoniicd 
 ill 1830, "Surveyor Thompson found seven families 
 only outside of the Fort." The infant settlement 
 was exposed to a second massacre. "In 1828 In- 
 dian hostility threatened a general attack on the 
 settlements ; but after the murder of a few immi- 
 grants a large volunteer force, added to the regu- 
 lars of Fort Dearborn and Fort Armstrong at Eock 
 Island, overawed the savages for the time." 
 
 The "Chicago Directory " for 1830 was not a 
 very portly volume. The commercial and business 
 sections of it condensed stand thus : Taverns, two ; 
 Indian traders, three; butchers, one; merchants, 
 one. The poll list for the county election that 
 year embraces thirty-two voters. 
 
 lieligious germs did not appear till the following 
 year, and Mr. Andreas well says, "As a whole, 
 the Chicago of 1831 could not have been consid- 
 ered a pious town." The Methodists were first on 
 the ground, as is usual on the frontier, always 
 excepting the Jesuits, where there are Indian and 
 Canadian village.s. Protestantism would spread 
 more rapidly and vigorously if its adherents were 
 as faithful as the lioman Catholics in carrying 
 their religion always with them. The quality of 
 the two forms of Christianity is, of course, another 
 matter ; but they carry tlieir best. 
 
 The opening of the school system in Chicago is 
 quite romantic. In 1810 a spelling-book found 
 its way to this lone village in a chest of. tea from
 
 70 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 Detroit, and came into the already historic house 
 of Baptiste Point de Saible, then occupied by 
 Kinzie. In the family was a son, John H., and 
 his cousin, Eobert A. Forsyth, afterward paymaster 
 in tlie United States Army, who assumed the posi- 
 tion of instructor. The teacher was thirteen years 
 old, his pupil six, the course of study tliis spelling- 
 book, and the school building was the " Kinzie 
 house." 
 
 The first formal school was opened in 1816 in a 
 log-house, once used as a bakery, in tlie rear part 
 of Kinzie's garden. The pupils were this Kinzie 
 boy, his brother, and two sisters, and three or four 
 children from the Fort. In 1820 a school was 
 taught in tlie Fort, and nine years later we find 
 it in a room "near the garrison." In 1830 its 
 twenty-five pupils are in " a large, low, gloomy 
 log-building, which had five rooms." The main 
 school-room was finally made cheerful by the white 
 cotton sheeting which covered the ugly walls. It 
 was a private school and Mrs. Forbes shared in 
 the charge with her husband, while she managed 
 the domestic apartments of the same building. 
 Mr. Forbes afterward was promoted to the office 
 of sheriff of the county, — whether from aptness 
 shown in catching and holding frontier children 
 is not stated. 
 
 While these varied items of fur trade, fighting, 
 and education were working into a thread of his- 
 tory on that section of the " Chicagou route "
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 71 
 
 between Canada and the Louisiana, the coming 
 civilization was agitating the Northwest Territory. 
 Immigration had made its trail along the borders 
 of the Lakes, had quite generally prospected the 
 valley of the Ohio, and extended to the Missis- 
 sippi. As early as 1802 Kentucky, Tennessee, 
 and Ohio were in the Union. In 1809 the north- 
 ern boundary of the Illinois Territory was run due 
 west from the southern point of Lake Michigan, 
 which left Chicago, the Kinzie boy, and his spell- 
 ing-book of the next year in Wisconsin Territory. 
 After the rebuilding of the Fort, Aster's fur-trading 
 schooner began to visit the lonely town, anchoring 
 there once or twice a year among innumerable 
 water-fowl. Excepting canoes and batteaux, this 
 was the only water craft that greeted it for many 
 years. In 1818 Illinois came into the Union and 
 Chicago came back into Illinois. Between 1830 
 and 1836 tliere entered the town in close and tumul- 
 tuous succession the usual staples of a young and 
 of course ambitious frontier settlement, — a post- 
 office and town incorporation, several denomina- 
 tional religions by organization, a newspaper, a 
 stage-line, Indian raids, rude bridges, critical foot- 
 walks, a land office, and a canal company incorpo- 
 rated in 1825 ; the capital of which was $1,000,000, 
 while the total valuation of all the land within the 
 present city limits was under $25,000, and tlie town 
 effected a loan of $60 for street improvements. In 
 1880 the valuation of Chicago was $115,003,561,
 
 72 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 its taxes were $3,829,618, and its bonded debt 
 was $12,752,000. Scientific accuracy finds a strik- 
 ing illustration in this canal project. Five routes 
 for it were surveyed between Lake Michigan 
 and the Illinois ; the lowest estimate of construc- 
 tion was $639,946, and the highest $716,110, and 
 Government made a land-grant way of 284,000 
 acres ; in March, 1843, the enterprise collapsed, 
 after an expenditure of $5,139,492.03. It was a 
 State project, though Chicago was eminent in it, 
 and in the year of incorporation had fourteen tax- 
 payers only, with an aggregate tax of $94.47. The 
 project was even national, for President Madison 
 had recommended it by message in 1814. The 
 same project gains a notice in the " St. Louis 
 Directory and Eegister " for 1821 : " In the course 
 of a few years the Illinois Eiver will be, most 
 probably, connected with Lake Michigan." Also 
 municipal regulations came in over the seven tav- 
 erns, that they should not cliarge more than twelve 
 and a half cents for a lodging or for a half pint 
 of whiskey, or more than twenty-five cents for a 
 breakfast, or for half a pint of brandy, or rum, or 
 wine, or for a supper. 
 
 Immigration came around the end of Lake Michi- 
 gan in tidal waves. The winter of 1831-32 is still 
 carried in the memories of some, and history will 
 never forget it, Four hundred immigrants were 
 quartered in the Fort, and as the intense cold, the 
 Indians, and the wolves closed in on the scattered
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 73 
 
 settlers, tlie entire body of the inhabitants followed 
 the immigrants. Tiie summer and General Scott 
 raised the siege, when the cholera fell on them, 
 coming with the stately general on the first steamer 
 tliat ever entered that port. 
 
 The pulse of speculative life that throbbed vio- 
 lently to the eastward of Lake Michigan affected 
 the finances of this young town. The Erie Canal 
 had made a splendid success, and brought the 
 Atlantic Ocean four hundred miles nearer; Ohio 
 liad rushed in growth ; steamers were puffing on 
 inland waters which canoes had hardly abandoned, 
 and the railroad era had opened in the seaboard 
 States with almost unlimited fancies of sudden 
 wealth. Land values became fabulously increased 
 on an infinite frontier of acres ; thousands of miles 
 of railroad were projected as into void space ; the 
 work and growth and fortunes of the next genera- 
 tion were anticipated, and telescopic values were 
 put on front lots and corner lots and water lots 
 about the lower end of Lake Michigan. Chicago 
 went crazy when steamers came in and railroads 
 promised to come. She did not then know that 
 the Mississippi Valley has more than forty rivers 
 navigable to the extent of more than fifteen thou- 
 sand miles, and could possibly postpone the rail- 
 road era. Immigration flooded the city. Between 
 April and September, 18:54, a hundred immigrant 
 vessels landed their burdens of men, hungry and 
 famishing for land, while the procession in carriage
 
 74: ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 and saddle and on foot was continuous ; and in 
 twelve months the pupulaLiun went up eight-fold. 
 So rife was speculation, that the town could not 
 borrow two thousand dollars at ten per cent. Real 
 money or coin disappeared except at the land 
 office,' — where it alone availed for land, and at 
 a dollar and a quarter an acre, — and promissory 
 notes, collaterals, and various wild paper flooded 
 the market. 
 
 Meanwhile the average American, with his love 
 of law and order, was there, and gambling-houses, 
 Sabbath-breaking, liquor-saloons, and shooting with- 
 in town limits were prohibited, and officials were 
 required to give bonds. The land fever and the 
 frenzy of speculation increased in wiklness till 
 1837. A crash then came, as a cyclone comes, 
 only that it was of immense advantage to Chicago 
 in bringing it to its senses and to old-fashioned 
 realities. In the year preceding, and before the 
 town "came to itself," its exports, total, were 
 $1,000.64, and its imports were $325,203.90 ; and 
 it was not till 1842 that as much was shipped 
 off as was received, when the population was 
 6,590. 
 
 Nothing could repress the city ; reverses and 
 checks could only consolidate it. The position 
 was a foreordination to growth and greatness, and 
 its success was inevitable and irresistible. Its 
 splendid future was made evident and certain 
 when the canal was opened in 1848 from the city
 
 ANXIENT CHICAGO. 75 
 
 to the head of navigation on the Illinois, and a 
 railroad with the East in 1852. Chicago was 
 naturally located at one of the few roundiug-points 
 in the highways of the world, and yet a thousand 
 miles inland. Tliese two grand connections with 
 the business world — canal and rail, especially the 
 one by rail — admitted it to that family of cos- 
 mopolitan cities any one of w]jich is a centre for 
 the trading nations. The locomotive, which so 
 ignores locality and makes the world migratory, 
 made the city permanent when it arrived ; and it 
 occasioned the pithy remark that "up to 1852 
 nobody residing in Chicago considered himself 
 permanently settled." 
 
 In 1838 shippers of hides ventured, with much 
 solicitude, to export for a market seventy-eight 
 bushels of wheat. Fcjrty-two years later the city 
 exported by water and land 22,796,288 bushels 
 of wheat, and 2,862,737 barrels of wheat flour, 
 making a total equivalent of 35,678,60-4 bushels 
 of wheat.i 
 
 In 1833 a citizens' meeting was convened to 
 incorporate the town. The total nund:)er of legal 
 voters was twelve, and against one negative the 
 incorporation was secured. One of the first town 
 ordinances was to prohibit live pigs in the streets. 
 
 1 Wheat ranges from four to six bushels to a barrel of flour, 
 according to the grade of wheat and of flour. The above esti- 
 mate is on the average for 1879, which was four and a half 
 bushels to the barrel.
 
 7G ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 Ill 1880 ChicaL,ni handled, through her streets, 
 7,059,355 of them, besides 39,091 barrels of dressed 
 pork. 
 
 The first white settler, Marquette, spent a winter 
 there, and supplied his family market with bufl'alo, 
 deer, and turkey, shot from his own cabin door. 
 In 1880 Chicago had for disposal, not to mention 
 other meats, 1,382,477 beef cattle. 
 
 On the 6th of May, 1635, the General Court 
 of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the fol- 
 lowing law : — 
 
 " It is ordered that it shalbe lawfull for Mr. 
 Leveredge to transporte ten bushells of corne out 
 of this jurisdiccon, notwithstanding any former 
 order to the contrary." ^ 
 
 At that time the region of Chicago was a good 
 thousand miles into the absolutely unknown West. 
 Marquette and La Salle were yet unborn. It is 
 yet, then, in the Massachusetts General Court, 
 thirty-five years before the first white man, 
 La Salle, shall see the present site of Chicago. 
 In 1880 Chicago, with no permit from any court, 
 exported 93,500,000 bushels of corn. For six 
 months, ending with October, 1880, the receipts 
 of corn averaged more than one thousand cars 
 of 24,000 pounds each for every working-day, — 
 that is, there came into the city 428,571 bushels 
 of corn a day. In 1837 the water-works of Chicago 
 
 ^ Records of Mass.ic]msots Bay Colony, 1635, vol. i. p. 148.
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. / i 
 
 consisted of a hogshead on wheels, with bucket 
 and faucet, for any one who would hail the wan- 
 dering cistern, — such water- works as the writer 
 I'ound in Leadville in 1880. Now, Chicago lifts 
 Lake Michigan as a goblet to her 750,000 pairs 
 of thirsty lips. 
 
 Andreas gives a good pen-picture of the town as 
 it appeared in the year of its incorporation : — 
 
 " The village was built along the south side of 
 "Water Street, and westerly toward the settlement 
 at the forks. There were scattered shanties over 
 the prairie south, and a few rough, iinpainted 
 buildings had been improvised on the north side, 
 between the old Kinzie house and what is now 
 Clark Street. All together, it would, in the light 
 of 1833, have presented a most woe-begone appear- 
 ance, even as a frontier town of the lowest class. 
 It did not show a single steeple, nor a chimney 
 four feet above any roof. A flag-staff at the Fort, 
 some fifty feet high, flaunted, in pleasant weather 
 and on holidays, a weather-beaten flag as an em- 
 blem of civilization, patriotic pride, national do- 
 main, or anj^thing else that might stir the hearts 
 of the denizens of the town. The buildings of the 
 Fort were low-posted, and none of them exceeding 
 two stories in height." 
 
 The first frame house for business had been built 
 only the year before, and the first for religious and 
 educational purposes, in part, this same year of
 
 78 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 town organization. In a private letter to the 
 author, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Porter says : " There 
 was not a framed dwelling-house in town in ]\Iay, 
 1833, and only three framed stores." The. pop- 
 nlation at the time of incorporation was about 
 two hundred and fifty, in which were eight physi- 
 cians and six lawyers; nevertheless the population 
 increased in numbers and grew in prosperity ! 
 The second hotel (the Tremont), built expressly 
 for such use, was added to make this year event- 
 ful ; and yet so rural was Chicago then, that its 
 guests could lounge on its steps and shoot wild 
 fowl in the slough before the door. 
 
 These glances at ancient Chicago would not be 
 perfect if one scene were omitted. In 1831 about 
 four thousand Indians surrounded the town with 
 their wigwams, and covered the lake, shores, and 
 creeks with their canoes, and trailed their blankets 
 along the walks of the village. They were laden 
 witli their arms and paint, and carried no extra 
 friendliness in their looks and manners. It was 
 pay-day on the border, and the United States offi- 
 cers were there to pass over the annuities. The 
 outside farmers, and the villagers too, might be 
 excused for some nervousness, for Black Hawk's 
 band had recently gone quite unwillingly to the 
 west of the Mississippi, and it was known that 
 emissaries from it were among the four thousand 
 to beget a bloody outbreak. The September skies 
 were peaceful and balmy, and yet it was an apt
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 79 
 
 time for tlie Imrricane. Had the Indian tornado 
 burst on them, they well knew that their two 
 hundred men, women, and children would have 
 gone like leaves before the whirlwind of four 
 thousand. It was almost ready, but did not burst 
 till the next year ; and the haughty, angered, and 
 drunken braves took their annuities, and went off 
 moody and disappointed that they had no scalps 
 to carry l)ack. We can appreciate the scene and 
 anxieties, from our experience at Keokuk ten years 
 later. It was when that town consisted of twelve 
 log and two frame houses tliat we were detained 
 there some days. The Iowa Territory Indians were 
 there in multitude, and were proving the thirteen 
 saloons in those twelve log-houses — one double — 
 while their head men were gone down to St. Louis 
 for their annuities. In later years we found it 
 another affair and wholly agreeable to spend some 
 time with twenty-five hundred in a great Indian 
 fair at JMuscogee, in the Indian Territory. 
 
 The year 1833 was an important one for the 
 town in many respects, and indeed it miglit be 
 said that ancient Chicago was terminated by it. 
 We have tlierefore tarried in collecting items 
 which would show it at that time, and now turn 
 for a moment to private and unpublished papers 
 for still more. Our correspondent had been for 
 about two years post chaplain at FoTt Brady, 
 Sault St. Marie, outlet of Lake Superior. He 
 writes : —
 
 80 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 " Wo sailed from the Sault, May 4, 1833; found 
 no settlement on the western shore of Luke Michi- 
 gan except the trading post of the American Fur 
 Company at Milwaukee; reached tiie anchorage 
 off Fort Dearborn Sunday morning, May 13. No 
 harbor, and sea so rough we could not go ashore that 
 day, and lay seasick, in our bertlis. . . . Major Fowle 
 had prepared for me a preaching place in Fort 
 Dearborn, there being none but a log schoolhouse 
 in town. That was the carpenter's shop. In it I 
 preached the first Sabbath morning, May 20, 1833, 
 from the words, ' Herein is my Father glorified, 
 that ye bear much fruit.' . . . Mine was the first 
 church ever organized at Chicago since the crea- 
 tion of the world ; and on the 26th of June, 1833, 
 by adopting the confession of faith of the Presby- 
 tery of Detroit, — the nearest to us. . . . By the 
 1st of January, 1834, I preached the dedication 
 sermon of our house of worship. It stood ' way 
 out on the prairie,' between where now stands the 
 Sherman House and Lake Street. ... In an un- 
 finished loft of one of tlie three framed houses was 
 my bedroom and study, and, for a time, Sabbath- 
 school room. . . . Wisconsin, Iowa, and all the 
 Northwest were then the abode of wild Indians." ^ 
 
 Dr. Porter adds an item which should be 
 expanded to complete the view of our ancient 
 
 1 Jeremiah Porter, D.D. , Fort Sill, Indian Territory, Nov. 3, 
 1873. Private letter.
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 81 
 
 Chicago. Among the wasting remnants of our In- 
 dians there probably are not enough now within 
 any single call to repeat the scene. He says : 
 " Five thousand Indians, assembled, came to make 
 terms of surrender of Illinois and Wisconsin lands 
 for others west of the Mississippi Eiver. . . . Tlie 
 council was held on the prairie on the north side 
 of the river, in front of my study window, and in 
 plain vieAv." This was the gathering for the great 
 Indian Treaty of 1833, under which the united 
 Chippewa, Ottawa, and Pottawatomie Indians were 
 moved to the eastern bank of tlie Missouri in the 
 region of Council Bluffs, and the United States 
 took their abandoned lands in Illinois and Wiscon- 
 sin, — about five millions of acres. The same num- 
 ber were accorded to these Indians for their new 
 home. It might as well have been fifty millions ; 
 for it was a nominal affair with the chiefs, when 
 they signed the treaty with their " mark," feasted 
 and drunken by the other " high contracting party;" 
 and when Iowa and other Western growths pressed 
 on them like high tides, they were lifted as waifs 
 and thrown farther west. 
 
 A few graphic passages from Charles J. Latrobe, 
 an English traveller, and an honored guest at the 
 council, will best show us the neighbors, Indian and 
 white, to the minister's study on that occasion. 
 
 The Indians "were encamped on all sides, — on 
 the wide level prairie beyond the scattered vil- 
 lage ; beneath the shelter of the low woods which 
 6
 
 82 AN'CIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 checkered them ; on the side of the small river, 
 or to the leeward of the sand-hills near the back 
 of the lake. . . . The little village was in an 
 uproar from morning to night and from night to 
 morning; for during the hours of darkness, when 
 the housed portion of the population of Chicago 
 strove to obtain repose in the crowded plank edi- 
 fices of the village, the Indians howled, sang, wept, 
 yelled, and whooped in their various encampments. 
 With all this, the whites seemed to me to be more 
 pagan than the red man. . . . Far and wide the 
 grassy prairie teemed w^ith figures, — warriors 
 mounted or on foot, squaws and horses. Here a 
 race between three or four Indian ponies, each 
 carrying a double rider, whooping and yelling like 
 fiends ; there a solitary horseman, with a long 
 spear, turbaned like an Arab, scouring along at 
 full speed ; groups of hobbled horses ; Indian dogs 
 and children ; or a grave conclave of gray chiefs 
 seated on the ground in consultation. . . . Emi- 
 grants and land speculators as numerous as the 
 sand; you will find horse-dealers and horse-steal- 
 ers, rogues of every description, white, black, brown, 
 and red ; half-breeds, quarter-breeds, and men of 
 no breed at all ; men pursuing Indian claims ; 
 sharpers of every degree ; pedlers, grog-sellers, 
 Indian agents and Indian traders of every de- 
 scription, and contractors to supply the Potta- 
 watomies with food. . . . The quarters [in Fort 
 Dearborn] were too confined to afford place of
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 83 
 
 residence for the Government commissioners, for 
 whom and a crowd of dependents a temporary set 
 of plank huts were erected on the north side 
 of the river. ... It is a grievous thing, — the 
 shameful and scandalous sale of whiskey to tliese 
 poor miserable wretches. But here lie casks of 
 it under the very eye of the commissioners, met 
 together for purposes which demand that sobriety 
 sliould be maintained. . . . The council fire was 
 lighted under a spacious ojien shed on the green 
 meadow on the opposite side of the river from 
 that on which the fort stood." The position of 
 the two parties in the council lodge was most sig- 
 nificant, though, of course, not intended to be so. 
 " The glorious light of the setting sun streaming 
 in under the low roof of the council-house fell full 
 on the countenances of the former [the whites], 
 while the pale light of the east hardly lighted up 
 the dark and painted lineaments of the poor In- 
 dians, whose souls evidently clave to their birth- 
 right in that quarter." ^ The position of the two 
 parties in this grand Indian council at Chicago on 
 that September day, 1833, was painfully and sadly 
 historic and prophetic. The Indians looking east- 
 ward and backward and despondent, and the white 
 man looking westward and forward and ardent, — 
 that is the history of the two races in this country. 
 Ou the Indian side the Treaty has the fallowing 
 
 1 The Ramhler in North Americn, 1832, 1833. By Charles 
 Joseph Latrobe. Two volumes. Vol. II., Letter XI.
 
 84 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 indorsement : " The undersigned, chiefs and head 
 men of the said nations of Indians, have hereunto 
 set their hands at Chicago the said day and year, 
 Sept. 26, 1833." Then follows the signature of 
 seventy-seven Indian names, and against each " his 
 X mark." It is safe to say that the Chicago Board 
 of Trade never did so much business on one day as 
 was done on this day in the transfer of land. 
 
 The post-office is a good index to the state of a 
 community, and the lirst one of Ancient Chicago 
 was characteristic of frontier America. In that 
 hard winter of 1831-32, memorable in the liistory 
 of the present magnificent city, a tough half-breed 
 went on foot once a fortnight to Niles, Michigan, 
 ninety miles away, to carry and bring the mail. 
 Though tliis date is so recent in our national 
 annals, it should be noticed that no steamer had 
 yet touched at Chicago. Only light sails, Macki- 
 naws, birches, and pirogues had then rounded 
 Wolf Point, the angle of land between the North 
 and South Branch. The year following, 1832, the 
 first steamboat arrived at Chicago, bringing the 
 eminent General Scott to take a hand in the Black 
 Hawk war, already well over, and the cholera came 
 with the General. This same year witnessed the 
 appointment of a new postmaster of the prophetic 
 city, like Paris and St. Petersburg rising from the 
 mud. Postmaster Hogan signalized his admin- 
 istration, and no doubt made political capital, by 
 two improvements on the half-breed arrangement.
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 85 
 
 He secured a weekly mail on horseback from 
 Niles, and inaugurated the private-box system. 
 This consisted of a row of old boots nailed to the 
 rude log walls, bearing the name of such as had a 
 heavy correspondence. The occasional letter was 
 served in a more democratic way, even much later, 
 as a private letter informs me. " My husband, 
 A. D. Reed, of Boston, came out to Illinois in Oc- 
 tober, 1837, on horseback, in company with Colonel 
 Porter, from Rochester. Tliey were prospecting 
 for the purpose of locating and investing in lauds. 
 Stopping at Chicago, they inquired at the post- 
 otfice for letters, and the letters were turned out 
 of a bushel basket on a table. Among these they 
 searched for any that might belong to them." All 
 this is somewhat in contrast with the Chicago post- 
 office of to-day. An official statement, courteously 
 given me on request, under date of October, 1886, 
 furnishes the following facts : Number of letters, 
 postal cards, and circulars despatched daily and 
 mailed in Chicago, 360,000 ; printed matter and mer- 
 chandise, 49,903 pieces; pieces of second-class mat- 
 ter, 125,000. Here is the daily despatch of 534,903 
 pieces of mail matter originating in the city. The 
 aggregate weight, not including second-class matter, 
 was 25,372 pounds. For carrying off the mails 
 of Chicago there are used, on a daily average, 
 1,386 canvas sacks, making an annual total of 
 499,272 sacks, and an annual total of 125,684 
 lock-pouches.
 
 8G ANCIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 The amount of money received for money-orders 
 between July 1, 1883, and June 30, 1886, was 
 $4,585,600.40, and the amount paid out for money- 
 orders for the same time was $23,322,029.84. At 
 date of statement the number of lock-boxes — not 
 old boots — was 774, the number of clerks was 
 518, and the number of carriers was 358. 
 
 This weiglit of mail is marvellously in excess 
 of the fortnightly burden of the half-breed carrier. 
 It would have required many scores of blanketed 
 Pottawatomies and Black Hawk spies to carry up 
 the population to the present number of post- 
 oftice men. The tramping and hurrying proces- 
 sion through the corridors and halls of the present 
 office, with the clicking of lock-boxes and the calls 
 at the general deliveries, is strongly in contrast 
 with Hogan's log-room and boot-boxes. Mr. Eeed 
 would hardly recognize bis bushel basket in the 
 present edifice. 
 
 Our Eastern friends of the basket post-office had 
 a fancy to feed their two saddle horses with oats 
 while they took refreshments " at a rude kind of 
 building" called a tavern, and prospected the vil- 
 lage for possible investments. "They inquired 
 for oats to feed their horses, and were informed 
 that none were to be had in town, which circum- 
 stance decided them to ride on, and probably pre- 
 vented their making a profitable investment in 
 land there." However, Mr. Eeed thought better 
 of the oatless town, and afterward returned to
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 87 
 
 permanent residence there, and must have been 
 satisfied finally in the call fur his favorite grain ; 
 for in the last year of his residence there (187C) 
 Chicago received 23,490,915 bnshels of oats. Here 
 were oats enough to bait ninety-four millions of 
 horses with a peck apiece. Tliat is more than 
 thirteen times the number of all the fed horses 
 in the United States at the last census. When in 
 later years Mr. Eeed was president of one of the 
 Chicago banks, he found his mail better served 
 than by the early method of bushel baskets. 
 
 It was in 1846 that Sir Eobert Peel predicted 
 in Parliament tliat two towns in interior America 
 would by and by rival Odessa and Dantzic in 
 the grain market of the world, and he mentioned 
 Chicago and Milwaukee. Tliese towns had never 
 before been spoken of in Parliament, and were 
 quite unknown to some geographical experts in 
 that body. To the whispered question what he 
 called them, the answer was tlie quite indefinite 
 one, " Some Indian places." The remark of Sir 
 Robert takes on almost the sublimity of a proph- 
 ecy of one of the ancients. Eminent Americans 
 have been quite as uninformed about our Western 
 growth as were the Englisli experts. In 1835 the 
 Piev. Dr. Joel Hawes, of Hartford, had a call to the 
 First Presbyterian Church in Chicago. "AVhen 
 Dr. Hawes received the letter of invitation, he 
 took it to Judge Williams of his church, and said: 
 ' I 've got a letter from some place out West, called
 
 88 A^■CIENT CHICAGO. 
 
 Chick'-a-go, asking me to come there and preach. 
 Can you tell me where it is ? ' Having learned 
 that it was in a great swamp hack of Lake Mich- 
 if'an, he thought it best not to remove." ^ 
 
 Only eight years before Sir llobert's prophecy 
 certain shippers of hides in Chicago had, with 
 much daring and timidity, made a venture for a 
 market by exporting forty-four sacks of wheat. 
 In 1880 that " Indian place" exported by land and 
 water 22,796,288 bushels of wheat, and 2,802,737 
 barrels of wheat flour, making a total aggregate for 
 one year of 35,678,604 bushels of wheat. 
 
 It is doubtless without precedent in the annals 
 of the world that a city of seven hundred and 
 fifty thousand has sprung up so suddenly on the 
 can] ping-ground of a conquered and retreating 
 people. In Old World times smouldering cities 
 have been left in the track of invading armies; 
 but in the iSTew World hamlets, villages, and cities 
 are planted by the invasion. To mark off to-day, 
 amouCT magnificent blocks of merchantmen and 
 mansions of merchant princes, the camping-ground 
 of those Indians, would be to thousands in Chicago 
 even as a story of Sinbad the Sailor, or as an in- 
 terlined and dubious chronicle of Alfred the Great 
 or of one of the early Henrys. No wonder that 
 Gladstone said of the United States in their growth, 
 " America is passing us by in a canter." 
 
 ^ Historical Sermon by the Eev. John H. Barrows, D.D. 
 Fiftieth Anniversary First Presbyterian Cliurch of Chicago.
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 89 
 
 Mention has hseii made of the first teacher in 
 Chicago, with his one pupil and one text-book. 
 That was in 1810, A more formal yet private 
 school followed in 1816. Immediately followincr 
 the Black Hawk war, in 1832, another school was 
 opened in a building twelve feet square, once a 
 stable, with "old store boxes for benches and 
 desks." In the first quarter Mr. Watkins, the 
 proprietor, had twelve pupils ; " only four of them 
 were white ; the others were quarter, half, and 
 three-quarter Indians." Billy Caldwell, the Potta- 
 watomie chief, offered to pay for tuition, books, 
 and clothing of so many Indian children in the 
 school as would adopt the dress of civilization, 
 but not one accepted his offer. The dress was 
 the obstacle. About this time a Miss Chappel 
 left her school at Mackinaw and opened one in 
 Chicago, with a Miss Mary Barrows as assistant. 
 At last accounts Miss Chappel, as Mrs. Jeremiah 
 Porter, was teaching at Port Sill in the Indian 
 Territory. 
 
 Two years afterward Mr. G. T, Sproat, from 
 Boston, opened an English and Classical school, 
 and a recent letter from one of his assistants gives 
 a good idea of Chicago at that time, — 1834. 
 
 " I used to go across without regard to streets. 
 It was not uncommon in going to and from school 
 to see prairie wolves, and we could hear them howl 
 any time in tlie day. We were frequently annoyed 
 by Indians, but the great difficulty we had to en-
 
 90 ANCIENT CHICAOO. 
 
 counter Wcis mnd. No person now can have a just 
 idea of what Chicago mud used to be. llubbers 
 were of no account. I purchased a pair of gen- 
 tlemen's brogans and fastened them tight about 
 the ankle, but would still go over them in mud 
 and water, and was obliged to have a pair of men's 
 boots made." 
 
 It will give a tolerable idea of the growth of 
 settlement to-day a thousand miles or two beyond 
 Chicago, in log-houses and mud-towns, among In- 
 dians and prairie wolves, if we notice what changes 
 fifty years have wrought around Fort Dearborn and 
 Wolf Point. In 1882 the Kinzie boy with his 
 spelling-book from the tea-chest would have found 
 110,466 schoolmates, as those of legal school age 
 in Chicago. Of these he would have noticed that 
 32,038 were attending private scliools, as was he 
 in 1810. Master Eobbie Forsyth, the teacher, 
 thirteen years old, would have found himself in 
 competition with 1,019 public scliool-teachers. 
 When Miss Warren drew on gentlemen's boots 
 and went wading back and forth across the lots, 
 tlie primitive order does not seem to have reached 
 Chicago, — "Let the dry land appear;" but the 
 work of creation has since been completed there, 
 and Chicago has ceased to be amphibian. 
 
 In setting forth Ancient Chicago, we made its 
 first human haljitation our resting-place and our 
 study ; and now, in conclusion, let us go back to 
 its threshold to take farewell.
 
 ANCIENT CHICAGO. 91 
 
 It is the first liouse built in Chicago, and by 
 De Saible, a Domingoau, in 1770. IMonarch of all 
 he surveys from its low doorway, and solitary for 
 seventeen years, he sells out to Le Mai, who keeps 
 it open to Indians and furs for eight years, when 
 John Kinzie buys him out in 1804, — the first 
 x\merican in the town, though born in Quebec. 
 Kinzie keeps it as a place for Indian barter till 
 tlie massacre of 1812. Then for four years it 
 stands open and vacant for the winds and the 
 wild animals, till the owner cautiously and sadly 
 returns. All about and in sight from its forsaken 
 doorway are the ghastly remains of the massacre. 
 Here the first wliite child is born in the city of to- 
 day, and in 1823 becomes, under the same roof, the 
 first bride. Of all the joyous weddings in that now 
 populous city, the first was within those log walls ; 
 and the same year its occupant, as probably the 
 first justice of the county, held the first court in 
 Chicago under its roof. Four years later it was 
 vacated by Justice Kinzie, who moved across the 
 river to a little house under tlie walls of the Fort, 
 where he died in 1828. In 1831 it was occupied 
 by Bailey, as the first postmaster in that prophetic 
 town ; probably thus early on its floor the basket 
 of mail matter was emptied, and later its walls 
 were decorated with those boot letter-boxes by his 
 successor and son-in-law, Hogan. It was easy of 
 access, one hundred and fifty yards from the lake, 
 on the north bank of the river and opposite the
 
 92 ANCIENT GAICAGO. 
 
 Fort, with a canoe or skiff or pirogue ferry between, 
 free to any one wlio could handle paddle or oar, and 
 half a mile or so down the river from Wolf Point. 
 The bridges and draws, innumerable and intoler- 
 able, were yet to come. After 1832, says Andreas, 
 " there is no record of its being inhal)ited. Its 
 decaying logs were used by the Indians and emi- 
 grants for fuel, and the drifting sands of Lake 
 Michigan were piled over its remains. No one 
 knows when it finally disappeared,"
 
 THE " GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 93 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE " GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 " T INN was granted 6 miles into the countrey, 
 J^ — J and Mr. Hauthorne and Lieft. Davenport 
 to view and informe how the land Ijeth — whether 
 it may bee fit for another plantation or no." So 
 ran the records of the colony of Massachusetts 
 Bay for the 13th of March, 1638-9. From that 
 day to this, official and private inquiry has 
 travelled westward from the colonial east " to 
 view and informe." As to this ancient case, in- 
 viting land was found, and colonial Lynn ex- 
 tended herself finally over what now embraces six 
 townships. The successors of Hawthorne and 
 Davenport have continued explorations westward 
 till settlers have gone quite to the Pacific, gener- 
 ally finding land " fit for another plantation." Of 
 course much of this emigrant movement into dense 
 forests and over mountain ranges and through 
 vast howling wilderness has been undertaken with 
 hesitation, and carried on amid fear and great pri- 
 vations and struggles. 
 
 But nothing so crept over the youthful mind in 
 the schoolroom or confronted daring pioneers on
 
 94 TlIK " GltKAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 tlie westward growtli of the nation, as the " Great 
 American Desert." It took position in North 
 America much as the Saliara did in Africa, and 
 the two claimed about equal space and importance 
 on our cliildhood maps. This traditional chimera 
 started very naturally in the ignorance of Ameri- 
 can geography which prevailed as to the interior 
 of our continent in colonial times. When Jona- 
 than Carver, between the old French war and the 
 Eevolution, was looking about the falls of St. An- 
 thony and westward for a ship channel through 
 to the Pacific, and the peace commission of 1783 
 were in a mistake of one hundred and twenty-five 
 miles in locating the head of the Mississippi, and 
 a Mexican historian was bordering our northwest 
 coast on Tartary, the interior might well be 
 unknown. 
 
 We were most unfortunate in some of our first 
 teachers in interior geography far back in colonial 
 times. True, Popple's map, engraved in 1733, 
 shows a grassy, wooded, and watered country be- 
 yond the Mississippi and the Missouri. But a 
 French map, " Par ordore de M. le Due de 
 Choiseul, etc., 1764," says of the lands south and 
 west of St. Louis, " ces centres sont pen connues," 
 and if unknown, then Popple's drawings must have 
 been pure fancy. This country lay south of tlie 
 Missouri and extended across Kansas to the Eed 
 Eiver. The first maps in accordance with the 
 treaty of 17''^3 locate "great meadows" on both
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 95 
 
 sides of the Missouri. In his " Universal Geog- 
 raphy" of 1793, Jedidiah Morse gives the most 
 advanced knowledge of our interior at that date, ' 
 and a few facts will indicate the extent and accu- 
 racy of it. " From the best accounts tliat can be 
 obtained from the Indians," he says, " we learn 
 that the four most capital rivers of the continent 
 of North America, namely, the St. Lawrence, the 
 Mississii)pi, the River Bourbon [Missouri], and 
 the Oregon, or River of tlie West, have their 
 sources in the same neighborhood." ^ It is now 
 interesting to see, on this old map, the Oregon, or 
 River of the West, starting in what we call Devil's 
 Lake, in northeastern Dakota, and emptying into 
 the Bay of San Erancisco. St. Louis " is four or 
 five miles north by west of Cahokia, on the east 
 side of the Mississippi." To-day the city of four 
 hundred thousand is gazetted differently. The 
 anxieties of that day, clustering around that far- 
 ofif and foreign land, are thus expressed : " It has 
 been supposed that all settlers who go beyond 
 the Mississippi will be forever lost to the United 
 States." ^ Colonel Morgan, of New Jersey, was 
 then founding a settlement to l)e called New 
 j\Ladrid, under the patronage of the Spanish king, 
 on the west bank of the Mississippi, about fifty 
 miles below the mouth of the Ohio. When ne- 
 gotiations were proposed for the purchase of the 
 Louisiana Territory, oidy a small tract was thought 
 
 1 Vol. i. p. 158. 2 Yoi_ j. p 169.
 
 96 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 of, enough to give the free navigation of the Mis- 
 sissippi. In a letter to M. Dupont of Feb. 1, 
 1803, Jefferson writes: "The country which we 
 wish to purchase is a barren sand, six hundred 
 miles from east to west, and from thirty to forty 
 and fifty miles from north to south." 
 
 After our acquisition of the Louisiana in 1803, 
 Lewis and Clark went across it to the Pacihc to 
 explore it, and long before their return, nothing 
 liaving been heard from them, they were presumed 
 to have perished in that unexplored region. Tliis 
 expedition of Lewis and Clark was organized be- 
 fore the purchase of Louisiana and in the interests 
 of the Indian trade. In 1788 John Ledyard, who 
 had been with Cook on the northwest coast, met Mr. 
 Jefferson in Paris, and proposed the organization 
 of a fur company for those coasts. Failing to en- 
 list Jefferson, he started alone for that region by 
 tlie way of Eussia, was arrested, imprisoned, re- 
 leased, and in 1789 died at Cairo, Egypt. In 
 1792 Jefferson proposed to the American Philo- 
 sophical Society of Philadelphia to send Captain 
 Lewis, with companions, across to the Pacific for 
 scientific and general exploring purposes. The 
 plan failed on the eve of starting by the with- 
 drawal of Michaux, tlie botanist, by his govern- 
 ment, the French. In 1803 Congress attempted 
 to extend the Indian trade into the wild northwest, 
 and so organized the expedition that has become 
 historic as that of Lewis and Clark. The instruc-
 
 THE "GKEAT AMERICAN DESERT." 97 
 
 tions for it were draughted in April, 1803. On 
 the last day of the same month Louisiana Mas 
 ceded to the United States ; and so the expedition 
 which consumed two years* four months and nine 
 days in the round trip from and to St. Louis, re- 
 sulted in an exploration of our own territory. 
 
 Under these shadows of ignorance, and beyond 
 the western horizon, the Great American Desert 
 took its place and name. Lieutenant Zebulon 
 M. Pike first gave outline and prominence to this 
 unfortunate myth in American geography and his- 
 tory. He commanded two Government explora- 
 tions of the country, examining the sources of 
 the Mississippi, Missouri, Platte, and Arkansas, in 
 1805-1807. In his report to the war office, pub- 
 lished soon after, he sketches the vast regions 
 explored as repulsive to all immigrants and im- 
 possible for settlements, and then says : — 
 
 " From these immense prairies may be derived 
 one great advantage to the United States ; namely, 
 the restriction of our population to some certain 
 limits, and thereby a continuation of the union. Our 
 citizens being so prone to rambling and extending 
 themselves on the frontier, will, through necessity, 
 be constrained to limit their extent to the west to 
 the borders of the Missouri and Mississippi, while 
 they leave the prairies, incapable of cultivation, to 
 the wandering and uncivilized Aborigines of the 
 country. It appears to me to be only possible to 
 7
 
 98 TIIK "CillEAT AMEllICAN DESERT." 
 
 introduce a limited population to the banks of the 
 Kansas, Platte, and Arkansas." ^ 
 
 From this Government document the delusion 
 was reproduced in manuals of geography, and 
 began to pervade literature at home and abroad. 
 The real biography of Major Pike is yet waiting 
 for the romantic pen of personal and thrilling 
 narrative. A son of the American army, born in 
 the heat of the Eevolution, early a lieutenant 
 under his father on the frontier, the first to ex- 
 plore officially those head-waters ; captured over 
 the unknown line and taken a prisoner to Santa 
 Fe and old Mexico, after leaving his name on one 
 of our noblest mountain peaks ; leading as briga- 
 dier-general in the attack on York, now Toronto, 
 in 1813 ; falling in the assault which proved vic- 
 torious, and making a sign in his dying moments 
 to have the captured British flag placed under his 
 head, — he ended a most adventurous and heroic 
 life. 
 
 In 1810-11 the land party of the Astoria enter- 
 prise, under Wilson P. Hunt, and outlined by the 
 graphic pen of Irving, gave most unjust coloring 
 to the horrors of this imagined desert; for the 
 tragic fate of that expedition was attributed, in 
 the popular mind, to the inhospitable qualities of 
 an American Sahara; and to this day unread 
 speakers and writers are damaging the West for 
 
 ^ Expeditions, etc., of Lieut. Z. M. Pike, Appendix II.
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 99 
 
 tlie mistake and disasters which occurred to that 
 party through ignorance of the country and in the 
 mountains far beyond the desert, so called. 
 
 In the year 1819-20, j\Iajor Stephen H. Long, 
 of the army, by order of John C. Calhoun, Sec- 
 retary of War, went out to " explore the Missouri 
 and its principal branches, and then in succes- 
 sion Red Eiver, Arkansas, and the Mississippi 
 above the mouth of the Missouri." The expedi- 
 tion took winter quarters near Council Bluffs, and 
 then swept the eastern base and slopes of the 
 Rocky Mountains along and among the heads and 
 tributaries of the Missouri and its lower valleys. 
 
 A few extracts from the official report of Major 
 Long will show how the "desert" grew in area 
 and in terror before the American people, and 
 how good material it furnished to Europeans, 
 who wished to disparage the United States and 
 discourage emigration, and prepare the way to 
 capture Oregon. Of the country between the 
 Mississippi and Missouri it is reported that " the 
 scarcity of timber, mill-seats, and springs of water 
 — defects that are almost uniformly prevalent — 
 must for a long time prove serious impediments in 
 the way of settling the country. Large tracts are 
 often to be met with, exhibiting scarcely a trace 
 of vegetation." ^ The Great American Desert 
 manifests itself thus authoritatively in an official 
 document in this " Report of a United States 
 
 1 Long's Expedition, riiila. Eel. 1S23, vol. ii. pp. 341, 352.
 
 100 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 Exploring- Expedition " : " From the minute ac- 
 count given in the narrative of the expedition of 
 the particular features of this region, it will be 
 perceived to bear a manifest resemblance to the 
 deserts of Siberia." ^ 
 
 Of the mountainous country beyond, Major 
 Long says : " It is a region destined by the bar- 
 renness of its soil, the inhospitable character of 
 its climate, and by other physical disadvantages, 
 to be the abode of perpetual desolation." ^ 
 
 If some early explorer from the Jamestown or 
 Plymouth colony had said this of large sections 
 to the westward, we could now see how their 
 reports would have stayed the territorial growth 
 of the colonies. Greenhow, in his " History of 
 Oregon," and as late as 1845, sets thus in summary 
 the teachings of " Long's Narrative " : " The whole 
 division of North America, drained by the Mis- 
 souri and the Arkansas and their tributaries, be- 
 tween the meridian of the mouth of the Platte 
 and the Eocky Mountains, is almost entirely unfit 
 for cultivation, and therefore uninhabitable by a 
 people depending upon agriculture for their sub- 
 sistence. . . . These circumstances, as they be- 
 came known through the United States, rendered 
 the people and their representatives in the Fed- 
 eral legislature more and more indifferent with 
 regard to the territories on the northwestern side 
 
 1 Long's Expedition, vol. ii. p. 389. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 401.
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." lUl 
 
 of the continent. It became always difficult, 
 and generally impossible, to engage the attention 
 of Congress to any matters connected with those 
 countries." ^ 
 
 It was quite in the official line, and inevitable, 
 that Pike's and Long's Government explorations 
 and reports should furnish the staple for our his- 
 tories and school geographies in their descriptions 
 of that border land. Government documents, then 
 as now, were taken as first authority ; wliile expe- 
 rience has been teaching us to quote them cau- 
 tiously where personal observation and judgment 
 alone have furnished the data. 
 
 In 1824 Woodbridge and Willard published 
 their " Geography for Schools," and they thus 
 spoke to the generation of pupils whom a better 
 information is now correcting. Eei'erring to the 
 great delta between the Mississippi and Missouri, 
 they say : " The soil of this region is probably 
 equal, if not superior, to that of any other tract 
 of upland in the United States ; but the scarcity 
 of timber, mill-seats, and springs must for a long 
 time impede its settlement." ^ 
 
 They cover a belt south of the Missouri, and 
 extending well toward Red Eiver, with the re- 
 mark, " The great swamp, two hundred miles in 
 length and from five to thirty in width." It is 
 now as difficult to find this "swamp" as to find 
 
 ^ History of Oregon and California, p. 323. 
 
 2 Woodbridge and Willard's Geogvapliy, 1824, p. 77.
 
 102 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 tlic " desert " of Pike and Long. Our authors 
 proceed to say : — 
 
 "From longitude 9G°, or the meridian of 
 Council Bluffs, to the Chippewan mountains is 
 a desert region of four hundred miles in leufjth 
 and breadth, or about sixteen thousand square 
 miles in extent. . . . On approaching within one 
 hundred miles of the Rocky Mountains, their 
 snow-capped summits became visible. Here the 
 hills become more frequent, and elevated rocks 
 more abundant, and the soil more sterile, until 
 we reach the abrupt chain of peaks which 
 divide it from the western declivities of North 
 America. Not a thousandth part can be said to 
 have any timber growth, and the surface is gen- 
 erally naked. . . . The predominant soil of this 
 region is a sterile sand, and large tracts are often 
 to be met with which exhibit scarcely a trace 
 of vegetation. . . . The salts and magnesia min- 
 gled with the soil are often so abundant as to 
 destroy vegetation. The waters are, to a great 
 extent, impure, and frequently too brackish for 
 use. . . . The valley of the Canadian Eiver is 
 encrusted to a great extent with salt nearly pure, 
 resembling ice or snow in its appearance. The 
 waters of this river are so impregnated with salt 
 as to be unfit for use, and this is the case with 
 other tributaries of the Arkansas and of the Red 
 River. , . . Agreeably to the best intelligence we
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 103 
 
 Imve, the country, both northward and southward 
 of that described, commencing near the sources of 
 the Sahine and Colorado, and extending to the 
 northern boundary of the United States, is through- 
 out of a similar character." ^ 
 
 Of the northwest territory the text-book taught 
 that " the northern parts are sterile ; " and of the 
 Missouri territory, that is, all nortli and west of 
 the State of Missouri, in 1824, " there is little 
 probability that it can ever become the residence 
 of an agricultural nation ; " and of the Arkansas 
 territory, that is, all southwest of Missouri to the 
 Spanish line, that " the western portions are dry 
 and sterile."^ 
 
 Olney's Geography, in the change of school 
 l)ooks, contained the same teachings. Of the 
 northwest territory he but copies his predecessors 
 in saying, " The- northern part is hilly and moun- 
 tainous, with a light, barren soil." ^ The same 
 author estimates the Missouri territory of that 
 day as containing about eight hundred thousand 
 square miles, extending from the Mississippi to 
 the Missouri, and says : " The soil in the western 
 parts and on the banks of the rivers is extremely 
 rich and fertile ; the remainder is generally a vast, 
 
 1 Woodbridge and Willard's Geography, pp. 77-79. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 2G6, Goodrich's Geography of 1826 speaks of "the 
 Great American Desert." 
 
 3 Olney's Geography, 1831, p. 114.
 
 104 THE " GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 elevated, and l)aiTen waste, destitute of tiiuLer 
 and vegetation." ^ 
 
 In his edition of 1839, Smith makes the Great 
 American Desert extend from the lied River of 
 Texas and the Indian Territory and Arkansas to 
 the North Platte. 
 
 After the Asliburton-Webster treaty of 1842 
 had been ratified, the Oregon question assumed a 
 livelier interest in Congress, and McDuffie, speak- 
 ing of the region in dispute, said : " Why, as I 
 understand it, seven hundred miles this side of 
 the Eocky Mountains it is uninhabitable, where 
 rain scarcely ever falls ; a barren, sandy soil." 
 Somewhat later another eminent statesman, yet 
 living, spoke of " a wagon road eighteen hundred 
 miles in length, tlirough an arid and mountainous 
 region," to the territory in dispute. 
 
 Of course these gloomy accounts of uninhal)ita- 
 ble and impassable wastes between the United 
 States and coveted Oregon soon found their way 
 into English periodicals, to aid in making the 
 coming arguments against American possession 
 over the mountains. So the " Edinburgh Review " 
 for 1843 says of the country west of the Missouri 
 and Arkansas : — 
 
 " There lies the desert, . . . except in a few 
 spots on the border of the rivers, incapable, proba- 
 bly forever, of fixed settlements. This is the great 
 
 1 Olney's Geography, p. 117.
 
 THE " GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 105 
 
 prairie wildern(3ss, wliicli lias a general breadth of 
 six hundred or seven hunch-ed miles, and extends 
 from south to north . . . nearly fourteen hundred 
 miles, ... so complete in the character of aridity 
 that the great rivers — the Platte, Arkansas, and 
 Rio Grande — after many hundred miles of course 
 through the mountains, dry up altogether on the 
 plains in summer, like the streams of Australia, 
 leaving only standing pools of water between wide 
 sand-bars. . . . Oregon will never be colonized 
 overland from the Eastern States. . . . With these 
 internal obstacles between, we cannot but imagine 
 that the world must assume a new face before 
 the American wagons make plain the road to the 
 Columbia as they have to the Ohio." 
 
 Of course that unfortunate passage is quoted 
 by the " Eeview " from Irving, in which the imagi- 
 nation was vigorous after knowledge failed : — 
 
 " An immense tract stretching north and south 
 for hundreds of miles along the foot of the Rocky 
 Mountains and drained by the tributary streams 
 of the jMissouri and the Mississippi. Tiiis re- 
 gion, which resembles one of the immeasurable 
 steppes of Asia, has not inaptly been termed ' the 
 Great American Desert.' ... It is a land where 
 no man permanently abides, for in certain seasons 
 of the year there is no food either for the hunter 
 or his steed. The herbage is parched and with- 
 ered ; the brooks and streams are dried up ; the
 
 106 Tllii: "OIIKAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 buffiilo, the elk, and tlie door have wandered to 
 distant parts, keeping within tlie range of expiring 
 verdure, and leaving behind them a vast uninhab- 
 ited solitude, seamed by ravines, the former beds 
 of torrents, but now serving only to tantalize and 
 increase tlie tliirst cjf the traveller. . , . Such is 
 the nature of this immense wilderness of the far 
 West, which apparently defies cultivation, and the 
 habitation of civilized life. ... It is to be feared 
 that a great part of it will form a lawless interval 
 between the abodes of civilized man, like the 
 wastes of the ocean or the deserts of Arabia." ^ 
 
 It is much to be regretted that this misappre- 
 hension of a vast region, much of it magnificent 
 in agriculture to-day, should traverse the round 
 world on the great fame of a pen which is hardly 
 surpassed in pure and elegantly fascinating Eng- 
 lish. He had no personal knowledge of the " des- 
 ert" over which he has thrown this ghastly spell. 
 His " Tour on the Prairies," published the year 
 before, and the record of his own experiences, 
 showed him no such forlorn region. In early 
 days he had revelled in the trapper, hunter, and 
 trader stories of the headquarters of the North- 
 west Fur Company at Montreal, at an age, he 
 owns, " when imagination lends its color to every- 
 thing." The men who gave him positive informa- 
 tion were but poor judges at the best of a region 
 
 1 Astoria, chap. x\ii. Tliis was publisheil in 1836.
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 107 
 
 for human homes ; and so far as they saw openings 
 inviting to immigration, it was their interest and 
 policy to conceal the fiicts and keep the country 
 unoccupied as a game preserve, as the Hudson 
 Bay Company covered and misrepresented their 
 game-field, to the great damage of the Englisli 
 Crown. The journals, letters, and business books 
 of the fur trade which Astor put into his hands 
 for this volume, the examining of which was 
 spared him by his nephew, he confesses "were 
 often meagre in their details, furnisliing hints to 
 provoke rather than narratives to satisfy inquiry." ^ 
 Irving makes an unconscious confession as to the 
 quality of his material when he speaks of " the 
 stories of these Sinbads of the wilderness " that 
 his ears took in so ardently in those genial head- 
 quarters at Montreal.^ A passage in his preface to 
 " The Tales of a Traveller " might properly precede 
 all that he says on the Great American Desert : 
 
 " I have read somewhat, heard and seen more, 
 and dreamt more than all. My brain is filled, 
 therefore, with all kinds of odds and ends. In 
 
 1 The writer, after a residence anil trial of years in St. Louis, 
 then the centre of tlie American fur trade, and in constant inter- 
 course with Indian traders anil trappers and wandering border 
 men, can .sympathize with Irving in this failure. 
 
 2 He supplemented his deficiency with the journals of travel- 
 lers, as Messrs. Lewis and Clark, Long, Bradbury, Brecken- 
 ridge, Franchere, and Eoss Cox. Of one of them, as authority. 
 Major Long, we have already spoken.
 
 108 THE "GKEAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 travelling, these heterogeneous matters have be- 
 come shaken up in my mind, as the articles are 
 apt to be in an ill-packed travelling-trunk ; so 
 that when I attempt to draw forth a fact, I cannot 
 determine whether I have heard, read, or dreamt 
 it, and I am always at a loss to know how much 
 to believe of my own stories." 
 
 The " Westminster Keview" has the same senti- 
 ment, borrowing from Pike, Long, Irving, and other 
 misled American authors : " From the Valley of 
 the Mississippi to the Eocky Mountains, the 
 United States territory consists of an arid tract 
 extending south nearly to Texas, which has been 
 called the Great American Desert. " 
 
 Edward I. Wallace, an English writer of 1846, 
 says : " The caravan of emigrants who undertake 
 the passage [of the desert and the mountains] take 
 provisions for six months, and many of them die 
 on the way." 
 
 Governor Simpson, of the Hudson Bay Com- 
 pany, who published his journey through the 
 northwest in 1847, has this passage: "From the 
 inhabited parts of the United States, it [Oregon] 
 is separated by deserts of rock and sand on either 
 side of the dividing ridge of mountains, — deserts 
 with whose horrors every reader of Washington 
 Irving's ' Astoria ' is familiar." 
 
 The overland expedition of Wilson P. Hunt 
 was not only a calamity to John Jacob Astor, but
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 109 
 
 to American geography and the general growth of 
 the United States toward the Pacific. 
 
 In his " Quarto Geography," 1849, Ohiey has 
 a map of the United States west of the Indian 
 Territory, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. There 
 is a curving zone extending back in width to the 
 Eocky Mountains, and from northern Texas to 
 the British line, and lettered " Great American 
 Desert," with this description covering it : " This 
 desert is traversed by numerous herds of buffaloes 
 and wild horses, and inhabited by roving tribes of 
 Indians." The " Modern Atlas " of W. C. Wood- 
 bridge, published twenty years before, had the 
 same belt with the same title, only that it there 
 extended south through Texas to the Eio Grande. 
 The " Quarto School Geography " of Eoswell C. 
 Smith, 1852, extends Nebraska back through Wy- 
 oming to the mountains, and says of the whole of 
 it, " Little better than a desert." While the 
 region north of Nebraska and extending west to 
 the mountains, substantially Dakota, " resembles 
 Nebraska in soil." Our school geographies, down 
 to very late years, have taught the children the 
 same mistakes about an uninhabitable region be- 
 yond the Mississippi and the Missouri. 
 
 It has already been shown that English interests 
 in Oregon, while its title and occupation were yet 
 open questions, studiously added area and horrors 
 to the " desert " said to intervene between the 
 States and that Territory. Twenty-five years later
 
 110 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 tlie English policy to settle their country hot ween 
 the Lake Superior region and the I'acific led 
 English writers to perpetuate and pro[)agate the 
 dying delusion ol" a Greiit American Desert. In 
 the " Westminster lieview" for July, 18G7, the 
 author makes a damaging attack on tlie Hudson 
 Bay Company for keeping a tract of country 
 " nearly as large as the whole United States and 
 more than half the size of Europe as a vast pre- 
 serve for the fur-bearing animals." In order to do 
 this, the writer says that " the company has stu- 
 diously cultivated the opinion that all Eupert's 
 Land [the Hudson Bay Basin] is a howling wil- 
 derness, a desert, where half-starved animals and 
 men wage war for life on each other, and that 
 nothing induces settlement." 
 
 Now, after the exclusive rights of that huge 
 monopoly had reverted to the Crown, and the 
 English Government discovered that its eminent 
 interest lay in opening up this magnificent country 
 between Ontario and the Pacific to their own emi- 
 grants and trade, the writer proceeds to adopt the 
 policy that he has reprobated in the Hudson 
 Bay Company. Speaking of the country south of 
 the parallel of forty-nine, which divides the two 
 countries, the " Eeview " says : — 
 
 " From the Valley of the Mississippi to the 
 Eocky Mountains the United States territory con- 
 sists of an arid tract extending south nearly to
 
 THE "GKEAT AMERICAN DESERT." Ill 
 
 Texas, which has bocii called the Great American 
 Desert. This sterile region, covering such au ini- 
 niense area, contains but a lew thousand miles 
 of fertile land. . . . North of this is the zone of 
 mixed country named the Fertile Belt, which is 
 drained by the Red, Assiniboine, and Saskatchewan, 
 and constitutes the basin of Lake Winnipeg. It 
 consists of an undulatiug, park-like country, where 
 prairies covered with luxuriant grasses are mingled 
 with stretches of woodland, and well watered by 
 numerous lakes and streams. . . . Nature, march- 
 ing from east to west, showered her bounties on 
 the laud of the United States until she reached the 
 Mississippi, but there she turned aside and went 
 northward to favor British territory." 
 
 It is an interesting discovery in physical geog- 
 raphy, that in the six days of creation, or somewhere 
 in the glacial eras, Nature was so predetermined 
 and took so sharp a turn north, after passing the 
 Mississippi, just "to favor British territory " and 
 advertise the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Yet ac- 
 cording to present appearances Iowa and Minne- 
 sota and Dakota were not totally disinherited in 
 the will and legacies of Nature. Indeed, the 
 author elsewhere, by a kind of human codicil, 
 admits the two former and Kansas to " this beau- 
 tiful region." 
 
 lieturning to the English side of the line, the 
 British autlior continues : " It appears that there
 
 112 THE "GUEAT AMEUICAN DESERT." 
 
 are from sixty tliousaiid to one hundred thousand 
 square miles lying directly between the two colo- 
 nies and British Columbia, which possess every 
 possible qualification for agricultural purposes." 
 
 Concerning which belt the " lleview " quotes 
 Lord Selkirk as saying : " If these regions were 
 occupied by an industrious population, they might 
 afford ample means of subsistence to more than 
 thirty millions of British subjects." 
 
 No doubt these are fair statements of the quali- 
 ties, areas, and possibilities of the English pos- 
 sessions in question, and the English Government 
 did not recover itself any too soon from a grasp- 
 ing and uncivilizing monopoly. Referring to the 
 Northern Pacific Eailroad, while writing for the 
 Canadian Pacific, the "Westminster" says: "A 
 road has been carried, not through a beautiful 
 country like the Fertile Belt [of the Canadian 
 Pacific], but through the barren wilderness of the 
 American Desert, inhabited by fierce and hostile 
 Indians. ... As the neighboring State of Minne- 
 sota fills up, American emigrants will throng more 
 and more over the boundary into the Fertile Belt. 
 They cannot spread westward within the limits of 
 the United States, for the Great American Desert 
 forbids it." 
 
 It does not seem needful to dwell further on the 
 earlier outlines and description of this famous and 
 fabled region, as Government reports, text-books, 
 and periodicals have presented it. The area of it
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 113 
 
 began to contract on the eastern border when the 
 Americans began, about 1843, to study earnestly 
 the Oregon question, and since that date it has 
 shown a steady diminution on the maps and in 
 books. Official reports of State and Territorial 
 surveys, text-books, and magazines have produced 
 immense shrinkage in "arid tracts," "great swamps," 
 " sterile sand," " steppes of Asia," and " the barren 
 wilderness of the American Desert." Colton, the 
 geographer, in 1867 draws a heavy pen through 
 his former desert. When writing of Kansas he 
 says : " The western portion is not so well adapted 
 to sustain a large population as the more eastern 
 districts." In his edition of 1877 he still farther 
 diminishes the traditional barrenness, and confines 
 the Mituvaises I'ervcs to a limited area in north- 
 western Nebraska and southwestern Dakota, around 
 the sources of the North Platte and White Earth 
 rivers. This is quite in contrast with his state- 
 ment in 1856, when, covering an extent of country 
 from Fort Laramie to Wood Eiver — three hun- 
 dred miles — he says, " Entirely unfit for cultiva- 
 tion ; " and of a wide range south of the Platte and 
 extending into Kansas, he remarks, "Much of this 
 country is unproductiv'e and sterile." The Amer- 
 ican Desert, while able to confront corps of civil 
 and military engineers and explorers, has not been 
 able to make a stand against the multitudes of 
 farming immigration, and it has slowly retreated, 
 before an army of invading ploughs, toward the 
 
 8
 
 114 THE " GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 iiioimtains. One section has turned to bay, like 
 an animal of the chase, in southwestern Dakota 
 and northwestern Nebraska, but for what length 
 of time remains to be seen. Some labor has been 
 expended by the writer in obtaining information 
 down to date from old residents of that region, 
 and of scientific experts who liave made offi- 
 cial surveys of it for tlie Government, that the 
 reader might see the American Sahara on its latest 
 exhibitions. 
 
 A. D., of Franklin County, took residence in 
 Nebraska in 1869, and as a professional man has 
 traversed the State quite extensively. He writes 
 me : " I came to Butler County in the fall of 1869, 
 making my home on the Platte. It was then 
 tliought that ' over the blutfs,' that is, outside the 
 Platte valley, the soil was of no account. There 
 were three small school districts along the river. 
 When I left in 1880 there were sixty-three school 
 districts in tlie county, and scarcely a foot of public 
 land to be had, every section occupied. It was 
 thought in 1869 that there was very little land 
 worth the having west of Butler County. How 
 immigration, with the plough, scattered our theo- 
 ries to the winds, — changed our theories notwith- 
 standing the winds ! " 
 
 Since that date settlements in Nebraska have 
 moved west from the centre meridian of Butler 
 County fifty miles on tlie shortest limit and one 
 hundred on the lontrest limit. This latter move-
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESEllT." 115 
 
 ment embraces a belt one third the width of the 
 State. On the two railroads running across the 
 State there are continuous settlements to the Colo- 
 rado and Wyoming lines. The average progress 
 west along our entire border, from the British to 
 the Me.\:ican boundaries, has been sixteen miles a 
 year for forty years ; but into these desert h^nds, 
 so supposed, the average has been reduced. 
 
 Another resident of ISTebraska since 1867 says : 
 
 " My own impression is that the Bad Lands are 
 about the best part of our State, and that the 
 American Desert is destined to blossom as the 
 rose. There is sand in small quantities distrib- 
 uted over vast areas, and some of our farmers like a 
 little sand and some would have more. . . . Some 
 of our citizens have travelled in western Nebraska, 
 where report said the poor land was, and they pro- 
 nounce that very portion of country excellent for 
 grazing. . . . There is a clay vegetable mould loam 
 in the sand along the Elkhorn and the Beaver 
 which holds the sand in place, and the ratio is 
 sufficient to make good soil in places where some 
 farmers would declare at sight that that land is 
 worthless." 
 
 Prof J. E. Todd, of the United States Geological 
 Survey, a man of thorougli, cautious, and clear 
 views, says of Nebraska : " I believe that the great 
 desideratum is water. The soil is good enough, but 
 the water is, over much of the region, one hundred
 
 116 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 feet below the surface or more. I believe, how- 
 ever, that the rainfall is increasing over the whole 
 region, and I presume that eventually the whole 
 may be inhabited tj[uite thickly, but it will be 
 by the help of irrigation. ... I should consider 
 the 'barrens' of Nebraska good grazing land as a 
 rule." 
 
 Anotlier, who had assisted in an official survey 
 of the northwestern portion of the State, estimates 
 the Bad Lands at less than thirty townships. 
 
 Of those whose opinions lie in manuscript be- 
 fore the writer, but one more will be quoted, — 
 W. F. K., — who was a resident business man in 
 the State for ten years, and part of that time 
 Indian agent for the Government. As he has 
 travelled over every portion of the State, his opin- 
 ions are to be received as -weighty and correct. 
 Having traversed in one trip much of the Repub- 
 lican valley and the South Platte from its mouth 
 to its source, he remarks:- — 
 
 " I can truly say that, in my judgment, there is 
 not an acre of ground in southwestern Nebraska, 
 where it is possible to irrigate the soil, but that 
 any of the hardier products can be raised in 
 abundance ; and tlie uplands are as fine a natural 
 pasturage as can be found in the world, and are 
 already covered by thousands of heads of stock 
 tliat live on its grasses tlie year round. The same 
 can be said of the bottom lands in the northwest
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESKUT." 117 
 
 part of the State. . . . There is a strip of laDcl 
 lying between the North Platte and the Niobrara, 
 of perhaps an average width north and south of 
 fifty miles by one hundred and fifty east and west, 
 comprising sand-liills covered by a scant vegeta- 
 tion, that will support a limited amount of stock. 
 Between the Niolnara and White Kivers is a strip 
 of rocky, broken lands of an average width, north 
 and south, of twenty miles, by a hundred or more 
 east and west, covered by an abundant growth 
 of fair quality of pine timber. And now comes 
 the only actual part of Nebraska that can be 
 called a desert. It is contained in that part of 
 the country lying between the White Eiver and 
 the north boundary of the State, less than thirty 
 miles north and south by perhaps a hundred east 
 and west. So you will see that Colton is away 
 off, wrong, when he says that the Bad Lands, or 
 Mcmvaiscs Terrcs, comprise a tenth of the State." 
 
 Of the great central and eastern sections of the 
 State, he adds : " All who have ever lived there 
 know tliat the natural soil is far superior to the 
 made gardens of New England." 
 
 On an official United States map of Nebraska,^ 
 drawn from Government surveys under the Depart- 
 ment of the Platte, there is a curving belt extend- 
 
 1 Map of Nebraska, compiled and drawn under the direction 
 of Capt. W. S. Stanton. Headijuarters Department of the 
 Platte, Fort Omaha, Nebraska, June 23, 1881.
 
 118 THE "GREAT AMEllICAN DESERT." 
 
 injjj froiii tlio I'Litte to the Niobrara and iiortliern 
 boundary, characterized by sand-hills, with some 
 alkali niarslies. A thin coarse grass covers the 
 summits of the hills, and a rank thick growth the 
 valleys. Since it was so mapped, in 1881, thrifty 
 settlements have entered the southern and north- 
 ern sections of this belt. Here, as elsewhere, such 
 regions, at first sight to the soldier and amateur 
 explorer so forbidding, have yielded to the farmer. 
 Twenty-five years ago the eastern third of Ne- 
 braska, now so thrifty in agriculture, would have 
 been mapped in the same way even as Long and 
 Pike did sixty and seventy years ago. 
 
 Passing from northwestern Nebraska into Da- 
 kota, one continues in these Bad Lands, so called, 
 and may traverse a region of them, right and left 
 and to the eastward and northerly of the Black 
 Hills, as large as Massachusetts. Primeval vol- 
 canic action and the abrasion by the weather for 
 long centuries have left pyramid rocks, as in the 
 Garden of the Gods, and wild ravines and gulches. 
 The buttes, pyramids, or mounds take on all forms, 
 and some the height of one hundred and fifty feet. 
 The soil is fertile, sometimes to excess, and tlie 
 high mesas, as well as the intervales, are covered 
 with heavy grasses, and by their attraction to 
 grazing animals make the region quite a game- 
 park. 
 
 The careless interchange of the terms "Bad 
 Land" and "desert," as if the two were synony-
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 119 
 
 mons, has doue mncli to mislead, and to give the 
 impression that the Bad Lands are barren. This 
 is far £rom fact, and the error has arisen from the 
 only partial adoption of the title that the early 
 trapping aud trading French voyagcurs gave to 
 these weird lands. Because of the gulches and 
 little canons that intersect them, and from the 
 fatty, sticky, "gumbo" quality of the soil, they 
 found it quite difticult to travel there with ponies 
 and pack animals, and therefore named such re- 
 gions mauvaises terres pour traverser. Writers and 
 geographers^ have taken by abbreviation the first 
 half only of the phrase, and so have applied the 
 word " bad " to the soil, whereas it belongs only to 
 the pony-trail through it. 
 
 The library of errors which we have been glean- 
 ing is exceedingly interesting reading, as in con- 
 trast with the existing facts. The old authors 
 come to view, much as the fossils of extinct races 
 in a cabinet of natural history. To follow to-day, 
 as we have, personally on the trail of Pike and Long 
 and Irving, and find those innumerable herds, and 
 grain-fields by the thousand acres, and magnificent 
 cities, and railways in the " desert," carries one 
 through the amazing into the amusing in official 
 and literary works. It is among vivid and happy 
 memories that w^e once rode in a prairie wagon 
 sixteen miles through continuous wheat-fields of 
 individual and German farms ; and by cars through 
 one wheat-farm of thirty thousand acres, affording
 
 120 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 six hundred thousand bushels a year ; and thirty 
 minutes, by the held watch, at fair railroad speed, 
 along a field of corn undivided by any fence or 
 opening, — ten miles of corn! These were on 
 Pike's barren frontier, providentially interposed 
 to keep the young republic from spreading there 
 to its ruin, and on portions of Long's regions 
 " bearing a manifest resemblance to the deserts of 
 Siberia." This corn and wheat were west of the 
 meridian of the mouth of the Platte, described by 
 Greenhow, as late as 1845, as " uninhabitable by a 
 people depending upon agriculture." Nor are the 
 three grain-regions, visited and insjjected, excep- 
 tional and selected. They are incidental to any 
 of the great north and soutli thoroughfares be- 
 tween the two Eed Eivers of the United States, — 
 tlie Manitoban and the Texan. These grains and 
 herds are in the " arid tract extending south nearly 
 to Texas," according to the " Westminster Eeview," 
 which tract, tlie " Edinburgh " said, had " a general 
 breadth of six hundred or seven hundred miles, 
 and extends from south to north nearly fourteen 
 hundred miles." It is the same Great American 
 Desert which to-day is putting cereals and meat 
 within the reach of hungry Europe. And yet, as 
 late as 1873, this same American Desert is made to 
 reappear on the more advanced points of settle- 
 ment, somewhat broken by arable land, extending 
 from Mexico to the British line. Like the old 
 military narratives, it is set forth by a soldier and
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 121 
 
 "described from personal observation extending 
 through fourteen years of military service on the 
 plains." The article ^ is a record of extended 
 travel, and embraces much valuable information, 
 with this just and general caution ; " There are, of 
 course, in so summary an account, many fine sec- 
 tions of limited extent which could not be noticed 
 in a sketch which undertakes to give only general 
 characteristics." 
 
 The General takes and states clearly his position, 
 like an old soldier that he is : — 
 
 " That the western limit of our agricultural 
 lands has already been reached (1873) by settle- 
 ments along the frontier from the Eio Grande to 
 the forty-ninth parallel of latitude. . . . We have 
 reached the border all along from Dakota to Texas, 
 where land for nothing is no cheaper than good 
 land at thirty dollars an acre. . . . From the one 
 hundredth meridian to the Sierra Nevada Moun- 
 tains, a distance of twelve hundred miles, there is 
 not more than one acre to the hundred that has 
 any appreciable value for agricultural puiposes, or 
 that will for the next hundred years sell for any 
 appreciable sum. Moreover, for one hundred miles 
 before reaching that meridian there is compara- 
 tively little good land. ... It is possible that at 
 
 1 The Great Middle Eegion of the United States, and its 
 Limited Space of Arable Land. By Gen. W. B. Hazen, North 
 American Review, January, 1875.
 
 122 THE " GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 some remote period the good lands of the country 
 may be so densely populated as to cause many to 
 seek a precarious existence by such meagre farming 
 as is possible in this region. . . . We must soon 
 face a condition of facts utterly new in tlie economy 
 of the country, when not new but old States must 
 make room for the increase of population." 
 
 The north and south line, therefore, according 
 to General Hazen, along which tillable land disap- 
 pears mostly on the east of it, and land without 
 any appreciable value for agriculture takes posses- 
 sion mostly of the west of it, — a line dividing in a 
 general way between the fertile and the barren, — 
 would start on the British border near Pembina 
 and run near Yankton, Dakota ; Ellsworth, Kansas ; 
 and by Wichita through Texas. On the west of 
 the Mississippi the General gives the area of this 
 worthless land, of course only by a general esti- 
 mation, in this way : Of Dakota, excepting a few 
 small fertile strips, he says that not one acre in a 
 hundred is fit for agriculture. One half only of 
 Nebraska and of Kansas he concedes to the farmer ; 
 one acre in twenty-five in Colorado ; one in seventy 
 in New Mexico ; and one in eighty in Arizona. 
 " The whole amount of arable land in Utah is so 
 very small as scarcely to admit of comparison." 
 Yet elsewhere this writer gives " slightly over a 
 hundredth of the area as arable." It is the half 
 of Kansas west of the meridian of Fort Hayes that
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 123 
 
 the General places in the list of desert lands. Of 
 California this strong remark is made : " About 
 one third of the western half of the State is 
 available, while not more than a twentieth of 
 the eastern part can be used by any of the pro- 
 cesses of farming which will be used in America 
 for a hundred years to come," 
 
 Montana, he estimates, has about one million of 
 acres of fine land for the farmer out of her ninety- 
 two millions. The fertile and inviting valley of the 
 Yellowstone, as it is generally understood, General 
 Hazen pronounces "a mytli." One half of Texas 
 he regards as dry, broken, and barren country, and 
 unfit for agriculture. Nearly or quite one half 
 of the Indian Territory on tlie west is surrendered 
 as too dry and barren to till. Nevada is classed 
 with Utah in general description, having " only the 
 merest patches of arable land," with tlie estimate 
 of not more than one acre to the hundred. Idaho 
 follows Montana in the general outlines of quality 
 for a farming population, or about one to a hundred 
 of arable land. In passing from Idaho into Oregon 
 and Washington, our author looks in vain for the 
 " broad, rich valley of the Columbia." This river, 
 he says, chafes through mountain gorges, with 
 here and there a valley, along which, if a trail be 
 possible, " the wheels cut into a loose, arid sand, 
 with here and there a sage-bush so large as to 
 have grown into a shrub with a stalk several
 
 124 THE " tIREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 inches in diameter, and extending its brandies 
 over several yards of ground. We find these gen- 
 eral features of a broken, mountainous country till 
 we cross the Sierra." 
 
 This leaves about two thirds of Oregon and 
 Washington to be added to the arid, rocky, and 
 desolate regions which General Hazen has been 
 collecting and sketching in his article in the 
 " North American." 
 
 After this manner, in per cents and descriptions, 
 General Hazen passes in review fifteen States 
 and Territories. They aggregate about 1,760,000 
 square miles, of which he estimates about 350,000 
 square miles as arable, — only about one fifth of 
 the whole. In the lands called arable he includes 
 only those that are irrigable ; and so, after deduct- 
 ing all that can in any ordinary circumstances be 
 put under the plough, lie leaves in the region 
 outlined about 1,410,000 square miles of territory 
 that no j)rocesses of farming now known can 
 utilize. The amount of desert or " bad " land is 
 equal to about one hundred and seventy-five States 
 as large as Massachusetts. The non-arable area of 
 General Hazen is equal to the German Empire, 
 France, Great Britain and Ireland, Italy, Spain, 
 Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland, 
 Greece, and thirty-two Palestines. 
 
 This article in the " North American " recalls 
 at once the narr9,tives of the expeditions of Pike 
 and Long and other explorers, who during this
 
 THE "GREAT' AMERICAN DESERT." 125 
 
 entire century have been furnishing our geogra- 
 phers and our untravelled authors with materials 
 for tlie Great American Desert. The historical 
 germ of this Sahara appears in Jefferson's letter 
 to Dupout, already quoted, in which he calls the 
 tract desired " a barren land." 
 
 As a rule agricnlturists are not good military 
 engineers, and would do but poorly in locating 
 military roads and forts. Is it not possible that 
 military men would be equally unfortunate in dis- 
 covei'ing agricultural lands and in locating farms ? 
 At least, it remains to be explained why officers 
 of the army, in their reconnoissances, reported the 
 original and wild lands now making Iowa, Minne- 
 sota, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas as naturally 
 unfit for human habitation. A possible explana- 
 tion may lurk in this grave confession of General 
 Hazen : — 
 
 " The Government has, year after year, at great 
 expense, sent parties of scientific men to traverse 
 these countries ; to gather up, describe, and publish 
 all that could be found out relative to beasts, birds, 
 insects, and fishes, and every conceivable creeping, 
 crawling, or flying creature ; also correct reports 
 of its geology. But I have never known any one 
 cliarged to learn and report that most important 
 of all items, ' whether it is good for agriculture.' " 
 
 In calling public attention to this vast amount, 
 as he estimates it, of desert land and bad laud,
 
 126 THE "GllEAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 iiiiiuliabitable for various reasons, General Hazen 
 dwells prominently on the great northern belt 
 from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific. It is 
 due to him to say that in his judgment " military 
 or State considerations seem sufficient to warrant 
 the construction of one road [railroad] which, for 
 many reasons should have been built along the 
 thirty-second parallel, as it probably would have 
 been had the South been represented in Congress." 
 In his hostility to the Northern Pacific the author 
 permits himself to speak of its advertisements as 
 containing "more or less positive falsehoods; issu- 
 ing a series of misrepresentations of the climate;" 
 and that eight years before, when in the valley 
 of the Yellowstone, he " saw the iniquity of the 
 whole scheme." Jefferson Davis when Secretary 
 of War (1853-57) had a similar hostility to a North- 
 ern railway and an approbation for a Southern 
 one from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Under 
 his direction Lieutenant Stevens made a survey 
 of the northern country, and the official report of 
 it was so favorable and tempting to immigration, 
 from its rich natural resources, and so inviting to a 
 trans-continental railroad, that the Secretary muti- 
 lated it before publication lest it should damage 
 his Southern policy and his schemes for a railroad 
 on the thirty-second parallel. Afterward, when 
 Mr. Davis was otherwise very busy in the Civil 
 War, the suppressed portions of the report were 
 published.
 
 THE "GIIEAT AMERICAN DESEltT." 127 
 
 Be the explanation what it may, as to this pre- 
 sentation of so much so-called worthless land in 
 our Northwest, the fact confronts us tliat farmers, 
 with wagons and ploughs and families, have car- 
 ried their surveys into tliese fabulous barrens and 
 deserts, and liave converted them into the most 
 magniiicent farming lands in the world. At last 
 the Government appears to have conquered fable 
 and legend, for it luis followed up this myth of a 
 " desert " as a retreating mirage and finally located 
 what little of substance it has. On the Govern- 
 ment map of 1882, based on the public surveys 
 and issued from the General Land Office, this 
 much-magnified and long-sought waste is placed 
 on the southwest of Salt Lake and somewhat 
 bordering it. The barren tract is mucli less 
 than twice the area of our smallest State, Ehode 
 Island, — 1,085 square miles, — and bears the 
 name so long a terror in our own country and 
 in Europe, — Great American Desert ! Under 
 the immigrant invasion and pressure of farmers, 
 mechanics, manufacturers, and merchants, with 
 schools and churches and colleges and legislatures 
 and courts and elections, this spectre has retreated 
 thirteen hundred miles from the west bank of the 
 Mississippi. It remains to be seen whether the 
 retreat will be continued, even in the face of offi- 
 cial reports to the contrary, as it has thus far been 
 made to retreat. 
 
 In the late elaborate and valuable report of
 
 128 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 Major J, W. Powell/ he says as to agriculture : 
 " Experience teaches that it is not wise to depend 
 upon rainliill where the amount is less than twenty 
 inches annually," and this should be distributed 
 with some evenness through the year. The border- 
 line of this twenty-inch rainfall " begins on the 
 southern boundary of the United States, about 
 sixty miles west of Brownsville, on tlie Itio Grande 
 del Norte, and intersects the northern boundary 
 about fifty miles east of Pembina." 
 
 The westward growth of the nation since 1803, 
 and especially since the locomotive arrived first on 
 the Mississippi and at Eock Island in 1854, makes 
 US quite sceptical whether agriculture will respect 
 Powell's line and pause on it. Hitherto it has not 
 much regarded scientific and military limitations. 
 Major Powell well says that "far too much atten- 
 tion has heretofore been paid to tlie chemical con- 
 stitution of soils, . . . and that a stranger entering 
 the arid region is apt to conclude that the soils 
 are sterile, because of their chemical composition ; 
 but experience demonstrates the fact that all soils 
 are suitable for agricultural purposes when prop- 
 erly supplied with water." ^ As 5'et the supply 
 of water for irrigating is but poorly utilized, and 
 how much it can do but poorly known. A cubic 
 foot of running water per second will make a hun- 
 dred acres fruitful, and the water-slied on either 
 
 1 Arid Lands of the United States. 1879. 
 •^ Ibid, p. 10.
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 129 
 
 slope of the Eocky Mountains and Sierras is pro- 
 vided with many and magnificent streams. It is 
 to be hoped that the Government will move in 
 good time to prevent liuge water monopolies in 
 our deep interior, since it has been somewhat too 
 late in preventing land monopolies. A national 
 water otiice as well constituted and managed as 
 the land office might do much in handling and 
 distributing equitably to private owners those 
 magnificent streams that flow east and south and 
 west from the Eocky Mountains and the Sierras, 
 and thus finally make those arid and desert lands 
 to rejoice and blossom as the rose. 
 
 Moreover, the increase of the water supply when 
 a country is opened by settlement has an important 
 bearing on this subject. That this increase does 
 take place should be conceded. In his report 
 Major Powell embraces Gibert's report on the 
 water supply of the interior. Gibert says that the 
 settlers " frequently told me that whenever and 
 wherever a settlement was established there fol- 
 lowed in a few years an increase of water supply." 
 Prof. Cyrus Thomas made a careful study of the 
 increase of the water supply at the western edge of 
 the plains in 18G9, and Dr. Ilayden thus reports 
 him in his " Eeport for 1867-69," pp. 237 : " Since 
 the Territory [Colorado] has begun to be settled, 
 towns and cities built up, farms cultivated, mines 
 opened, and roads made and travelled, there has 
 been a gradual increase of moisture."
 
 130 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 Concerning the Catliolic Missions in New 
 Mexico and California Major Powell says : " In 
 this history of the settlement of tlie several 
 districts an important fact has been uniformly 
 observed, — in the first years of the settlement 
 tlie streams have steadily increased in volume. 
 . . . The increase is abundantly proved ; it is 
 a matter of universal experience. Tlie observa- 
 tions of the writer thereon have been widely 
 extended." ^ 
 
 The Utah basin furnishes a bold illustration of 
 this increase of water, be the cause what it may. 
 Between 1850 and 1860 Great Salt Lake made a 
 steady and apparentty permanent gain of between 
 seven and eight feet. It increased its area by 
 overflow of its ancient shores from 1750 square 
 miles to 2166, — a gain of about seventeen per 
 cent. Perhaps as careful a study of other arid 
 yet occupied lands would show an encouraging 
 increase of v/ater supply. Whether the increase 
 is due to settlement or to some occult natural 
 causes is a mooted question, but it is not philo- 
 sophical to deny the facts because we cannot 
 explain them. The practical thing is to see the 
 twenty-inch water line and the front of an agri- 
 cultural immigration move off westward /7a?'^ jjass?/, 
 even as they have been doing to some extent for 
 half a century. The grasses and the trees thrive 
 beyond it, and why not the cereals and the vege- 
 
 1 Report, pp. 90, 91.
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 131 
 
 taLles, when man by the sweat of his face becomes 
 auxiliary to Nature ? 
 
 As to this rise of Salt Lake and tlie general 
 increase of moisture in the arid districts, a gentle- 
 man of intelligence, and resident in the great West 
 beyond South Pass since 1852, and much of this 
 time engaged in stock-ranching, gave the author 
 this information, — other stock-men with whom 
 he spent a month in the autumn of 1885 con- 
 firming it : " Before the country was stocked the 
 land was porous or opien, and absorbed the water 
 that fell ; now, stocking has tramped and hardened 
 it, and more of the water is retained on the sur- 
 face or finds its way to Salt Lake. There are 
 lakes and pools now where there were none for- 
 merly, because of the tramping and hardening of 
 the ground by stock." 
 
 It is gratifying to be able to confirm these views, 
 as to the increase of moisture in the arid districts 
 of the West, by very recent information, carefully 
 obtained by scientific and official observations : 
 " Proofs of a growing rainfall in the far West 
 are thickening. A valuable testimony in this 
 direction just now comes from General ]\Iorrow, 
 United States Army, in command at Fort Sidney. 
 In an address delivered last month at the first 
 annual fair in Cheyenne County, on the western 
 frontier of Nebraska, he gave a leaf from his own 
 experience. Twenty years before, he had led sol- 
 diers through that identical reuion when there was
 
 132 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 no settlement for five liundred miles east of Jules- 
 burg. Then he had observed that men slept in 
 the open air from May to November without 
 having- their blankets dampened ; but in August, 
 1887, he saw on the same ground dews as heavy 
 as ever at the same season in Michigan or Arkan- 
 sas. During the first three fourths of the present 
 year he reports the rainfall at his post to have 
 been fourteen inches, while the annual fall in 
 fertile Malta does not exceed fourteen, and that 
 about Spanish Madrid is only nine. The annual 
 amount of rain registered at Camp Douglas in its 
 first year, 1861, was eleven inches; but in 1874, 
 the last of five years during which General Morrow 
 held command at that post, the rainfall had more 
 than doubled, the rain-gauge showing twenty- 
 seven inches. The speaker emphasized these facts, 
 because in portions of the Cheyenne region the 
 last two seasons have been exceptionally dry. He 
 also showed that within the last three months 
 eighty-three thousand acres of Government land 
 had been taken up in that county, largely by 
 homesteaders. The fair exhibits, also, already 
 showed every variety of farm produce. These 
 facts are the more noteworthy because Cheyenne 
 County stretches four degrees west of the famous 
 meridian of 100°, which in Government publica- 
 tions figures as a line that agricultui'e cannot cross. 
 They are still more striking if we note how they 
 refute the doctrine laid down by the 'North Amer-
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT. loo 
 
 icau Keview ' in 1858. At that date, wheu there 
 was scarcely one Nebraska hamlet forty miles west 
 of the Missouri, the ' Xorth American ' described 
 our people as having ' already reached their west- 
 ern inland frontier,' and the westward stream of 
 emigration as there ' dammed up so that it must 
 fork northward or southward.' The Missouri 
 bluffs, accordingly, were described as ' ashore at 
 the termination of a vast ocean desert nearly 
 one thousand miles in breadth, which it was 
 proposed to traverse, if at all, with caravans of 
 camels, and which interposed a final barrier to 
 the establishment of large communities, — agri- 
 cultural, mercantile, or even pastoral.' Yet be- 
 fore the close of 1880 Nebraska numbered half 
 a million inhabitants." ^ 
 
 It remains only to state, in a few brief sen- 
 tences and in certain statistics not remarkably dry 
 to an American, and especially one of the Western 
 type, what has been done in the way of settling 
 and civilizing this " desert." It was the opinion 
 of Lieutenant Pike that immigrants would be 
 compelled from very barrenness to limit their 
 wanderings " to the borders of the Missouri and 
 Mississippi, while they leave the prairies, inca- 
 pable of cultivation, to the wandering and uncivil- 
 ized aborigines of the country." This Government 
 explorer abandons to natural isolation and to the 
 
 1 The Nation, Nov. 3, 188".
 
 134 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 
 
 American Ijodouins our territory l)et\\'een the Brit- 
 ish line and southern Arkansas, aud west from the 
 ]Mississi])])i to the mountains. Tliis quadrant now 
 embraces Minnesota, Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Mis- 
 souri, Kansas, Arkansas to the Indian Territory, — 
 an area in total equal to nine New Englands. As 
 the latter — a region as large as eiglit States like 
 Massachusetts and organized solely for Indian oc- 
 cupation in 1844 — has not been open and exposed 
 tu white development, it cannot be embraced in the 
 summary of facts to follow. It may be said, how- 
 ever, in this connection that its equal development 
 is merely a question of time, for in some explora- 
 tions of it in 1880 we marked it as in no way 
 inferior to Missouri for human homes, and there- 
 fore may be occupied as densely as the other seven 
 divisions. In a half-dozen or so of particulars it 
 can now be shown how immigrants, M'ith their 
 agricultural, meclianical, and manufacturing in- 
 struments, have surveyed and rescued this region 
 from military explorers and dismal congressional 
 reports. Aggregating the population of tlie six 
 States and one Territory named, when the re- 
 spective census of each was first taken, it ap- 
 pears that they all then had 472,040 inhabitants. 
 Tlie total population of the seven in 1880 was 
 8,746,044. This is something more than one 
 sixth of the population of the country, and more 
 than double the population of New England, and 
 a fair show for Pike's prairie regions "incapable
 
 THE " GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 135 
 
 of cultivation," and Long's "abode of perpetual 
 desolation." 
 
 The grain products of the quadrant in question, 
 as reported in 1880 (for 1879), were 642,416,200 
 bushels. This is more than forty times the total 
 amount of the same six grains in all New England 
 for the same year. These grains are barley, buck- 
 wheat, corn, oats, rye, and wheat. Nor is it in 
 cereals alone that this desert land, so called, has 
 shown its products. The cash value of its manu- 
 factures is reported by the last census to have been 
 $365,098,571 in the year 1879; and, what is much 
 more significant, during the same year this region 
 had in the public schools 1,567,164 pupils, — 
 young " American Bedouins." 
 
 IMinnesota is the northeast corner of the tradi- 
 tional desert, and we think of it now mainly as a 
 wheat-field ten times the area of Massachusetts. 
 Yet note the timber item in its natural wealth. 
 A belt of 3,200,000 acres of white and black oak, 
 maple, hickory, basswood, cottonwood, elm, tama- 
 rack, and other hard woods up to the number 
 of thirty varieties, stretches across the middle of 
 the State. In the northeast of it is an immense 
 pine forest of 13,440,000 acres, — more than twice 
 the number of acres in Massachusetts. 
 
 By Act of Congress of March 3, 1877, certain 
 lands were declared to be and named desert land, 
 lying mostly to the westward of the mythical 
 desert which we have been followinij. Tlie Act
 
 136 THE "GREAT AMElilCAN DESERT." 
 
 thus defines them : " All laiuls, exclusive of timber 
 and mineral lands, which will not without irri- 
 gation ])roduce some agricultural crop, are deemed 
 and held to be desert land, under this Act." These 
 lands are in demand. From March 3, 1877, the 
 date of the Act, to June 30, 1883, 5,103 entries of 
 such land were made, and the land-ofFice treasury- 
 received for the same $401,036.62. This is the 
 amount of the first payment of twenty-five cents 
 an acre. When the final payment is made of one 
 dollar an acre at the end of three years, the re- 
 ceipts will be $2,008,346.84. Thousands of farms 
 and homes have been introduced into such desert 
 lands, and a network of railway is being thrown 
 over the whole. 
 
 For fifty years an army of agricultural invaders, 
 crossing the Mississippi, have been crowding the 
 Great American Desert toward the Pacific; and they 
 have made annually the daily march of the Eoman 
 army in its conquering progress. Lately our sci- 
 entific explorers have discovered that this ghostly 
 desert has been displaced by the best grain lands 
 and timber lands and grazing lands and mineral 
 lands of the world, it never having been more than 
 a ghostly delusion. 
 
 Tradition ascribes a remarkable act to Franklin. 
 In one of those courtly halls and gatherings in 
 Europe, where nobility and statesmanship and 
 diplomacy were toying with the young Republic, 
 there hung ^ map of the United States, with that
 
 THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT." 137 
 
 disheartening inscription curving from the Texan 
 to the British border, — "The Great American 
 Desert." Franklin took a pen and drew a broad 
 erasing line through the title. Was it not a pro- 
 phetic pen that Benjamin Franklin then used ?
 
 138 LANDIIOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 LARGE LANDIIOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 IT was at his own expense that De Soto, under 
 the patronage of the Emperor Cliarles V., 
 undertook the conquest of Florida. The Florida 
 of that day was all of the present United States 
 south of New York and of its southern parallel 
 of latitude, and extended into the unknown West. 
 De Soto was, by royal commission, to be the civil 
 and military head of both Cuba and this Florida, 
 and he was to have a princely estate somewhere 
 in this country, fifteen leagues by thirty in extent. 
 It was in 1538 that the gallant invader set sail 
 with a band, Spanish and Portuguese, of nine hun- 
 dred and fifty men, young and vigorous, and with 
 scarcely a gray hair, bearing away a freight of am- 
 bitions to the New World. Four years and two 
 months later, at midnight, De Soto came stealthily 
 into the possession of a grave in the Mississippi, 
 twenty miles below the mouth of tlie Arkansas. 
 
 This magnificent gift of twenty-five nnllion of 
 acres within the present t^irritory of the. United 
 States was an august opening to a most remark- 
 able series of land-iirants in North America. We
 
 LAXDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 139 
 
 stand amazed at tlie amplitude of tlie imperial 
 gift and at the area of the personal and private 
 domain of the great immigrant if he shall ever 
 come in possession. Yet for about three hundred 
 and fifty years this series of immense gifts and 
 acquisitions has been running. The grants of land 
 by the Spanish, French, and English crowns to 
 individuals and to companies in those old eras 
 of discoveries and of colonies were on so grand a 
 scale that one might almost think of those nion- 
 archs as silent partners when the dry land was 
 made to appear during the creative days. And the 
 amazement stirred by the size of those possessions 
 of two and three centuries ago would be repeated 
 to-day, in view of the immense personal and cor- 
 porate land estates now acquired and held in our 
 country, if they were not abundant enough to be 
 common and of constant multiplication. 
 
 It would be foreign to the purpose of this 
 chapter to give even a partial list of these grants 
 made prior to the establishment of our Government. 
 Yet a few may be named, indexes to the whole, to 
 accomplish our object, — to impress on the reader 
 the immensity of the national domain, and the 
 equal immensity of our patriotic and Christian 
 obligation to develop it as a young nation with 
 proper qualities. 
 
 Of the earliest grants in colonial times a few 
 may be named. In 1622 the Great Council for 
 New En "land firanted to Gorges and Mason all the
 
 110 LANDKOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 land between the Merriinac and the Kennebec, and 
 for sixty miles inland from the mouths of these 
 rivers. Some two years before, Gorges had the 
 project to gain a tract forty miles square on the 
 Kennebec and Androscoggin. The old Saxon sjreed 
 for land and the passion for speculating in wild 
 lands showed early development in this country. 
 Robert Gorges, the son of Sir Ferdinando, gained 
 a tract extending from Boston ten miles toward 
 Salem ; and to the grandson of Sir Ferdinando there 
 was granted a tract of twenty-four thousand acres 
 on both sides of York River, Maine, on the condi- 
 tion that he should found a city within the same. 
 In 1629 the land between the middle of the Aler- 
 rimac and the middle of the Piscataqua, and for 
 sixty miles inland, with all islands within five 
 leagues of the shore, was given by this Great 
 Council for New England to Capt. John Mason. 
 The famous Waldo patent, originally the Mus- 
 cogus, being about thirty miles square, may also 
 be mentioned. Within this grant Portland now 
 stands. In 1629 the Council granted to Bradford 
 all the territory between Cohasset River and tiie 
 Narragansett, and inland as far as the utmost limits 
 of Pokenacutt. 
 
 Nor was the passion for wild land in large bodies 
 in those earlier days free from " irregularities " 
 even in New England. For in 1676 Robert Mason 
 petitioned the king to be put in possession of lands 
 granted to his grandfather, and he represented that
 
 lANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 141 
 
 the Massachusetts Company "did surreptitiously 
 and unknown to the said Council get the Seal 
 of the said Company affixed to a grant of certain 
 lands," and so obtained confirmation of the same 
 to themselves under the Great Seal of England. 
 The Massachusetts Company, however, entered a 
 denial, and some late antiquarian students assure 
 tlie writer that the Company is not open to such 
 an accusation.^ 
 
 An index to the policy of the Massachusetts 
 Colony may be taken from its records December 
 10, 1641: "Mrs. Marg* Winthrope hath her 3,000 
 acres of land formerl}^ granted to her, to be as- 
 signed about the lower end of Concord Eyver, near 
 Merrimack." ^ 
 
 It was in 1669 that John Alexander paid six 
 thousand pounds of tobacco for nine miles of river 
 front nearly opposite to the present District of 
 Columbia ; and soon after the great-grandfather of 
 Washington bought seven thousand acres in and 
 around Mount Vernon, — tluis early aiding the 
 foundation of the large Washington estate of later 
 
 CD O 
 
 days. 
 
 The acquisition of portions of Mexico, or New 
 Spain., by tiie United States in the treaties of 1848 
 and 1853 makes it proper to notice some of the 
 
 1 History oC Grants, under the Great Council for New Eng- 
 land. By Samuel P. Haven. Lowell Institute Lectures, 1869. 
 Published by Massachusetts Historical Society, 1869, pp. 128- 
 162. 
 
 2 See Mass. Records, June li, 1612.
 
 142 LANDIIOLDIXGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 large landlioldiiigs tliat tlicn came into our domain. 
 By those treaties the United States guaranteed 
 tlie private ownership of grants from the previous 
 Spanish and Mexican Governments tliat could be 
 legally established to the satisfaction and coniir- 
 mation of Congress. 
 
 These grants in New Spain were personal and 
 private, and were made by the Spanish kings and 
 Mexican governors to their favorites, and also for 
 purposes of colonization, in dates running back 
 from 1846 to the earliest supremacy of Spain in 
 the country. To the Eastern American whose 
 life and travels have been confined mainly to his 
 " pent-up Utica," the first knowledge of the extent 
 of these grants is simply overwhelming, and he 
 begins at once to reconstruct his ideas of spaces in 
 the United States. Nor will this reconstruction 
 come any too soon to those who intend to bear a 
 manly hand in shaping the empire of the future. 
 For the interest of such, we devote a page to the 
 number and extent, not exhaustive, of landhold- 
 ings or grants which had their origin in foreign 
 governments, and which the United States guar- 
 anteed when the lands in whicli the grants lay 
 came into our possession. Tliey came within tlie 
 dominion of the United States by the purchase of 
 Louisiana and of Florida, and by the acquisition 
 of New Mexico and California. 
 
 In California " the United States has confirmed 
 five hundred and thirty-eiglit claims, having a
 
 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 143 
 
 total acreage of 8,332,431 acres, — tlie smallest 
 being one acre and seventy-seven one hundred tlis. 
 and tlie largest 133,440 acres." ^ These confirmed 
 claims equal one and three fifths States as large as 
 Massachusetts. The claims in Florida amount to 
 about 1,300,000 acres, only a few of which have 
 been patented. In Louisiana about ten thousand 
 claims have been confirmed, but not one in ten has 
 yet been patented. While the commissioners may 
 " confirm " the claim, the " patent " or absolute 
 title must come from Congress, and it by no means 
 grants a patent to all lands when the commis- 
 sioners have " confirmed " the claims. To June 30, 
 1883, twelve claims had been reported to Congress 
 from Arizona, aggregating 188,179 acres. At the 
 same date twenty-five claims, equalling 1,913,301 
 acres, had been confirmed in New Mexico and 
 Colorado. 
 
 These claims continue to come in, as Congress 
 did not limit the time of their presentation, and 
 the officials say that " no one can estimate the 
 number of private land-claims yet to be filed," — 
 it may be one thousand or it may be five thousand. 
 They urge upon Government the necessity of lim- 
 iting tlie time in which clainis may be presented, 
 to head off the modern manufacture of ancient 
 titles. The forgeries have been very many, and 
 these, with other irregularities, liave opened tliose 
 
 1 The Public Domain. By Thomas Donaldson. Washing- 
 ton, Govevnment Printing Office. 1884. p. 381.
 
 lU LANDIIOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 old Spanish regions to the inavandiii;^ of land- 
 thieves on the most extravagant scale. The Com- 
 missioner of the General Laud Office, in his Eeport 
 for 1883, furnislies an illustrative case : " An in- 
 stance has been called to my attention where the 
 original claim was for a quautity of land shown 
 upon a plat presented to the Surveyor-General as 
 containing one square league, or less than five 
 thousand acres, and described as having fixed 
 natural boundaries, which claimants stated were 
 well known and easily identified. And yet, upon 
 the assignment of tliis claim to other parties, a pre- 
 liminary survey was obtained, purporting to show 
 identically the same boundaries, but embracing an 
 area exceeding three hundred thousand acres." ^ 
 
 There has been much lively work over doubtful 
 papers and witnesses, before the congressional 
 committees on claims under the treaties, to estab- 
 lish rights to these grants. In 1880 the Secretary 
 of the Interior reported : " After a lapse of nearly 
 thirty years, more than one thousand claims have 
 been filed with the Surveyors-General, of which 
 less than one hundred and fifty have been reported 
 to Congress ; and of the number so reported Con- 
 gress has finally acted upon only seventy-one." 
 
 This appears to show the condition of things in 
 New Mexico. Very likely many more claimants 
 are waiting till " available " men may be offered to 
 pass on them. Meanwhile the unconfirmed grants 
 
 1 Tlie Public Domain, p. 11.^6.
 
 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 145 
 
 are in the market by the tens of thousands of acres 
 at three cents and upward per acre. 
 
 The pressures and dangers attending these duties 
 are not so great as at first. Prior to 1860 the 
 Commission labored under the mistake that the 
 confirmation of an offered title would carry with 
 , it all mineral in the land. It was then discovered 
 that the Spanish and Mexican authorities made 
 special reservation to the Government of all the 
 precious metals, and that therefore all title to them 
 vested in the United States after the treaties, and 
 not in the grantees and their heirs. This mistake 
 of the Commission is not so surprising when we 
 consider how distant and difficult of access New 
 Mexico was. David Douglass, scientific explorer 
 in the northwest of America, 1824-34, says in his 
 narrative : " The caravan, which leaves St. Louis, 
 on the Missouri, about the end of May next, will 
 reach Santa F^ in about sixty-five days." This 
 time was reduced slowly ; for the first locomotive 
 reached the Mississippi at Eock Island in 1854, 
 and St. Louis in 1857, and St. Joseph (on the Mis- 
 souri) in 1859, and Santa F^ in 1880. In those 
 days American recreating travel was mostly abroad, 
 and " the bounds to a new empire," as Washington 
 prophetically spoke of our interior in 1783, were 
 not much passed and studied till the railroads 
 made it comparatively easy. It is now but a 
 decade of years, as the writer knows, when he was 
 regarded as singular and daring who ran a few 
 10
 
 1-iG LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 thousand miles up and down a log-cabined and 
 mining and Indian interior, and he had much of 
 the new and strange to tell on his return. Now, 
 with frequent and large and charming "excursions," 
 there is more hope for the " new empire." 
 
 It may not be considered as wandering from our 
 historical line of large landholdings, to mention here 
 the twenty-one Franciscan Missions on the coast 
 of California. The first was planted in 17G9 and 
 the last in 1823. They were established on grants 
 from the Spanish Crown, and embraced the entire 
 coast from San Diego to San Francisco, about five 
 hundred miles, and extended inward forty miles, 
 and their average area was about six hundred 
 thousand acres. While planted ostensibly for 
 Christianizing the Indians, these Missions made 
 almost slaves of them while they seemed to be 
 evangelizing them ; and the San Francisco Mis- 
 sion in 1825 owned seventy-six thousand head 
 of cattle, seventy-nine thousand sheep, and three 
 thousand horses, while their red and white wines 
 were of high repute. Of these, the Mission of 
 San Gabriel produced annually from four to six 
 hundred barrels. These ranch Missions had at one 
 time 18,683 Indians under their control, and used 
 them as servants and workmen. In 1821 Mexico 
 assumed independence of Spain, and as the Mis- 
 sion policy for California failed to either civilize 
 or Christianize the natives, the Missions began to 
 be broken up by Government in 1826.
 
 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 147 
 
 This reference to large land-grants in California 
 should not omit a vast one projected and well- 
 nigh secured. During the two or three lively 
 years before that Pacific territory became a part 
 of the United States, the English were ambitious 
 and scheming for it. The English consul, Forbes, 
 contracted with one Macnamara, an Irish priest, to 
 colonize California, overthrow the Mexican Gov- 
 ernment, and then put it under an English pro- 
 tectorate. For this work the priest was to receive 
 three thousand square leagues in the Sacramento 
 and San Joaquin valleys, — more than thirteen 
 millions of acres. Governor Pico and General 
 Castro, the civil and military heads of the prov- 
 ince, were in the plot, and the papers were drawn, 
 but not executed. This was in 1846. The papers 
 fell into the hands of Frdmont in the spring of that 
 year, and the splendid lands into the hands of the 
 United States soon afterward. 
 
 The allusion to one other Spanish grant should 
 not be omitted, for it sustains interesting relations 
 to the United States. In 1786 Julien Dubuque, 
 an energetic Canadian, explored the lead-mine 
 regions of the Upper Mississippi. Two years after- 
 ward he returned and purchased of the Indians, 
 in council, about one hundred and forty thousand 
 acres, on which Dubuque now stands, and in 1796 
 the Baron de Carondelet, Spanish Governor of the 
 Upper Louisiana, conveyed the same substantially 
 to Dubuque, and the king confirmed the grant.
 
 148 LANDIIOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 It embraced nominally three leagues on the river 
 and six into tlie interior; and it was the gift of a 
 Spanish king to a French subject. 
 
 By partnership in purchase the property came 
 to be known as the Dubuque-Chouteau claim, and 
 the fee simple was declared, only twenty years ago, 
 to vest in the United States, since the king origi- 
 nally, and the baron following him, had granted 
 only a right to hunt and work minerals on the 
 claim, so called. 
 
 In the ambitious and good policy of France to 
 acquire and hold the Lower Mississippi Valley, 
 immigration was encouraged to it by fascinating 
 grants of land. Industrious, enterprising, and in- 
 fluential men received offers of large tracts of land 
 in the bottoms of the Mississippi and its tributa- 
 ries. The largest of these were on the main river 
 and within three hundred miles of New Orleans, 
 and others were on the Red and the Wichita, 
 the Yazoo and the Arkansas. In his "History 
 of the Mississippi Valley" Monette specifies fif- 
 teen of these grants with the conditions annexed.^ 
 Leading among the grantees was the Scotchman 
 John Law, author and finisher of the Mississippi 
 Bubble, — a paper-money inflation, 1718-23. His 
 grant was twelve miles square on the Arkan- 
 sas. Law stipulated to colonize the Arkansas 
 with fifteen hundred emigrants from Provence, 
 in France, and to keep up a sufficient military 
 
 1 Vol. i. p. 220 et seq.
 
 LANDHOLDIXGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 149 
 
 force for their protection against Indian lios- 
 tility." Daring the six speculative years of Law 
 he introduced into Louisiana 4,044 settlers, 1,441 
 African slaves, — the first introduction of slaves 
 to the lower Mississippi, — one hundred and fifty 
 galley slaves, and several hundred females of ill 
 repute. The bubble burst in 1723, and the first 
 slave insurrection in this country occurred six 
 years afterward.^ 
 
 The curious, who may wish to know the details 
 in this early American land fever, will find many 
 illustrative cases in Martin's " Louisiana." ^ 
 
 In these schemes to gain and hold the Great 
 Valley the French Government imitated the Span- 
 ish in the grants already named. The English 
 Crown followed the French in the policy of be- 
 stowing on royal favorites immense tracts of wild 
 land in the New World. In 1748 the Crown 
 granted to the Ohio Company six hundred thou- 
 sand acres, with the coming Pittsburg for a central 
 post, as a semi-military advance force to crowd the 
 French to a farther West. This was accomplished 
 in 1758, when the French retreated and built Fort 
 Massac, on the Ohio, forty miles above its mouth, — 
 the last stronghold built by France east of the 
 IVIississippi. The same year the English rebuilt 
 Fort Duquesne, burned by the French, and called 
 it Fort Pitt. 
 
 ^ Monette, vol. i. p. 220 et scq. 
 2 Vol. i. p. 202 et circ.
 
 150 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 Afterward, yet prior to 1757, and with the 
 approbation of the Crown, the provincial govern- 
 ment issued script and military warrants to the 
 amount of tliree million acres, on and about the 
 headwaters of the Ohio. The grant to the Ohio 
 Company was only one of many, some being earlier 
 and some later. 
 
 The liberal disposition of the public lands was 
 manifested in the colonial legislature of Virginia 
 in 1770 and following, as already mentioned. In 
 1787 the Ohio Land Company, a new company, 
 obtained from Congress grants of wild land ag- 
 gregating nearly five million acres. In this the 
 company acted also as agent for other organiza- 
 tions, and finally retained as its own 964,285 acres. 
 In the following year John Cleaves Symmes, of 
 New Jersey, purchased of the Government six 
 hundred thousand acres, as before mentioned. 
 
 Near the close of the last century William Bing- 
 ham, banker, of Philadelphia, became by two pur- 
 chases one of the heaviest landholders in the 
 United States. At the close of the Eevolution, 
 when the finances of the country were in a desper- 
 ate condition, and the hardy soldiers had been paid 
 off in paper, of which sometimes one silver dollar 
 would buy two hundred, Governor Hancock, of 
 Massachusetts, suggested that State lands in the 
 Province of Maine be sold to pay the State war 
 debts. The legislature instituted a lottery by 
 which to dispose of fifty townships beyond the
 
 LAXDHOLDIXGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 151 
 
 Penobscot, at fifty cents an acre. The scheme 
 was not popular. The total of land offered was 
 1,270,670 acres, of which only 105,280 acres were 
 drawn. This was in October, 1787. Mr. Bingham 
 took the balance, and afterward bought in the 
 most of what was drawn. Some little time after- 
 ward General Knox, one of the staff of General 
 Washington, contracted for about a million acres 
 — forty-three townsliips — on the upper waters 
 of the Kennebec, and in 1793, by the consent of 
 Massachusetts, he transferred this contract to Mr. 
 Bingham. About two and a half million acres of 
 Maine lands thus came into the hands of Mr. 
 Bingham, for which he paid cash down, $311,250. 
 The average cost per acre for these ninety-three 
 townships was twelve and a half cents. To develop 
 tlie Province and guard against speculation, the 
 State provided that no title should be conveyed 
 for any township, even though paid for, till it was 
 occupied by forty settlers. This general policy 
 governed Bingham and all other purchasers. The 
 sales by Mr. Bingliam, who died in 1800, and by 
 his agent, Col. John Black, were slow. For the 
 first thirty-five years there was not enough of 
 the Kennebec lands sold to pay the taxes. Of 
 the lottery tract, enough land and timber were sold 
 during that time to meet taxes and expenses. 
 At the end of forty-two years from the purchase 
 enough had been sold to cover the purchase- 
 money, interest, taxes, and expenses. In 1828 a
 
 152 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 few townships were sold at auction at seventy-five 
 and seventy -six cents an acre. Then the " Eastern 
 land fever " was created, and timber-lands were 
 sold and resold till they reached the wild price of 
 eight and even ten dollars an acre, and the Missis- 
 sippi Bubble was repeated in the Kennebec and 
 Penobscot bubbles. 
 
 A fact foreign to our main thought will interest 
 the curious. Two of Mr. Bingham's five daugh- 
 ters married two of the Baring brothers, English 
 bankers. One of these gentlemen was William, 
 afterward Lord Ashburton, wlio lias gained an 
 eminence in American liistory, in the Webster- 
 Ashburton Treaty, by which our international 
 boundary was settled from the St. Croix to the 
 Rocky Mountains. "When, therefore, William Bar- 
 ing, in 1842, was determining the eastern section 
 of that boundary, he was well-nigh at home, if not 
 actually on lands liis own by marriage.^ 
 
 In our earlier days there were bold movements 
 and manoeuvres and seizures, under cover of law, to 
 take large portions of the public wild domain, even 
 as sometimes to-day. Georgia claimed south on 
 latitude 31°, west to the Mississippi, which was, 
 indeed, the treaty line between the United States 
 and the Spanish possessions. But between the 
 western boundary of the State of Georgia and the 
 
 ' Collections Maine Historical Society, 1876, vol. vii. pp. 
 353-360; Williamson's History of Maine, vol. ii. p. 531 ; Varney's 
 Gazetteer; Greenleafs Geography of Maine.
 
 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 153 
 
 Mississippi was a large territory extending north 
 to the mouth of the Yazoo and occupied by about 
 ten thousand Spanish subjects. In disregard of 
 treaty Spain claimed this, as did also Georgia in 
 disregard of her western State limit. The Spanish 
 authorities refused to yield the territory in ques- 
 tion, and even forbade immigration into it from 
 the States. The question lingered with multiply- 
 ing perplexities from 1785 till 1795, when tlie 
 Georgia legislature incorporated the Mississippi 
 Company to take and hold these lands, now for 
 ten years organized into Bourbon County. The 
 charter gave the company more than three million 
 acres of wild land, while about four million more 
 •were involved in the intrigue. The year following, 
 the legislature declared the charter forfeit, as ob- 
 tained by corruption, and Congress set it aside as 
 covering United States lands, over which the State 
 had no control. The extent of the grasp and the 
 fraud were not inferior to the endeavors of some 
 rings of to-day. 
 
 The same year in which this Georgia scheme 
 was matured, a sharp one was put in operation in 
 Virginia. Pittsburg was now about one year old 
 by incorporation, with its one thousand inhabi- 
 tants, when General Wayne's great victory on the 
 Mauraee over the Indians, with their English allies, 
 opened up the frontier beyond the Alleghany to 
 safe settlements. Of course it was in the inter- 
 est of the Government to have hardy pioneers
 
 154 LANDH0LD1XC;S IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 take possession, and Virginia offered strong temp- 
 tations to buth capitalists and poor men. To 
 a strong association of the former, entitled the 
 " Population Company," she granted large tracts 
 of wild land, on the condition that within a given 
 time the company should locate, on any section of 
 four hundred acres within the grant, an immigrant 
 who should make and hold improvements to a 
 certain extent. Then the company offered to war- 
 rantee one hundred and fifty acres to any settler 
 who would meet tliese conditions, and, for success- 
 ful labor in this line, it would gain two hundred 
 and fifty acres in each case. When the " Western 
 fever" was running so high that it would require 
 more effort to hold men back than to point tliem 
 to the front, this shrewd speculation, incorporated 
 and empowered by a well-lobbied legislature, was 
 becoming a great success. Soon after the people 
 saw through the policy of the company, who were 
 speculating on the gift-lands of the Government, 
 when tlie leijislature offered the four hundred acres 
 direct to any settler who would meet the pre- 
 vious conditions. Then this Population Company 
 of land speculators complained that its " vested 
 rights " were infringed. But the people had their 
 way, to an extent. Some incautiously pre-empted 
 on the company grants ; cases came into court, 
 when the poor cabin settler stood no chance with 
 a rich corporation ; ejectments and evictions fol- 
 lowed, patterned from the Ireland and Scotland
 
 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 155 
 
 of that day, till, harassed with expensive litigation, 
 they threw up all claims and improvements, and 
 moved farther west into the Connecticut Eeserve, 
 where no lands were given away, and titles were 
 guaranteed to purchasers. Large land sales for 
 the development of a new country are not neces- 
 sarily and totally advantageous to the interests of 
 the people. 
 
 The grants of public lands by the United States 
 for canals, highways, and railroads must impress 
 the most careless with the magnitude of the pub- 
 lic domain, and its wonderful development. A 
 statement of the vast areas thus granted by the 
 Government for public good might reasonably be 
 discredited in any one of the twenty realms of 
 Europe, Eussia excepted. For, to encourage the 
 American people, in private corporations, to open 
 up ways of travel on whicli they may go about the 
 country and attend to their business, the Govern- 
 ment has granted public lands to more than double 
 the area of Great Britain and Ireland, or eight 
 times the area of Scotland. Washington practi- 
 cally inaugurated our system of internal improve- 
 ments before he had sheathed the sword of the 
 Ee volution. While the army lay on their arms 
 at Newburgli, awaiting the details of peace, he, 
 with Gov. George Clinton, made what proved 
 to be the first reconnoissance for the Erie Canal. 
 After Independence was conceded, Washington 
 made his seventh trip over the mountains, gratify-
 
 15G LANDIIOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 ing to au extent what he said after the expedition 
 with Governor Clinton : " I shall not rest con- 
 tented till I have explored the western country, and 
 traversed those lines, or a great part of them, which 
 have given bounds to a new empire." ^ Yet many 
 American travellers make their seventh trip to 
 Europe before they have made their first to " ex- 
 plore the western country and the bounds of a 
 new empire." These excursions of Washington 
 initiated the Baltimore and Ohio liailroad, and 
 indeeil the great system of internal improvement 
 which has since so developed the country. 
 
 On this branch of our general topic, in showing 
 where and what the West is, details would be 
 impossible if not useless. Summaries must suffice. 
 One of the severest civil and political struggles 
 of the Government opened in 1803, on the ques- 
 tion to what extent the general Government should 
 aid in opening in the new country highways for 
 travel and commerce. The first grant of wild land 
 had been made the previous year in favor of Ohio 
 for public roads, and the first for a canal was in 
 favor of Indiana in 1824. From that date to 
 June 30, 1883, Government has granted and pa- 
 tented for canal purposes 4,424,073 acres ; to the 
 same date for wagon roads, 1,741,897 acres ; to 
 railroads, 47,004,043 acres, making a total of 
 53,170,013 acres. Tliis amount of public land, 
 that has been thus donated and passed over into 
 
 ^ Irving's Washington, vol. vi. pp. 432-434, 455-459.
 
 LA.NDH0LD1NGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 157 
 
 private companies, is equal to all New England, 
 and two States as large as Massachusetts addi- 
 tional. The breadth and vastness of the national 
 domain, and the very extensive and rapid develop- 
 ment of it, must impress one who entertains even 
 for a few moments these offers and conveyances of 
 wild land. 
 
 A few cases in contrast will show how the pub- 
 lic land policy has expanded as the people have 
 come to comprehend the magnitude of our domain. 
 In 1835 Congress granted to a Florida company 
 for a railroad a right of way through the public 
 lands, thirty feet on each side of its line, with use 
 of timber three hundred feet on each side, and ten 
 acres for the terminus. The next year Congress 
 granted to the New Orleans and Nashville Eailroad 
 Company five acres together for each necessary 
 depot, water station, and workshop, and the grants 
 must be located at least fifteen miles apart. In 
 1862 Congress incorporated the Union and Central 
 Pacific Railroads to run from the Missouri River 
 to the Pacific Ocean, about two thousand miles, 
 and for depots, shops, and aid in construction the 
 road was to have every alternate square mile, for 
 five miles deep, on each side of the road. This 
 would secure the donation of land equal to a strip 
 five miles wide from the Missouri to the Pacific. 
 In 1864 the Northern Pacific was chartered to run 
 from Lake Superior to the Pacific Ocean, about 
 two thousand miles. The grant of land was equal
 
 158 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 to a belt ten miles wide, where the road should 
 run through a State, and twenty miles wide in a 
 Territory, — about forty-two million acres, — and 
 equal to llhode Island, Connecticut, and seven 
 States like Massachusetts. It is true the road 
 failed to secure so much land by failing to fill the 
 conditions ; but the immensity of the grant is tlie 
 same, suggestive of the immensity of the public 
 domain. 
 
 As the settlements have made growth into our 
 wild country, different business interests have 
 often had each a movement of its own, and enough 
 to constitute a special population for a given belt 
 and time. At first the fur trade led the advance 
 of white men, yet only here and there, as wild 
 animals and Indian hunters offered gain. An agri- 
 cultural front showed itself everywhere, pioneering 
 and supporting, as it does, all the other industries 
 of civilization. In some sections the lumber-mills, 
 with a peculiar class of people, moved solidly into 
 the timbered sections and devoured the forests by 
 thousands of acres. The coal mountains took to 
 themselves a population unlike any other, and in 
 1848 the precious metals gathered adventurers from 
 the whole world, who ignored a border by substi- 
 tuting the interior for it, and dropped towns and 
 cities on the mountains and in the canons, with 
 the hurry and random of the wind when it is 
 sowing wild seed. 
 
 The last great interest that has orsanized and
 
 LANDHOLDIXGS IN THE UXITED STATES. 159 
 
 manifested itself, as not only continental but inter- 
 national, is ranciiing, stock-raising. Wild lands, 
 not yet fringed with lone cabins and settlements, 
 and stretching every way to the horizon, with 
 the amplitude of the ocean, men have taken for 
 grazing purposes. At first these great American 
 pastures were as free to the herder as the rivers 
 which watered them. Some hint had been given 
 toward this industry by the immense ranches of 
 California and South America that earned fortunes 
 to the owners in hides and tallow only. No one 
 gains a tolerable idea of the amplitude of our do- 
 main, and of the leading interests that employ and 
 feed seventy millions of people in it, who has not 
 received quite an amount of compact information 
 on ranching in the United States, and bestowed 
 some close considerations on it. It is designed 
 now to call attention to enough of these ranches 
 here and there to impress the reader with the 
 vastness of a country where men can turn loose 
 for grazing ten thousand, fifty thousand, and even 
 one hundred thousand head of stock in single 
 pastures. Of course the figures must be given in 
 a round way, since there is no official State or 
 National enumeration of the acres and tlie animals 
 in these vast estates. Sample cases will be taken 
 miscellaneously, and only -enough to illustrate the 
 point in hand.^ 
 
 ^ The terms " range," " ranch," and " farm " are used in the 
 new country with this discrimination : The range is a large tract
 
 IGO LANDllOLDIXGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 In April, 1883, a Scotchman opened a ranch of 
 forty-eight square miles — about thirty thousand 
 acres — eiglity miles west of Topeka, Kansas. 
 Seventy miles of wire fencing were soon com- 
 pleted, a part of which enclosed a five hundred- 
 acre lot for hogs. At the end of the first year the 
 ranch had twenty-five thousand head of cattle, 
 six hundred hogs, and two hundred and twenty- 
 five yearling and colt mules. At that time there 
 had been expended $100,000 for land, $100,000 
 for stock, and $25,000 for improvements. 
 
 In 1884 there went into operation a contract for 
 grazinij between three and four million acres of 
 wild land west of the Arkansas, in the Cheyenne 
 and Arrapahoe reservation. It was leased by 
 the Indians to a company of stock-raisers for five 
 years, on an annuity of $100,000, one half cash 
 and one half live-stock. This is fine grazing- 
 land, and had long been coveted by the border 
 whites. The Indians, no doubt, were expected 
 soon to make trouble, when the Government 
 would remove them, and the land would pass 
 
 of wild land used but not owned by individuals or companies 
 but by the United States, for stock-raising ; the ranch is a large 
 tract of country owned and used by one or more persons, usu- 
 ally for grazing ; the farm is a small ranch, and more or less 
 under cultivation. The writer lacks data to affirm that the 
 term " ranch," as here used; implies in every case personal 
 ownership. In estimating the extent of these ranges and 
 ranches, it will be of aid to remember that the average town- 
 ship of Massachusetts is about 15,000 acres, and the perfect 
 Government town.ship of the West is 23,040 acres.
 
 LANDHOLDIXGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 161 
 
 throngii a nominal market into ranch rings of 
 white men. The cattle pasture in question is 
 about seven hundred square miles larger than 
 Connecticut. 
 
 There is a range in Wyoming, called t])e Lake 
 Voorhees cattle-range, embracing about a million 
 of acres, forty thousand of which are enclosed by a 
 sinole wire fence. This range would embrace about 
 sixty of the average townships of Massachusetts. 
 
 Some years since a ranchman by the name 
 of Rabb, living near Corpus Christi, Texas, died 
 and left to his widow about forty thousand head 
 of cattle. She has distinguished herself by her 
 good management of the herd, and has acquired 
 tlie title of the cattle-queen of Texas. Of good 
 physique, plain habits, fond of the saddle and 
 outdoor life, and now the wife of a Methodist 
 clergyman, Mrs. Rogers herds her forty thousand 
 cattle on her two hundred thousand acres, in her 
 own name and by her own management. When 
 the widower, with seven children, married the 
 widow and the herd, his health failed him as a 
 clergyman, and he was obliged to quit preaching. 
 Such cases are not uncommon, and should be a 
 warning to unmarried and healthy ministers. He 
 was unable for some reasons to take charge of the 
 ranch, and fell off into politics and the legislature. 
 
 Texas is supposed to have the lai-gest stock 
 ranches in the United States, and probably the 
 best in the world. Leading among them all is the 
 
 11
 
 162 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 cattle ranch of Charles Goodwright, on tlie head of 
 Red River, It contains seven hundred thousand 
 acres ; Rhode Island has eight hundred thousand 
 acres. In 1883 it had sixty thousand liead of cattle, 
 but will carry one liundred thousand. Though 
 purchased within tlie last four years, it has two 
 hundred and iilty miles of barbed wire fence. It 
 has naturally the best grass and water and shelter. 
 The stock is made up of the best foreign bloods for 
 beef, and ranges high in the market for the table 
 and for stocking other ranches. The purchase price 
 of the land ranged from fifty cents to one dollar an 
 acre, and the money was advanced by the partner 
 of Goodwright, a Dublin millionnaire, who leaves 
 Ireland annually to look after his American beef. 
 In 1873 Goodwright was a heavy and speculating 
 banker in Colorado, and in 1876 a bankrupt. In 
 his best days he prudently endowed his wife with 
 a herd of cattle, which after his failure he drove 
 into this then wild and free land of Texas, and so 
 recovered his fortune. ^ 
 
 While Mr. Goodwright is said to have the best 
 administered ranch in America, Richard King 
 carries the palm for more acres and animals. His 
 huge pasture lands are in two divisions fifty miles 
 apart. Bordering on the Gulf coast of Texas he 
 holds one hundred and sixty thousand acres, while 
 in his inland tract are six hundred thousand. Re- 
 ports vary as to his amount of stock, for lie does 
 not know himself, and the assessors tax him at a
 
 LANDHOLDIXGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 163 
 
 guess. A receut estimate gives him from seventy- 
 five thousaud to one hundred thousand cattle, 
 thirty thousand sheep, and twenty thousand horses. 
 His annual sales are about twenty thousand head 
 of beef steers, three thousand to four thousand 
 horses, and as many sheep. His income is about 
 half a million. He entertains in a princely way 
 in his village of neat cottages around his own 
 lordly residence, — Santa Gertrude, — and princes 
 and dukes are said to have been numbered among 
 his guests. 
 
 Other ranches for cattle might be named, as 
 Kennedy's, near Corpus Christi, nine miles front 
 on the bay, and extending forty-five miles into the 
 interior. His large and original ranch he sold, 
 before buying this small one, to a Dundee — 
 Scotch — company for $2,500,000. There are also 
 the ranch of Miller and Lux in California, where 
 six hundred men are employed to take care of 
 ninety-five thousand head of cattle and one hun- 
 dred and ten thousand sheep, and the two ranches 
 of Irvine in Los Angeles County, twenty-two miles 
 by nine in joint extent. 
 
 An extract here and there from private letters 
 will give wider information on tliis point. A 
 friend in Kansas, on the borders of the Indian 
 Territory, writing of ranches, says : " Ours, which 
 is a small one, has twelve miles of river front on 
 both sides of the river. Lee and Scott have about 
 forty miles on the Canadian. . . . Towers and
 
 1G4 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 Gudgell, on the Beaver and Cinnamon rivers, have 
 also forty or mure miles. . . . There are several 
 other quite large ranges in this vicinity." A party 
 in the Southwest, answering certain questions on 
 our general theme, has this compreiiensive passage 
 in the reply : — 
 
 " So far as our acquaintance goes, the largest 
 landholders in the United States are the Maxwell 
 Land Grant Company, 1,800,000 acres in New 
 Mexico ; the Matador Cattle Company have about 
 600,000 acres in Texas ; the Texas Land and 
 Cattle Company, about 400,000 acres in Texas ; 
 the Prairie Cattle Company about 150,000 acres 
 in Texas and New Mexico ; Mr. J. G. Adair, of 
 Ireland, about 400,000 acres in Texas ; the Swan 
 Lake and Cattle Company, about 250,000 acres in 
 "Wyoming; the Hansford Land and Cattle Com- 
 pany, about 110,000 acres in Texas; the Western 
 Land and Cattle Company, about 70,000 acres in 
 Kansas." 
 
 It would be an easy thing to run these items 
 up into scores, in the States and Territories west 
 of the meridian of 100° ; but we are not collecting 
 for a catalogue ; we cite cases only for illustrations 
 of the public domain as shown by this branch of 
 business. It seems quite in order, in illustrating 
 the immense areas of our country, and some of its 
 industrial productions on a gigantic scale, by refer- 
 ence to personal ownerships, to pass from the ranch
 
 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 165 
 
 to the farm. The former is grazed and the latter 
 is cultivated. The one is worked for its products 
 by the brute animal process of life, and the other 
 by human hands and mechanics. 
 
 California will serve well our purpose, since her 
 extent, with a sea-board that would extend from 
 New York to Charleston, South Carolina, affords nat- 
 ural facilities for almost all the products in Ameri- 
 can agriculture. In the southern division of that 
 State we find, and without close and complete cull- 
 ing, the following farms: Moftit & Maclay, 20,000 
 acres; E. J. Baldwin, 20,000; J. W. Hellman, 
 25,000 ; Eichard Gird, 30,000 ; J. & L. Bixbey, 
 30,000 ; B. F. & G. K. Porter, 36,000 ; H. M. New- 
 hall, 48,000 ; J. Irvine, 48,000 ; Thomas R. Bard, 
 50,000 ; D. Freeman, 50,000 ; Lankersheim & Co., 
 56,000; John G. Downey, 75,000 ; James S. Flood, 
 137,000 ; General Beale, 200,000 ; Haggin & Carr, 
 300,000 ; Miller & Lux, 600,000 ; the late Dan 
 Murphy farms, 16,000,000. Probably several of 
 these combine the ranch and farm policy. 
 
 Enough instances have been cited for the pur- 
 pose in hand, and yet certain other conspicuous 
 ones should not be omitted. Off the southern 
 coast of California, and not far from Santa Barbara, 
 lies an island about twenty-four by sixteen miles, 
 called Santa Ptosa. This is owned by A. P. Moore, 
 who has stocked it with eighty thousand sheep. 
 About fifty shearers clip the wool twice a year, 
 each man shearing about ninety sheep a day, and
 
 IGG LANDIIOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 tlie clip is four huiidrcd and fifteen thousand 
 -pounds, returning to Mr. Moore about $112,000. 
 In herding the sheep, trained goats are used in- 
 stead of dogs, a goat leading the band, and a 
 shepherd the goat. The sheep-rancli was pur- 
 chased a few years ago for $600,000. Mr. Moore 
 also has an interest in the Santa Cruz island 
 ranch near by, of sixty four thousand acres and 
 twenty-five thousand sheep. 
 
 The well-known Dalrymple farm of Dakota 
 should not be omitted in this connection. Its 
 area is thirty thousand acres, and its product of 
 wheat in 1881 was six hundred thousand bushels. 
 The author well remembers seeing the first two 
 square miles that were ploughed of this famous 
 wheat-farm. It was in the autumn of 1875, and 
 the virgin prairie had been turned over, three inches 
 deep, in the preceding June. The black furrows 
 lay up glossy in the October sun, as uniform and 
 distinct as the threads in a web of silk. The next 
 June those twelve hundred and eighty acres, a 
 magnificent parallelogram, gave back thirty thou- 
 sand bushels of wheat. 
 
 It is said that recently Rufus Hatch, with some 
 English capitalists, has purchased seven hundred 
 and fifty thousand acres for stock-raising on the 
 Yellowstone ; and if the Farwells and others have 
 made the purchase reported, they are probably the 
 largest landowners in the world. The purchase is 
 made of the State of Texas, in its northeastern
 
 LANDHOLDINGS IN THE UNITED STATES. 167 
 
 section, and covers a territory of one hundred and 
 ninety-seven miles in length, with an average 
 width of twenty-seven miles, — a tract larger than 
 Connecticut, or almost five times as large as Ehode 
 Island. Such a land property casts the Jefferson 
 estate quite in the shade as diminutive, though 
 noted in the days of the third President. His 
 Albemarle estate comprised 5,591f acres, his Pop- 
 lar Forest was about the same, while his purchase 
 that embraced the Natural Bridge was one hundred 
 and fifty-seven acres. 
 
 The preceding statements as to stock-farms, 
 ranches, and ranges, may be presumed to be re- 
 liable up to the date of writing ; but as they em- 
 brace variable properties, titles and areas and 
 amount of stock must be presumed to change 
 with time. They serve fully, as they stand, the 
 purpose of their introduction, — to illustrate the 
 vastness of our public domain by showing the im- 
 mensity of local and personal land interests. Had 
 the territory of the United States been confined to 
 the Atlantic slope north of Florida, as the English 
 and French and Spanish combined to do in our 
 first quarter-century, we should to-day be hemmed 
 in by those and other European powers, much as 
 if we were packed somewhere among the present 
 twenty small realms of Europe. 
 
 Since the above was written, the author has 
 twice enjoyed wild freedom among the ranches 
 
 1 Report of Governor of Wyoming, 1885, p. 1181.
 
 168 LANDHOLDINGS IN THK UNITED STATES. 
 
 aud ranges of Wyoming and her two miliiou 
 cattle, and of other Western regions. In the wan- 
 derings there over illimitable plains, — American 
 steppes or pampas, — the only guides and guards 
 and enclosures were tlie foot-hills and the rivers. 
 Ambitious Lot, the primitive cowboy, and his 
 uncle Abraham could liave arranged easy separa- 
 tion. Lot could have "journeyed east" and found 
 abundance of grazing and water for his stock in 
 the heads of the North Platte and the Yellow- 
 stone ; while Abraham could have moved off west, 
 and kept among those crystal springs and trout- 
 brooks which give rise to the Colorado and the Co- 
 lumbia. The Territory of Wyoming and of cattle, 
 where we enjoyed so much charming idleness and 
 profitable American observation, Avould cut up into 
 seventeen Palestines or a dozen Bay States, with 
 clippings enough for a Rhode Island, and ten 
 square miles over. Of course, as we show a friend 
 our line of travel there on a map, the finger or 
 pointer or pencil-head covers up what would make 
 a whole belt of Connecticuts, — much as a Western 
 man is troubled to find Massachusetts on the map, 
 till he lifts his finger from New England.
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BOIIDEK. 1G9 
 
 CHAPTEK VIII. 
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 
 
 GALISTEO is near the j auction of the Santa 
 Fe branch Avith its trunk, the Atchison, 
 Topeka, and Santa Y6 Road. In returning from 
 Santa Fe I had passed Galisteo and stopped off 
 two days at Baughl's Station, then so-called, to 
 examine the ruins of Pecos, — an abandoned Aztec 
 pueblo, with its old Spanish church, two years 
 older than Boston. The age of tlie pueblo is 
 unknown. 
 
 At the end of the second day I returned to the 
 station, two miles, to take the Eastern-bound train, 
 mixed, of freight and passengers. It was late, and 
 did not come in till midnight. On arrival, the 
 train-boys rushed for the station-hands and loung- 
 ers with exciting news from Galisteo. This Galis- 
 teo was a kind of shanty and umbrella town, with 
 a great deal of outdoors to it. Here and there 
 was an ancient adobe, markiug the Mexican ele- 
 ment ; while rough board saloons of two rooms, or 
 one with curtain partitions and gamiug-tables and 
 bars, showed the American growth. It had signs
 
 170 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 
 
 enough for a small city, and conspicuous among 
 them was the one of the colored barber. 
 
 The exciting news brought up on that midnight 
 train was told by half a dozen at once, as the 
 grim fellows huddled, now in the glare of the 
 head-light of the engine, and now in the murky- 
 shadows of cars or shanties or clouds of smoke. 
 I kept near, but shady, while they talked and 
 walked. 
 
 " You see," says one, " that lank greaser, Jim, 
 he put it bad on the nigger, and he were rough. 
 The nigger he stood it as long as he could, for he 
 did n't want to fight." " Yes, and a nigger has no 
 chance down this way," said another. " And no 
 right to be in these diggins', anyhow," said a third 
 rough. " By and by," continued the first speaker, 
 "his blood it got hot, and he drew a bead on lank 
 Jim, but, missing him, took Joe Lawkins right in 
 the ribs." " Bad," said some one, " for everybody 
 likes Joe." " If it had been lank Jim, it would 
 have been hueno," shouted two or three. " The 
 nigger did n't go for Joe," some one interposed. 
 " Well," continued the first man, " Lawkins he was 
 done for in ten minutes. Then his brother he 
 felt powerful bad, and lank Jim he said, ' Shoot 
 the nigger ! ' but two or three others said, ' Shoot 
 lank Jim ! ' Then they said ' yes ' and ' no ' all 
 round lively. Things got mixed mighty fast, and 
 the fellows got on steam, and every one stood with 
 his finger on his weepon." " Hi ! Hi ! " cried
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BOEDER. 171 
 
 two or three. " Well," he continued, " the nigger 
 he was making himself scarce toward the arroyo, 
 when some feller popped on him." "*Lank Jim, 
 you bet," said one. " Yes ; and you bet," the 
 principal speaker went on to say, " that three or 
 four put their muzzles right up to lank Jim, and 
 cried, ' You hold ! ' Well, the barber he was leav- 
 ing on double quick, and lank Jim's side went 
 after him. Then some fired on them, and they 
 fired back ; and in two twinks they were firing 
 both ways, and then all round. Oh, 'twas a high 
 old time ! " " Well, who is tumbled ? " several 
 cried at once. " They brought back the nigger 
 as white as a nigger could be, and the shooting 
 stopped. Then Joe's brother he said, 'This is my 
 business, and the nigger sha' n't be hurt.' Then 
 lank Jim and his side they swore awful ; and 
 both sides stood around the nigger, and every man 
 had his finger on his weepon. Then Joe's brother 
 he said, ' The nigger shall have his life in his legs, 
 and an hour's start.' Then they cleaned him of 
 his weepons, and he got up and got ; and it were 
 tall, the way he did that thing. Pretty soon Joe's 
 brother he felt powerful bad again ; for there lay 
 Joe, and the blood running out of his jacket, and 
 nobody hurt for it. Then Joe's brother he said, 
 ' Somebody must suffer, and you may go for the 
 nigger.' So half of them they prepared to git ; and 
 the rest they lifted their weepons, and said, ' You 
 sha' n't touch his curly head, for he did n't go to
 
 17 '2 WILD LIFE 0\ THE BORDER. 
 
 do it.' So tliey were talking high and swinging 
 their weepons, when the machine she whistled ' All 
 aboard ! ' and we vamosed. But it was a high old 
 time, and I don't know what became of the nig." 
 
 In a short time we also were off; and so I left 
 that twilight border of civilization. That " high 
 old time " was not so uncommon an affair, and it 
 v.-as, withal, a bit typical of the front. Such 
 scenes do not often find their way into the papers, 
 for both local papers and readers are scarce. If 
 noted men from the States are waylaid, or large 
 sums of money are stolen, or railroad surveyors 
 are shot down, the incident travels up to the 
 Arkansas and Missouri and so comes East. In 
 Sante F^ I was told that many of her leading 
 men, in the past, had failed to reach a natural 
 death. I had just left, Pierce City, Mo., on this 
 same trip, when it was thrown into a fever by a 
 bold daylight stage robbery fifteen miles off; And 
 fifty men jumped to their saddles with rifles in 
 hot hunting for the banditti. In that Southwest 
 these brigands make ns think of mountainous 
 Italy and Turkey and the Koord ranges. 
 
 Probably the East does not hear of one in a 
 hundred of those outrages. A Galveston paper 
 before me mentions four hundred arrests in that 
 State, in 1880, for crimes punishable with death. 
 Fourteen were convicted, four of these hung, and 
 the others let off lightly. I drifted down toward 
 Liberty County, Texas, that had the credit of
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 173 
 
 nearly four hundred homicides within a few 
 years. 
 
 It thrilled New England when Dr. Leonard 
 Bacon, years ago, gave his account of the seizure 
 of his party by brigands between two stations of 
 the American Board in the East. One need not 
 now go abroad for such incidents ; be M'ill find 
 the stations for home missions on the borders 
 far off, and the outrages close by. After I came 
 up from that " high old time " into Colorado, I 
 signed the application for the first Congregational 
 missionary station in New Mexico. They then 
 had none in Arizona. The two Territories are 
 equal to twenty-six areas of Massachusetts, and 
 w-e then had had them on hand more than tliirty 
 years. In that State of four hundred arrests for 
 capital crimes the American Home Missionary So- 
 ciety then had two missionaries only. The great 
 civilizing power at that time in New Mexico was 
 the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Eailroad. 
 
 All this accords very well with what Mowry 
 said of that region in 1864 : " There is no law or 
 protection from Government. Every man redresses 
 his wrongs with the pistol or knife, or submits in 
 silence." ^ If the germs of many frontier settle- 
 ments are taken into account, it will be seen that 
 only a low and imperfect stage of civilization can 
 be expected for one or two generations. And if 
 
 1 Arizona and Sonora. By Sylvester Mowry, Delegate to 
 Congress. Harpers, 1864. p. 34.
 
 174 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 
 
 some of the authorities about to be quoted pertain 
 much to earlier days, it must be considered that 
 half a century and even more sometimes, on an 
 old Spanish and Indian basis, is not a long period 
 for growth and fruiting after the planting of a 
 new civil and social life. ]\Ioreover, yesterday is 
 to-day on the frontier. The cliaracter, quality, 
 and conduct which marked our extreme western 
 belt of settlement long years ago is quite the 
 same as formerly ; it is only the belt which has 
 changed, and it only its place. Perliaps the quali- 
 fication should be added that there is more vio- 
 lence, rougli crime, and brigand outrage since the 
 mining element came in ; and the Indians with 
 less roaming-ground, and invaded by an eastern 
 and a western army of immigrants, are the occa- 
 sion of more personal and bloody rencontres. 
 
 The reflections of Monette are strictly just and 
 historically accurate, whether applied to the flood 
 of immigration which set into the frontier in 
 1774, as he applies them, or to that of any decade 
 since : " It is a fact which has been verified by all 
 experience, from the first occupancy of the British 
 Colonics in North America up to the present time, 
 that when the tide of emigration sets strong 
 toward the wilderness occupied by the native 
 tribes, a large proportion of the most lawless and 
 worthless part of the population is carried in 
 advance of the older settlements like drift-wood 
 upon a swollen river. Hence it is almost impos-
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BOIJDER. 175 
 
 sible for tlie civil authorities to restrain acts of 
 lawless violence in such persons on the extreme 
 confines of civilization. Men wlio are impatient 
 of the wholesome restraints of law and social order 
 naturally seek those parts of a civilized commu- 
 nity where the arm of the civil authority is weak- 
 ened by distance, or wliere they find themselves 
 beyond the reach of civil government." ^ 
 
 No language could more aptly describe large 
 sections of our border population of to-day. They 
 have sought the front for the reasons here given, 
 and maintain a semi-civilized independence of 
 civil government. Between 1769 and 1823 the 
 Franciscan Missions settled about five hundred 
 miles of the California coast, and inland for fifty 
 miles. Church and State united in this work, — 
 the one for religion, and the other for empire ; and 
 the soldiers and colonists sent out by the Gov- 
 ernment were often raflians and renegades trans- 
 ported for crimes.^ All of New Spain had much 
 of this unfortunate material in its foundations, and 
 we are prepared, therefore, to read what Lieutenant 
 Pike said of it in the narrative of his Expedition 
 into it, published in 1807. In an apologetic para- 
 graph in the Preface he says : " With respect; to 
 the Spanish part, it has been suggested to me by 
 
 1 jronette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. i. 
 p. 369. 
 
 - The Natural Wealth of California. By Titus Fye Cronise. 
 1868.
 
 176 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 
 
 some respected friends, that tlie picture I drew of 
 the inanucrs, morals, etc., of individuals, generally 
 of New Spain, if a good likeness, was certainly not 
 making a proper return for the hospitality and 
 kindness with which those people honored me. 
 Those reasons have induced me to omit many 
 transactions, and draw a veil over various habits 
 and customs, which might appear in an unfavor- 
 able point of view, at the same time that I have 
 dwelt on their virtues." 
 
 Where so much of the uncivilized and degrad- 
 ing is revealed, it is difficult to imagine what can 
 have been veiled. Of that New Spain the United 
 States took the area of one hundred and four 
 States like Massachusetts, including Texas and 
 the Gadsden purchase, and the Galisteo of the 
 opening paragraph in this chapter is a part of it. 
 
 The evil elements here indicated in our territory 
 of Spanish colonizations have been enhanced in 
 our earlier frontier domain by the mixed nation- 
 alities of the border men. In years gone by, in 
 the second and third quarters of this century, we 
 were not receiving from the Old World so good a 
 class of foreigners as to-day, and with their im- 
 ported notions of government and law in this 
 country, as also of social and moral life, these 
 mixed races from the Old World did not well unify 
 or constitute the best foundations for coming 
 towns. Look at those founders as grouped by 
 Bradbury, the English traveller, in the " Interior
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 177 
 
 of North America in 1809-11": "The popula- 
 tion is at present compounded of a great number 
 of nations not yet amalgamated, consisting of 
 emigrants from every State in the Union, mixed 
 with English, Irish, Scotch, Dutch, Swiss, Ger- 
 man, French, and almost from every country in 
 Europe." ^ 
 
 If an Eastern community, under traditional re- 
 gime, staid, conservative, and almost fossil, is 
 sometimes perplexed or alarmed by the advent of 
 a few ** foreigners," presumed to be innovators and 
 possibly lawless, what is to be thought or said of 
 one of these frontier belts of Bradbury ? "With 
 time and aid all will come right, if the assimilating 
 and organizing present can be well passed. The 
 future is insured ; it is the present wliich is criti- 
 cal, since man's natural state, antecedent to local 
 government, is a wild state. 
 
 Account also must be taken of the fact that 
 many new settlements are started, not only by pio- 
 neers, but by families whose ancestors have been 
 pioneers for two or three generations. One cita- 
 tion will show a double fact, — w^hat the old fron- 
 tier was, and what the new one must be for 
 a season. An English tourist in California, in 
 1857, speaking of the immigrants there from Pike 
 County, Mo., says : " Till they came to California, 
 most of them had never in their lives before seen 
 two houses together ; and in any little village in 
 
 1 Bradbury's Travels, p. 304. 
 12
 
 178 WILD LIFK ON THE BORDER. 
 
 the mines they witnessed more of the wonders of 
 civilization than ever they had dreamed of." ^ 
 
 In the United States nothing seems to test the 
 civilization of a man more than to have his own 
 interests brought into close relations with the in- 
 terests of the Indians. Eight and wrong appear 
 to lose their immutability as held and practised 
 in older and more civilized communities, and one 
 is inclined to ask whether pecuniary and social 
 morals are provincial. At least, a keen sense of 
 right, honor, and integrity do not seem to have 
 emigrated with the man to the semi-wild frontier, 
 or there is something in his new surroundings that 
 is decivilizing. This is an experience or fact which 
 antedates the founding of the Eepublic and is still 
 vigorous in its repetition. 
 
 In 1768 the president of the King's Council for 
 Virginia set forth, in a message to the Colonial 
 Legislature, " that a set of men, regardless of the 
 laws of natural justice, unmindful of the duties 
 they owe to society, and in contempt of the royal 
 proclamations, have dared to settle themselves up- 
 on the lands near Redstone Creek and Cheat River, 
 which are the property of the Indians ; and not- 
 withstanding the repeated wrarnings of the danger 
 of such lawless proceedings, and the strict and 
 spirited injunctions to desist and quit their unjust 
 possessions, they still remain unmoved, and seem 
 
 1 Three Years in California. By J. D. Borthwick, 1851-52. 
 Edinburgh and London, 1857. pp. 147, 148.
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 179 
 
 to defy the orders and even the powers of the 
 Government." ^ 
 
 It would be difficult to frame passages more per- 
 tinent for a presidential proclamation against tlie 
 invasion of Oklahoma in 1884. This falling off of 
 frontier men into a wild border life is as notable 
 as it is lamentable, and has causes which are per- 
 manent, while the decades run by and the frontier 
 moves on. The explanation may lie partly in the 
 fact that the looseness incident to camp, tent, and 
 saddle life makes an equitable government and 
 fair- toned justice quite impossible. Be the causes 
 what they may, the humiliating passage of Mac- 
 kenzie cannot be much qualified : " Experience 
 proves that it requires much less time for a civil- 
 ized people to deviate into the manners and cus- 
 toms of savage life than for savages to rise into a 
 state of civilization." ^ 
 
 Of tliis decivilizing process, Parkman, in " The 
 Old Edgime in Canada," gives a graphic and start- 
 ling account in the thirteenth and seventeenth 
 chapters. It was while Canada was yet French 
 domain, and that defeat, on the Plains of Abra- 
 ham, so total and so continental, was in the near- 
 ing future : — 
 
 " Out of the beaver trade rose a huge evil, bane- 
 ful to the growth and the morals of Canada. All 
 
 1 Butler's History of Kentucky, Appendix, p. 475. 
 
 2 Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans 
 in 1789 and 1793, Preface.
 
 180 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 
 
 that was most active and vigorous in the colony 
 took to the woods and escaped Iroiu the control of 
 intendants, councils, and priests, to the savage free- 
 dom of the wilderness. . . . Edict after edict was 
 directed against them ; and more than once tlie 
 colony presented the extraordinary spectacle of the 
 greater part of its young men turned into forest 
 outlaws. . . . Their plan was to be absent four 
 years, in order that the edicts against them might 
 have time to relent. . . . The king ordered that 
 any person going into the woods without a license 
 should be wliipped and branded for the first offence, 
 and sent for life to the galleys for the second." 
 
 Denonville, the Governor of Canada, reports in 
 later years " on their vagabond and lawless ways, 
 their indifference to marriage, and the mischief 
 caused by their example ; describes how on their 
 return from the woods they swagger like lords, 
 spend all their gains in dress and drunken rev- 
 elry, and despise the peasants, whose daughters 
 they will not deign to marry, though they are 
 peasants themselves, . . . and cause their children 
 to be as unruly as Indians, being brought up in the 
 same manner." Married or unmarried, these rene- 
 gades of civilization, in their four years' absence 
 for trade and wilderness freedom among the In- 
 dians, had left their children scattered through the 
 forests. 
 
 Lord Selkirk's Red River Settlement, when his
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 181 
 
 heirs were bought out in 1(S35, serves well the 
 illustratiou of Wild Life ou the Border. " The 
 inhabitants of the region at the time were of as 
 motley and miscellaneous a make-up as any ex- 
 tensive region of the earth would have afforded, 
 — Canadians, half-breeds, Indians, and naked, 
 painted, and featliered savages, strutting and fum- 
 ing voyageurs, farmers, hunters, fishermen, fur- 
 nished with missionaries of rival creeds, and not 
 without means of education. Groups of human 
 dwellings presented the strongest contrast, as be- 
 tween well-furnished and well-stocked houses and 
 farm-barns, and the filthiest, dreariest cabins and 
 wigwams. Any of the Indians who were inclined 
 to adopt the usages of civilization had the progres- 
 sive stages of it set before them and facilitated, 
 all the way up from and all the way down to 
 barbarism. Many of the settlers, however, were 
 faithful to their Indian wives, sought to raise them 
 and their habits and modes of life, and sent their 
 half-blood offspring to Canada and Europe for 
 education." ^ 
 
 It is very true that these facts are old, yet not 
 old enough to be obsolete or unrepeated. In 
 1843-44 Fremont made an exploring tour to Ore- 
 gon and northern California. On the return to the 
 States the expedition stopped June 1st of the lat- 
 ter year, at Eoubideau's trading-post on the Uin- 
 
 1 The Red Man and the White Man. By George E. Ellis. 
 p. 494.
 
 182 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 
 
 tah river, and Frdiiioiit tlius speaks of it: " It lias 
 mostly a garrison of Canadians and Spanish en- 
 gages and hunters, with the usual number of In- 
 dian women." Two years afterward all that region 
 was swept into the Union, and to-day it is a fitting 
 part of polygamous Utah. 
 
 We sometimes try to think that wild life on the 
 border has been lived out, and gone into legends 
 and books. No doubt the era of blood in Sau 
 Francisco is passed, which is thus epitomized by 
 the California " Alta " of June 1, 1856 : " Over a 
 year ago we understood the district attorney to 
 state, in an argument before a jury in a murder 
 case, that since the settlement of San Francisco 
 by the American people there had been twelve 
 hundred murders committed here. We thought 
 at the time the number stated was unduly large, 
 and think so still." 
 
 That city has done making such records, yet 
 others are doing it in our new country. In Octo- 
 ber, 1880, a policeman of Leadville, then a city of 
 twelve thousand, informed the writer that since he 
 entered that service in the March preceding, the 
 violent deaths there had averaged two a week. 
 " The highest time we had was a Sunday in April, 
 when seven were killed." 
 
 We return to early San Francisco in this study 
 of American the border. An English traveller 
 made himself somewhat familiar with California 
 in the years 1851-54, and speaks in this way of
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 183 
 
 the amusements and habits of San Francisco at 
 that time : " The most curious were certainly 
 the masquerades. They were generally given 
 in one of the large gambling-saloons, and in the 
 placards announcing that they were to come off 
 appeared conspicuously the intimations of 'No 
 Weapons Admitted ; ' 'A Strong Police will be 
 in Attendance.' " ^ 
 
 Many years after we came into possession of 
 New Mexico, as an official of the United States in- 
 formed the author, there in a prominent city social 
 assemblies were held twice a week, and they were 
 originated and patronized by the leading men; 
 but none of their partners were their wives, or 
 married women. 
 
 The Sabbath is a good day in which to view the 
 frontier. Of the origin, authority, modes of observ- 
 ance, and utility of the Christian Sabbath there 
 are many views, and all are entitled to consider- 
 ation, though conflicting. In the main, however, 
 there is a general agreement that the mode and 
 tone in which this day is received and passed are 
 a fair index to the civil, social, and moral character 
 of the place. These illustrations, therefore, out 
 of many of Sabbath life, are cited to show some 
 phases of the border. Flint has already been 
 quoted as an intelligent, observing, and candid 
 resident of ten years on the frontier, — 1815-25. 
 
 1 Three Years in California. By J. D. Borthwick. Edin- 
 burgh and London, 1857. p. 77.
 
 184 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 
 
 He was both a teacher and a minister, and has left 
 this record of the Sabbath at the Post of Arkansas. 
 When he marks the observance as French, it must 
 be borne in mind that lie samples a wide territory, 
 and a people who gave a broad and deep quality to 
 the primitive civilization of the Mississippi Val- 
 ley : " The French people generally came to the 
 place of worship arrayed in ball-dresses, and went 
 direct from worship to the ball. A brilliant room 
 was near, and parts of my audience sometimes 
 came in for a moment, and after listening to a few 
 sentences returned to their billiards." ^ 
 
 The vivid recollections of St. Louis come back, 
 as we found it fifteen years later, with its seven- 
 teen thousand people, French, Spanish, and Amer- 
 ican, and a bold dash of blood from old Europe. 
 There was unusual life on the Sabbath, though 
 not much business on the levee, between the solid 
 Front Street ti'ading-houses and the twenty to 
 forty steamers lying uneasy at the bank in the 
 muddy Missouri water. The clear and compara- 
 tively pure Mississippi was crowded by it to the 
 Illinois shore, and it hugged it with more or less 
 of the distinctness of a dividing line for fifty miles 
 down. For religious purposes we made regularly 
 the Sabbath tour of the levee and steamers all 
 tlirough the months of open navigation for a year. 
 The Christian Sabbath was as foreign to that levee 
 as any sacred day of an Arab or Hindu. Many 
 
 1 Flint's Travels, p. 274.
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 185 
 
 shops were open in the city • parades with music 
 were common ; and as congregations were gather- 
 ing for worship it created no surprise to meet a 
 band of clattering horsemen on the streets headed 
 for the country, carrying their fowling-pieces and 
 whistling their game-dogs alon»r. 
 
 Borthwick the Englishman has been already 
 quoted. His description of a mining town on the 
 Sabbath will answer to-day as faithfully as twenty- 
 five years ago to any large mining camp between 
 the Black Hills and Sonora : — 
 
 " During the week, and especially when the 
 miners were all at work, Hangtown [now Placer- 
 ville] was comparatively quiet, but on Sundays 
 it was a very different place. On that day the 
 miners living within eight or ten miles all Hocked 
 in to buy provisions for the week, to spend their 
 money in the gambling-saloons, to play cards, to 
 get their letters from home, and to refresh them- 
 selves after a week's labor and isolation in the 
 mountains, in enjoying the excitement of the 
 scene according to their tastes. . . . The store- 
 keepers did more business on Sundays than in 
 all the rest of the week ; and in the afternoon 
 crowds of miners could be seen dispersing over the 
 hills in every direction, laden with the provisions 
 they had been pjurchasing, chiefly flour, pork, and 
 beans, and perhaps a lump of fresh beef. . . . 
 There was only one place of public worship in
 
 186 WILD LIFE ON THE BOUDEU. 
 
 Hangtown, — a very neat little wooden edifice 
 which belonged to some denomination of Metho- 
 dists, and seemed to he well attended. ... On the 
 streets almost every one wore a pistol or a knife, 
 many wore both ; but they were rarely used." ^ 
 
 There may have been no natural and original 
 connection between the name and the Sabbath 
 character of this place, but there is a legitimate 
 and grim aptness between the two. " Placerville, 
 known in early times as 'Hangtown,' in memory 
 of the lynching there of three men who were 
 arrested for highway robbery, and two of them 
 identified as the persons guilty of a murder." ^ 
 
 A pen-photograph of the place by our author 
 will not be out of place on this page : " The street 
 itself was in many places knee-deep in mud, and 
 was plentifully strewed with old boots, hats, and 
 shirts, old sardine-boxes, empty tins of preserved 
 oysters, empty bottles, worn-out pots and kettles, 
 old ham-bones, broken picks and shovels, and other 
 rubbish too various to particularize." ^ 
 
 Although our Southwest, beyond the Missis- 
 sippi, cannot all be called border land, it has 
 been characterized by a wild life that should be 
 embraced in the survey of this chapter. When 
 we purchased Louisiana, we annexed a civilization 
 
 1 Three Years in California. By J. D. Borthwick. 1851-54. 
 pp. 118, 119. 
 
 2 Tuthill'.s History of California, p. 389. 
 8 Borthwick, pp. 114, 115.
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 187 
 
 essentially foreign, and raucb of it mediaeval ; and 
 while it has to an extent been Americanized, it 
 still presents startling and painful points to one 
 who would make the region a social and moral 
 study. What New Orleans was, much of society 
 still is, on the west of it, and up to the then reced- 
 ing: border. When we read the account of that 
 city, by George W. Cable, the wonder is, not that 
 social convulsions have agitated society there, and 
 the wide regions moulded by it, but that the frame- 
 work itself of society has endured. And while his 
 painfully graphic description is confined nominally 
 to the city at one epoch, it runs out, practically, 
 over a vast area to the west, and into an era of half 
 a century : — 
 
 "Between 1831 and 1833 the foreign exports 
 and imports ran up from twenty-six to nearly 
 fifty-four millions of dollars. . . . Vice put on the 
 same activity that commerce showed. The Creole 
 had never been a strong moral foi'ce. The Amer- 
 ican came in as to gold diggings or diamond fields, 
 — to grab and run. The transatlantic immigrant 
 of those days was the offscouring of Europe. The 
 West Indian was a leader in licentiousness, gam- 
 bling, and duelling. The number of billiard-rooms, 
 gaming-houses, and lottery offices was immense. 
 In the old town they seemed to be every second 
 house. There was the French Evangelical Church 
 Lottery, the Baton Ptouge Church Lottery, the
 
 188 WILL) LIFE ON THE BORDER. 
 
 Natchitoches Church Lottery, and a host of others 
 less piously inclined. The catus of the central 
 town were full of filibusters. . . . Even in the 
 heart of the town highway robbery and murder 
 lay always in wait for the incautious night way- 
 farer who ventured out alone. . . . The worst day 
 of all the week was Sunday. The stores and shops 
 were open, but toil slackened and license gained 
 headway. Gambling-rooms and ball-rooms were 
 full, weapons were often out, the masques of the 
 Salle de Cond^ were thronged with men of high 
 standing, and crowds of barge and raits men, as 
 well as Creoles and St. Domingoans, gathered at 
 those open-air African dances, carousals, and de- 
 baucheries in the rear of the town, that have left 
 their monument in the name of Congo Square. . . . 
 Schools were scarce and poor, churches few and ill- 
 attended, and domestic service squalid, inefficient, 
 and corrupt." ^ 
 
 This is not the New Orleans of to-day, but that 
 New Orleans is now diffused, propagated, "gone 
 West" into and across Texas, into the interior and 
 on the borders. 
 
 Sample and reference illustrations would prop- 
 erly follow such a statement. We enter a Texan 
 hotel in the newer interior or rough border of this 
 Empire State. The " hostelrie " is a shanty strug- 
 gling to be a story and a half. Office, reception- 
 
 1 The Century, June, 1883. The Great South Gate. By 
 George W. Cable, pp. 221, 222.
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BOKDER. 189 
 
 room, ladies' room, common sitting-room, private 
 parlors, and the family room are all one and the 
 same apartment, twelve feet by twelve. The 
 gaunt traveller easily measures the height of the 
 ceiling if he is above five feet ten, and stoops to 
 conquer a position. Within this room are the 
 squat, uncourtly, unwashed landlord ; the landlady 
 and baby and nursery appendages; half a dozen 
 urchins of the family stock, which in Texas seems 
 to run mostly to boys ; some cowboys in leather 
 breeches and spurs, and whiskey with its spurs ; 
 loafers from the nearest cabins in constant attend- 
 ance ; two or three boarders with wives, — it is just 
 before dinner, — and a couple of horseback travel- 
 lers. The announcement of dinner sweeps them all 
 into a banqueting-hall of corresponding splendor 
 and furnishing — in a " lean-to." As the rosy sun- 
 set fades out, and dewy eve steals on, they all re- 
 tire to their several apartments, and do not go far, 
 for sweet repose. The sable curtains of the night 
 make further description impossible, and so we leave 
 the reader fancy free. Men of saddle, or buggy, or 
 stage, over the magnificent distances in the por- 
 tions of sparsely-peopled Texas, know experimen- 
 tally that this description is drawn mildly, and will 
 answer for much highway off the railroad in an 
 immense State. 
 
 These are an American type of the merry for- 
 esters of early England, with some dash of the 
 Knishts of tlie liound Table in their blood. Amer-
 
 190 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 
 
 icans and citizens, yet owning to no government 
 that does not go with them in the saddle, they live 
 a hybrid order of life, produced of the prairie and 
 saddle and tent. The untravelled yet intelligent 
 man of the old thirteen States, living among the 
 hills of his ancestors, with schoolhouses and kind 
 neighbors, and churches and bridges, and old oaken 
 buckets swinging in the wells of Jacobs all about 
 him, knows the least possible of his fellow-citizens 
 on the border. He has not enough in his mind 
 of even "such stuff as dreams are made of" to 
 furnish a sleepy conception of them. What oc- 
 casion has he ever had to know what a saddle and 
 sleeping blanket, now a tent and now a bed, a 
 camp-fire, and a buffalo or antelope steak broiled 
 on a ramrod, will make of a man ? It would re- 
 quire eight New Englands to cover United States 
 territory which is occupied more or less in this 
 way. The fascination of it and its power of self- 
 propagation and extension are an amazement to 
 every book student of civilization. 
 
 One of the problems of a Christian civilization, 
 so called, offers itself to our study, with a vast ex- 
 panse and a diffuse population, constituting the 
 wild border-life on our southwest. Aboriginally 
 it was barbarian and pagan, in the European terms 
 of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Then 
 came European civilization and Spanish Chris- 
 tianity to lift up the people. With what results ? 
 " The Pueblo Indians, living in well-built villages.
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 191 
 
 depending upon agriculture, possessing certain 
 comforts of manufactures and arts, and advanced 
 somewhat in civil and social ideas, were encoun- 
 tered by the Spaniards, tliree and a third centuries 
 ago, in the same localities where they are now 
 found, and with the same manners and customs 
 as to-day,"^ 
 
 As to their explorers, or rather invaders, the 
 same author says : " In all forms of treaties and in 
 all cases of submission the unalterable condition 
 of faith to the new religion was required." Speak- 
 ing of the pueblo of Taos, the most powerful in 
 numbers and resources referred to by the old Span- 
 ish historians, he says : " They live in the same 
 homes to-day as then, and occupy much the same 
 land now as then. They are little if any better 
 off in lands, property, numbers, and comforts now 
 than they were three hundred years ago." As a 
 sample pueblo, our officer of the United States 
 Army, who has studied his theme on the ground 
 as well as in the library, thus refers to Acoma, a 
 pueblo : " Inhabited since history began, it seems 
 the same place to-day as described three hundred 
 and thirty years ago, — has gained nothing, nor 
 lost in any respect its ancient features." Covering 
 the Pueblo and Aztec population generally, the 
 same authority adds: ""VVe should, at the first 
 thought, have expected to have found some of the 
 
 1 A Political Problem : New Mexico ami the New Mexicans. 
 By an Officer of the Armj'. 1876. p. 2.
 
 192 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 
 
 blessings of civilization and Christianity. But 
 witli this delineation of the true character of their 
 religion we must conclude our premise wrong. In 
 the Pueblo communities themselves it is known 
 that the ancient belief and the ancient rites have 
 always been preserved, and are to-day kept up 
 with a pretended acquiescence in the ritual of the 
 established Church." Eeferring to the civil, moral, 
 and religious influences of the United States there 
 since it became a part of our dominion, he con- 
 cludes with this mild statement, so mortifying and 
 reproving to our methods of administering Chris- 
 tianity : " No sign has been exhibited, in twenty-six 
 years, of the adoption of our ideas of civilization, 
 or of amendment of their points of variance." ^ 
 
 These quoted remarks apply equally well to 
 Arizona as to New Mexico. The original popula- 
 tion is Mexican or Aztec, — synonymous terms, — 
 and pueblos are simply Mexican or Aztec villa- 
 gers living on reservations, with a communistic 
 house, more or less walled, for defence. The rest 
 of the population, equally Aztec, is diffused 
 through tlie country in various pursuits. Of tlie 
 pueblos proper, as walled towns, about twenty-five 
 are extant. Many are abandoned of population, 
 the last of which was Pecos. If the Pueblos dif- 
 fer from the rest of the Mexicans on either side of 
 the Eio Grande, it is in having retained a purer 
 Aztec blood and morals, and more of the charac- 
 
 1 A Political Problem, pp. 29, 17, 23, 30, 31.
 
 WILD LIFE OX THE BORDER. 193 
 
 teristics which marked the race before the invasion 
 of Europeans. So far as yet appears, ethnologi- 
 cally the Aztecs are a race distinct from the North 
 American Indians ; though this name, Indian, is 
 loosely given to the more uncivilized portions of 
 them in Mexico, as well as in New Mexico and 
 Arizona. 
 
 Such is one section of our wild American bor- 
 der, pagan and Christian in its religion ; as to the 
 natives, pagan and medieeval in its civilization 
 wlien annexed to the United States ; and strangely 
 neglected afterward in our home and foreign 
 schemes and expenditures for educating and Chris- 
 tianizing the unfortunate and degraded. It was 
 left for railroad enterprise to carry the nineteenth 
 and Christian century into our conquered and 
 annexed Southwest. 
 
 This condition of civil and social and moral 
 life on the frontier, which we have been outlining, 
 does not seem surprising to the thoughtful, but, on 
 the contrary, quite natural and reasonable. What 
 otherwise can be expected ? For two hundred 
 years, and especially for the last one hundred, since 
 the Revolution into independence opened the way 
 west, and stimulated the emigrating propensities 
 of the Americans, we have rushed over the bor- 
 der. When the Republic was born, a thousand 
 personal, individual, and sovereign interests were 
 born, and a boundless interior invited to their 
 development. History has no parallel to the 
 
 13
 
 194 AYILD LIFE ON TIIH BOUDHll. 
 
 American migration of this current century. But 
 it was building tlie State out into open space. 
 The deep soil and the minerals, the mountains 
 and prairies and forests and rivers, and the skies of 
 God were the raw material, and on tlie building-lot. 
 The State is yet to come, and must be built on the 
 ground. It cannot be immigrant, while its found- 
 ers must be. It can no more be moved out from 
 the old East, as by a colony in an emigrant train, 
 than the old Pilgrim wells of Plymouth and 
 Salem. The State is an autocthon, though of 
 imported germs. It comes of society, which 
 in a new country is composed of the imported 
 fragments of an old disintegrated society, which 
 fragments, on the new building ground, we call 
 immigrants. These fragments have gone west, as 
 individuals and families, disintegrating and re- 
 ducing some of the old States, as Maine and New 
 Hampshire. Betw^een 1860 and 1870 they did 
 not hold their own, but fell off in population from 
 emigration. Between 1850 and 1860 Vermont 
 barely held her own, from the same cause. 
 
 Now, as to deterioration in this new society 
 which is to build the State on the border, con- 
 sider how much of the man is left behind when 
 one emigrates. He carries with him his qualities 
 but not his character, as the transplanted tree 
 carries its label and its branches, but only a part 
 of its roots, which hold its vitality and strength. 
 As he makes a new farm, or business, or dwelling-
 
 AVILD LIFE OX THE BOKDER. 195 
 
 house, he must make a new reputation, or power 
 to do. At this stage many emigrants reveal a 
 liumiliating weakness. They have been indebted 
 to society more than they or their old neighbors 
 were conscious of, for their good name and general 
 usefulness. They have stood upright in their old 
 surroundings, because not required to stand alone. 
 Traditions, ambitions, honorable relations, fears of 
 failure and shame, virtues enforced by surround- 
 ings, as cheaper than vices, have in the old home 
 of childhood braced them up to an erectness. 
 These favorable surroundings do not emigrate with 
 a man when he crosses the Ohio or Missouri. 
 Many a timber has no dishonor in the old house, 
 but is a poor stick in rebuilding. Common law, 
 civil law, genial neighborhood benedictions, the 
 schoolhouse and the church do not emigrate. 
 These must be built into the new settlement as 
 truly as the highway and farm and bridge. The 
 intellectual and literary atmosphere which the 
 body politic must breathe, to be vigorous and 
 well-toned, is not native to the virgin forests and 
 prairies and mountains of the coveted West. The 
 school and the academy and tlie college, with their 
 historic playgrounds and ancestral avenues and 
 classic associations, — great factors, in making noble 
 men and women, — come slowly on the border. 
 
 In all these unfavorable circumstances perils 
 come promptly. In the passage from the old to 
 the new, in the disintegration, removal, and recon-
 
 196 ^V1LD LIFE ON THE BOUDER. 
 
 strncti(in, a thousand miles into the interior, witli 
 so much of good and indispensable inevitably left 
 behind, a civil, social, and moral relapse in the 
 building of the new state is a painful and neces- 
 sary certainty. For civilization has its laws of 
 decline as well as of growth. Until the unemi- 
 grating and indispensable qualities for the higher 
 civilization which crowned society in the old 
 thirteen states can be produced for the new state, 
 on the new ground, there must be decline. The 
 second generation will fall below the first, possibly 
 the third below the second, in the stronger, nobler, 
 and sweeter elements of the family and of the 
 public. This decline will sometiines show itself 
 in a loose undervaluing of education, or in a low 
 pride in the unrefined, or in a contempt for what 
 is delicate in taste and feeling. The amusements, 
 also, will usually indicate this retrograde, by as- 
 suming more of a coarse, physical, semi-animal 
 and semi-vicious character. All such is a hint 
 that decivilization is going on, and the ease and 
 rapidity of such tendencies are surprising to one 
 who has not observed or studied them. Civiliza- 
 tion is an acquisition or conquest over nature, 
 obtained with struggle and held by perpetual 
 vigilance. 
 
 These decivilizing causes and retrograde ten- 
 dencies on the border are outlined here in no way 
 of reflection or reproach on our pioneer belt of 
 citizens. They are perils incidpnt to the emi-
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 197 
 
 grating, dissolved, and reconstructing stage of 
 society, inevitable, and inseparable from the mi- 
 gratory state. Those who take the republic in 
 their hands thus to enlarge it, and who, therefore, 
 necessarily incur these disadvantages and perils, 
 not always successfully, are entitled to our sym- 
 pathy, and to our honor even, in some failures. 
 As usually the strongest and most energetic emi- 
 grate, they have probably done what the best 
 would have done. 
 
 When we add to this exposed class the emi- 
 grants of fortune, and the American nomads of the 
 border, who pour contempt on education and so- 
 ciety and law and morals, and add also the crimi- 
 nal tramps and desperadoes of a new country, it 
 will be seen that the state is to be builded with 
 great difficulties on our frontier, as we constantly 
 crowd it along into a farther wilderness. When, 
 in the first stage of the Marietta Colony under 
 Putnam, they wrote out an extempore code of 
 laws, and posted it on the trees around their rude 
 cabins, the temptations and proclivities were strong 
 toward a government as rough and rude as their 
 cabins, and only the exceptionally high tone of 
 the settlers saved them from it. For when there 
 is no king in Israel, and every one is left to do 
 what is right in his own eyes, there is a good open- 
 ing toward anarchy and barbarism, and all the 
 more if in a country in the wild and unsubdued 
 state of nature.
 
 198 WILD J.IFK ON TUK linRDKU. 
 
 Illuslralive cases are uot wanting in history to 
 show what has here been said. Spain sent her 
 best blood and high Castihan civilization into her 
 New Spain. True, it was of the sixteenth century ; 
 but then Europe had nothing better to offer for 
 ccdonial founders than those knightly and courtly 
 generals and civilians. In their wilderness homes 
 they fell away from their Castilian breeding and 
 ambitions, and their posterity and their institutions 
 compromised witli the natives on midway grounds, 
 and now but few remnants and faint memories of 
 that hi<i[h origin can be discovered. 
 
 Not far from the time wlien Jamestown and 
 Plymouth and Salem were being founded, and 
 the American Commonwealths were germinating, 
 high Protestants, and of the strictest type, left Hol- 
 land to colonize South Africa. Better blood and 
 principles, civil and religious, were not abundant in 
 Europe. The Netherlands, as the colonial mother, 
 then led on the high seas, and her children were 
 not left to want, until the adverse combinations of 
 the seventeenth century turned off those colonists 
 to a kind of orphanage. Then came a relapse, and 
 uncivilized nature began to claim her wild rights. 
 The virgin, rich country, and surrounding and 
 intermingling savage tribes, the border Indians of 
 their frontier, turned that old Dutch energy into 
 daring recklessness. Then, stooping lower and 
 still lower, they became a temptation and a prey 
 to British ambitions and invasions ; and imported
 
 WILD LIFE ON THE BORDER. 199 
 
 governors, by their humiliating and oppressive ad- 
 ministrations, hastened their apostasy from the 
 civilization of their ancestors of the Ehine and the 
 Zuyder Zee and Amsterdam. They afiiliated with 
 the natives and barbarized themselves. When their 
 English invaders, in struggles at subjugation, drove 
 them from one border to another, and attempted 
 to win the Caffre aborigines to British loyalty by 
 Christian baptism, they turned away from that 
 type of Christianity with contempt. They came 
 to a pause in their decivilizing tendencies when 
 freedom for this Dutch blood was secured, af- 
 ter many fierce struggles, but they paused on a 
 level much below their original and colonial one. 
 " They are now a race of nominally Christian bar- 
 barians, — barbarians under the Synod of Dort ; a 
 standing proof that Protestants, and they, too, of 
 the Saxon blood, may drop out of civilization, and 
 take their place on the same level of ignorance 
 and social brutality with the barbarous tribes of 
 the earth. Let no American that loves his country 
 refuse to heed the example." ^ 
 
 1 Barbarism the First Danger. Bv Horace Bushnell, D.D.
 
 200 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 
 
 IT was very fortunate that, when the young 
 American Republic made that great advance 
 into the Northwest Territory, it was started among 
 the schoolhouses of the New England pattern. 
 At the second meeting of tlie Ohio Company, 
 March 5, 1788, it was voted " That the Directors 
 be requested to pay as early attention as possible 
 to the education of youth." 
 
 When, in July following, the territorial govern- 
 ment was proclaimed by Governor St. Clair, one 
 ordinance declared that " schools and the means of 
 education shall forever be encouraged." The fact 
 is to be held in the perpetual and grateful remem- 
 brance of this Ohio Company, that they originated 
 the usage of setting apart a certain portion of the 
 wild lands of the Government for the support of 
 public schools. The act took a modified form in 
 the Congress of 1803, by which certain parcels of 
 land were so set apart, first, in the United States 
 Military Tract, and in tlie Connecticut Reserve, 
 and in the Virginia Military Reservation, — all 
 in the Ohio. Then the act proceeds to set apart
 
 PIO^'EEl.'IXG IN EDUCATION. 201 
 
 " one thirty-sixth part of all tlie lauds of the Uiiiled 
 States, lying in the State of Ohio," certain condi- 
 tions being appended. When, three years later. 
 Congress had next an occasion to recognize this 
 Ohio scliool policj/' while framing a territorial 
 government for the new Territory of Louisiana, 
 it incorporated the theory and practice into the 
 organic structure of the Territory. From that time 
 onward, as new Territories and States have en- 
 larged the American Union, the general Govern- 
 ment has distinctly and constitutionally said to 
 each, " Schools and the means of education shall 
 forever be encouraged." Prior to 1848 every six- 
 teenth section of public land in every township, 
 in any State admitted was reserved for the in- 
 terests of the public school. After that date the 
 amount reserved was doubled, and Sections 16 and 
 36 were reserved.^ When Wyoming, the last Ter- 
 ritory to be organized, was added in 1868, it was 
 enacted "That sections numbered 16 and 36 in 
 each township in said Territory shall be, and the 
 same are hereby reserved for the purposes of being 
 applied to public schools in the State or States here- 
 after to be erected out of the same." Almost in 
 identical words from the first, and to each new 
 member, as Illinois, Arkansas, Utah, and New Mex- 
 ico, this has been said ; and so the basis for public- 
 school education has been laid by the foresight of 
 
 1 Public Domain : A Public Document. By Thomas Donald- 
 son. Washington. 1884. p. 223.
 
 202 noxEEUiXG in epucatiox. 
 
 the national Government in the full persuasion tliat 
 the public school is indispensable to a republic. 
 
 With two exceptions this wise policy of the 
 Government has prevailed whenever new country 
 has been added to the national domain, or any 
 unorganized portion of it has been placed under 
 territorial or state government. Alaska is one of 
 the exceptions, since it yet lias no territorial gov- 
 ernment. Texas is the other, which came into the 
 Union as a foreign and sovereign State, so that 
 the United States made in it no acquisition of 
 public lands. 
 
 As fast as Indian titles to lands have been ex- 
 tinguished, and the lands so gained have been 
 exposed to public sale, this reservation and proviso 
 have prevailed. On the assumption that each new 
 township embraces thirty-six square miles, and 
 that each mile is numbered on a prescribed plan, 
 numbers sixteen and thirty-six are reserved for 
 schools. 
 
 The scope and power of this Ohio Company pro- 
 viso, as one dwells a little on it, run off into the sub- 
 lime. All American children are born heirs to an 
 interest and right in a public education. Theoreti- 
 cally, neither poverty nor the wilderness can be a 
 bar to the privilege, but practically there are some 
 serious and adverse conditions. Eeference has been 
 made in the chapter " Ancient Chicago " to the 
 student life of the Kinzie boy in Chicago in 1810, 
 and to the private school of Mr. Watkins there, in
 
 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 203 
 
 an old stable, in 1832, and to the private scliool of 
 Miss Chappel and Miss Barrows, about the same 
 time. This region was covered by the original 
 provision for public schools, based on the public 
 lands ; but the system was of slow growth, and had 
 not yet practically arrived at Chicago. In 1841 
 the private English and Classical School of the 
 writer was a fair type of tlie provisions for educa- 
 tion in St. Louis and other leading towns west of 
 the Mississippi. Private enterprise furnished the 
 opportunities. 
 
 At first thought one would expect better educa- 
 tional provisions in the ancient Upper Louisiana, 
 and in that old Franco-Spanish and English city 
 of 1764 But one must remember that the great 
 valley had a Papal planting, and it was then no 
 theory of the Catholic Church to educate the 
 masses. Indeed,' an early colonial governor of 
 Virginia, Protestant as he was, thanked God that 
 there were no public schools in the Old Domin- 
 ion. Writing of the state of education in Louis- 
 iana in 1791, Monette says : "Heretofore but little 
 attention had been given to education in Louisiana. 
 Schools were few, and confined exclusively to the 
 wealthy, or were under the control of the clergy, 
 where the expenses of education effectually ex- 
 cluded the great mass of the people. The only 
 school in New Orleans was one under the con- 
 trol of the priests, taught by a few Spanish 
 nuns. . . . During the autumn of 1791, however.
 
 204 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 
 
 a nuiiiber ot" French refugees from the massacre 
 of St. ])oiniiigo arrived iu New Orleans, and be- 
 ing destitute of property, were compelled to seek 
 a livelihood in the cai)acity of teacliers. Many 
 of them, being well educated, became valuable 
 citizens of Louisiana, and contributed greatly to 
 the subsequent introduction of schools in the 
 Province." ^ 
 
 At this time New Orleans contained a popula- 
 tion of about six thousand. 
 
 The control of education in Louisiana, as in all 
 Papal countries, was conceded to the sacred or- 
 ders, and the nuns had charge of much of it, as an 
 outside work of mercy. ]\Iajor Stoddard, wlio re- 
 ceived the Province of Upper Louisiana from Spain 
 for France, as the commissioned representative of 
 the latter, and who under his connnission deliv- 
 ered the territory the next day to the agent of the 
 United States, and who at the same time entered 
 on his office as civil and military commandant of 
 Upper Louisiana, makes these remarks concerning 
 the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans : " At- 
 tached to the convent is a small house, contain- 
 ing three rooms, divided longitudinally from each 
 other by double gratings about six inches asunder, 
 with apertures about two inches square, where 
 strangers may see and converse with the nuns and 
 boarders on particular business. . . . Near to the 
 
 ^ Mouette's History of tlie Mississippi Valley, vol. i. pp. 480, 
 481.
 
 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 205 
 
 main building [convent], and on the street, stands 
 an old schoolhouse, where the female children of 
 citizens appear at fixed hours to be gratuitously 
 instructed in writing, reading, and arithmetic." ^ 
 
 Some similar and slight provision was at the 
 same time elsewhere made for a free boys' school. 
 The same author says of the whole province : " The 
 public treasury advanced but little money for the 
 support of seminaries of learning ; no laws w^ere ever 
 made to compel the inliabitants to maintain schools. 
 Even in New Orleans, the capital of the Province, 
 two schools only were patronized by public author- 
 ity. . . . The Ursuline Nuns usually received 
 $600 per annum from the public, and this sum, 
 together with avails of about one thousand acres 
 of land belongino- to the convent, enabled them to 
 educate twelve female orphans. . . . There were 
 also some private schools in the city, but they 
 were of no great use. The settlements at a dis- 
 tance from the capital were still worse provided, 
 and a person who could read and write was 
 considered as a kind of prodigy among them." 
 In the college of priests at Kaskaskia " scho- 
 lastic divinity afforded almost the only subject of 
 investigation." ^ 
 
 This educational system of the old Louisiana, 
 shown in its best estate in New Orleans, was Euro- 
 
 ^ Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana. By 
 Major Amos Stoddavd. 1812. pp. 152, 154, 155. 
 - Ibid., pp. 308, 309.
 
 206 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 
 
 peau and mediaeval, and totally foreign to the 
 American genius. Tlie city itself was of the same 
 type of civilization, and it was a walled town with 
 four gates. These were shut every night at nine, 
 and after that hour no one was permitted to walk 
 the streets without leave from the governor. 
 
 The same theory and practice in matters of edu- 
 cation prevailed at the same time in the Canadas. 
 " All education was controlled by priests and 
 nuns. The ablest teachers in Canada were the 
 Jesuits. Tlieir college of Quebec was tliree years 
 older than Harvard. . . . They were taught a little 
 Latin, a little rhetoric, and a little logic; but 
 against all that might rouse the faculties to inde- 
 pendent action the Canadian schools prudently 
 closed their doors. . . . The true purpose of the 
 schools was — first, to make priests, and secondly, 
 to make obedient servants of the Church and the 
 King ; all the rest was extraneous, and of slight 
 account." About 1720 a printing-press was brought 
 into Canada, but was soon sent out again.^ 
 
 It will readily be seen what a change must have 
 come over that imperial addition to the Union — 
 more than doubling its area — when it was added 
 to the United States, and came under the same 
 beneficent and patriotic provisions for universal 
 public instruction. At the same time the Terri- 
 tory offered a most inviting opening for the theory 
 
 1 The Old Regime in Canada. By Francis Parkman. pp. 
 359, 360.
 
 riONEEKING IX EDUCATION. 207 
 
 and practice of sucli a system of popular education 
 as would meet the necessities of a republican gov- 
 ernment with its free ballot. One or two genera- 
 tions must pass away before the scheme could be 
 intelligently appi'ehended. To this prior condi- 
 tion is due in part the fact that tlie per cent of 
 those unable to read is as high as twenty-eight, 
 and of those unable to write, thirty-eight in every 
 one hundred in Arkansas, and twenty-four and 
 twenty-nine in Texas, and sixty and sixty-live in 
 New Mexico, while it is only four and seven in a 
 hundred in Illinois. 
 
 It needs this statement of the almost total neg- 
 lect of education in the ancient Louisiana, soon 
 to come into the Union, to show the utility and 
 scope of the fundamental provision for popular and 
 universal instruction, introduced by the Ohio Com- 
 pany, and which crossed the Mississippi with the 
 American flag. 
 
 Of course an incident mentioned by Bradbury 
 is not typical, but it is illustrative, of the popular 
 ignorance prevalent in the early part of this cen- 
 tury on the frontier. Mr. Bradbury and company 
 were in New Madrid and vicinity in 1811, during 
 the earthquake which was so destructive, and they 
 experienced much of the force of it, and afterward 
 went among the stricken people and the ruins. 
 " One of the men," he says, " who appeared to be 
 considered as possessing more knowledge than 
 the rest, entered into an explanation of the cause
 
 208 nONREUING IN EDUCATKDX. 
 
 of the eartliquake, and attributod it to the comet 
 tliat had appeared a few mouths before, which he 
 described as liaving two horns, over one of which 
 the earth had rolled and was now lodged betwixt 
 tiiem ; that the sliocks were occasioned by the at- 
 tempts made by the earth to snrmount the other 
 horn. If this shonld be accom])lished all would 
 be well; if otherwise, inevitable destruction to tlie 
 world would follow. Finding him confident in his 
 hypothesis, and myself unable to refute it, I did 
 not dispute the point." ^ 
 
 In those border settlements of seventy years ago 
 the necessaries of civilization came slowly and sin- 
 gly, and they do not totally otherwise to-day. When 
 the way-worn immigrant made a final camp beside 
 his faithful wagon, and turned loose his family and 
 staked off his homestead, the comforts were all 
 ahead, and not all the troubles behind. The brush, 
 grass, and turf roof will give slielter for a few 
 months, while he turns the first furrow, plants the 
 first kernels of corn and spoonful of wheat, digs 
 the first well, and throws the first logs over the 
 ugly ford. By and by he lays the first shingle, 
 and his family eat their first frontier potato. Of 
 course the schoolhouse comes tardily in the long 
 procession of first things, where so many need to 
 lead. Especially must this be so in a valley in 
 the great American Basin, recently visited by the 
 
 • Travels in the Interior of North America in 1809, 1810, 
 1811. By John BradUuy. p. 206.
 
 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 209 
 
 writer, "u^liere the mail is delivered weekly iu its 
 upper section, and the nearest store for a sack of 
 flour, 3'ard of tape, or cake of yeast, is one hundred 
 and twenty-five miles away. 
 
 A kind of heroism attaches to this imperative 
 provision of the Government to secure, by the or- 
 ganic laws of a Territory, the introduction of the 
 common-school system. A section of this valley 
 belt, one hundred and twenty-five miles long, we 
 found without a school. Money could be raised 
 for school purposes, and schools made movable 
 up and down the long and narrow districts, being 
 held in the private cabins of the families, now 
 here and now there, on mutual plans for tlie good 
 of all. We lately found a public school on the 
 Oregon Short Line Eailroad, where only two houses 
 were in sight, and the pupils came into this lonely 
 centre on trails of six miles each way. This splen- 
 did American school system seemed there as if 
 searching for any American children of school age, 
 like gravitation going at once for any newly-created 
 particles of matter. 
 
 Two or three sample clippings from earlier ex- 
 periences and memory will serve us as well as a 
 long chapter to show the pioneer schoolhouses of 
 the United States ; and the school of the frontier 
 is about the same to-day as it was yesterday, only 
 the frontier is sixteen miles farther west each 
 year. 
 
 It was in a hazy, soft, dreamy day in October, 
 
 14
 
 210 riUNEElilNG IN EDUCATION. 
 
 1840, when the writer enjoyed a saddle jannt in 
 Sangamon and Morgan counties, Illinois. The ride 
 was without a companion, or guide, or even trail, 
 across the prairies. A general point of compass, 
 the sun and one or two headlands of timl)er run- 
 ning out into the world of grass, were the only 
 aids to direction, — no house, no fence, no furrow, 
 nothing domestic or civil. It was as yet the no- 
 blest, most inspiring ride of life. By and by, in 
 one of those timber islands or promontories lying 
 in the great russet ocean of grass, a lazy smoke was 
 seen to go up from among the trees. Of course 
 the inference was a hunter's camp ; for deer and 
 turkey and chickens and web-feet were abundant. 
 But finally it proved to arise from a log-cabin, 
 which, on nearer approach, showed neither window 
 nor door, but only a dark vacancy the entire length 
 of one side, as if a log had fallen out. As I came 
 closer, this dark belt showed a row of human faces 
 the whole length, and drawing rein around the 
 corner a door appeared, and a school inside ! This 
 door and another "window" on the opposite side, 
 like the one described, admitted all the light. 
 The ground was the floor, into which stakes were 
 driven, and on these slabs were spiked for seats. 
 Some of the pupils, like Ant?eus, touched mother 
 earth with their feet in tlieir struggle with the 
 Hercules of ignorance, while the little ones swung 
 for it. Books were as scant as the leaves in the 
 last edition of the Sibyl of Cumse. It was the
 
 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 211 
 
 typical school of the pioneers, and the best for 
 the times in a frontier county. The f^imilies were 
 on openings and clearings back in the timber. Now 
 Sangamon County has its fifty thousand people 
 and a fine school system in the very heart of the 
 nation, and that log schoolhouse would be coveted 
 for the archives of the Illinois Board of Education 
 as a souvenir of early days. And what would 
 seem strange if not foolish to an Eastern man, who 
 had never crossed the Alleghanies, — within a few 
 hours' ride of this log schoolhouse was a college. 
 Many New Englanders who were solicited to aid 
 in founding this Illinois College regarded the en- 
 terprise as greatly in advance of population, un- 
 needed and unwise ; but the history of this noble, 
 intelligent, and Christian State confirms the wis- 
 dom and foresight and statesmanship of its found- 
 ers. These timid men, slow in their gifts and 
 limited in their travel, cannot appreciate the am- 
 plitude of our Western domain and tlie wonderful 
 growth of settlements in it. Nor do such men 
 consider that Harvard and Dartmouth and Brown 
 and Yale were planted within a very few hours' 
 saddle-ride of log cabins and wigwams. 
 
 When Harvard was founded in 1638, and Yale 
 in 1701, and Brown in 1764, and Dartmouth in 
 1770, the Indians were near to tliem and abun- 
 dant, and the frontier was at hand and wild. Nor 
 was it then high tide of immigration and new set- 
 tlements around them, as around our young West-
 
 212 nONEEKING IN EDUCATION. 
 
 ei'u colleges oi" to-day. We do not coine up yet to 
 the foresight, enthusiasm, benevolence, and sacri- 
 fice of the colonial fathers in planting institutions 
 of learning on the borders. 
 
 It is obvious why the census of 18G0 showed 
 tliat in Illinois there were fifty-nine thousand 
 persons over ten years of age who could not read 
 and write, and in Missouri sixty thousand, and in 
 Indiana sixty-two thousand. Here is an evil inci- 
 dental and inevitable to the frontier. The school- 
 house and the meeting-house are apt to move 
 slower than the immigrant army, but they inevita- 
 bly arrive. 
 
 Twenty-four years after we added New Mexico 
 to the Union, and when coming East from the 
 mountains and from under the shadows of Pike's 
 Peak, I left Kit Carson station on the Kansas 
 Pacific and ran south fifty miles over a totally un- 
 settled prairie to Las Animas on the Arkansas. 
 The train was running one car only, loaded with 
 pigs of silver. 
 
 What a home missionary a locomotive is in that 
 weird Southwest ! It sets the drowsy and laggard 
 Mexican natives to a double-quick, establishes 
 hours and minutes, carries in chairs and ploughs 
 and metal goods generally, builds a wooden house, 
 plants the family, runs a bold line between the 
 mediaeval and the modern, whirls up universally 
 the cultivated and sacred dust of ages with its own 
 engine smoke ; and with its short sharp whistle,
 
 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 213 
 
 as it enters this sleepy old town of Montezuma 
 and Coronado and Cortez, it seems to say: Sit 
 lux, sit lux. 
 
 When we arrived, the railroad had not yet 
 brought in the public spelling-book. Private en- 
 terprise, under a lady from Indiana, had gathered 
 forty pupils, of mixed bloods, colors, and costumes, 
 in a rough-board house, long, narrow, and low, 
 and they were entering into the mysteries and 
 powers of the twenty-six English letters and ten 
 Arabic figures, — all which work the priest followed 
 up with warnings and maledictions on schoolhouse 
 heretics. 
 
 The first public-school building was then in 
 process of construction, — a novelty to the people 
 and an offence to the clergy, whose traditions and 
 usages and monopolies a Northern schoolhouse 
 was daring to invade. This was almost a genera- 
 tion after that region had become American terri- 
 tory. Nearly a generation had been strangely 
 neglected to grow up un-Americanized, and the 
 private adventurer and the locomotive were the 
 untechnical missionaries to open a way for the com- 
 mon school. 
 
 Educational and Christian philanthropy in the 
 United States has some eccentricities, but they 
 " lean to virtue's side." During those twenty-four 
 years we were using widows' mites and the thou- 
 sands from princely donors to open chapels and free 
 schools in old Mexico and Spain and Italy and
 
 214 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION'. 
 
 France and Austria, — all (if these Christian coun- 
 tries, — wliile we left our own people, conquered 
 into citizenship, under the low type of mediceval 
 Eonianism and Aztec iicatlienisnr. It was left for 
 the ranchman and miner and railway builders to 
 lead the way for education and reformed Chris- 
 tianity into that immense Southwest, now under 
 our tlag. Perhaps there should be a new proverb, 
 — the farther from home, the better the deed. 
 
 It is the purpose to make this chapter on Pio- 
 neering in Education a miscellaneous one, which 
 will present, by examples, hard fields and struggles 
 with illiteracy, untoward and heroic beginnings, 
 and gratifying results. No doubt the educational 
 system of the East, especially the common-school 
 system, has made great improvements in the new 
 States, wdiere they have not been constrained to 
 a high conservatism and comfortable satisfaction 
 by gratifying memories that sometimes run into 
 atavism. 
 
 No American pioneer has been more daring than 
 a Western college. It comes of an ancestry inured 
 to exposure and poverty and hardship, when pecks 
 of corn, and pewter platters, and Hebrew Bibles 
 were thankfully received by the treasurer at Har- 
 vard, and when burnt stumps were suggestive of 
 Indians and bears at Dartmouth. Greek recita- 
 tions and the war-whoop were almost near enough 
 together to be mingled in our colonial colleges. 
 So now a colle'ie of the second or third irenera-
 
 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 215 
 
 tioii ill the Mississippi Valley, or on the Columbia, 
 as Whitman College at Walla Walla, is neither 
 timid nor retiring among the clearings and cabins 
 and Indians. It comes of a hardy race, whose 
 place, of right and by inheritance, is the frontier. 
 This was our conviction wlien we saw the crude 
 foundations of Illinois College, one remove only 
 from logs ; and the shanty church where Iowa Col- 
 lege was born ; and the mail-bag, fifteen inches by 
 eight, which carried on the back of man the out- 
 side world six miles over marsh and creek and 
 windfall timbers to Oberlin College, as rouglily 
 housed as He of the 'manger. And so we felt 
 when we turned from the charred and still sound 
 timbers of tlie Mission, which had fallen a prey to 
 the tomahawk and the flames, to visit Whitman 
 College, five miles away. 
 
 There is nothing like the bravery, the emigrating 
 passion, and the vitality of letters among pro- 
 gressive Americans. The first cabin and school- 
 house and church and highway and college are 
 usually cliildren of the first family settlers on a 
 good border. Of course college-planting is over- 
 done. Overdoing is always the happy danger of 
 progress. It is a characteristic of unvitiated and 
 vigorous nature to be prodigal of germs, as witness 
 the myriad seeds of one plant, or the thousands 
 of eggs of one salmon. Time, utility, and practical 
 judgment leave the unneeded colleges to disappear, 
 and soon the growing community has only what
 
 21G PIOXEKKING IN EDUCATION. 
 
 it needs. Germs are clieap, and the loss in tbetn 
 is slight compared with the gain that has come in 
 the stimulus of hoping and struggling for a college 
 and finally obtaining one really needed. In the 
 visions of local speculators a proposed railway is 
 an elongated series of depots ; but utility and good 
 sense thin them out, and the thrifty community 
 is content. 
 
 The term " college " is cheaply printed, and is 
 easily made to cover any institution of literary 
 ambition, Ijut finally abides only where it is wor- 
 thy. Of many hundreds of those pretentious 
 porticos for scholarly halls, not even the shadows 
 remain, and others yet barely cast a shadow ; and, 
 on trial for life or death, donors are an excellent 
 jury. I was once invited to lecture on American 
 History before a " University " on the border. The 
 " University Buildings " showed well on. the cata- 
 logue, as did the list of the " Faculty," and of the 
 students, repeated for as many " Departments " as 
 they had studies. All tliis was good for a vision ; 
 but for the time being tlie " University Build- 
 ings " were one low lean-to against a small church, 
 with other pretensions reduced to reality in sim- 
 ilar proportions. A bundle express wagon could 
 probably have carried off the entire " University," 
 and, indeed, it did move on afterward. 
 
 The remark is common in tlie old States that 
 there are too many colleges in the new country. 
 Two or tln'ee facts are not considered in this state-
 
 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 217 
 
 ment, — the breadth of territory between the Alle- 
 ghanies and the Pacific ; the " colleges " of ambition 
 and pretension and vision, which have died early, 
 but still live in Eastern memories (for the num- 
 ber has been reduced like Gideon's army) ; tlie 
 combination of the high school, academy, and col- 
 lege in these institutions ; the co-education of the 
 sexes in them ; the fair patronage which each liv- 
 ing and really established college has, and the long 
 distances between them. They are not close and 
 crowded together as Bowdoin and Dartmouth 
 and Harvard and Brown and Yale and Amherst 
 and Williams, — a splendid constellation of the 
 greater lights. If the objector to their number 
 would attempt to attend a few of their consecutive 
 commencements, on radii from St. Louis or Chicago, 
 he would qualify his remark. 
 
 An hour's budding in the nursery will affect 
 the fruit market for the next fifty years more than 
 a week's grafting on old trees. It is well, there- 
 fore, to maintain a just and prudential proportion 
 between the benevolent budding of new and mar- 
 vellously growing cities in the West and the grafting 
 of ancient and perhaps decaying ones in the old 
 East, whether within or beyond the Atlantic. Presi- 
 dent Quincy, in his "History of Harvard Univer- 
 sity," says of the founding of that institution: " The 
 poor emigrant, struggling for subsistence, almost 
 houseless, in a manner defenceless, is giving ac- 
 cording to his means toward establishing for learn-
 
 218 riOXKEUIXG IN EDUCATION. 
 
 ing a resling-pliico, and for science a fixed habi- 
 tation, on the borders of tlie wilderness. . , . No 
 rank, no order of men is unrepresented in this 
 great crusade against ignorance and infidelity." 
 
 In his "Travels in New England," Dwight helps 
 us toward a still more apt parallel in founding 
 Western colleges : " Within ten years after the 
 little ilock huuled at Salem, a college was endowed 
 by them and establislied ; " and it is to be added, 
 that within ten years after the Indian scalping of 
 the pioneer and scattered citizens of the vicinity, 
 Carleton College was crowning the heads of sur- 
 viving children with the honors of scholarship. 
 Only in our growing West could diplomas crowd 
 so closely on scalping-knives, and benevolent in- 
 vestments show so quick and profitable returns. 
 
 Little bands, yet unknown in the opulent East, 
 and as benevolent as opulent, are now quietly draw- 
 ing their educational lines of latitude and longitude 
 through the wild lands and across the junctions 
 and centres of immigrant trails, wisely presuming 
 that five hundred miles is too far to send sons and 
 daughters to college. When these educational sur- 
 veyors and picket men for American civilization 
 appear for funds in the East, appealing to our 
 noble men and women who are now having finan- 
 cial success, and Mdiose philanthropy and benevo- 
 lence and love of country grow apace with their 
 incomes and accumulating legacies, let them be 
 welcomed, even as they are. Let these obscure
 
 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 219 
 
 pioneers of the Republic go on with their fore- 
 castings and outlinings for needed foundations in 
 proper places, and when the due time comes, and 
 they visit the East for funds, they will be welcomed 
 with courtesy. They will see business eyes and ears 
 turned thoughtfully toward their so-called openings 
 and calls of Providence. All Western appeals for 
 aid thus coming and scrutinized, which facts are 
 made to approve, will be lieartily met. Such facts 
 are always cashed in the East at sight. If enterprises 
 of the educational and religious and missionary kind 
 weaken in their proper incomes, it is because the 
 facts have not been officially filed and discreetly 
 used in drawing and in backing their calls. Good 
 Western paper for such enterprises is always paid 
 at maturity. If regret or reproach arise that places 
 were not seasonably occupied, and that payments 
 followed sadly behind promises, and tliat scanty 
 supplies, poor housing, and winter severities cut 
 short the labors and lives of the devoted men and 
 women of God, and that Paul had occasionally to 
 quit preaching for tent-making, the cause must not 
 be sought among the donors. They are able and 
 willing to meet all reasonable wants up to the 
 limits of fairly furnished information. Western 
 Christians are known to surpass the Eastern in 
 their benevolent gifts, in proportion to their abil- 
 ity, because they live among the facts and see 
 them. The same facts will draw funds in the old 
 States just in proportion as they are presented.
 
 220 PIONEERING IN EDUCATION. 
 
 The trying results of the iufelicitous administra- 
 tion of benevolent work must not be charged to 
 tlie negligence of contributors who have usually- 
 lived up to the light furnished them. 
 
 Perhaps a freer use of Western ini'ormation by 
 the living voice of Western men, and by a prolific 
 press, would save from stringency in benevolent 
 finances and from painful recoveries. Por evi- 
 dently the truly benevolent do not now give 
 according to ability, but up to knowledge only. 
 Many princely donations for letters and religion 
 in the country would doubtless have been be- 
 stowed on younger and vastly more needy and 
 hopeful fields, if the donors had been more broadly 
 informed. 
 
 That was a noble saying of a most noble man : 
 " There is in no part of the country or of the world 
 so great call for the means of education as in these 
 new States. These are the fields and here is the 
 deep and cpiick soil for the seeds of knowledge and 
 of virtue, and this is the favored season, the very 
 springtime of sowing them. Let them be dissemi- 
 nated without stint. Let them be scattered with 
 a bountiful hand broadcast." ^ 
 
 ^ Webster on Foote's Resolutions, second speech.
 
 LYNCH LAW, 221 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 TWO men stood in a saloon in Bannack, Mon- 
 tana, in the winter of 1862-63, disputing 
 whether one of them had paid to the other a cer- 
 tain sum of money. "Jeff" assured him that he 
 had settled the debt, and thereupon Jack said, 
 ' Well, if it is settled, it is all right,' but he still 
 continued to refer to it and kept reaching for his 
 pistol. Plummer, who was present, told him that 
 if he did not behave himself he would take him in 
 hand, for that Jeff liad settled the debt and that he 
 [Jack Cleveland] ought to be satisfied. Jeff [Per- 
 kins] went home for his derringers, and while he 
 was absent. Jack Cleveland boastingly declared 
 that he was afraid of none of them. Plummer 
 jumped to his feet instantly, saying, ' I am tired of 
 this,' and drawing his pistol, he commenced firing 
 at Cleveland. The first ball lodged in the beam 
 overhead, where it still remains [1866]. The sec- 
 ond struck him below the belt, and he fell to his 
 knees, grasping wildly at his pistol and exclaim- 
 ing, 'Plummer, you won't shoot me when I'm 
 down ; ' to which Plummer replied, ' No, get up ; '
 
 222 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 and as he staggered to his feet, he sliot liim a little 
 above the heart. The bullet, however, glanced on 
 the rib and went round the body. The next en- 
 tered below the eye and lodged in the head. The 
 last missile went between Moore and another man, 
 who was sitting on the bench. . . . Singular 
 enough it must appear to the inhabitants of settled 
 communities, that a man was being shaved in the 
 saloon at the time, and neither he nor the operator 
 left off business. Custom is everything, and fire- 
 eating is demonstrably an acquired habit." 
 
 "A Dutchman, known as Dutch Fred, was met 
 by one of the band [of Eoad Agents], who ordered 
 him to throw up his hands, as usual. Finding he 
 had $5 in treasury notes with him, the robber told 
 him he would take them at par, and added, with a 
 volley of curses, ' If ever you come this way with 
 only five dollars I '11 shoot you. 1 '11 shoot you 
 anyhow,' and raising his pistol he shot him in the 
 arm." 
 
 "In March, 1863, Charley Reeves, a prominent 
 ' clerk of St. Nicholas,' bought a Sheep-Eater 
 squaw ; but she refused to live with him, alleging 
 that she was ill-treated, and went back to her tribe, 
 who were encamped on the rise of the hill, south of 
 Yankee Flat, about fifty yards to the rear of the 
 street. Reeves went after her, and sought to force 
 her to come back with him, but on his attempting 
 to use violence, an old chief interfered. The two 
 grappled. Reeves, with a sudden effort, broke from
 
 LYNCH LAW. 223 
 
 him, striking him a blow with his pistol, and in 
 the scuffle one l:)arrel was harmlessly discharged. 
 The next evening Moore and Eeeves, in a state of 
 intoxication, entered Goodrich's saloon, laying down 
 two double-barrelled shot-guns and four revolvers 
 on the counter. They declared, while drinking, 
 that if the cowardly white folks on Yankee Flat 
 were afraid of the Indians they were not, and that 
 they would soon ' set the ball a-rolling.' Taking 
 their weapons they went off to the back of the 
 house, opposite the camp, and levelling their 
 pieces, they fired into the tepee, wounding one In- 
 dian. They returned to the saloon and got three 
 drinks more, boasting of what they had done, and 
 accompanied by William Mitchell of Minnesota, 
 and two others, they went back, determined to 
 complete their murderous work. The three above 
 named then deliberately poured a volley into the 
 tepee, with fatal effect. Mitchell, whose gun was 
 loaded with an ounce ball and a charge of buck- 
 shot, killed a Frenchman named Brissette, who had 
 run up to ascertain the cause of the first firing, the 
 ball striking him in the forehead and the bucksliot 
 wounding him in ten different places. The Indian 
 chief, a lame Indian boy, and a pappoose were also 
 killed, but the number of the parties who were 
 wounded has never been ascertained. John Burnes 
 escaped with a broken thumb, and a man named 
 Woods was shot in the groin, of which wound he 
 has not yet entirely recovered. This unfortunate
 
 '224: LYNCH L.VW. 
 
 ])aii', like Brissette, had come to see the cause of 
 the shooting and of the yells of the savages. The 
 murderers being told that they had killed white 
 men, Moore replied, with great scmr/ froid, ' They 
 had no business there.' " 
 
 " A man had been whipped for larceny near 
 Nevada City [Montana], and to escape the sting of 
 the lash he offered to give information about the 
 Hoad Agents. Ives heard of it, and meeting him 
 l^urposely between Virginia and Dempsey's, he 
 deliberately fired at him with his double-barrelled 
 gun. The gun was so badl}^ loaded and the man's 
 coat so thickly padded that the buckshot did not 
 take effect ; upon which he coolly drew his re- 
 volver, and talking to him all the time, shot him 
 dead. Tiiis deed was perpetrated in the broad 
 daylight on a highway, a very Bloomingdale road 
 of the community, in plain view of Daley's and 
 the Cold Spring Eanch, with two or three other 
 teams in sight." 
 
 William Palmer found two men in the wakiup 
 and " told them that there was the body of a dead 
 man below, and asked them if they would help 
 him to put the corpse into his wagon, saying tliat 
 he would take it to town and see if it could be 
 identified. They said, 'No, that is nothing. They 
 kill people in Virginia every day, and there 's noth- 
 ing said about it, and we want to have nothing to 
 do with it.' The man lay for half a day exposed 
 in the wagon after being brought up to Nevada."
 
 LYNCH LAW. 225 
 
 " At the latter end of the month of November, 
 1863, Oliver's Salt Lake coach, driven by Thomas 
 C. Caldwell, left Virginia for Salt Lake City, 
 carrying as passengers Leroy Southmayde and 
 Captain Moore. There was also a discharged 
 driver named Billy. ... At about eleven A. M. 
 the travellers overtook the three Eoad Agents. 
 Each one had his gun lying over his left arm, and 
 they appeared, from behind, like hunters. As 
 the stage came up they wheeled their horses at 
 once and presented their pieces. Bill Graves 
 drew a bead on Tom Caldwell ; Ives covered 
 Southmayde ; while Bob Zachary, keeping his 
 gun pointed at the coach, watched Captain Moore 
 and Billy. . . . Ives called out, ' Halt ! throw 
 up your hands,' and then bade Zachary ' get down 
 and look after those fellows.' . . . Each robber 
 had on a green and blue blanket, covering the 
 body entirely. Whiskey Bill wore a plug hat; 
 Lis sleeves were rolled up above the elbows ; he 
 had a black silk handkerchief over his face, with 
 holes for sight and air, and he rode a gray horse 
 covered from the ears to the tail with a blanket, 
 which, however, left the head and legs exposed 
 to view. George Ives's horse was blanketed in 
 the same way. He himself was masked with a 
 piece of a gray blanket with the necessary perfo- 
 rations. Zachary 's horse was blanketed like the 
 others, and his mask was a piece of a Jersey 
 shirt." All the valuables were taken from each 
 15
 
 22G LYNCH LAW. 
 
 person of the coach. " Having finished his search, 
 Zachary picked up his gun and stepped back. 
 Ives dismissed the ' parade ' with the laconic 
 command, ' Get up and skedaddle.' " 
 
 It has been thought best to let quoted facts 
 speak for themselves on the topic of this chapter, 
 rather than to present the extraordinary condition 
 of things in summary. The author is fortunate 
 in authentic material.^ During those anxious and 
 critical times we had also relatives in that coun- 
 try, and some extracts from their letters, written 
 in 1884, here follow. 
 
 " My recollection of Professor Dimsdale's book 
 is, that while there may be a little of the look of 
 exaggeration, yet it is about as correct as you 
 could expect to be written in such a country, 
 and in such times as we had in Montana during 
 1864, 1865, and along in 1866. The action of the 
 Vigilantes was the only means of saving that 
 country from probably the worst outlaws that 
 ever cursed a country. And I think that with 
 the very many executed by order of that organi- 
 zation I never heard of their making a mistake. 
 All deserved hanging. I had a residence and 
 bank at Virginia City, also at Helena. My resi- 
 dence in the Territory dates from the spring of 
 1864 to the fall of 1866." 
 
 ^ The Vigilantes of Jlontana ; or, Popular Justice in the 
 Rocky Mountains. By Tliomas J. Dimsdale. Virginia City, 
 Montana, 1866.
 
 LYNCH LAW. 227 
 
 Another writes : — 
 
 " In regard to the hook, ' Vigilantes,' I can 
 vouch for it as being in the main correct. Of 
 course some of the minor items are colored, hut 
 the book on the whole is correct. I was there 
 before the book was written up, and knew Pro- 
 fessor Dimsdale quite well as editor of the ' Mon- 
 tana Post.' Knew so many who were intimately 
 acquainted with the workings of the Vigilance 
 Committee that I know whereof I speak. ... I 
 remember as if it were yesterday the last work 
 the Committee did. . . . They gave a butcher 
 thirty-six lashes on the bare back, and banished 
 him, for stealing a hog from a poor widow who 
 lived at Nevada, a small mining camp a mile 
 below Virginia. I saw none of the murdered men 
 the book speaks of, nor did I see any one hung ; 
 but I saw several who were hanging, for it was 
 no uncommon thing to see a man hanging to a 
 large pine-tree near the city. For the first year 
 [1863-64] I was near Virginia City. The second 
 year I was near Helena, and on the west side of 
 the main range, making several trips into the 
 British Possessions on the north and into Oregon 
 on the west." 
 
 Two round trips to Montana, with business resi- 
 dence there during three years, by a brother of 
 the writer, are sketched quite fully in the " P)Oston 
 Eeview," Vols. V. and VL, 1865, 1866, and have
 
 228 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 been helpful in the preparation of this chapter. 
 Moreover, now that we are led to prepare this 
 narrative of those wild times, we count it a good 
 fortune and happy memory to have travelled and 
 chatted with one of the original Vigilantes of 
 Montana. It was in a return trip from the West 
 in 1875, when we formed his acquaintance on the 
 Northern Pacific. He carried an unusually heavy 
 hand and muscular arm, with no lack of shoulder 
 to hang and swing it, a huge round head on a short 
 bullock neck, and a mild, winning, immovable face. 
 It is said no one ever saw it disturbed by fear. In 
 a coach not half filled he occupied two double 
 seats turned apart, and he had eased himself by 
 laying two navy revolvers and his belt-knife on 
 the one front of him. It pleased him that I 
 had read of him and had sought an introduction. 
 He was full of experiences and information on 
 rough mountain life, and some of his pictures will 
 always hang in my halls of memory. Looking at 
 him and hearing him talk in his quiet way on des- 
 perate and bloody scenes, one would prefer to have 
 him on his side in any little unpleasantness that 
 might spring up. Lynch law has its origin in a 
 state of society such as is here indicated. 
 
 The idea of civil, local government is inborn 
 with the American people. When they move off 
 into wild lands with their goods and chattels they 
 may not carry law-books and codes of government, 
 but they carry notions enough, and of the right
 
 LYNCH LAW, 229 
 
 kind, about the rights of person, and of property, 
 and of conscience, to set up a government at will. 
 No border society is too crude or emergency too 
 abrupt for these legislators of the frontier. Of 
 course they are months in advance of any civil 
 code, courts, and judicial proceedings, as witness 
 Kentucky when a county of Virginia, or the North- 
 west Territory, Illinois County, State of Virginia, 
 or a large portion of Montana, when taken in hand 
 by the Vigilantes. The roughs live in the saddle 
 and saloons and dens, monarchs of the waste, and 
 now and then gain office as Plummer, about to be 
 mentioned, where they can pack the court-room 
 and write verdicts. 
 
 But such men are only a few to the great body 
 of honorable and orderly frontier men ; and the 
 majesty, stability, and broad promise of the Amer- 
 ican people nowhere show better than when they 
 extemporize a government for the occasion, and 
 surround person and property with the sacred 
 guards of laws by the people. It is not only not 
 from disregard of order and justice, but from rev- 
 erence and high esteem of these, that they thus 
 defend the public good, while the majesty of stat- 
 ute law and old States' precedents are arriving 
 tardily. 
 
 The Montana of those days is sampled by these 
 miscellaneous facts. Men were there as good and 
 true as any in the oldest State in the Union, and 
 their American blood was at a normal pulse. The
 
 230 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 feelings and convictions of justice overflowed, but 
 there were no ordered and recognized channels for 
 them. Organic government had not yet crossed the 
 plains and encamped among the miners and stock- 
 men around the heads of the Gallatin and Madison 
 and Jefferson rivers. That murdered body, lying 
 half a day in an open wagon in the streets of 
 Nevada City, hastened the issue, and at ten o'clock 
 of the same night twenty-five men, armed with 
 just purposes and reliable revolvers and shot-guns, 
 left Nevada silently for some shanties in the hills 
 beyond, where the body was found. In the gray 
 of the icy morning they make a " surround " of a 
 wakiup outside of which eight or ten men lie 
 wrapped in blankets. The leader of the troop dis- 
 mounts with a shout, " The first man that raises 
 will get a quart of buckshot in him." It was not 
 much overstated, for twenty-five double-barrelled 
 guns were levelled on the group. The leader 
 hastened to the door of the shanty, and the fol- 
 lowing colloquy ensued : " Is Long John here ? " — 
 " Yes." " Come out here ; I want you." — " Well, 
 I guess I know what you want me for." " Prob- 
 ably you do ; but hurry up : we have got no time 
 to lose." — " Well, wait till I get my moccasins on, 
 won't you?" "Be quick about it, then." Four 
 shot-guns and some revolvers took him under 
 guard. The conversation was more impressive 
 than abundant. " Long Jolin, you liad better 
 prepare for another world."
 
 LYNCH LAW. 231 
 
 The leader entered again the wakiup, and in the 
 yet deep haze of the morning touched a blanketed 
 fellow, with the question, " Is your name George 
 Ives ? " — " Yes." " I want you." — " What do you 
 want me for ? " " To go to Virginia City." — " All 
 right ; I expect I have to go." Then the shanty 
 was explored. Five men were sent into the wakiup, 
 and the rest stood round it, Tiie result of their 
 search was the capture of several dragoon and 
 navy revolvers, nine shot-guns, and thirteen rifles. 
 
 The mixed party started for Nevada City, pick- 
 ing up several more suspected road agents on the 
 way. The arrival was in the evening of Decem- 
 ber 18, 18G3. The exciting news went almost as 
 by telephone through all the wild region, and 
 there was a general stampede to Nevada. "The 
 forenoon of the 1 9th saw the still swelling tide of 
 miners, merchants, and artisans winding their way 
 to Nevada. All the morning was spent in private 
 examinations of the prisoners, and private consul- 
 tations as to the best method of trial. . . . Little 
 boys were at play in the streets, and fifteen hundred 
 men stood in them, impatient for action, but wait- 
 ing without a murmur, in order that everything 
 might be done decently and in order." 
 
 It was decided that the trial should be by the 
 people, and therefore they agreed on a judge, 
 prosecuting and defending counsel, and twenty- 
 four jurors, — the power of revision of verdict 
 being retained by the people, — mainly miners.
 
 232 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 The trial opened on tlie 21st, in the morning, 
 and was closed in the deepening dusk of the 
 evening of the same day, by a verdict against the 
 prisoners of twenty-three to one. It was con- 
 ducted under the open sky ; the judge and coun- 
 sel occupied a wagon ; the encircling crowd were 
 kept back by well-armed and brawny men, and 
 a huge mountaineers' fire occupied the centre. 
 A light log-chain, with padlocks, made the three 
 prisoners fast to each other ; while in the eager, 
 pressing, and swaying crowd there were friends 
 and foes, no one yet knew how divided in strength. 
 This was certain : among tliem were bandits, des- 
 peradoes, and murderers, of terrible energy, with 
 feelings and anxieties intensified by the conviction 
 that they might any time wear those chains if the 
 prisoners were executed. 
 
 It was generally expected that a bloody rush 
 would be sprung, to rescue the accused. All faces 
 wore purposes, and none more so than the officials, 
 each of whom, as well as every condemning wit- 
 ness, felt that his life would hang lightly about 
 him after the trial if the halter should be cheated 
 out of its due. As tlie day waned, and darkness 
 and excitement deepened together, and the crum- 
 bling brands of the camp-fire flashed a wild light 
 over the encircling crowd, it was a scene for a 
 painter. The sketch of it would hang worth- 
 ily in English and American halls, among his- 
 toric paintings which show when civil rights and
 
 LYNCH LA^Y. 233 
 
 regulated liberty took yet another good step 
 forward. 
 
 The verdict was adopted by the people with 
 only a slight dissent, when it was expected by 
 some that further proceedings would be adjourned 
 till daylight. But that would have been too 
 critical for justice. Then appeared one of those 
 heroic men and acts, born of occasions and to meet 
 emergencies. Colonel Sanders mounted the wagon, 
 and, reciting the accusations, evidence, and verdict 
 of the people, moved " That George Ives be forth- 
 with hung by the neck until he is dead." To this 
 the people agreed. Time was given for making 
 a will and little gifts and prayers, and for dictat- 
 ing letters. A business air pervaded the mixed 
 multitude, and movements, indicating a rush and a 
 rescue, were soon quieted by the glint from the 
 camp-fire, as it fell on guns and revolvers brought 
 to bear ; and the deadly " click, click " of the 
 hammers brought to place quieted all murmurs. 
 
 Not far away from where George Ives sat in 
 trial was an unfinished house, with sides, but no roof 
 The preparations for hanging there were simple, 
 ample, and brief. " The butt of a forty-foot pole 
 was planted inside the house, at the foot of one 
 of the walls, and the stick leaned outward over 
 a cross-beam. Near the point was tied the fatal 
 cord, with the open noose." Outside and under- 
 neath this rope's end of justice was placed a dry- 
 goods box. Hands, carrying as many coats of
 
 234 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 blood as an old colonial lionse of to-day does 
 paint, were pinioned. One man was executed by 
 the Vigilantes who had killed his twelve. In 
 fil'ty-eight minutes from the time his doom was 
 fixed, that llocky Mountain outlaw was placed 
 on the box, and the noose answered the ends of 
 justice instantly. Two others followed George 
 Ives. 
 
 The crisis was passed, though neither party 
 knew it. "All the promiucnt friends of justice 
 were dogged, threatened, and watched by the 
 roughs." Eight and wrong stood in defiant but 
 as yet unorganized opposition, and each man on 
 either side carried his assumed rights on the trigger 
 of his revolver. This was a delicate state of things, 
 when every bandit had made himself an expert 
 shot. Plummer, the leader of the outlaws, was 
 credited with an ability to draw and deliver five 
 shots in three seconds. 
 
 Only the simpler forms of government had yet 
 arrived in the mining-camps and ranches. It had 
 only the goodly appearance, and outside, like 
 armor on a skeleton. Some offices were filled, 
 and yet often by the outlaws themselves. This 
 Plummer was sheriff of the county, — Beaver 
 Head, — and so added the power of legal place 
 to work his schemes of violence and robbery and 
 murder. The feelings of equity and justice ran 
 high, but had no channels, and common sense came 
 to the rescue, not waiting for red tape.
 
 LYNCH LAW. 235 
 
 " Five men in Virginia City and one in Nevada 
 City commenced simultaneously to take the ini- 
 tiative in the matter. Two days had not elapsed 
 before their efibrts were united, and when once 
 a beginning had been made, the ramifications of 
 the league of safety and order extended, in a week 
 or two, all over the Territory, and on the 14th of 
 January, 1864, the coup de grace was given to the 
 power of the band by tlie execution of five of the 
 chief villains in Virginia City. . . . Merchants, 
 miners, mechanics, and professional men alike 
 joined in the movement, . . . which upon the 
 whole, it must be admitted, has from the first 
 acted with a wisdom, a justice, and a vigor never 
 surpassed on this continent, and rarely, if ever, 
 equalled." Progress was made in organization, and 
 the mixed and massed populace around that great 
 camp-fire gave place to selected and organized 
 men. They possessed intelligence, honor, coolness 
 of head, and energy. The Vigilantes of Montana 
 were originally twenty-four such men, volunteers, 
 and approved of the body of fair citizens. They 
 were detectives, police, a court of inquiry and of 
 trial and of execution. " They carried generally 
 a pair of revolvers, a rifle and shot-gun, blankets, 
 and some rope. Spirits were forbidden to be 
 used." They followed these outlaws through the 
 camps, hunted them in the wakiups, and passed 
 over mountains and valleys, sometimes for hun- 
 dreds of miles, and for months continuous. In
 
 236 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 all cases possible, arrests were made without as- 
 sault, as in the States, and the prisoners were 
 taken to populous centres for trial. Witnesses were 
 gathered for and against, the accused having his 
 own when reasonably demanded. " The evidence 
 not being conclusive, they were released, though 
 their guilt was morally certain. The Vigilantes 
 rigidly abstained, in all cases, from inflicting the 
 penalty due to crime, without entirely satisfactory 
 evidence of guilt." 
 
 After trial had and verdict rendered, by this 
 extempore government of this frontier belt of 
 civilization, the finality of justice was reached 
 with great expedition. A convenient limb, a rope, 
 ten or a score of honorable, earnest men, a camp- 
 stool, box, barrel, or plank, easily jerked from 
 under, and the work was done. The simplicity 
 and facility of the terrible process, with its speed, 
 corresponded to the American border life of those 
 regions and times. All this appeared fitting, as 
 in the case of Dutch John, who " travelled with 
 a rifle in his hand, a heart of stone, a will of iron, 
 and the frame of a Hercules." 
 
 Three men — Plummer,the head of the bandits of 
 Montana, Buck Stinson, and Ned Eay — were tried 
 and sentenced while at large, and were captured 
 in the night, when about to flee the country. Their 
 execution followed immediately. In the suburbs 
 of Bannack stood a gallows, which Plummer, as 
 sheriff, had prepared for another man. Toward it
 
 LYNCH LAW. 237 
 
 the Vigilantes moved with a business tread, guard- 
 ing in escort the three doomed men, while a mis- 
 cellaneous crowd fell in. The lanterns glanced 
 their light from the guns, which were carried for 
 a sudden aim, and with fatal readiness, as when 
 one is shooting on the wing. The spectators were 
 halted by the guard at a safe distance, one rope 
 was thrown over the beam, and the order went out 
 into the still night air, " Bring up Ned Eay ; " and 
 the desperado was swung up, with curses on his 
 lips. Stinson followed his companion in crimes. 
 Then the call, " Bring up Plummer." This " per- 
 fect gentleman," as his friends aflected to call him, 
 pleaded delay, with the request, " Give a man 
 time to pray." The leader responded, " Certainly ; 
 but let him say his prayers up here." It was rap- 
 idly over, and the intense cold soon held the three 
 bodies in a freezing embrace, and the " Eeign of 
 Terror" in Bannack was ended. Groans and curs- 
 ings and wailings broke the stillness, as an infa- 
 mous woman, the mistress of Ned Eay, pressed 
 through the crowd toward the gallows. 
 
 Sometimes, though very seldom, judicial pun- 
 ishment degenerated, among the outsiders, into 
 vengeance and mobbing, as when the Mexican, 
 Pizanthia, w^as executed. He was famed as a des- 
 perado, robber, and murderer. His hut was a half 
 excavation in the hillside, in which he resisted ar- 
 rest, killing one of the Vigilantes and wounding an- 
 other. Some former soldiers of the army brought
 
 238 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 an old howitzer to bear, and what with it and 
 small arms, the cabin was riddled and then stormed. 
 Enough life was found in the outlaw to hang him, 
 and then the mob burnt tlie hut. " In tlie morn- 
 ing some miserable women actually panned out 
 the ashes to see whether the desperado had any 
 gold." 
 
 These rough and radical measures to insure the 
 enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap- 
 piness in Montana, ran on with increasing vigor 
 and success, and with decreasing need, down into 
 1865. When these stern processes of irregular 
 justice were introduced, there had been more than 
 one hundred violent and well-discovered deaths, to 
 say nothing of undiscovered murders of missing 
 men, and of minor yet high-handed acts of out- 
 lawry and crime. From what is well known of 
 border life to-day, it is safe to affirm that the 
 undiscovered deaths by violence were as four to 
 one of the discovered. These inroads of blood 
 and brigandage were arrested by the summary 
 execution of twenty-four outlaws within one 
 year from the hanging of George Ives, Dec. 21, 
 1863. 
 
 These processes of justice, so fearfully direct be- 
 tween a community and its enemies, had a much 
 shorter career in Montana than in California, be- 
 cause the former had before them the experiences 
 of the latter. The Vigilance Committee of San 
 Francisco had two administrations, or one might
 
 LYKCH LAW. 239 
 
 say that there were two committees, — the one of 
 1851 and the other of 1856, — while the latter was 
 almost the reinanguration of the former. A brief 
 statement of the orioin, methods, and doings of the 
 Vigilantes of San Francisco will not only give, in 
 caption, one of the most exciting, romantic, and 
 tragic chapters in our frontier history, but it will 
 show, by sample, the material of much of our bor- 
 der life to-day, and how we are working it up into 
 a civil and safe and honorable society. The best 
 as well as the briefest statement of Lynch law in 
 California, in its youngest American days, can be 
 made in a few passages. 
 
 The original Vigilance Committee of San Fran- 
 cisco organized in 1851. As to the period of two 
 years preceding : " It was the free-and-easy age 
 when everybody was flush, and fortune, if not in 
 the palm, w^as only just beyond the grasp of all. 
 Men lived chiefly in tents, or in cabins scarcely 
 more durable, and behaved themselves like a gen- 
 eration of bachelors. The family was beyond the 
 mountains ; the restraints of society had not yet 
 arrived. . . . More rollicked in a perfect freedom 
 from those bonds which good men cheerfully as- 
 sume in settled society for the good of the greater 
 number. . . . This heterogeneous mixture of men 
 were either without law, or were the makers and 
 executors of their own law. ... As to civil law, 
 the country was utterly at sea. It had a governor 
 in the person of the commandant of the military
 
 240 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 district it belonged to, but no goveniineiit. . . . The 
 fame of the gold placers liad tempted a rush of all 
 sorts of men, and it must be confessed that for a 
 ■while it seemed that the doubtful and dangerous 
 classes were in excess over the orderly. The light- 
 est drift of the floating population of the world 
 waslied up here, — not only the restless characters 
 of Christendom, but of heathen countries also. . . . 
 The gamblers of the world met here; the foremost 
 of that desperate and wretched class swarmed to 
 San Francisco like vultures to the carcass. . . . 
 The absence of municipal law, or tlie neglect of 
 its officers, left them without restraint to indulge 
 their career. . . . The ' El Dorado,' while a tent 
 fifteen by twenty-five feet on the ground, rented 
 for forty thousand dollars a year to gamblers. . . . 
 A great deal of trouble was caused by the desper- 
 ate, reckless villains who flocked to the city from 
 all parts of the world." ^ 
 
 So far Tuthill speaks of the material in the pop- 
 ulation of San Francisco, then fifty thousand, which 
 seemed to demand the extraordinary measures of 
 government under the first Vigilance Committee of 
 1851. Of this condition of things, and of the ne- 
 cessity for a new regime, another historian thus 
 writes : " The pioneers saw nearly the whole busi- 
 ness part of the city swept away by several great 
 conflagrations. They saw the Sydney convicts 
 
 1 The History of California. Bj- Franklin Tuthill. 1866, pp. 
 244, 245, 246, 326, 337, 380.
 
 LYNCH LAW. 241 
 
 threaten to become masters of the place in 1851."^ 
 The same author quotes the report of a grand jury 
 of the county, to the same end, which was made 
 after the Committee had executed two persons : 
 "When we recall the delays, and the inefficient 
 and we believe that with truth it may be said the 
 corrupt administration of the law, the incapacity 
 and indifference of those who are its sworn guar- 
 dians and ministers, the frequent and unnecessary 
 postponement of important trials in the district 
 court, the disregard of duty, and impatience while 
 attending to perform it, manifested by some of our 
 judges having criminal jurisdiction, the many no- 
 torious villains who have gone un whipped of jus- 
 tice, — we are led to believe that the members of 
 the Association have been governed by a feeling of 
 opposition to the manner in which the law has 
 been administered and those who have adminis- 
 tered it, rather than a determination to disregard 
 the law itself, . . . when all other means of pre- 
 venting crime and bringing criminals to direct 
 punishment had failed." ^ 
 
 Of the organization of the committee our au- 
 thors proceed to say : " Many of the best citizens 
 formed themselves into a Committee of Vigilance, 
 and because the courts could not, or would not, 
 punish crime, undertook themselves to administer 
 
 1 A History of the City of San Francisco. By John S. HittelL 
 1878. p. 7. 
 
 2 Hittell, p. 176. 
 
 16
 
 242 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 justice." ^ " Without law, tliere was an unwritten 
 law taken for granted, that dealt justice to rich 
 and poor alike with rigid exactness." ^ 
 
 " Though grave crimes had been committed in 
 large numbers, none of the offenders had been pun- 
 ished. The police were inefficient if not criminal, 
 and the judges and prosecuting attorneys showed 
 no zeal in their business. The people saw that if 
 they wanted an effective administration of justice, 
 they must take charge of it themselves, and ac- 
 cordingly about three thousand citizens gathered at 
 the City Hall to take decisive action." ^ 
 
 " England had been banishing her convicts and 
 dangerous classes to Australia, whence they re- 
 shipped direct for San Francisco. Many of these, 
 to the number of fifty probably, were detected by 
 the Committee before lauding, and with return 
 passage money paid for them, they were sent back 
 to their British Botany Bay." * 
 
 The main work of the Committee of 1851 was to 
 banish desperadoes, outlaws, and rascals. The five 
 great fires in the city, destroying about sixteen 
 millions' worth of property within eighteen months, 
 were presumed to have originated with them, of 
 whom scores were exiled under severe penalty of 
 return. This Committee executed but few men, 
 and, as has been intimated, after a brief and vigor- 
 ous life it went into a state of suspended anima- 
 
 1 Tuthill, p. 380. 3 Tuthill, p. 172. . 
 
 2 Hittell, p. 338. « Hittell, p. 177, 178.
 
 LYNCH LAW. 243 
 
 tion rather than of extinction. Indeed, in the 
 mines it never ceased to be vigilant and executive. 
 When robbery and violence there were committed, 
 " they rallied from all the camps about, to hunt 
 the culprit, and when found, to try him, Judge 
 Lynch presiding. The jury were intolerant of 
 long trials. The examinations were sharp and 
 brief, the questions apt to be leading. When the 
 jury found a verdict of guilty, the miserable pris- 
 oner was run up by the neck to a limb of the 
 nearest tree. The very swiftness of justice saved 
 her from being called into frequent requisition." ^ 
 
 It is easy to tell the causes which led to the 
 organization and doings of the Vigilance Committee 
 of 1856. "About the meanest class that cursed 
 the community was a brood of unprincipled, labor- 
 hating, professional politicians, who gathered from 
 all corners of the States, fetching with them the 
 worst vices peculiar to the political system of the 
 locality they had relieved by leaving." This class 
 Hittell tersely describes in his Preface : " The 
 political ruffians obtained a powerful influence in 
 the municipal government in 1856." Tuthill goes 
 on to say : " The dregs of society, swindlers, 
 thieves, and gamblers, dictated to the party dicta- 
 tors, and ruled the State with a tyranny that con- 
 ventions dare not meddle with. . . . The better 
 classes had despised politics, and the worst classes 
 picked up the reins and were driving fast to ruin. 
 
 1 Tuthill, p. 339.
 
 244 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 Tlie judiciary fell into disrepute. The course of 
 regular justice was obstructed. Criminals enjoyed 
 an alarming immunity from punishment. Violence 
 ruled in city and country. . . . There was no assur- 
 ance that conviction would follow arrest, no matter 
 how many witnesses. . . . The State-prison at San 
 Queutin was a sieve. In December, 1854, thirty 
 convicts escaped from it on the same day. . . 
 There were bad men in office, who had things very 
 much their own way; corrupt judges, who fingered 
 bribes, as the public believed ; sheriffs and con- 
 stables and jailers, to whom detected criminals ran 
 for refuge." ^ 
 
 The time was, of course, hastening when that 
 would occur which Tuthill had said might justly 
 occur : " When the enacted laws failed of exe- 
 cution, it was the people's right to resume the 
 power that they had delegated, or which had been 
 usurped." ^ 
 
 We have elsewhere stated that the first code 
 of laws drafted, published, and executed in the 
 Northwest Territory, at Marietta, was by a mass 
 meeting, and therefore a code of Lynch law. The 
 first job of printing ever executed in that imperial 
 Territory was its first body of laws. They were 
 irregularly and informally passed, and never ap- 
 proved by Congress, yet had force, but not legality, 
 till a constitutional code was adopted. The Lynch 
 
 1 Tuthill, pp. 339, 426, 427, 429, 430. 
 
 2 Tuthill, p. 460.
 
 LYNCH LAW. 245 
 
 law code preceded in both the necessity and the 
 equity of the case. 
 
 These historical passages are philosophical also^ 
 and convey hints as well as facts. When tlie law's 
 delays and prearranged weaknesses and failures 
 are lessening confidence in the government, it is 
 inevitable that the American people at least should 
 irregularly and more or less covertly array them- 
 selves against it. For with them the notion of 
 government is inborn and divine, and what many 
 incline to call abnormal is fundamentally normal 
 with intelligent Americans, since demand and rev- 
 erence for law lead them to disregard lifeless and 
 skeleton law. While questions of equity can be 
 hung up for decades of years, and moved along on 
 serial hooks of the law, in the old settlements of 
 the East, till the original parties have gone up to 
 the final court, a orowing American town on the 
 border becomes impatient. When the English 
 language is almost exhausted in the structure of 
 legal technicalities, till there is an infinite swamp 
 of refuge, as for a hunted wolf, and the eminent 
 lawyer flees to it with his client, it must not seem 
 strange if an injured and neglected community way- 
 lay the fugitive criminal in the " open " before he 
 gains cover. 
 
 When, in one of these wild counties of six 
 months' growth men go to the witness stand and 
 jury box and bench, who should have gone behind 
 the bars or to the gallows, and all that they may
 
 246 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 let criminals go by witli a password and for a con- 
 sideration, men, good and true, who cannot stop 
 to be politicians and court managers, must be ex- 
 pected to do something abruptly. And when the 
 pardoning power is debased to the veto of equity 
 and justice, and wild animals are uncaged, as if 
 one should meddle with a menagerie, men of order 
 must be expected to become disorderly in a me- 
 thodical and most patriotic way. 
 
 An occasion for a people's court offered in May, 
 1856, when James King was shot for some severe 
 editorial reflections in his paper on James P. Casey. 
 The latter retaliated with his revolver for the 
 political and personal attack, and his victim died 
 in six days. On the evening of the shooting, the 
 Vigilance Committee of 1851 convened. The press 
 generally advocated a vigorous and executive course 
 by the people, and within thirty hours of the as- 
 sault twenty-five hundred names were enrolled ou 
 the books of a Vigilance Committee, " who pledged 
 themselves to work together for the purging of 
 the city of its late ruling classes, — the gamblers, 
 ballot-box stuffers, jury-packers, foreign convicts, 
 swindlers, thieves high and low, and of villains 
 generally. Hundreds were waiting their turn, all 
 day, to register themselves." ^ The Committee took 
 prominent and ample headquarters, cleared the 
 streets for two blocks, mounted six brass pieces, 
 placed swivels loaded with grape on the roof, and 
 
 1 Tuthill, p. 438.
 
 LYNCH LAW. 247 
 
 put the streets under the control of three hundred 
 rifles and muskets. Small arms were gathered 
 abundantly inside, and all spirituous liquors were 
 excluded. The headquarters were at the same 
 time an armory, a drill-room, a court-room, a guard- 
 house, a fort, and a secure prison, with expenses 
 at about five hundred dollars a day. A huge tri- 
 angle swung on the roof, and its sounds could call 
 thousands instantly, on an emergency. Draymen 
 stopped in the street, freed their horses, mounted, 
 and went clattering to the rendezvous. Store- 
 keepers locked up hastily and ran. Clerks leaped 
 over their counters ; carpenters left the shaving 
 in the plane ; blacksmiths dropped the hammer 
 by the red-hot iron on the anvil. All the city 
 hurried to headquarters for any sudden work. 
 An immense mass-meeting stimulated and con- 
 centrated the purposes for reform. One voting 
 district of thirty legal voters was named as re- 
 turning five hundred votes ; three precincts of 
 three hundred voters had returned fifteen hun- 
 dred. One speaker said " that probably more 
 than five hundred murders had been committed 
 in California during the preceding year, yet not 
 more than five of the perpetrators had been pun- 
 ished according to the forms of the law." When 
 the Committee had been in action only two weeks, 
 " the newspapers almost unanimously, the clergy 
 with astonishing boldness, the people, apparently 
 for the time as one man, approved the formation
 
 248 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 of the Committee. . . . Three fourths of all the 
 people of the State sympathized with and indorsed 
 their efforts at reform." ^ 
 
 As to the methods of administration under this 
 code of emergency, it is high commendation of a 
 mixed populace of American citizens, outraged 
 in sight of the halls of formal justice, and even 
 within them, and intensely aroused by their 
 wrongs, that they carried unlawful weapons and 
 equity with such an even hand. The first great 
 trial — that of Casey for shooting King — canie 
 off on the day following King's death. 
 
 "No person was present at the trial save the 
 accused, members of the Vigilance Committee, and 
 witnesses. The testimony was given under oath, 
 though there was no lawful authority for its ad- 
 ministration. Hearsay testimony was excluded ; 
 the general rules of evidence observed in the courts 
 were adopted ; the accused heard all the witnesses, 
 cross-examined those against him, summoned such 
 as he wanted in his favor, had an attorue}'^ to assist 
 him, and was permitted to make an argument by 
 himself or his attorney in his own defence. . . . 
 The Executive Committee were careful to take no 
 evidence except that which would be received in 
 the courts, and to execute no prisoner unless he 
 had committed a crime punishable with death 
 under the law of California. . . . The Vigilance 
 organization did not interfere in any way with the 
 
 1 Tuthill, pp. 451, 460, 467, 476.
 
 LYNCH LAW. 249 
 
 ordinary business of the courts and the police. 
 The district courts sat every day to try suits in- 
 volving the rights of property, and the criminal 
 courts sentenced offenders for theft, assault, and 
 drunkenness, as in ordinary times. The city was 
 far more orderly than ever before or since." ^ 
 
 The very formidable police and military and 
 judicial manifestation of the Committee no doubt 
 did much to make punishment unnecessary. The 
 renegade and variously corrupt mass was overawed 
 and restrained by so imposing a tribunal. Only 
 four persons were executed by the Committee of 
 1856. Those who were noted for minor crimes, 
 and especially those who corrupted government 
 and equity at their very fountains by stuffing the 
 ballot-box, were banished, and usually to the places 
 whence they came, as Sydney and other Australian 
 ports. 
 
 This off-hand and inexpensive administration of 
 justice by banishment had a pleasing illustration 
 for us at the great Indian Fair at Muskogee, in 
 September, 1880. It was a remarkably orderly 
 gathering of about twenty-five hundred persons, 
 mostly Indians, and wholly under Indian manage- 
 ment. Some white roughs had come down from 
 Arkansas to breed riot and crime. When certain 
 overt acts had come to light, the Indian detectives 
 and sheriff took these men back to the railway 
 station, and as the Texan cars returned, going 
 1 Hittell, pp. 250, 252, 253.
 
 250 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 north, they were put on hoard, ticketed home to 
 Arkansas. This Indian copying of tlie white 
 man's civilization quite interested and encouraged 
 us as to the future of the lied man. 
 
 The testimony of an observer, at tlie time on 
 tlie ground in San Francisco, is pertinent liere : 
 " In the administration of California Lynch law, 
 so far as I have known or heard, the tliunderbolt 
 of public fury has always fallen only on the head 
 of the guilty man who, by the enormity and pal- 
 pable character of his crimes, excited it ; and then 
 not till after his guilt was proved to the satisfaction 
 of the masses composing the court. ... In pro- 
 portion as the law acquires power in California 
 for the protection of the citizens, in that propor- 
 tion Lynch law is dispensed with." ^ 
 
 After about three months of anxious, perilous, 
 and expensive labors, the Committee accomplished 
 the work which they undertook. In the interests of 
 justice and order they had defied the empty and 
 mocking forms of law, until they could refill them 
 with life and normal activity, and so make them a 
 terror to evil-doers. This was now done, and they 
 prepared to lay down the amazing power which 
 they had so daringly and heroically seized. Their 
 august opening was half the battle for right, and 
 they planned a magnificent closing, that they might 
 perpetuate a wholesome fear in the memories of 
 
 1 California Life Illustrated. By William Taylor. 1858. 
 pp. 296, 299.
 
 LYNCH LAW. 251 
 
 all bad citizens. At the same time the impression 
 was left on the community that the organization 
 went into suspense rather than dissolution, and 
 could reappear on the alarm-tolling of an ominous 
 bell. 
 
 " Under the influence of such considerations 
 [finished work] the Executive Committee, with the 
 approval of the board of delegates, adopted a res- 
 olution to disband the forces. On the 18th of 
 August [1856] the city took a general holiday, to 
 witness the celebration of the disbanding of the 
 Vigilance Committee, and thousands came from 
 interior towns to see the men who had defied the 
 law for three months in the interest of justice and 
 honesty. The streets were bright witli flags and 
 flowers ; the sidewalks were lined with ladies in 
 brilliant dresses along the line adopted by the 
 procession, or rather the army, which contained 
 five thousand one liundred and thirty-seven men, 
 including three artillery companies, with eighteen 
 pieces of cannon, twenty-nine members of the 
 Executive Committee, two hundred and ninety 
 dragoons, forty-nine surgeons and physicians, one 
 hundred and fifty members of the Committee of 
 Vigilance of 1851, vigilant police, hundreds of citi- 
 zens on horseback, thirty-three companies of the 
 vigilant infantry, and numerous military bands. 
 The troops were reviewed, and a farewell address 
 was published by the Executive Committee, con- 
 gratulatin<' the freneral committee and the com-
 
 252 LYNCH LA\V. 
 
 muiiity on the valuable services rendered, and 
 promising that the organization sliould be revived 
 if it were necessary to protect its members against 
 violence or malicious prosecution on account of 
 the action of the Committee, or to guard the 
 ])urity of the ballot-box. It was never formally 
 dissolved." ^ 
 
 Such a force, unorganized, is always at hand on 
 our wild border, and is more operative than is 
 generally supposed. As the frequent failures of 
 the law and the court are only now and then 
 made public, and to a limited extent at the best, 
 in wild border counties as large as an Eastern 
 State, so these prompt trials and inevitable execu- 
 tions of judgments by extemporized courts are not 
 widely published. Occasionally a case gains the 
 notoriety of print, and thus the impression is left 
 by the solitariness of published accounts that they 
 are rare. One needs only to make Lynch law the 
 topic, and then listen in cabin or tent on the bor- 
 der, to be satisfied of the frequency of these sum- 
 mary proceedings. We were once enjoying camp- 
 fire and log-cabin life for a month under the per- 
 petual snow-peaks of the Rocky Mountains, among 
 men who had ranged from the Mexican border to 
 British Columbia. They had been trappers and 
 Indian traders, ranch-men and miners. At a single 
 evening camp-fire, in their details of personal 
 incidents, twenty-seven cases of lynching were 
 
 1 Hittell, pp. 259, 260.
 
 LYN'CII LAW. 253 
 
 mentioned in which they had been either actors 
 or spectators. Tlie executions were scattered 
 through Arizona, Kansas, Colorado, and Missouri, 
 and between 1870 and 1880. When returning 
 from Puget Sound over the Northern Pacific not 
 long since, the author met at Medora the sanitary 
 government inspector of cattle for that region. 
 When the hope was expressed that there is less 
 violence now in maintaining order in the Eocky 
 Mountain region than there was in the days of 
 the Vigilantes, he replied that in 1884 twenty-five 
 horse-thieves were believed to have been lynched 
 in Montana. 
 
 It surprises some that the horse-thief, so called, 
 should so lead off in the number of lynched men, 
 when his crime is presumed to be a question of 
 property of one or two hundred dollars. Tlie 
 term "horse-thief" is really generic, or a syno- 
 nym for a great variety of criminals. He is the 
 thief of any movable property, a highwayman, a 
 bandit, a murderer, at his convenience, defiant of 
 government, an outlaw, and the enemy, specific 
 and in general, of society. The execution of a 
 horse-thief, therefore, is ordinarily the adminis- 
 tration of justice in gross, and not in severalty 
 of crimes. 
 
 This is to be said, — that lynching in the Territo- 
 ries and new States comes in where the law is crude 
 and feeble. Where the court-house appears in due 
 dignity and power. Lynch law disappears in the
 
 254 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 shadow, and will come from roar to front on any 
 well-grounded call. Americans understand, as no 
 other people, that liberty and equity cannot be lost 
 in the inoperative framework of law. They are per- 
 petual, the law is temporary ; they are the freight, 
 the law is only the carriage : and sometimes, as in 
 the days of old Israel in their emigrant and tent 
 era, the ark of the covenant, the main thing, will 
 be set forward on a new cart, while the old one be- 
 comes a bonfire. Lynch law, commonly in the old 
 East thought of opprobriously, is usually enforced 
 on the frontier practically and patriotically, and 
 from a high esteem for law. The abnormal or 
 rather the nascent condition of society in a Terri- 
 tory or very new State makes this law sometimes 
 a necessity, and therefore normal. The personals 
 of life and movable properties emigrate and take 
 orderly and rightful place in new homes faster than 
 statutes ; and clusters of families are often in ad- 
 vance of district and municipal and circuit courts. 
 The Marietta Colony arrived on the Muskingum in 
 the spring; but Governor St. Clair and the territo- 
 rial code of laws did not arrive till midsummer. 
 Meantime the colony extemporized and executed 
 a code. These notions of personal rights are in- 
 nate, and as truly adhere to the man and go with 
 him as his limbs or life. Out of tliem comes the 
 municipal and civil state, under the titles of so- 
 ciety, government, and statutes. They arrive in 
 the settlement in the form of Blackstone or a law
 
 LYNCH LAW. 255 
 
 library, and take civil sliape and associate power 
 after the immigrant and his neighbors have arrived. 
 In that transition and formation and growing time 
 between the recent and isolated settlers and the 
 organized, well-compacted, and well-running so- 
 ciety, rights will be few, and will demand protec- 
 tion under extempore government, and of home 
 manufacture. Like so much else around the cab- 
 ins and tents, the civil must be crude, as well as 
 the mechanical and domestic and architectural ; and 
 when debased, barbarous, and bloody men strike 
 out defiantly for a low animal communism, they 
 are the law-abiding men, in the non-arrival as yet 
 of Eoman or English or New England laws, who 
 soonest find the outlaw and visit penalty. Our 
 border government from colonial times lias been 
 of this kind, and of necessity, and therefore 
 reasonably. 
 
 We have seen that the Ohio Company extempo- 
 rized a people's code of laws and a court, while in 
 waiting for what had been established but had not 
 arrived ; nor were they hasty in forming an extem- 
 pore government, on the theory of the primitive 
 settlers in Oregon, who petitioned their first Legis- 
 lative Committee to build a jail, when as yet they 
 had no convicts, saying, " We are assured that it 
 is better to have the building standing without 
 a tenant, than a tenant without the building." ^ 
 
 1 A History of Oregon. By W. H. Gray. p. 382. The Ohio 
 Company soon saw the wisdom of the policy of anticipation.
 
 256 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 " It was not long before a complaint was made 
 against Paddy Grimes for robbing a truck-patch, 
 on which the sheriff was commanded to arrest him 
 and summon a jury for his trial. Tlie order was 
 obeyed ; and on hearing the evidence, the jury 
 found him guilty, and he was sentenced to receive 
 twenty-nine lashes, which were inflicted in due 
 form on the same afternoon." ^ Thougli the crime 
 and the punishment did not rise to any high grade 
 of dignity, as when the five outlaws fired into the 
 tepee at Bannack, killing three Indians and a 
 Frenchman, and when Plummer, Eay, and Stin- 
 son were hung in the same city for sundry rob- 
 beries and murders, the proceedings were the 
 same in kind and in principle, and moreover by 
 men not yet a year out of conservative Xew Eng- 
 land. Sometimes the aggravations were great and 
 the necessities imperious to take summary process 
 and redress wrongs promptly. In 1790 Judge 
 lunes wrote to the Secretary of War that within 
 the last seven years " he could venture to say tliat 
 more than fifteen hundred persons had been killed 
 and taken prisoners by the Indians, and that up- 
 ward of twenty thousand horses had been taken 
 and carried off with other property, . . . The tardy 
 movements of the General Government were criti- 
 cised with great severity ; and men of influence on 
 the frontier were deliberating on the expediency of 
 taking their protection into their own hands. . . . 
 ^ Burnett's Notes on the Northwest Territory, p. 57.
 
 LYNCH LAW. 257 
 
 He assured tlie War Department that volunteer 
 expeditions would be carried into the Indian coun- 
 try, as well for the purpose of revenge as for pro- 
 tection and self-preservation ; . . . that they have 
 long groaned under their misfortunes and see no 
 prospect of relief." ^ 
 
 Kentucky antedates California seventy -six years 
 in the same principles and policy of a government 
 by the people and for the people. On the 23d of 
 May, 1775, Daniel Boone and his sixteen asso- 
 ciates, acting for the four cabin settlements of hunt- 
 ers and frontier families, met under a great elm, 
 where now Boonesborough stands. Prayers were 
 offered, and then the business of the people's Con- 
 vention, to frame and ordain the jfirst civil laws for 
 Kentucky, was formally opened. Colonel Hender- 
 son said : " You are assembled for a noble purpose. 
 ... As justice is and must be eternally the same, 
 so your laws, founded in wisdom, will gather 
 strength by time. . . . If any doubt remain amongst 
 you with respect to the force or efficacy of what- 
 ever laws you now or hereafter make, be pleased to 
 consider that all power is originally in the people." 
 A few days afterward the same thing was said 
 at Bunker HilL " We represent the good people 
 of this infant country," responded the Convention. 
 Between their sessions the Sabbath intervened, 
 and they converted their council-chamber, the 
 great elm, into a church and worshipped. 
 
 J Burnett's Notes on the Northwest Territory, pp. 90-92. 
 17
 
 258 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 " They shook the depths of the desert's gloom 
 With their hymns of lofty cheer." 
 
 " Thus began the Commonwealth of Kentucky." ^ 
 
 Our constantly emigrating border, extending 
 from the British to the Mexican boundaries, has 
 been marked every year by^)?'^ tcjnjjore legislation, 
 when the leaders of the young communities felt 
 it necessary to energize the existing laws, or open 
 new cliannels for the popular will, or put a sudden 
 hand on outlawry. 
 
 Bancroft well states the fact and sentiment for 
 the United States, when referring to the daring 
 resistance which Captain Wads worth successfully 
 offered to the encroachments of the Crown on the 
 liberties of the young Colony of Hartford in 1693, 
 then a frontier town : " It is the fortune of our 
 America, that if in any moment the happiness of 
 the State depended on the will of one man, that 
 man was true to his duty."^ 
 
 To recur once more to Judge Burnett and his 
 court sessions in those territorial days of Ohio, he 
 says that the seats of justice " were at that time 
 separated from each other by extensive tracts of 
 uninhabited wilderness stretching from one hun- 
 dred and fifty to two hundred miles, without roads, 
 bridges, or fences." ^ Between these distant cen- 
 
 1 Bancroft's History of tlie United States, vol. vii. pp. 367- 
 369; Collins's Kentucky, vol. ii. p. 508 ; Shaler's Kentucky, pp. 
 68-70. 
 
 2 History of the United States, vol. iii. pp. 67, 68. 
 
 ^ Notes on the Northwest Territory, p. 65. 
 
 ■i
 
 LYNCH LAAV. 259 
 
 tres of justice, and in the long lapses of time be- 
 tween the sessions of the court, either in the early 
 Northwest Territory, or in Montana, or, as we found 
 it, in Wyoming, equity in self-protection must 
 sometimes work inorganically, while the letter of 
 the law is impatiently waited for, over roads and 
 bridges and ferries yet to be built. 
 
 What Monette says, covering our border lands 
 in the Mississippi Valley, between 1770 and 1810, 
 has been true ever since of our frontier settle- 
 ments, and will continue so till our frontier is 
 exhausted : " Although the pioneers in the West 
 were a hardy, enterprising, honest race of men, yet 
 the frontier settlements are often a retreat for loose 
 and unprincipled individuals from the old settle- 
 ments, who, if not familiar with crime, have very 
 blunt perceptions of virtue. The genuine pioneer, 
 the woodsman, is independent, brave, and upright ; 
 but, as the jackal follows in the footsteps of the 
 lion, so the sturdy hunter is followed by the mis- 
 creant destitute of noble qualities, — men who are 
 the pests of the human race, averse to labor, im- 
 patient of the wholesome restraints of law or the 
 courtesies of civilized life. Some, indeed, are des- 
 jjeradoes flying from justice, to escape the. grasp of 
 the law in older settlements ; and in the frontier 
 settlements he bids the civil law defiance. For 
 sucli intruders the frontiers had a law of their 
 own, a lex loci, known as Lynch law, which 
 seldom failed to purge tlie community of his
 
 260 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 unwelcome presence. Its operation was often 
 indispensable wlien a horse-thief, a counterfeiter, 
 or other desperate vagabond infested tlie neighbor- 
 hood, evading justice l)y cunning, or by a strong 
 audacious arm, or by the number of his confed- 
 erates. The citizens formed themselves into a 
 regulating party, commonly known as ' regulators,' 
 a kind of holy brotherhood whose duty required 
 them to purge the neighborhood of such unruly 
 members. Mounted, armed, and commanded by a 
 leader, they proceeded to arrest the object of their 
 mission." 1 After fair trial, punishment followed 
 immediately, and fitting to the crime. 
 
 Two considerations must be entertained in mak- 
 ing a fair judgment of this method of border gov- 
 ernment. In our theory of governing, the power 
 to make and execute law inheres in the people ; 
 and in the novel growth of our settlements into 
 new country, government arrives after the people 
 arrive, — or rather, is started by them as all other 
 local interests are started, and for that locality, 
 and for those conditions, dc novo. Precedents can 
 be found only for civil proceedings of the most 
 general kind. 
 
 For illustration, here is Leadville, as we found 
 it in 1880, two years old, with twelve thousand 
 inhabitants. Of different nationalities and from 
 every State in the Union ; unknown to each other ; 
 
 1 Monette's History of the Mississippi Valley. 1846. Vol. 
 ii. pp. 16, 17.
 
 LYNCH LAW. 261 
 
 adventurers, mauy of them most honorable, with a 
 large proportion of the desperate and degraded and 
 criminal of both sexes ; under the high pressure of 
 a ruining excitement, which is the highest known 
 to any lawful calling ; every day twenty-four hours 
 of work, old-fashioned sunrise and sunset " played 
 out," as was remarked to me there ; drinking and 
 gambling saloons crowded by day, with debauching, 
 underground, and systematized " hells " by night ; 
 and an average of two violent deaths a week for 
 the last thirty weeks, and no single conviction 
 and execution for manslaughter, as one of the po- 
 lice informed us, — what precedents are there for 
 governing such a city ? Its age, size, quality of 
 citizenship, and business ardor are without par- 
 allel, except in the mining districts of the United 
 States. 
 
 The extempore handling of the best interests of 
 a mining camp or rushing town of a few years' 
 growth by honorable and orderly men, must not 
 be judged by the traditional and conservative and 
 grooved system of one of the old thirteen States. 
 The true men of the place will show themselves 
 to be the men for the times, and they will dis- 
 cover that methods of relief are twin-born with 
 emergencies. 
 
 When sheriff or judge or a part of the jurymen, 
 each or all, may be known to be in league with 
 the accused, it must not seem strange if primitive 
 rights assert themselves to expedite things, and
 
 262 LYNCH LAW. 
 
 equity ignores conventional forms and comes to 
 the front suddenly with a stride. Where coon 
 and beaver and coyote skins have taken the place 
 of the ermine, other variations may be expected, 
 and must be tolerated on the bench. 
 
 The relief, and the promise for an orderly, pros- 
 perous, yet at the same time intensely earnest 
 future were already in Leadville in germ. The 
 usual churches, feeble, devout, and energetic, were 
 starting. Sabbath, mission, and day schools, all 
 under the stinmlus and patronage of these churches, 
 were founded, and the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
 ciation also. Nobler bands of workers for Church 
 and State it would be difficult to find in our oldest 
 cities. It seemed as if Lynch law must come in 
 to rule the city the coming winter, when the wild 
 storms should drive the miners down from the 
 mountains and out of the caiions, and pack the 
 saloons and dens of the place. These moral and 
 educating forces met the emergency, and a Lynch 
 court, so much to be dreaded, yet sometimes 
 needed, was not found necessary, and was not held. 
 The crisis was passed without rope or banishment. 
 These same forces, educational and social and moral 
 and Christian, are the last reliance, and the only 
 real power to hold barbarism in check and lead 
 civilization to the frontier.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 263 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY AND NEGLECT OF THE WEST. 
 
 WASHINGTON made eight tours into the 
 West. After returning from the seventh 
 to the headquarters of the army at Newburgh, 
 where it was quietly awaiting the conclusion of 
 the negotiations for peace, he thus wrote to the 
 Chevalier de Chastellux, Oct. 12, 1783 : " Prompted 
 by these actual observations, I could not help 
 taking a more extensive view of the vast inland 
 navigation of these United States from maps and 
 the information of others ; and could not but be 
 struck witli the immense extent and importance 
 of it, and with the goodness of that Providence 
 which has dealt its favors to us with so profuse 
 a hand. AVould to God we may have wisdom 
 enough to improve them. I shall not rest con- 
 tented till I have explored the Western country, 
 and traversed those lines, or a great part of them, 
 which have given bounds to a new empire." ^ 
 
 After returning from his eighth tour in the fol- 
 lowing year (1784), he wrote to Governor Harrison 
 of Virginia his impressions made by it, and the 
 
 ^ Sparks's Writings of Washington, vol. viii. p. 489.
 
 264 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 letter is almost a state paper t'roni its scope. Fore- 
 casting tlio development of that immense extent 
 of country, which lie is moved to call " a new em- 
 pire," intrusted by divine favors to the young re- 
 public, and referring to the vigorous settlements 
 there, and anticipating the States to come out of 
 it, he adds : " When they get strength, which will 
 be sooner than most people conceive," ^ etc. A 
 century now, and more, has been filling the East 
 with surprises by the fulfilments of that prophecy. 
 Irving well says: "The suggestions of Washington 
 in his letter to the governor, and his represen- 
 tation, during this visit to Eichmond, gave the 
 first impulse to the great system of internal im- 
 provements since pursued throughout the United 
 States." 2 
 
 Those eight Western tours, short for a travelling 
 salesman of to-day, but then very extended, ele- 
 vated Washington from a provincial to a conti- 
 nental statesman, and enabled him to say, from 
 travel and study, what few have been able to 
 say, then or since, — that the West would show 
 great strength "sooner than most people conceive." 
 That growth has ever since kept in advance of the 
 conceptions of the average Atlantic statesman, and 
 is constantly surprising even the students of West- 
 ern development, A few aggregate statements, 
 
 1 Sparks's Writings of Washington, vol. ix. p. 62, Octo- 
 ber 10, 1784. 
 
 2 Life of W£(shington, vol. iv, p. 459.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 265 
 
 made up to 1880, will confirm tlie prediction of 
 Washington and the comments which we have 
 made on it. 
 
 Of the thirty-five cities classed in the last census 
 as having a population of fifty thousand or more 
 each, fifteen of them are beyond the Alleghanies. 
 Even Boston, after all its annexations, is shut in, 
 for its numerical position, between Chicago and 
 St. Louis, — the latter a foreign town when Wash- 
 ington made the tour, and the former not born till 
 near half a century afterward. 
 
 Between 1870 and 1880, the population of the 
 United States incresaed 11,920,000. When it is 
 considered that the centre of population in 1880 
 was eight miles west by south from the heart of 
 the city of Cincinnati, it will be seen that much of 
 this increase must have been in the West ; and 
 that centre is about two hundred and twenty miles 
 farther west than any point which Washington 
 reached. He gained his impressions of " the im- 
 mense extent and importance " of the United States 
 without crossing the meridian of Cincinnati. 
 
 It is needless to say that all the food supplies, 
 for American tables totally, and for European so 
 largely, are furnished almost wholly by the West. 
 All the wheat of 'New England would not call for 
 her hot ovens three weeks a year. All the oats 
 raised in New England in 1880 would feed all the 
 working-horses of the country only tliree days, at 
 a peck a day.
 
 266 EASTERN' JEALOUSY OF TIIE WEST. 
 
 It will be observed tliut the most of these items, 
 as population, live-stock and cereals, and the prac- 
 tical and special metals, which have carried our 
 nation, in a century, to the fulfilment of Washing- 
 ton's predictions, and to the very front among the 
 nations of the world, were produced " out West." 
 The aggregates given may not be unfamiliar to our 
 princely and international men of commerce, and 
 to eminent railroad men ; but the great body of the 
 people receive such statements with profound sur- 
 prise, and with the scepticism usually underlying 
 the saying, " Western stories." These inunense 
 gains of national strength have come "sooner than 
 most people conceived." 
 
 The very extent and development of our new 
 country have put it to a disadvantage before the 
 older sections as regards its areas and increase and 
 importance to the entire body politic, by compel- 
 ling statements of them whicli seem incredible to 
 the unread and untravelled. Sometimes a lack of 
 apprehension has been followed, rationally, by a 
 lack of appreciation ; and sometimes it has been so 
 far measured and estimated as to create jealousy 
 and stimulate repression by the older States. As 
 to any attempts, however, locally and provincially, 
 or nationally, to repress Western growth, it proved 
 as futile as to serve an injunction on an active vol- 
 cano, or move to stay proceedings in the process of 
 an eclipse. Yet our history is not barren in this 
 line. Failure to foresee and anticipate has led to
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSV OF THE -WEST. 2G7 
 
 some unfortunate neglects, and tlie loss of grand 
 opportunities. Wealth has rare foreknowledge, 
 and the bees have discovered rich fields afar and 
 made new hives in them ; while sedentary benevo- 
 lence has indulged memories rather than anticipa- 
 tions, and worked over and over again the some- 
 what exhausted acres of the fathers. 
 
 In his own delicate and comprehensive way 
 Washington hinted at the neglect of the West by 
 the Atlantic East, which feeling he soon saw de- 
 veloped, even to opposition. The letter of General 
 Putnam to him in 1783 revealed a chance for a 
 noble movement into the West, and he gave it his 
 favor, and soon learned how sceptical and suspi- 
 cious the East was of the West. Tlie letter was 
 more than an epistle, in both volume and topic, 
 and will hold place among eminent jiapers on the 
 Mississippi Valley, as inaugurating both the Ohio 
 Company and a general policy. By Act of Con- 
 gress, Oct. 27, 1787, then in session at Kew York, 
 grants of wild lands in the Northwest Territory 
 were made to the company, amounting to near 
 five millions of acres. In obtaining tliese lands 
 it acted for other parties jointly with itself, and 
 finally obtained as its own 904,285 acres, and 
 Washington signed many of the patents, May 
 10, 1792. The Eev. Dr. Manasseh Cutler acted 
 as agent for the company before Congress. In a 
 diary, quite minute, he says : " The delegates from 
 Massachusetts, although exceedingly worthy men.
 
 268 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 and in general would wish to promote the Ohio 
 scheme, yet, if it should militate against the par- 
 ticular interest of this State, by draining her of 
 inhabitants, especially when she is forming the 
 plan of selling the Eastern country [Province of 
 Maine], I thought they would not be very warm 
 advocates in our favor ; and I dare not trust my- 
 self with any of the New York delegates with 
 whom I am acquainted, because that government 
 is wisely inviting the Eastern people to settle in 
 that State. . . . Few, Bingham, and Kearney are 
 our principal opposers. . . . New York, Connecti- 
 cut, and Massachusetts would sell us lauds at half 
 a dollar an acre." ^ 
 
 The opposition which the Ohio Company encoun- 
 tered in Mr. Bingham was Eastern and personal 
 and financial. This William Bingham, to whom 
 reference has been made, then delegate from Penn- 
 sylvania, was about this time the owner of nearly 
 two and a half million acres of wild land in the 
 Province of Maine, and naturally would oppose 
 the schemes before the Continental Congress, to 
 put five millions of Ohio land on the public 
 market. There were other heavy Eastern opera- 
 tions in wild land which stood in the way of 
 the Ohio movement, and one more may be 
 stated. In a letter to his Secretary of State, 
 Washington says : " It will be fortunate for the 
 
 1 Walker's History of Athens County, Ohio, pp. 38, 39, 65, 
 
 67 et alibi.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 269 
 
 American public if private speculations in lands 
 still claimed by the aborigines do not aggravate 
 those differences which policy, humanity, and jus- 
 tice concur to deprecate." 
 
 To this Sparks, editing the writings of Washing- 
 ton, adds this note : " Alluding to the large pur- 
 chasers of new lands, situated in the eastern part 
 of Massachusetts, which had recently been made 
 by Kobert Morris, of Gorliam and Phillips. The 
 quantity, as stated by Mr. Jefferson, was 1,300,000 
 acres, at five pence an acre, with an additional 
 tract for the gross sura of X 100,000." 
 
 This additional tract, at the same price, would 
 be 4,800,000 acres, — total purchase by Morris, of 
 6,100,000 acres.i 
 
 When Louisiana was added to our domain in 
 1803, the question of its settlement by immigra- 
 tion became a leading, and at times a very warm 
 one. Under the treaty of cession Major Amos 
 Stoddard took charge of the Upper Province for 
 the United States, and thus states the great 
 question : " Will the United States permit the 
 sale of the public lands in Louisiana, and by 
 this measure encourage the settlement of that 
 country ? ... It has been suggested that, the 
 more effectually to promote the national interests, 
 we must first dispose of the public lands on the 
 east side of the Mississippi. . . . Settlers enter- 
 
 1 Sparks's Writings of Washington (Letter to Jefferson, 
 April 1, 1791), vol. x. p. 151.
 
 270 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 tain a predilection for the lands in the Upper 
 Louisiana." ^ 
 
 Here, as in the case of the Ohio Company, the 
 sale and settlement of the new lands in the West are 
 made of doubtful policy because the East has so 
 much unsold on the market. When the acquisition 
 of Louisiana was probable, either by negotiation or 
 conquest, popular discussion took up the topic, and 
 in a tract those who wished it through war are thus 
 set forth : " Tlie speculators of all kinds anticipate 
 new scenes for their rapacity, and the Eastern 
 States indulge their apprehensions of the rising 
 prosperity and strength of the Western." ^ 
 
 Another author pleads the seaboard side of this 
 question more pointedly, and shows the advantage 
 of the purchase f5r the East, " in having effectually 
 secured ourselves against future rivalship in the 
 sales of our lands on this side the Mississippi. 
 Our Western lands now command two dollars per 
 acre at the lowest." ^ Here is the plan to keep 
 up the price of wild land east of the Mississippi, 
 then much in private hands and tending that way, 
 by withholding the new purchase from the market. 
 But it did not succeed, and the price dropped to 
 one dollar and a quarter. The author goes on to 
 
 1 Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana. By 
 Major Amos Stoddard. 1812. pp. 259-262. 
 
 2 The Mississippi Question Fairly Stated. By Camillus. 
 1803. 
 
 3 Reflections on the Cession of Louisiana to the United States. 
 By Sylvestris. Aug. 10, 1803.
 
 EASTEKN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 271 
 
 say of the purchase: "It secures us against the 
 danger of depopulation by emigration from tliese 
 States to Louisiana. . . . The rage for acquiring 
 lands in Louisiana and migrating thither to settle, 
 if encouraged, must at no very distant day weaken 
 and reduce the population in the Atlantic States, 
 and not improbably all that lie eastward of the 
 Mississippi. The consequence of such a reduction 
 must prove ultimately fatal to the United States, 
 for we may boldly pronounce that the confederacy 
 can never be permanently extended beyond the 
 Mississippi, nor preserved among its present num- 
 bers, whenever Louisiana shall become a populous 
 country. Whenever that event takes place, the 
 constellation of the present United States will 
 probably set forever." 
 
 Yet Iowa and Minnesota and Missouri and 
 Kansas have not caused even an eclipse of that 
 constellation ! 
 
 " Must we, then, never dispose of this immense 
 quantity of valuable lands which we have pur- 
 chased at such a price ? No, never, as long as the 
 United States have lands to dispose of and settle 
 on this side the Mississippi. ... In no possible 
 view can I perceive any benefit likely to result 
 to the United States by opening a land office in 
 Louisiana, whilst a thousand mischiefs threaten to 
 flow from any attempt of the kind." ^ 
 
 1 Reflections on the Cession of Louisiana to the United 
 States, pp. 16, 22, 23, 24.
 
 272 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 And " Sylvestris " finally balances liis hopes and 
 fears over the Louisiana purchase with a plausible 
 ejaculation, in a pagan tongue, that the United 
 States might discover the fact that they are already 
 well off.i 
 
 In 1807 Ehea of Tennessee proposed in the 
 House some surveys in Louisiana, that more of 
 the public lands might be put on the market; 
 but Varuum of Massachusetts opposed the scheme, 
 since it would put on the market lands competing 
 with those of the East, and it was laid over. 
 
 A political and partisan and provincial philippic 
 will show some of the darker shades of this ques- 
 tion, as set in New England light, when the ad- 
 mission of the State of Louisiana was claiming 
 attention : " There is no subject of complaint 
 against the Democratic administration which pre- 
 sents such a variety of disgraceful features, which 
 involved so many and so various causes of censure, 
 in its origin, principles, progress, and effects, as this 
 shameful purchase of a colony of Frenchmen. In 
 its origin it was corrupt. ... In its principles it 
 was hostile to our Constitution and unfriendly to 
 our republican habits. ... In its effects it has 
 been a vast whirlpool which has not only swal- 
 lowed up the original purchase-money of eleven 
 millions and a half, but the immense sums which 
 have been expended in exploring its unknown 
 frontiers ; in regulating, with France, the adjust- 
 
 1 " fortunali, nimium, sua si bona noverint/"
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 273 
 
 ment of boundaries purposely left unsettled ; iu 
 fortificatious and a navy for its defence, as well 
 as the maintenance of an army who have gone 
 thither only to fertilize its soil with their misera- 
 ble remains. . . . The origin of this monstrous 
 purchase, the effects of which will be felt to our 
 latest posterity, it is well known is to be found in 
 the necessity which the transmontane or Western 
 States were under to have the free navigation of 
 the Mississippi ... all to be charged to the ac- 
 count of those backwoodsmen who are so hostile to 
 commercial interests," etc.-^ 
 
 It would be unjust to the topic in hand not to 
 introduce evidence from another source, and all 
 the more worthy as furnished by a representative 
 and deliberative body. What the Hartford Con- 
 vention of 1814 was called to do, or did, or failed 
 to do, does not concern our inquiry. Only its ex- 
 pressed sentiments on the East as related to the 
 West are now pertinent. 
 
 In reporting the causes which the committee of 
 the Convention thought had sadly depressed the 
 commerce, manufactures, trade, and general busi- 
 ness of New England, they state this as the sixth : 
 "The admission of new States into the Union, 
 formed at pleasure in the western region, has de- 
 stroyed the balance of power which existed among 
 
 ^ The New England Patriot : Being a candid comparison 
 of the principles and conduct of the Washington and Jefferson 
 administrations. Boston, 1810, pp. 58, 59. 
 
 18
 
 274 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 the original States, and deeply affected their 
 interest." 
 
 In recommending measures of action for relief 
 and future safety, a second committee reported : 
 " That it is expedient to make provision for 
 re.straiuing Congress in the exercise of an unlim- 
 ited power to make new States and admit them 
 into the Union," So far as the records show, 
 this recommendation was adopted. In commend- 
 ing this restriction of congressional pcJwer, the 
 first committee, in their report, say : " By the 
 admissions of these States that balance (between 
 the original thirteen) has been materially af- 
 fected, and unless the practice be modified, must 
 ultimately be destroyed. The Southern States 
 will first avail themselves of their new confed- 
 erates to govern the East ; and finally the Western 
 States, multiplied in number and augmented in 
 population, will control the interests of the whole. 
 . . . Those who are immediately concerned in the 
 prosecution of commerce will, of necessity, be al- 
 ways a minority of the nation. They are, however, 
 best qualified to manage and direct its course by 
 the advantages of experience and the sense of in- 
 terest. But they are entirely unable to protect 
 themselves against tlie sudden and injudicious 
 decisions of bare majorities, and the mistaken or 
 oppressive projecte of those who are not actively 
 concerned in its pursuits. Of consequence, this 
 interest is always exposed to be harassed, inter-
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 275 
 
 rupted, and entirely destroyed, upon pretence of 
 securing other interests. Had the merchants of 
 this nation been permitted by their own govern- 
 ment to pursue an innocent and lawful course, 
 how different w'ould have been the state of the 
 treasury and the public credit ! . . The immense 
 population which has swarmed into the West, re- 
 mote from immediate danger, and which is con- 
 stantly augmenting, will not be averse from the 
 occasional disturbances of the Atlantic States."^ 
 
 As the results of one hundred years show, Jef- 
 ferson had broad and forecasting views as to the 
 ownership of Louisiana, and it would be difficult 
 to name another act of statesmanship which has 
 so rounded up the republic with grace and strength 
 and promise : " We should take care not to think 
 it for the interest of that great continent to press 
 too soon upon the Spaniards. Those countries 
 cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they 
 are too feeble to hold them until our population 
 can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them 
 piece by piece. The navigation of the Mississippi 
 we must have soon. This is all we are yet ready 
 to receive."^ 
 
 This was in 1786. 
 
 The unintelligent neglect of the West by the 
 East — apathy and sometimes opposition — may 
 
 1 History of the Hartford Convention. By Tlieodore Dwight, 
 Secretary of the Convention, pp. 369, 371, 372, 373, 392. 
 ^ American State Papers, Boston edition, vol, v. p. 94.
 
 276 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 be best seen by groupiii'j;, somewhat miscella- 
 neously, a few scattered Tacts. In 1791 Vermont 
 prevailed over the opposition of Virginia, North 
 and South Carolina, and Georgia, and entered tlie 
 Union. Madison, in a paper furnished by himself 
 to Sparks, says : " The grounds of this opposition 
 are, first, an habitual jealousy of a predominance 
 of Eastern interests." ^ 
 
 The citations following go more directly to show 
 a willingness to limit the national growth west- 
 ward. Lieutenant Pike, basing his remarks on 
 observations made in his two exploring tours 
 (1805-07), says that the prairies, "incapable of 
 cultivation," will serve as " a restriction of our 
 population to some certain limits, and thereby a 
 continuance of the Union." In a letter to Astor, 
 Jefferson speaks of the Astorian enterprise as the 
 hopeful germ of a body of " independent Ameri- 
 cans unconnected with us but by the ties of blood 
 and interest, enjoying, like us, the right of self- 
 government." Our first Governor of the Upper 
 Louisiana, Major Stoddard, enters this most singu- 
 lar statement in his " Sketches," so discouraging 
 to immigration into that exuberant wheat-field 
 of the world : " The country above the Falls of 
 St. Anthony will never attract the attention of 
 the agriculturalists. It is mostly of a cold and 
 sterile nature." In a communication addressed 
 to President Monroe, General Jackson advances 
 1 Writings of Washington, vol. xii. S^S.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 277 
 
 this theory : " Concentrate our population, confine 
 our frontier to j)roper limits, until our country, 
 to those limits, is tilled with a dense population. 
 It is the denseness of our population that gives 
 strength and security to our frontier." 
 
 lu "Flint's Travels in the Valley of the Mis- 
 sissippi, 1815-25," the author thus sets forth, in 
 paraphrase, the views on the new settlers and 
 settlements, of a man famed for his scholarship, 
 offices, and published writings, among them travels 
 in New England and New York : ^ " I have read, 
 and not without feelings of pain, the bitter repre- 
 sentations of the learned Dr. D wight in speaking 
 of them. He represents these vast regions as a 
 kind of reservoir for the scum of the Atlantic 
 States. He characterizes, in the mass, the emi- 
 grants from New England, as discontented cobblers, 
 too proud, too much in debt, too unprincipled, too 
 much puffed up with self-conceit, too strongly im- 
 pressed that their fanciful talents could not find 
 scope in tlieir own country, to stay there." 
 
 These views of the President of Yale College — 
 not drawn from observation — are quite in con- 
 trast with those of Daniel Webster, in his speech 
 in the Senate in 1838, on " The Eight of Pre-emp- 
 tion," after he had visited regions beyond the 
 Mississippi, and looked upon our border men in 
 their homes : " They have the general character 
 
 1 Travels in New England and New York. By Timothy 
 Dwight, D.D., LL.D. Vol. ii. Letter 14.
 
 278 EASTERN JKALOUSY OF TlIK WEST. 
 
 of tVoutiursmeii ; they are liarJy, adventurous, and 
 enterprising. Tliey have come from far to estab- 
 lish themselves and families in new abodes in the 
 West. They appeared to me to be industrious 
 and laborious ; and I saw nothing in their charac- 
 ter or conduct that should justly draw upon them 
 expressions of contumely and reproach." ^ 
 
 Such impressions of the West as those given 
 by Dr. Dwight have not ceased even yet, and 
 among otherwise learned men, who confine their 
 travels to their family carriage and to their native 
 New England hills. Bradbury, an English travel- 
 ler, who ventured so far from home as to spend the 
 years 1809-11 in the interior of North America, 
 and while making the discovery of the surprising 
 breadth of country between the Mississippi Eiver 
 and the Eocky Mountains, makes these uninten- 
 tional reflections on American geographers and 
 travellers : " The territory west of the Mississippi, 
 and extending from that river to the Eocky Moun- 
 tains, ... is not accurately known on account of 
 the real situation of the Eocky Mountains not yet 
 being truly ascertained. But it appears from the 
 accounts of liunters and travellers, that on some 
 of our best maps and globes they are laid down 
 too far to the eastward." 
 
 Very like. It is not the Eocky Mountains 
 alone which have been easily moved about here 
 and there, and by Americans scholarly in the 
 i Webster's Works, vol. iv. p. 399.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 279 
 
 alcove and quite at home in the Alps and on the 
 Jordan and the Nile ! A chapter of blunders iu 
 American geography would be a choice entertain- 
 ment, and all the contributors to it would not be 
 foreigners and Western Americans. 
 
 William Sturgis, speaking once, somewhat rep- 
 resentatively, for New England commerce, before 
 the Mercantile Library Association in Boston, said 
 it would be a less evil for the American Union to 
 have the Pacific extend itself over Oregon Terri- 
 tory to the base of the Eocky Mountains, than 
 to convert that Territory into new States for the 
 Union. 
 
 In his admirable letters, which shed so much 
 light on the Oregon question, and aided so much 
 to its final and fortunate settlement, Albert Gal- 
 latin, Secretary of the Treasury from 1801 to 1814, 
 favored the policy of an undivided Oregon, ex- 
 tending north to fifty-four degrees forty minutes, 
 erected into an independent government. These 
 letters were written in 1846. 
 
 In his seat in the lower House of Congress in 
 1844, Winthrop guards against the preponderating 
 growth of the West over the East, by making 
 access to Oregon across the continent impossible 
 by nature, and speaks of " the perpetual snows 
 which nature has opposed to the passage of this 
 disputed territory ; " and again : " The West has 
 no interest, the country has no interest in extend- 
 ing our territorial possessions." And again in
 
 280 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 Congress, in 1846 : " Are our Western brethren 
 straitened for elbow-room, or likely to be for a 
 tliousand years ? " The " perpetual snows " have 
 proved to be a figure of speech rather tlian a fact 
 in nature ; and from the speed with which " our 
 Western brethren " are filling up that impassable 
 and inhospitable region, it seems likely to be 
 necessary to shorten the "one thousand years" 
 into a hundred and less. 
 
 In the line of thought which we are now open- 
 ing it is a suggestive fact that " no bill relating to 
 Oregon was passed by either House before 1843, 
 nor was any decisive measure on the subject 
 adopted by the American Government." ^ It was 
 in March of the same year that Dr. Whitman ended 
 his wonderful ride at Washington, and first fully 
 showed to the East the value and accessibility of 
 Oregon, and in the summer took back eight hun- 
 dred and seventy-five emigrants in two hundred 
 wagons, with thirteen hundred head of cattle, and 
 thus saved Oregon. Covering these and other 
 great facts, Gallatin well says in his fifth letter : 
 " Enterprising individuals have, without any aid 
 or encouragement by Government, opened a wagon 
 road eighteen hundred miles in length, through an 
 arid or mountainous region, and made settlements 
 on or near the sliores of the Pacific, without any 
 guaranty for the possession of the land improved 
 by their labors. . . . Xow that the tide of emigra- 
 
 1 Greenhow's History of Oregon and California, p. 379.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 281 
 
 tion has turned in tlieir favor, they are suddenly 
 invited to assume a hostile position, to endure the 
 calamities, and to run the chances and conse- 
 quences of war." 
 
 Early and primitive Oregon is a marked illus- 
 tration of this neglect of the West. The Gov- 
 ernment had its claims on Oregon, and the founders 
 of the comiiifT twentieth State in the Union were 
 there. These were left without civil government 
 or laws, except as those of an alien power, those of 
 the Hudson Bay Company, were imposed on them. 
 So hemmed in were they by the critical issues of 
 the Oregon controversy, and the nervous anxieties 
 of the times, that they could not openly convene 
 in council to take first steps from an inorganic to 
 an organic civil state. A ruse was well planned 
 to supply the deficiency of Congress. They were 
 stock-owners, and the wild animals preyed on 
 their herds, and they called a "wolf meeting," to 
 concert measures for defence, and thence went up 
 from wild animals to men, and established the 
 first civil government of Oregon. ^ It was nothing 
 new for the best blood and heroic spirits of the 
 Eepublic, then at the extreme front planting out 
 coming commonwealths, to be left quite unaided 
 to struggle with wild animals and hostile Indians. 
 The same thing was common to the border from 
 
 1 The History of Oregon. By W. H. Gray. 1870. Chap, 
 xxxiii. Oregon : The Struggle for Possession. By W. Bar- 
 rows. 1884. Chap. xxvi.
 
 282 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE AVEST. 
 
 earlier days, and, sad to say, is yet. The voice of 
 many a John the Baptist is now crying in the 
 ■wilderness of America, and doing Lrave and pa- 
 triotic and Christian work for civilization, to whom 
 very scant stipends come, and often tardily, and 
 dubious wardrobes from the very comfortable East. 
 Judge Innes of Kentucky, in a letter to the War 
 Department, under date of July, 1790, says: "All 
 measures heretofore attempted for relief have been 
 committed for execution to the hands of strangers 
 [Eastern men] who have no interest in common 
 ■with the West." 
 
 Nor did matters much or rapidly improve for the 
 advance belt of the American nation, as the years 
 ran by. "The few roads that crossed the mountains 
 [the Alleghanies, 1811] were so wretchedly bad that 
 the wagons toiled over them with great difficulty, 
 and a large portion of the merchandise was carried 
 on the backs of horses. Even that was considered 
 a triumphant result of enterprise and a rapid ad- 
 vance in improvement. For a few years only had 
 then advanced since Mr. Brown, a delegate from 
 Kentucky in Congress, had been smiled at as vis- 
 ionary, by the members of that august body, for 
 asking the establishment of a mail to Pittsburgh, 
 to be carried on horseback once in two "weeks. 
 He was told that such a mail was not needed, 
 that probably it would never be required, and that 
 the obstacles of the road were insuperable." ^ 
 
 1 Notes on the Western States. By James Hall. 1832. p. 225.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 283 
 
 Benton had pointed out tlie same unwise and 
 cramping policy of the East toward the new coun- 
 try in the discussion of the resolution of Mr. Foote, 
 offered in the Senate in 1829. Mr. Foote was 
 Senator from Connecticut, and may he assumed to 
 have carried the ordinary interests that Eastern 
 men then had in visionary fortunes in wild lands, 
 already purchased, both sides of the Alleghanies. 
 His project was to stop all survey and sales of 
 Government lands till those already on the public 
 market, at the national land offices, were sold. 
 The opponents of the resolution urged that that 
 state of things had already been attained which 
 Webster, during the discussion, said would come 
 under another system of sale, when individuals 
 would get large quantities of land into their hands, 
 and then " become themselves the competitors 
 with the government in the sale of land." The 
 East held inferior lands, which they could not sell 
 without forcing the land market to a scarcity of 
 supply. The resolution had this tendency and 
 apparent design, and, if enforced, would greatly 
 damage the opening of the new West. Hence 
 Mr. Benton said : " If the sales are limited to the 
 lands now in market, emigration will cease to flow, 
 for those lands [now in market] are not of a char- 
 acter to attract people at a distance." They were 
 the refuse of many years' sales, as " shop-worn " 
 goods. It was as if sharp speculators in wheat 
 had loaded themselves heavily with inferior and
 
 284 EASTRHX JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 unsalable grain, and would move to stop receipts 
 of good grades till, under stress of buyers, they 
 could unload. These speculative capitalists sought 
 thus to use the Government for private gains and 
 to help them out of poor investments, by dwarf- 
 ing and stopping the growth of the nation on 
 the borders. Benton urged that the resolution 
 would have the effect of " limiting the settlements 
 in the new States and Territories," and by keeping 
 back first-class lands "it would deliver up large 
 portions of new States and Territories to the 
 dominion of wild beasts." In the same connec- 
 tion Benton said that the scheme of the resolution 
 " was intended to prevent emigration to the West. 
 It was a renewed effort to strangle the young Her- 
 cules. Tlie same attempt had been systematically 
 made for forty years. The attempt came from 
 the same quarter now as formerly." In comment- 
 ing on the discussion as developing Eastern jeal- 
 ousy of the West and a selfish willingness to 
 sacrifice it to the ill-proportioned growth of the 
 oldest States, he adds : " The debate spread and 
 took an acrimonious and sectional turn, imputing 
 to the quarter of the Union from which it came 
 an old and early policy to check the growth of the 
 West at the outset." ^ 
 
 The defence of the East, in this regard, by 
 Webster, must not be forgotten, as, indeed, there 
 is no danger. Out of this resolution of Foote to 
 1 Benton's Thirty Years' View, vol. i. pp. 130-132.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 285 
 
 stop tlie sales of the public lands came those two 
 remarkable speeches of the great statesman, in 
 which he defended New England against varied 
 criticisms and attacks, as summed up by Benton, 
 but formally and oratorically presented by Hayne. 
 It is doubtful whether the English language, so 
 well adapted for a forensic oration, was ever more 
 nobly used. That masterly constitutional defence 
 of the American Union left nothing more for ar- 
 gument, and all remaining protection to the sword. 
 When the logical defence revived, in later days, 
 all turned to that speecli for argument, and little 
 was found that Webster had left unsaid. He 
 towered above all others as a fortress of strength, 
 and those who looked for a peaceable preservation 
 of tlie Union turned to him, saying : " Thy neck 
 is like the tower of David builded for an armory, 
 whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all 
 shields of mighty men." The prayer of his great 
 American heart was answered, yet not much 
 in advance of the visions he feared : " When my 
 eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time 
 the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on 
 the broken and dishonored fragments of a once 
 glorious Union, — on States dissevered, discordant, 
 belligerent, — on a land rent with civil feuds, or 
 drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood ! " 
 
 His defence, however, of the East, which should 
 lie rather in the line of facts than of oratory, does 
 not seem to have been as conclusive as his con-
 
 286 EASTKUN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 stitutional avL^nunont for tlie Union. His defence 
 of the East is made up mostly of well-rounded and 
 energetic affirmations and denials. His strongest 
 point is put first : " It appears that we have, at 
 this moment, surveyed and in the market, ready 
 for sale, two hundred and ten millions of acres or 
 thereabouts." He also says, and to the honor of 
 New England : "In 1820 the people of the West 
 besought Congress for a reduction in the price of 
 lands. In favor of that reduction, New England, 
 with a delegation of forty members in the other 
 House, gave thirty-three votes, and one only against 
 it. . . . In 1821 the law passed for the relief of 
 the purchasers of the public lands," for which 
 New England gave more votes than the South, 
 who had a delegation one fourth larger. At that 
 time the Government was selling its lands on 
 credit, and this law eased the purchasers, now in 
 arrears, at the rate of about thirty-seven cents to 
 the acre. The total relinquished by the Govern- 
 ment under this law was six or seven millions of 
 dollars.^ 
 
 For the rest, the defence is mainly declarative : 
 " I rise to defend the East. I rise to repel both 
 the charge itself and the cause assigned for it. I 
 deny that the East has, at any time, shown an 
 illiberal policy towards the West. I pronounce 
 the whole accusation to be without the least foun- 
 dation in any facts existing now or at any previous 
 
 1 Webster's Works, vol, iii. pp. 249, 294, 295.
 
 EASTEEN JEALOUSY OF THE AVEST. 287 
 
 time. I deny it in the general, and I deny each 
 and all its particulars. I deny the sum total, and 
 I deny the detail. . . . New England is guiltless 
 of the policy of retarding AYestern population, and 
 of all envy and jealousy of the growth of the new 
 States." 
 
 Against these round periods it would be fitting, 
 as before a board of cool referees, that such men 
 as Clay and Benton and Linn, speaking from their 
 border ground and out of their experiences, should 
 file in their facts. The ellipse, enclosing all which 
 is pertinent to a fair judgment, has two foci, eastern 
 and western. Of course McDuffie is extravagant 
 in remarks made on the National Road Bill, in 
 1825 : " I believe that if the public lands had 
 never been sold, the aggregate amount of the 
 national wealth would have been greater at tliis 
 moment. Our population, if concentrated in the 
 old States, and not ground down by tariff, would 
 have been more prosperous and wealthy." This is 
 the senator who, speaking of Oregon as a farming 
 country, said, " I would not, for that purpose, give 
 a pinch of snuff for the whole territory." 
 
 Some years after his defence of the East, Webster 
 admitted the strong opposition of the East to the 
 West, which, in his great speech, he assumed to 
 disprove : " I remember, sir, and indeed a very 
 short memory might retain the recollection, when 
 the first appropriations for harbors on the Great 
 
 1 Webster's "Works, vol. iii. pp. 261, 289.
 
 288 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 Lakes were carried through tliis body, not without 
 the utmost difficulty and against the most deter- 
 mined opposition. ... I remember when Laive 
 Ontario, Lake Erie, and Lake Michigan were 
 likely to be condemned to a continuance in the 
 state in which nature and the Indian tribes had 
 left them, with no proof upon their shores of the 
 policy of a civilized state, no harbors for the shel- 
 ter of a hundred vessels, no lighthouse even to 
 point out to the inland navigator the dangers of 
 his course." ^ 
 
 No one question has so drawn the line of 
 demarcation between the East and the West, and 
 continuously through decades of years, and with 
 deep sectional warmth, as that of internal improve- 
 ments. Donaldson, in his " Public Domain," 1884, 
 speaks of these struggles as " the fierce political 
 battles after the year 1803." It will be enough 
 to name some of the bills over which the provin- 
 cial contests were waged and prolonged from 1802 
 till the "West was able to take the matter into 
 their own hands, and initiated the system of land- 
 grants for railroads by passing the bill for the 
 Illinois Central, Sept. 20, 1850. There were the 
 Cumberland Eoad Bill and the Maysville, with 
 their vetoes by Monroe and Jackson ; and con- 
 tinuously, some portion of the National Road, 
 which was finally opened as far as Indianapolis, 
 
 1 Remarks in the Senate on the Louisville Canal, May 25, 
 1836. Works, vol. iv. pp. 219-251.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 289 
 
 A quotation here from the St. Louis Directory 
 of 1821, the first of that city, will prove an item 
 of information and serve as a milestone of prog- 
 ress in the westward movement of the nation. 
 The assessed valuation of this backwoods city 
 then was $940,926, and its taxes for that year 
 were $3,763, on a population of 5,500. The town 
 was then within fortifications. " They consist of 
 several circular stone towers, about fifteen feet in 
 height and twenty in diameter, a wooden block- 
 house, and a large stone bastion," then used as a 
 military garden. Eef erring back to the time when 
 they killed buffalo on Mill Creek and around 
 Choteau's Pond, now the heart of the city of 
 three hundred and fifty thousand people, the 
 author, Mr. Paxton, says : " What a prodigious 
 change has been operated ! " The Directory pro- 
 ceeds to say : " The roads leading from St. Louis 
 are very good. . . . Two stages run from this 
 town, — one to Edwardsville and the other to 
 Franklin. ... It is expected that the Great Na- 
 tional Turnpike, leading from Washington, will 
 strike this place, as the commissioners for tlie 
 United States have reported in favor of it. . . . 
 It is contemplated at some future day to open a 
 direct intercourse with India, by the Missouri and 
 Columbia rivers." 
 
 The Straits of Anian, it will be noticed, were 
 yet a beautiful 'and stimulating delusion. And 
 the wag came nearer to being a prophet than was 
 19
 
 290 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 supposed, when he caricatured tlie ambitions of 
 St. Louis by thus advertising in their city papers 
 in 1815 a new town, called Neplusultra : " The 
 streets were laid out a mile in width ; the squares 
 were to be sections, each containing six hundred 
 and forty acres. The Mall was a vast standing 
 forest. In the centre of this modern Babylon 
 roads were to cross each other in a meridional 
 line, at right angles, one from the south pole to 
 Symmes hole in the earth, and another from 
 Pekin to Jerusalem." ^ When this National lioad 
 Bill was under discussion in the House, in 1825, 
 Mr. Beecher of Ohio said: "Fifteen million dollars 
 were expended annually, and what proportion of 
 it went west of the Alleghany Mountains ? . . . 
 The entire sum (to build the road) would not be 
 equal to what was expended in some small ports 
 on the Atlantic coast." ^ 
 
 There was the Wabash Improvement Bill and 
 its veto by Jackson, and the Eiver, Harbor, and 
 Improvement Bill, vetoed by Polk. There were, 
 between 1824 and 1880, twenty concessions of pub- 
 lic land for canal purposes, aggregating 4,424,073 
 acres, over which many of those " fierce political 
 battles " were fought, — the West steadily gaining 
 for the next issue. 
 
 1 Flint's Travels in the Valley of the Mississippi, pp. 187, 
 188. 
 
 2 Gales and Seaton's Congressional Debates, vol. i. pp. 190, 
 191.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 201 
 
 We have already seen how Congress smiled at 
 the visionary scheme to have a horseback mail 
 once in two weeks over the Alleghanies into the 
 West. Mr. Brown was told that such mail ac- 
 commodations would never be needed, and that 
 the obstacles to such a road were insuperable. 
 It appeared, slowly, that the obstacles were not 
 in the Alleghanies, but in Washington. The 
 struggles of the West for their national roads 
 were constant and varied through multiplex and 
 intricate and formidable opposition. This opposi- 
 tion, principally from the tide-water East, sprang 
 from various causes ; mainly it was from a failure 
 to grasp and comprehend the West, and to antici- 
 pate its future, and hence indifference to its de- 
 velopment. There were, also, vast funded moneys 
 in commerce and in Eastern lands, which would 
 suffer under Western growth. There were added 
 the petty ambitions of tlie village statesman, to 
 whom his county and the country were almost 
 synonymous, and who, therefore, picketed and 
 fingered his ancestral garden in " pent-up Utica." 
 But slowly, somewhat imperceptibly and irresist- 
 ibly, the centre of national power moved west- 
 ward, and still going west, it held its emigrating 
 centre in 1880, as has been already stated, on the 
 Kentucky side of the Ohio, eight miles west by 
 south from the heart of Cincinnati. 
 
 We have not had many men built on the plan 
 of the breadth of our continent, who could easily
 
 '2'X2 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 turn it in hand, as a piece of property, and ex- 
 amine its Atlantic and Pacitic, and lake and gulf 
 sides. The limitations of their comprehension com- 
 pelled many of our leading men to be provincial 
 in their feelings and sectional in their policies. 
 Travel to the interior regions was not much in- 
 dulged in because of discomforts, expense, and cost 
 of time, on account of the magnificent distances, 
 A trip to the Ohio in tlie first quarter of the cen- 
 tury was a greater undertaking than one to China 
 to-day. So ignorance of the West, its distance 
 from the colonial seaboard, and the lack of pro- 
 phetic foresight by the East, as well as jealous 
 anxieties concerning its growth, doomed its de- 
 velopment by congressional aid to a constant 
 struggle, till the balance of power found a way 
 over the Alleghanies which Congress could not 
 find for a semi-monthly mail on horseback. Even 
 Webster, one of the first to entertain a continental 
 policy, came up but slowly to the eminence of a 
 national statesman. It was as late as 1836, when 
 the Louisville Canal Bill was under discussion, that 
 he made that noble utterance : " For one, I look 
 to the magnitude of the object, and not to its 
 locality. I ask not whether it be east or west 
 of the mountains. There are no Alleghanies in 
 my politics." He crossed them the next year and 
 spent five days, in June, beyond the Mississippi, 
 in St. Louis. 
 
 Sketchimi here and there this Eastern neglect
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST, 293 
 
 of the West serves to introduce a case boldly 
 illustrative and somewhat extreme. The illus- 
 tration will have weight in the fact that the life 
 of the person covered eighty-eight years of the 
 Eepublic, closing in the fourth year of the late 
 war, and that almost his entire adult life was pub- 
 lic, bearing state and national and civic and aca- 
 demic honor, while he sustained well a name 
 eminent in New England history. Josiah Quiucy 
 served one year in the Massachusetts Senate, 
 entered Congress, — the lower House, — in 1805, 
 and retired in 1813, and was for sixteen years the 
 president of Harvard College. The publicity of 
 the man in offices so high and filled by election, 
 gives prominence and weight to his views on 
 national questions, some of the cardinal ones 
 of which, his son and biographer says, he adhered 
 to, " right or wrong," to the day of his death. 
 
 By the addition of Louisiana to the public do- 
 main, Mr. Quincy maintained that the Consti- 
 tution was violated and the foundations of the 
 Government were unsettled, so tliat no State 
 formed out of it could constitutionally enter the 
 Union or become an equal with States founded 
 in the original domain.^ 
 
 On the 15th of January, 1811, and by a vote 
 of seventy-seven to thirty-six, Louisiana was ad- 
 mitted as a State into the Union. On the day 
 
 1 The Life of Josiah Quincy. By Edmund Quincy. 1874. 
 pp. 91, 97, 205.
 
 29-4 EASTEILX JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 preceding, Mr. Quincy spoke against the admis- 
 sion, and in very strong terms, some of them 
 remarkable : " I am compelled to declare it as my 
 deliberate opinion, that if this bill passes, the 
 bonds of the Union are virtually dissolved ; so 
 that the States which compose it are free from 
 their moral obligations, and that, as it will be the 
 right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to pre- 
 pare definitely for a separation, amicably if they 
 can, violently if they must." ^ 
 
 One would not be looking for the doctrines of 
 secession from Massachusetts, and so many years 
 in advance of South Carolina. But when the same 
 doctrines came into Congress from the South, in 
 1830, Massacliusetts also furnished their energetic 
 denial and refutation. 
 
 " ' But,' says the gentleman from Tennessee, Mr. 
 Ehea, ' these people have been seven years citi- 
 zens of the United States.' I deny it, sir. As 
 citizens of New Orleans, or of Louisiana, they 
 never have been, and by the mode proposed they 
 never will be, citizens of the United States. . . . 
 "Why, sir, I have already heard of six States and 
 some say there will be, at no great distance of 
 time, more. We have thirteen now, and nine 
 stately Territories in vigorous progress. I have 
 also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will be far 
 to the east of the centre of the contemplated 
 
 1 Life of Josiah Quincy, p. 206.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST, 295 
 
 empire. If the bill is passed, the principle is rec- 
 ognized. All the rest are mere questions of ex- 
 pediency. It is impossible such a power could be 
 granted. It was not for these men that our fathers 
 fought, it was not for them this Constitution was 
 adopted. You have no authority to throw the 
 rights and liberties and property of this people 
 into hotch-pot with the wild men on the Missouri, 
 nor with the mixed, though more respectable, race 
 of Anglo-Hispano Americans, who bask on the 
 sands in the mouth of the Mississippi. . . . Do 
 you suppose the people of the aSTorthern and Atlan- 
 tic States will, or ought, to look on w'ith patience, 
 and see representatives and senators from the Eed 
 Eiver and the Missouri pouring themselves upon 
 this and the other floor, managing the concerns of 
 a seaboard one thousand and five hundred miles at 
 least from their residences, and having a prepon- 
 derance in councils into which, constitutionally, 
 they could never have been admitted. . . . Take 
 care, in your haste after effectual dominion, not to 
 overload the scale by heaping it with these new 
 acquisitions. . . . Already tiie old States sink in 
 the estimation of members, when brought into 
 comparison with these new countries. . . . "We 
 have been asked : ' What are some of the small 
 States compared with the IMississippi territory ? ' 
 The gentleman from that territory, Mr. Poindex- 
 ter, spoke the other day of the Mississippi as of 
 ' a high road between.' Good heavens ! between
 
 296 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 what, Mr. Speaker ? ' Why, tlie Eastern and the 
 "Western States.' So that all the northwestern 
 Territories, all the countries once the extreme west- 
 ern boundary of the Union, are hereafter to he 
 denominated Eastern States.' [How accurately, 
 how unwillingly and unintentionally correct ! For 
 a north and south halving-line of the Union of 
 that day, including the " unconstitutional " Louis- 
 iana, would place the most of Minnesota and Iowa 
 and all of Missouri and Arkansas and Louisiana, 
 and sections of Kansas, the Indian Territory, and 
 Texas, within the Eastern States.] . . . The exten- 
 sion of their principles to the States contemplated 
 beyond the Mississippi, cannot, will not, and ought 
 not to be borne. . . . The bill, if it passes, is a 
 death-blow to the Constitution."^ 
 
 Of this speech Mr. Hildreth says : " It was the 
 first announcement on the floor of Congress of the 
 doctrines of secession." ^ Two years afterward Mr. 
 Quincy returned to private life, and in April, 1813, 
 gave the annual address before the Washington 
 Benevolent Society of Boston. It is reported to 
 have been received with great favor, and passages 
 from it may therefore be taken while considering 
 the East and the West in their relations to each 
 other. Especially may this be done in view of the 
 fact that, the same year, the Massachusetts legis- 
 
 1 Life of Josiah Quincy, pp. 206-211. 
 
 2 History of the United States, voL iii. p. 226.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 297 
 
 lature passed a resolution instructing its represen- 
 tatives in Congress to ask for the repeal of the 
 action which admitted Louisiana as a State into 
 the Union. Mr. Quincy says, in this address : — 
 
 " The new States govern the old, the unsettled 
 the settled; the inHueuces of emigrants prevail 
 over those of the ancient natives ; a black popula- 
 tion overbalances the white; from woods and lakes 
 and desert wilderness legislators issue, controlling 
 the destinies of a seaboard people, paralyzing all 
 their interests and darkening all their prospects. 
 ... A whirlwind from the west is passing over 
 those massy pillars of our greatness, and they are 
 almost prostrate. Our commerce, navigation, and 
 fisheries are gone. . . . Louisiana is spoken of as 
 being an integral part of the nation, with as much 
 indifference as though it had been admitted by an 
 unquestionable authority. We hear of the inten- 
 tion of cutting it up into new States, with as much 
 unconcern as though we had no interest in the 
 matter. . . . That proportion of power which they 
 [the New England States] possessed at the adoption 
 of the Constitution is gone. This proportion, thus 
 diminished, is every day diminishing still further, 
 in a geometrical ratio. . . . Out from your coun- 
 cils, out from your confidence, be every man who 
 will not maintain the old foundations of New Eng- 
 land prosperity. Follow no longer the doctrines 
 and commandments from the mountains. Con-
 
 298 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 tend earnestly fur the conimerciiil faith delivered 
 by your fathers, and let him who will not stand up 
 for.it be to you worse than an infidel." ^ 
 
 Of course we pardon much to the habitat of the 
 man whose home commanded a full view of Boston 
 Harbor, and from whose windows every ship enter- 
 ing and leaving tliat port could be seen. His ideas 
 of national prosperity were inseparable from tide- 
 water. Hence his extreme Eastern and commer- 
 cial notions drove him rashly to secession from 
 agricultural and fresh-water growth in the deep 
 interior. The Republican chick must not lose 
 sight of its egg-shell. We also pardon much to 
 the gloomy times when the War of 1812, with its 
 embargo, and with shipping and wharves decaying 
 together, cast an eclipse over the Atlantic seaboard. 
 Yet it would seem that an ardent man, educated 
 and in the prime of forty-one years, should have 
 had some of the instincts of a prophet and been 
 open to the inspiration of a boundless continent. 
 But we remember that a prince among prophets 
 wrote also a " Book of Lamentation." The surprise 
 is lessened by the fact that, even yet, many men, 
 very able in their sphere, fail to appreciate our mag- 
 nificent interior development. They were born 
 among ships, and when they travel it is in ships, 
 and so their education is in local rather than in 
 national interests and pursuits. They are able up 
 
 1 Life of Josiah Quincy, pp. 309, 316.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST, 299 
 
 to their limits, but lack au apprehension and an 
 appreciation. They have " Alleghanies in their 
 politics." 
 
 It is with deep regret for the entire dominion 
 of our flag that one holding such view, and in so 
 pronounced a way, had the guiding and moulding 
 for sixteen years of the American sentiment of so 
 many young men coming prominently to the front 
 in national affairs. The inevitable and, indeed, 
 the accomplished from 1803 downward, was de- 
 clined and disowned, and all of the Union west of 
 the Mississippi was put under ban as an unconsti- 
 tutional and enforced partner in the American 
 Union. This was a rejection, so far as it had 
 power, of more territory than the fathers gained in 
 the Eevolution ; and as that immense valley, one 
 half larger than the old Eoman empire, is indi- 
 visible in interests and sympathies, the sense of 
 alienation thus begotten extended from the Alle- 
 ghanies to the Pacific. The indifference to its de- 
 velopment and the ignorance of its geography and 
 natural resources and prophetic growths, thus en- 
 gendered in the East, are felt to this day. Scholars 
 have taken their diplomas with a much better 
 knowledge of Europe than of the United States, 
 and are more at home in the exhumed towns and 
 cities of classic lands than in the land of their birth 
 and life work. Thalaba, among the ruins of Baby- 
 lon, could not have been a more bewildered and 
 amazed traveller than would be many Eastern grad-
 
 300 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 iiate3 ill any one of a dozen living cities, ranging 
 from a score of thousand inhabitants to the size 
 of Boston, in that same alienated territory. As a 
 sectional sentiment, it was historically and pro- 
 phetically correct to say " the old States sink," 
 while it is left for any one to say to-day that the 
 United States, as a nation, stand abreast of the first 
 in the world ; or, as the Eiiglisli Premier puts it: 
 " I suppose that the very next census, in the year 
 1880, will exhibit her to the world as certainly the 
 wealthiest of all the nations." And the fact proved 
 that Gladstone was correct, when the nations sub- 
 mitted their census tables for 1880. 
 
 The frequent reference to salt-water commerce, 
 not yet obsolete, lacks the national in scope and 
 interest, and does not correspond with the inter- 
 national character of the United States. Nine hun- 
 dred steamers chafing the levee at different times, 
 and forty at once, at St. Louis, gave me different 
 feelings. The influence of immigrants over the 
 " ancient nation " was bewailed then as now, but 
 were not the fathers " immigrants " ? Complaint 
 was filed that the West would come east fifteen 
 hundred miles to manage a thousand miles of At- 
 lantic seaboard ; yet what if the East now propose 
 to go three and four thousand miles westward to 
 manage six thousand five hundred miles of Pacific 
 seaboard ? The lament arose, nor has it wholly 
 died away, that the proportional power in each of 
 the original thirteen States was diminished by the
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 301 
 
 addition of new States. This is not kindly or gen- 
 erous or politic. The second son of Jacob lessened 
 relatively the power of the first, but the twelve 
 made a splendid family. The lament lacks the 
 national air of " The Star-Spangled Banner." The 
 " whirlwind from the West," so bemoaned, has 
 become the most magnificent and well-regulated 
 trade-wind of the world. 
 
 It is among the surprises, in the unfolding of 
 our early history, to see with what struggle of 
 study among statesmen, and in what blindness 
 and often against what judicial opposition, the 
 West has gained recognition as a part of the Amer- 
 ican unit, and the privileges and riglits common 
 to those who are born free and equal. One 
 would not suppose that it would require sev- 
 enty years for a United States jurisdiction to emi- 
 grate from tide-water to the Great Lakes and the 
 Mississippi Eiver; yet so long, and by painful stages 
 and often with retreats followed by heroic advances, 
 was the admiralty jurisdiction in the Supreme 
 Court of the United States in going from salt 
 water westward to fresh water ; and so much has 
 it cost the western part and now grand majority 
 of the nation to conquer acknowledgment and 
 place and equality before our Supreme bench and 
 bar. The fact may be stated on this wise. 
 
 In the organization of our Government under the 
 Constitution, English law became largely pattern 
 and substance for American law, and in this way
 
 302 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 tlie admiralty court was established in the young 
 republic. This court had jurisdiction over mari- 
 time causes, both civil and criminal. Under the 
 English scope of this court a maritime cause must 
 arise on the open seas, not only off shore but be- 
 yond the mouths of rivers and creeks, and out on 
 the open ocean. In 1789 Congress divided tlie 
 country into districts, in each of which it estab- 
 lished a court, and into these, by the Constitution 
 and acts of Congress, came "all civil causes of 
 admiralty and maritime jurisdiction."^ 
 
 Following now the English pattern, where terri- 
 tory was so insular, and water commerce so almost 
 wholly marine, and attempting to exercise tlie ad- 
 miralty jurisdiction on a vast continent, and where 
 fresh-water commerce was almost unlimited, grave 
 difficulties arose. It will be considered that at 
 that time American legislators and the bar and the 
 bench had mainly English law to study, and many 
 of the leaders had studied it in English schools. 
 The transfer and adaptation, therefore, of the ad- 
 miralty jurisdiction of Great Britain to a continent, 
 and to a new and growing nation, were attended 
 with obstacles of moment. 
 
 It was a long struggle among jurists to limit 
 and define the locality where a maritime case could 
 arise for admiralty jurisdiction. The English law 
 and rulings of Parliament fixed this on tlie high 
 seas. In 1825 our Supreme Court had so far out- 
 
 1 Judiciary Act of 1789.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 303 
 
 grown the English limits as to hold that where- 
 ever ocean-tides ebbed and flowed, up and down 
 bays and straits, creeks and rivers, with water 
 enough to take freight from and to the ocean, there 
 admiralty jurisdiction would hold. This was a 
 great departure from English law, and a great move- 
 ment toward providing our river waters with 
 maritime courts. The law was thus brought to the 
 shore of the continent in its movement toward 
 the west. The presence of tidal effect in a body 
 of water, be it a bay, river, or water-way of any 
 kind, made it possible for a case for admiralty juris- 
 diction. This was reaffirmed in the De Soto case 
 in 1847 of a steamboat collision on the Missis- 
 sippi above New Orleans, yet not above tidal influ- 
 ences. This reaffirmation was made at great cost 
 of learning and study and argument. 
 
 But as yet all river and lake commerce in the 
 West, beyond a marine tide, was beyond the reach 
 and advantages of admiralty jurisdiction. The re- 
 cognition of the growing, commercial, and opulent 
 West, and the progress of laws into it to protect 
 its fresh-water trade in the same way and to the 
 same extent that salt-water trade was protected, 
 was exceedingly slow. What saltness had to do 
 with jurists and laws it is hard to divine. 
 
 After these decisions of the Supreme Court, and 
 in 1845, Congress passed " an act extending the 
 jurisdiction of the district courts to certain cases 
 upon the lakes and navigable waters connecting
 
 304 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 the sarae."^ The cases were to be treated tlie same 
 as if they were on the high seas or on the tide- 
 waters. This was an immense gain for our inland 
 and lake trade ; and in a case arising under it in 
 1851 the court decided that the "admiralty and 
 marine jurisdiction" given by the Constitution ex- 
 tends to our great interior seas, and is not limited 
 Ity tide-water. It was not, therefore, till 1851 that 
 the navigable fresh water of the West came into 
 an equality with tlie salt water of the East in the 
 interests of the commerce of the Union. 
 
 And still Western commerce was kept under 
 intimidation. It was an agitated question whether 
 admiralty jurisdiction extended also over rivers 
 not connecting the Great Lakes ; and whether it 
 could cover cases arising where the navigation was 
 not " between ports and places in different States 
 and Territories," according to the words of the Con- 
 gressional Act of 1845, but between ports within 
 the same State, and unconnected with foreign com- 
 merce. On these points finally Mr. Justice Clif- 
 ford eased the West, by ruling that neither the 
 admixture of foreign commerce nor tide-water nor 
 State lines liuiit admiralty jurisdiction. The navi- 
 gation furnishing a case might be wholly within 
 one State, as in a collision on the Alabama, whose 
 navigable waters are wholly within that State, and 
 where the collision occurred two hundred miles 
 above tide-water. In this case Mr. Justice Clifford 
 
 1 5 U. S. Laws, 726.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 305 
 
 went very far to place the West on an equality with 
 the East in the rights of her commerce before the 
 courts, where he ruled that so far as locality is con- 
 cerned, admiralty jurisdiction is co-extensive with 
 the navigability of an American river. 
 
 Other justices, as McLane, Nelson, and Daniel, 
 however, still divided the court by insisting on 
 tide-water limits and foreign or interstate com- 
 merce, as necessary to the founding of a case in 
 admiralty jurisdiction ; and it was not till 1868, 
 in the case of the " Belfast," that the ruling of Mr. 
 Justice Cliftbrd superseded all previous adverse 
 decisions, and placed the inland country of the 
 Union, with all its lake and river commerce, on 
 an equality with the tide-water sections before 
 the courts of the nation. 
 
 In this protracted struggle of seventy years to 
 assimilate the new West to the old East in a 
 common judicial system, and to ignore the salt- 
 ness or the freshness of water in the one fact that 
 it could float American commerce, it is interest- 
 ing to use a passage from Webster, as a side light 
 cast on the scene : " Whoever would do his duty 
 and his whole duty in the councils of this Govern- 
 ment must look upon the country as it is, in its 
 whole length and breadth. He must comprehend 
 it in its vast extent, its novel character, its sudden 
 development, its amazing progress, confounding all 
 calculations, and almost overwhelming the imagi- 
 nation. . . . With us, at least in this part of the 
 20
 
 306 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 country, iicavigatioii IVom the seas docs not stop 
 where the tide stops. Our ports and harbors are 
 not at the mouths of rivers only, or at the head 
 of the tides of the sea. Hundretls of miles, nay, 
 thousands of miles beyond the point where the 
 tides of the ocean are felt, deep waters spread out, 
 and capacious harbors open themselves to the 
 reception of a vast and increasing navigation." 
 
 It was in 183(5 when Webster made these 
 remarks on the Louisville Canal Bill before the 
 Senate. It was in the exercise of much legal 
 study and argument, eleven years later, that the 
 Supreme Court reaffirmed the point beyond fur- 
 ther question, that admiralty law could go up a 
 river as far as the tide goes. So was this stately 
 progress of the nation's will led off by a conti- 
 nental statesman into new lands and commercial 
 openings, to be followed up and affirmed by our 
 most conservative and authoritative tribunal. The 
 final and total victory for the West came in 1868, 
 when the full advantages of admiralty jurisdiction 
 were extended over all American waters which 
 were deep enough to float articles of trade.^ 
 
 This tardy, reluctant, and almost protesting 
 adjustment of the colonial and Atlantic States 
 system to the new and magnificent interior was 
 
 1 Wallace Reports, vol. vii. pp. 288, 639, 640 ; vol. viii. 
 pp. 20, 25 ; vol. x. p. 563 ; vol. xi. pp. 24, 26 ; vol. xv. p. 
 384 ; vol. xvi. p. 531 ; vol. xxi. pp. 245, 286 ; vol. xviii. p. 
 304. American Law Review, vol. v.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 307 
 
 not surprising. The young Eepublic had no right 
 to expect any such growth as followed its founda- 
 tion. The Old World, from which only the fathers 
 could reason, furnished no precedent or warrant, 
 and there is no probability that it ever will, of any 
 such marvellous development. The East was as a 
 young professional man fresh from the schools of 
 the Old World and slow to venture beyond the 
 note-books of the lecture-room. Our new popu- 
 lation and institutions and wealth, before they 
 passed the watershed of the great valley, suffered 
 from this colonial and parental timidity. They 
 who comfortably held the old homesteads could 
 not put on the daring and originality of the more 
 energetic and enterprising, who took the ox-team 
 and pack-horse and disappeared on the Western 
 trail, where the post-office addresses of their chil- 
 dren were soon to be in cities of ten, seventy, 
 and a hundred thousand people. As is apt to be 
 the case in the family, the young West grew in 
 years and experience faster than the parent East 
 grew in the knowledge of it. Adaptation by the 
 home government did not keep pace with " the 
 sudden development, the amazing progress," which 
 demanded it ; and the civic oak planted by the 
 fathers in the rock and ice of the East did not 
 recognize promptly and take on gracefully the 
 annular growths which the deep soil of the West 
 forced on it when it was planted beyond the 
 Alleghanies. The fathers were slow and resistant
 
 308 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 in conceding the fact that fresh water might need 
 lightliousos wlierc cities to-day of one or two 
 hundred thousand make ports for the commerce 
 of the Lakes, and where Chicago opens a harhor 
 for a popuhition nearly double that of Boston. 
 
 The same feelings of the East toward the West 
 were developed in the struggles to build national 
 and military roads into the new country. A 
 chapter on this topic would be interesting and 
 instructive in unfolding our general theme, but it 
 is not needful. The apathy and neglect shown 
 toward the nation of the future have been suffi- 
 ciently illustrated. 
 
 The causes are not obscure. The magnificent 
 "West was totally beyond reasonable expectation 
 or even imagination. Many of the statesmen- 
 prophets, whose predictions we have embodied in 
 our chapter on The Empire of the Future, had 
 not then spoken ; some of them were not born. 
 Moreover, and more to the point, many formerly, 
 as now, were more gifted for public service in 
 memories and precedents than in anticipation. 
 
 The structure of a new nation is an experience 
 so strange that the nation itself does not seem to 
 catch up with the fact, and it moves on a little 
 awkwardly, as a lad growing fast toward manhood 
 does not become readily and easily familiar with 
 his new years and added avoirdupois. The dis- 
 covery has come dreamily to some that the West 
 is a part of us and somewhat ponderous.
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 309 
 
 The feeliniT has been as constant as the orowtli 
 of the nation into wild land, that the increase on 
 the border was speculative and forced and over- 
 done, and would be only temporary, with disas- 
 trous reaction. Yet the growtli and the foreboding 
 have moved off together, and each year has seen 
 its new belt of settlements, and in the East a new 
 set of prophets of evil. Since my border home 
 was in Missouri in 1840 I have seen eight States 
 and eight Territories added to the census list, each 
 to the surprise of the Atlantic slope, untravelled 
 and unstudied in the United States of America 
 beyond the Mississippi. And, except in new 
 civil divisions with new names, there is every 
 probability that this enlargement of the nation, 
 with the accompanying surprise and scepticism 
 of the colonial section, will run for a century yet. 
 Fortunately, in its immense preponderance of 
 growth tlie new country some time since came 
 into the mastery of its own destiny in civil af- 
 fairs. As we were once hunting land in the great 
 prairies of northwestern Iowa with a national 
 man, and scholarly in statesmanship, he remarked : 
 " We would move the capital over the Mississippi, 
 out into the nation, but that it would cost two 
 or three hundred millions, and now our war debt 
 is heavy. We can do it any time." The remark 
 was easy, and quite in keeping with our vastness 
 of vision on those high prairies. 
 
 In the times now sketched it was a policy of the
 
 310 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 North and East to admit to councils and confidence 
 and honors only those who would sacrifice new 
 growths in the West to old foundations in the East; 
 but that was when Hercules was in his cradle. 
 The scales of patronage and power and honors, 
 however, turned slowly but permanently westward, 
 and a singular reverse, typical of many, was wit- 
 nessed in a convention at Cincinnati for the nomi- 
 nation of president and vice-president. A name 
 much honored in connection with the highest gifts 
 of the people was offered fur the vice-presidency. 
 When it was stated, on inquiry, that he had never 
 visited the West, the name was dropped instantly 
 and finally, thus illustrating, says a member of the 
 convention, and my correspondent, " a growing sen- 
 timent among our people that if a man aimed at 
 high political office, where the welfare and perhaps 
 destiny of the country were to be placed in his 
 keeping, he must have manifested enough interest 
 in the country and its people to have at least vis- 
 ited the various sections, rather than spend his 
 leisure time and money in extended visits and en- 
 joyments of other countries." 
 
 " When they gain strength, which will be sooner 
 than most people conceive," said Washington, 
 speaking of the West. In view of what he saw 
 and foresaw, he favored an exploration and study 
 of the new country, development of it, and a sym- 
 pathetic, affiliated cultivation of the mutual rela- 
 tions between the old and the new. The advice
 
 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 311 
 
 of tlie eminent statesman as well as soldier was 
 not well heeded and followed, perhaps because it 
 was too general or universal. For we recall what 
 Webster said of him at the centennial of his birth- 
 day : " Washington stood not only at the com- 
 mencement of a new era, but at the head of a new 
 world." 
 
 It is evident to all that the nation is moving 
 west with the massiveness and grandeur of empire. 
 In 1811 it was New England which said deplor- 
 ingly, " The old States sink." Very true ; and the 
 region beyond the Mississippi, then treated as an 
 alien, now puts fifty-two representatives into Con- 
 gress, against the twenty-six from the section which 
 called her alien. The depression of the old thir- 
 teen is only relative ; and what continental Amer- 
 ican does not foi'get provincial comparisons in 
 national exaltation ! It was the grand eminence 
 and pivot of success in the dubious struggle for the 
 union of the colonies, when Patrick Henry rose to 
 the exigency of the occasion by saying, " The dis- 
 tinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New 
 Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am 
 not a Virginian, but an American," ^ 
 
 The time for comparisons and rivalries and jeal- 
 ousies is gone by. With her acres and natural 
 resources, and votes and wealth, and wonderful in- 
 crease in population, and with pre-eminently her 
 
 1 Frotliingham's Rise of the Republic of the United States, 
 p. 400.
 
 312 EASTERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 
 
 young ouei'gy, ilie West can take care of herself. 
 Fortunate is the aspirant for national honors who 
 is born west of the Alleghanies ; and if he has failed 
 of this he is wise in recovering from the political 
 misfortune by extensive travel at home. 
 
 It is to be regretted that benevolent wealth, 
 moving off voluntarily and divinely, like the gifts 
 of God, has not kept the educating and Christian- 
 izinff forces abreast of the financial and civil, in 
 their westward progress. As a general thing, the 
 hand-to-hand collections for such purposes have 
 gone to new fields, while the princely gifts and the 
 legacies have stopped in old fields near home, to 
 enrich or embellish institutions already strong, and 
 to lay more foundations, where they already are 
 close neighbors to each other. If educating and 
 Christianizing funds had been invested with the 
 forethought which determines a good financial in- 
 vestment, — where the greatest possible income is 
 sure, — more money, in benevolent channels, would 
 have gone over the Alleghanies and the Missis- 
 sippi, It would not be difficult to satisfy a board 
 of Wall Street and State Street men, whether be- 
 nevolent moneys should be invested in the East or 
 in the West, for the highest dividends, on long time. 
 Other things being equal, investments grow in pro- 
 portion to the growth of population in the same 
 place. Our last national census showed for the 
 preceding decade an increase of eighteen per cent 
 in the population of New England, New York,
 
 EA.STERN JEALOUSY OF THE WEST. 313 
 
 New Jersey, aud Peuiisylvania — nine States — and 
 an increase of thirty-four per cent in the nortli- 
 western — fourteen States — and of forty-eight per 
 cent in the seven Pacific States. The Western in- 
 crease is about double the Eastern, and the greater, 
 the farther we go back in the decades. For results, 
 a gift of ten thousand dollars for the West is equal 
 to a gift of one hundred thousand for the East, so 
 extensive and open and prolific are those new and 
 unoccupied fields. Humboldt informs us that a 
 follower of Cortez first sowed wheat in America. 
 He had but three kernels to begin with, which he 
 had found in their supply of rice, but he planted it 
 in the right place. The crop or "dividends" iu 
 1880 were 459,483,137 bushels.
 
 314 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 " TF there were to be no railroads, it was, on the 
 JL whole, rather an impertinence in Columbus 
 to discover America." The point is well taken by 
 Gail Hamilton, The tide margins of the conti- 
 nent could provide for a belt of civilized homes, 
 which navigation could encourage and utilize for 
 the rest of the world, and steamers could do simi- 
 lar service along the banks of large rivers. All 
 this, however, when best done, would leave the 
 New World neglected in primitive nature. It 
 might do for insular England, so threatened by 
 salt water, but would not for Dakota, three times 
 as large, and two thousand miles from the Atlantic 
 Ocean. 
 
 In 1840 I had occasion to traverse somewhat 
 the almost unbroken prairie country stretching 
 away, ocean-like, from Chicago to Cairo. To the 
 lone traveller in the saddle, with scant roads to 
 guide or fences to check one, and a point of timber 
 here and there, like a headland at sea, it was mostly 
 ccelum undiquc et undique campus. The lonesome 
 farms furnished magnificent livin2;s in "rains and
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 315 
 
 meats and vegetables, almost miraculous in the 
 eyes of the immigrant from New England, where 
 the very sure annual staples are rock and ice. Yet 
 what was to be done with the " twelve baskets 
 full of fragments" in Illinois? My friend in 
 Sangamon County was feeding unthreshed wheat 
 from the stack to his cattle and swine, rather than 
 to thresh and haul it fifteen miles, and get but 
 twenty-five cents a bushel for it : four years later 
 it could command only that in Chicago. The 
 lands loaded and drugged the market at a dollar 
 and a quarter an acre ; farm wages were ten to 
 thirteen dollars per month, and board. Surplus 
 products were exchanged — as oats, twelve cents a 
 bushel ; corn, fifteen ; beef and pork, one and a half 
 to two and a half cents a pound — for store goods, 
 and these were taken, in exchange, at about double 
 their prices in the East. On the Iowa shore of 
 the Mississippi, in 1841-43, we found a belt of 
 settlements inland for perhaps fifteen miles, log 
 and some board cabins and houses, with the staples 
 of life easy and abundant, and prices somewhat 
 better than in the Illinois interior. The Indian 
 and the buffalo had the prices of land and of food 
 supplies quite their own way throughout the most 
 of the Territory, and continued to do so till they 
 heard the locomotive over the river eastward. 
 There lies before me the first map of Iowa ever 
 published — 1845. It shows thirty-one counties 
 — there are now ninetv-nine — clusterino; on the
 
 31G THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 Mississippi between the Des Moines and tlie lati- 
 tude of Prairie du Chien. About eighty towns 
 are located on this map, — Iowa now has fifteen 
 hundred and seventy-eight post-offices, — and the 
 most of them within a day's ride of the river. 
 Nine of the counties do not show one town. The 
 State embraces about fifty-six thousand square 
 miles, and it would be difficult to find the same 
 amount of land in one body in the world that can 
 furnish more cereal and flesh food for the human 
 family. Yet at the time here named, such was 
 the condition of transportation between the East 
 and the West, or between tlie supply and the 
 world's market, that a bushel of wheat and an 
 Eastern letter were at the same cost in Iowa, — 
 twenty-five cents. The railroad had not then 
 crossed the Mississippi. Now, postage there is 
 two cents, and wheat from seventy cents to a 
 dollar. The railroad has arrived in Iowa, seven 
 thousand four hundred and seventy-eight miles 
 of it.i 
 
 Illinois and Iowa are fair illustrations of all our 
 Western States prior to the introduction of the 
 railroad system. They, from the first, had their 
 princely wealth in cereals and meats, as truly as 
 in the mines, and each staple was awaiting equall}'' 
 development and a market. The wheat and the 
 corn were in the loam, potentially and waiting, as 
 
 1 Notes on Iowa Territory. "With a Map. By Willard Bar- 
 rows, United States Deputy Surveyor. Cincinnati, 1845.
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 317 
 
 really as the strata of coals and ores underneath. 
 The great pine forests in Washington Territory 
 were worth nothing, except enough for one house 
 for a resident owner, till he could have trans- 
 portation. 
 
 " Trees six and seven feet in diameter and two 
 hundred to two hundred and fifty feet high are 
 very common, perhaps rarely out of sight, in the 
 forest in "Washington Territory, Eight feet in 
 diameter and three hundred feet high are rare, 
 but still not at all uncommon. The builder of the 
 telegraph line had hitched his wire, in one case, 
 to a cedar which was fourteen feet in diameter. A 
 monster tree that had fallen — the forests are full 
 of fallen trees — measured three hundred and 
 twenty-five feet long ; and another tree at a dis- 
 tance of ninety feet from its root was seven feet 
 in diameter." ^ An editor at Olympia informed 
 the author in October, 1885, that they were pre- 
 paring for the New Orleans Exposition a section 
 from a Washington Territory tree nineteen feet in 
 diameter. 
 
 The grains, meats, hides, ores, coals, timber, and 
 wool have practically been waiting for their oppor- 
 tunity in the great North American West a thou- 
 sand years. They were natural values, on deposit, 
 without interest, and subject to draft for all the 
 uses and profits of conmierce. I was once offered 
 very heavy timber-land on the head-waters of the 
 
 1 Across the Continent. By Samuel Bowles. 1865. p. 206.
 
 318 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 Conuecticut for one dollar an acre, but only the bear 
 and deer and myself seemed able to reach it. A 
 raih'oad has since made it a piece of good property. 
 
 To state the case briefly, and then expand and 
 illustrate it by items, the board of appraisers or 
 of valuation for the United States consists of 
 three, — the highway, the canal, and the railroad. 
 Each rises in valuation on all real estate and 
 local products within accessible distances ; the 
 railroads mark highest and last. What is not 
 appraised, as in central Wyoming, where the 
 United States have not yet surveyed the lands, 
 as not yet in demand enough to be put on the 
 market, up in Alaska on the Yukon, or out on 
 the Aleutian Islands, has no nominal value, — 
 that is, value which can be named. The timber, 
 arable lands, fisheries, ores, and furs have the 
 same natural value which they would have in 
 central New York ; but to assign to them con- 
 vertible and commercial worth, this board of three 
 United States appraisers must go on the ground 
 and fix prices. 
 
 In early times our Eastern vessels went around 
 Cape Horn to California for cargoes of hides, and 
 agents contracted for the ship-load. " The num- 
 ber of cattle required might vary from a thousand 
 to tens of thousands. In some instances they 
 were corraled, and let out by tens and twenties, 
 to be despatched with sledges, or by other methods. 
 In later years they were sometimes felled in large
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 319 
 
 numbers by bullets, while grazing with the herd 
 on the plains. The hides, tallow, horns, and 
 hanks were preserved ; but the carcasses were left 
 either in piles or scattered over the plains, to dry 
 away and disappear under the scorching rays of 
 the sun. . . . The bones of the heads were some- 
 times used for the construction of fences around 
 small lots in the vicinity of their dwellings. In 
 one place, even to this day, there remains such 
 a fence nearly two rods in length. The fence was 
 of the thickness of two heads." Before the Mis- 
 sions were broken up by the Government, the 
 padres, anticipating the confiscation of both lands 
 and live-stock, slaughtered -immense numbers of 
 cattle. " It is estimated that in those three years 
 there were sent from the JNIissions to the ports 
 three hundred thousand hides with the tallow." ^ 
 
 But the railroad came in and appraised not only 
 the hides and tallow and horns, but the beef and 
 bones also, and even the hair, as worth transpor- 
 tation. After spending a month in 1885 on the 
 ranches and ranges of Wyoming, the writer reads 
 the above account from eastern California with 
 commercial horror. Dana's " Two Years Before 
 the Mast" furnishes a graphic detail of this in- 
 calculable waste on the Pacific coast, while that 
 country was waiting for a government and our 
 continental railways. 
 
 1 Histoiy of California. By E. S. Capron, Boston, 1854. 
 pp. 29-31.
 
 320 TlIK KAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST, 
 
 The expenses for doing business beyond the 
 plains and on the Pacific slope, before the Union 
 and Central and the Northern and Southern Pa- 
 cific roads were opened, left bulky goods, in the 
 mountains and beyond, almost valueless to the 
 East; while the necessaries to be carried West 
 were placed almost above price by the cost of 
 transportation. 
 
 In 1849, packages not exceeding fifteen pounds 
 were carried by Adams & Co.'s Express from New 
 York to San Francisco at the rate of seventy-five 
 cents per pound. The charge was three dollars on 
 an ordinary daguerreotype, and twelve dollars on 
 a package the size of a common novel. 
 
 Julesburg is in Colorado, now a station on the 
 Union Pacific, one hundred and thirty-nine miles 
 east of Cheyenne. In 18G4 there arrived at this 
 shanty town, from the States, 3,574 wagons ot 
 freight, under guard of 4,258 men, and hauled by 
 28,592 animals. At that date Holladay's Over- 
 land Express had been under way two or three 
 years, — started on a capital of $2,500,000, — and 
 this year it was emjDloying, between the Missouri 
 and the mountains, 15,000 men, 20,000 wagons, 
 and 150,000 animals, on a capital of $20,000,000. 
 In 1864 it transported west 100,000,000 pounds 
 of freight, and in 1865 double this amount, at a 
 cost of fifteen cents to the pound. Bundles were 
 charged seventeen cents a pound for every hun- 
 dred miles, and passengers paid from thirty to fifty
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 321 
 
 cents a mile. Freights were from thirty-five to 
 sixty days from the Missouri to Denver, while 
 the stage made the same trip in six days. The 
 next year (1866) Government paid this company 
 $735,000 for carrying the mail and other Govern- 
 ment matter.^ 
 
 Indeed, Governor Stanford, of California, did not 
 lift too soon that first spadeful of earth for the 
 Pacific Kailroad at Sacramento, in January, 1863. 
 Yet this vast amount of merchandise, to be loaded 
 and unloaded by human hands and hauled by 
 animals, was as one solitary baggage-wagon com- 
 pared with what those prairie and mountain and 
 Pacific roads are now doing. 
 
 The railroad makes it possible to utilize natural 
 values and convert them into property, and thus 
 swell and lengthen all the channels of commerce. 
 This is more evidently true in our new country, 
 where natural resources are so much more abun- 
 dant than in the old colonial States, and cover 
 immensely more area. The great staples of life 
 have tlieir prices fixed by the railroad. The blank 
 schedule of grains, meats, wools, hides, coals, ores, 
 timber, and lumber does not have its column of 
 prices filled until the railroad comes in. 
 
 The Illinois lands were as rich and as sus- 
 ceptible of their immense burden of agricultural 
 products in 1850 as they were in 1880. At the 
 former date the State had 46,208 farms ; at the 
 
 ^ Overland Traction Engine Co. Report for 1865. p. 31. 
 21
 
 322 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 latter, 255,741. A valid reason for both facts is 
 not far to be found. It was not till 1842 that the 
 Boston and Albany Road was opened to the Hud- 
 son, and not till 1850 that the sill and strap rail 
 was removed from tlie track between Schenectady 
 and Utica. Why should wheat and beef and pork 
 be raised, and then stacked up in Illinois ? It was 
 not till 1851 that the cars could meet Western prod- 
 ucts on Lake Erie, and not till 1853 that Chicago 
 saw a locomotive. What call was there for more 
 farms in Illinois in 1850 ? If she would ship her 
 supplies east by the Mississippi and Ohio she must 
 haul them over the Alleghanies on the Portage 
 Eoad, or store them three years at Wheeling, wait- 
 ing for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to open 
 there in 1853. Illinois had had the first of prairie 
 railroads in 1838, running from Meredosia to Spring- 
 field ; but it proved a failure, and no wonder, for 
 six inches of snow would stop its engine. General 
 Semples afterward put tires two feet wide to the 
 wheels of this locomotive, and attempted to run it 
 here and there on the open prairie. The experi- 
 ment was akin in wildness to the one with sails on 
 the Baltimore and Ohio, and on the Charleston and 
 Hamburg railroads, in 1830. 
 
 In 1880 Illinois had increased her number of 
 farms from 46,208 to 255,741. Well she might, 
 for it paid, since the State then had 7,955 miles of 
 railroad, — one mile of road to every seven square 
 miles of land. The farms must have been few on
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 323 
 
 which the whistle of the locomotive could not 
 be heard, and often to take on wheat for England. 
 Other things being equal, it pays to make grain 
 and meat where the whistle of a locomotive can 
 be heard. My friend need no longer feed his un- 
 threshed wheat from the stalk, for a railroad now 
 runs within sight of that farm. 
 
 When these railroads began to come into Illinois 
 freely in 1861, the average value of land went up 
 from five to fifteen dollars an acre, and in 1880 
 improved lands averaged from thirty to fifty dol- 
 lars an acre; whereas, between 1840 and 1850, 
 when the State had one railroad only, and it a fail- 
 ure, land loaded the market at Government price. 
 At the same time (1880) the price of corn, beei^ 
 and pork had almost doubled, and wheat had gone 
 up about threefold. 
 
 The reasons are obvious. The railroad is able 
 largely to triumph over space between the producer 
 and the consumer, and can create markets for the 
 farmer. It is able to offer the Liverpool trade to 
 the Dakota wheat-fields. By this interweaving of 
 our own country with freight lines prices are equal- 
 ized across the continent, and it is a matter of 
 comparative indifference whether one's farm be 
 west of the Mississippi or east of the Hudson. 
 The price of grain is affected more by fifteen miles 
 in a freight-wagon than by fifteen hundred miles 
 in the cars. la the old times of the batrorafTe-wafion 
 between Buffalo and New York, the freight on a
 
 324 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 barrel of tiour was ten dollars ; the Erie Canal re- 
 duced it to two dollars in 1825 ; and now the rail- 
 road reduces it to perhaps thirty-five cents. Or, 
 to use terms in the official reports, in 1817 freight 
 was one hundred dollars a ton from Buffalo to 
 New York ; in 1825 it was twenty dollars by Erie 
 Canal ; and now it is three dollars or so. 
 
 Nor is it too bold a figure of speech to say that 
 the railroads create markets. In proportion as 
 space and time are overcome by the locomotive, 
 the opportunities for the sale of products, agricul- 
 tural and mechanical, are brought nearer to tlie 
 farm and factory and shop. With all our famil- 
 iarity with the railway in this broad domain, hav- 
 ing its right-angled diameters of two thousand and 
 three thousand miles, we do not yet comprehend 
 the unification and the centralization of our na- 
 tional industries and interests by the railway sys- 
 tem. Steam can put all our marketable and 
 movable products into one place in a few hours 
 or days, thus maintaining a kind of equation of 
 prices. So the railway forces of the North and the 
 South and the East and the West, set over against 
 each other, preserve an equilibrium in trade prices, 
 as the opposite pivots of the mariner's compass keep 
 it level and reliable on the roughest sea. Once on 
 the car, any barrel of flour in the United States is 
 within twenty possible days of the table of any 
 man who lives on the railroad in this country. 
 The greatest speed for any distance, so far as ap-
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 325 
 
 pears, is made by tlie New York and Chicago Lim- 
 ited, — 913 miles in 25 hours, or 35 miles an hour 
 for consecutive hours ; and no one conversant with 
 the history and progress of mechanics will pre- 
 sume to say that the highest limit of train speed 
 has been attained. This is practical annihilation 
 of space and time to the producer and consumer. 
 Gladstone raises some practical fears in his article 
 of 1878 in the "North American Eeview," over 
 the preservation of a fragmentary empire, like the 
 British, in forty — and now, with Burniah, furty-oue 
 — isolated portions. In our broad territory the 
 railway system unifies all our interests. 
 
 This statement may be extended to cover the 
 United States and more or less of Europe. The 
 prices of bread and meat supplies in Chicago 
 affect those of Liverpool ; and so much so, that with- 
 in the last ten years Great Britain has been moved 
 to turn one fourth of her wheat acreage to some 
 other uses. In 1880 the United States exported 
 $389,000,000 worth of grains, meats, and the prod- 
 ucts of the dairy. As this importation must tone 
 down prices there on these articles, it must compel 
 a reduction of the prices of lands and rentals. It 
 would be no very strange thing, therefore, if the 
 land question of Ireland and England and Scot- 
 land, so often and for so long time postponed in 
 Parliament, should be forced to a settlement on our 
 Western prairies. The locomotive and the steam- 
 ship are forcing English and American lands into
 
 320 TlIK l: A II, WAV SYSTKM OF THE WEST. 
 
 juxtaposiLioii. The Xcw World lias already done 
 singular and surprising things for the Old World. 
 In reality, and as among bottom forces, the United 
 States introduced the English corn-law question 
 and closed it in 1848. The world grovvs smaller, 
 the Atlantic ocean narrower, St. Paul and London 
 talk with each other hourly, and the human family, 
 in its different brandies, are coming to live nearer 
 together, as in one city or block. The term " for- 
 eigner " is dying out, — the highways between the 
 nations are so many and broad and inexpensive. 
 An old advertisement of fares on emigrant placards 
 in England told more tlian tlie passer-by read, — 
 " London to Chicago, £G 8.9." It will be wisely 
 done, if Americans allow that term, " foreigner," 
 to pass kindly and gently into disuse. Trade 
 makes nations and laws, and one need not move 
 long on the great channels of commerce, on either 
 side of the ocean, to notice that there are no 
 foreigners. 
 
 The acres and grains and meats and other sup- 
 plies for human wants are coming nearer and nearer 
 to the same prices in different cities, no matter 
 what oceans or mountains lie between. All this 
 was preordained when the locomotive first pulled 
 out from Boston and Baltimore and Philadelphia, 
 and when the first train of cars turned the pitch 
 of the watershed on the Alleghanies and went 
 "out West." 
 
 When those five shovelfuls of earth were thrown
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 327 
 
 up, as on July 4, 1828, for tlie Baltimore and Ohio, 
 — the first passenger road in the United States, — 
 by Charles Carroll, the only surviving signer of the 
 Declaration of Independence, and for the first 
 railroad in Ohio (1835), and for the first in Illinois, 
 and for the Kentucky, Frankfort, and Lexington 
 Eoad (both in 1838), deeds were done hardly sur- 
 passed by any industrial acts for the civilization of 
 the world. When those last spikes were driven at 
 the completion of the Union and Central Pacific 
 railway and of the Northern Pacific, of the South- 
 ern and of the Mexican Central, the echo of the 
 hammers and the salvos of artillery and the ring- 
 ing of bells sent good news to man like " the shot 
 heard round the world." The human race never 
 before took so long a stride as when they then 
 stepped over the Alleghanies and struck out for the 
 Pacific. It was our hap to see the waving banners 
 and to hear the glad shouts when men passed west- 
 ward through Winnipeg — the old Fort Garry of 
 the Hudson Bay Company — to drive the last spike 
 for the Canadian Pacific early in November, 1885. 
 Then another trunk road, believed to be the long- 
 est in the world, — 2,906 miles, — was completed, 
 and North America was put under another bond 
 to aid the interests and keep the peace of man- 
 kind. How different from the time when old Fort 
 Garry was in its glory of solitude, and the largest 
 monopoly, save one, in the world, held sway over 
 territory "one third larger than all Europe, larger
 
 328 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 than the United States of to-day, Alaska included, 
 by half a niillion square miles." ^ 
 
 For nearly two liundred years that iron monop- 
 oly kept white men and civilization out of tliat 
 vast region, only letting in a man with a steel trap 
 to bring out a beaver for the company. Now wor- 
 thy emigrants from Great Britain will go in freely 
 by the ten thousand, and factories will take the 
 place of steel traps around the waterfalls, and 
 grain-fields will be opened up equal to three times 
 the area of all England. 
 
 But this chapter has to do with the United 
 States, and we return from abroad and into the 
 West. The power of the railway system to develop 
 a country, naturally inviting, is well illustrated in 
 Missom'i. At the opening of the civil war that 
 magnificent and almost empire State of more than 
 sixty-eight thousand square miles had only six 
 hundred miles of railroad in operation ; but at 
 the return of peace it took a new departure. 
 " Instead of numbering our railroads by a few 
 hundred miles, they are counted by thousands 
 of miles [1883]. In that part of the State north 
 of the Missouri Eiver there is not a single county 
 which is not traversed by at least one railroad, 
 and in many cases by many. South of the Mis- 
 souri the supply of railroads is not so great, but 
 yet it is very considerable. Instead of consum- 
 
 1 Oregon : The Struggle for Possession. By William Bar- 
 rows. Boston, 1885, p. 39.
 
 THE llAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 329 
 
 ing a week to reach our great city from distant 
 parts of our State, we can reach it from the same 
 points in less than a day. Instead of having 
 but one market, we have a multitude of markets ; 
 instead of being practically excluded from the 
 world, many months every year, we are in constant 
 intercourse with it every day, and I might say 
 every night. Large and important cities have 
 sprung up in our midst. The log-cabins of the 
 farmer have been transformed into habitations 
 of comfort, and often of elegance. Our public 
 schoolhouses have been multiplied and enlarged, 
 and in many cases students of these institutions 
 are fitted for Yale and Harvard. The price of farm 
 labor, which in 1860 was eight and ten dollars per 
 month and less, is now fifteen dollars per month or 
 more. The entire assessed value of the real estate 
 in Missouri was, in 1860, S2-i9,469,620.91 ; in 
 1880, $406,104,426."! 
 
 It should be considered that as late as 1850 
 there was not one mile of railroad west of the 
 Mississippi Eiver. 
 
 It has been stated that a railroad creates a mar- 
 ket by shortening up time and space between 
 producers and consumers, be it in agriculture or 
 mechanics. Conjointly it stimulates production in 
 sections naturally adapted to it, but formerly too 
 distant from markets to make production profitable. 
 
 ^ The Railroad and the Farmer. By Hon. Edward Atkin- 
 son. 18S3, p. 54. (\n Agricultural licvieu; New York. )
 
 330 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE \YEST. 
 
 Ill proYiiig tliese two statements, a box of straw- 
 berries ill Illinois will serve us equally as well as 
 the Iron Mountain in Missouri, both waiting for 
 cars. In June, 1869, the writer was visiting in 
 CobJen, Illinois. The whole region was one vast 
 fruit-garden, opened about ten years before, on the 
 advent of the Illinois Central Railroad. There 
 were peach-orchards of twelve thousand trees, and 
 pear of twenty tliousand, and strawberry-beds of 
 half an acre to ten acres each, as also immense 
 quantities of small berries and early vegetables. 
 The principal markets were Cliicago, 323 miles, 
 Milwaukee, 408, Detroit, 610, sometimes St. Louis, 
 120 miles. There were special express fruit trains, 
 and these delicacies from the earlier and " sunny 
 South " were hurried north. The shipping clerk 
 at the station furnished me these figures for the 
 strawberry season of that year, nineteen days : 
 572,496 boxes, one quart each, eqnal to 17,890 
 bushels, forwarded. But for the railroad, only so 
 many of these boxes would have been needed as 
 would supply families and strawberry festivals 
 in that border village. 
 
 In running down the Columbia River valley by 
 cars, and up that river by steamer, in the autumn 
 of 1885, our attention was called to immense 
 salmon canneries on the banks ; and to some huge 
 fishing wheels or machines, projecting from the 
 shore into the river. A leading operator in this 
 interest informed me that duriuff the current
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE ^VEST. 331 
 
 salmon season, mainly June and July, be had 
 put up a million and a half of cans. A can of 
 salmon is one pound, and a case is forty-eight 
 cans. Before the railroads were opened to the 
 Pacific this branch of commerce was slight. In 
 1866 the product Avas only 4,000 cases, but in 
 1884 the number had gone up to 672,350 cases, 
 which realized to the people more than three 
 millions of dollars. "The foreign demand has 
 become a settled fact, and Oregon canned salmon 
 is being used in nearly all civilized countries as a 
 daily article of diet. . . . Since the opening of the 
 Northern Pacific, fresh salmon are exported to the 
 Eastern States in refrigerator cars, — an export, 
 although it bids fair to increase each year, which 
 can only be conducted at each season for two or 
 three months."^ All the United States to the east- 
 ward of the Eocky Mountains is supplied with 
 the canned salmon ; wliile Australia, England, and 
 other European markets are extensive customers, 
 and the business is thought to be capable of great 
 expansion. 
 
 It is not necessary to schedule and tabulate all 
 the commercial interests on our northwest coast, 
 which the railroad has created or caused to be de- 
 veloped, in order to show the relations of the rail- 
 road in our new country to national growth. The 
 brevity to which we are constrained compels to 
 
 1 Progi-es9 of the State of Oregon and of the City of Portland, 
 from 1870 to 1885. By William IJeid. 1885.
 
 332 THE KAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 the presentation of the topics by glances. It is due 
 largely to the introduction of railroads into Oregon 
 that the State liad, in 1880, a population of 144,000, 
 and farm value to the amount of $56,000,000 ; 
 manufactured goods for the year preceding amounted 
 to almost $11,000,000, and 1,782,537 head of live- 
 stock. Similar showing might be made for all the 
 States between the Pacific and the Alleghanies ; 
 each was born of the railroad system, as one of 
 the forces in the leading nations of the world. 
 When Chicago had but one mail a week, in 1834, 
 which was all it needed, the United States was 
 quite in the rear among the nations. In 1880, 
 Mulhall, comparing the nations and speaking of 
 the industries of the world, says : " At present 
 Great Britain holds the foremost place, but the 
 United States will probably pass us in the ensuing 
 decade." ^ In the matter of wealth it stood at the 
 head of all the nations. 
 
 It is the locomotive which has hauled up the 
 United States to the front in the procession of the 
 nations. In his reports on the International Ex- 
 position at Paris, in 1867, Michel Chevalier uses 
 this remarkable expression : " It seems that the 
 supreme authority is about to escape from western 
 and central Europe, and to pass to the New World." 
 
 We recur to the railroad creation of markets and 
 the utilization of neglected values. In 1870 I was 
 
 1 Balance Sheet of the World for Ten Years, — 1870-1880, 
 pp. 3, 41.
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 333 
 
 over the Kansas Pacific, — the year of its opening 
 to Denver. At Salina we spent the night where cat- 
 tle were waiting by the ten thousand to be sold and 
 shipped East. Owners and purchasers and cow- 
 boys thronged the station, and the herds covered 
 the prairie in all directions toward the horizon. 
 How those ranch-men of old, Abraham, and Lot, 
 and Jacob and his twelve cowboys, " whose trade 
 had been about cattle from their youth," would have 
 enjoyed that day and night at Salina, Kansas ! 
 
 The road was said to be under contract to ship 
 East seventy thousand head between June and De- 
 cember of that year. Some of those herds were 
 said to have been on the trail six months. They 
 came from the Indian Territory and the extremes of 
 Texas, and' from ranches and ranges where New 
 and Old Mexico border on each other, — drives of 
 five hundred, eight hundred, and even a thousand 
 miles. A few years before, there was not a mile 
 of railroad west of the Mississippi to help on a 
 steer toward his slaughter ; and at that long dis- 
 tance from a meat market and a tannery, he was 
 not worth the stripping of his hide. As we have 
 seen, they were worth only that in California in 
 those days, though near to shipping ports. Now, 
 by our railway system, those unlimited American 
 pastures, in which England could be secreted, have 
 been placed, if we may so illu.strate, just back of 
 the abattoirs of Kansas City and St. Louis and 
 Chicaso and Brishton.
 
 334 THE R.VIIAVAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 A month among the cattle and horse and sheep 
 ranges in Wyoming, in the autumn of 1885, and 
 again in 1887, furnished a good sample of this 
 great American industry, and the wealth which 
 lies in it. Areas of natural pasture we passed 
 over, where ample counties of New England could 
 be placed in tier right and left and in front to the 
 horizon ; and beyond it another tier, and so on, — 
 for Wyoming is as large as twelve States like Mas- 
 sachusetts, though it has a large per cent which 
 cannot be grazed. However, its river valleys and 
 mesas and natural parks in the mountains are im- 
 measurable for a month in the saddle. Its natural 
 grasses, it is claimed, make better beef than grain- 
 feeding in the East. Of the 197,497 head, pur- 
 chased in one year by one cattle-dealer* in Chicago, 
 and for which he paid more than thirteen million 
 dollars, very few would know grain by sight or 
 taste. In cattle, Wyoming leads nine of the 
 United States, west of the Mississippi, and rail- 
 roads on the three sides of the Territory make 
 a market accessible. But in riding over those 
 pastures, limited somewhat by snow-peaked moun- 
 tains, but more by the horizon, and seeing herds 
 from one thousand to thirty thousand, it was pain- 
 ful to think how through centuries the country had 
 lain waste, and a hungry world had waited for the 
 locomotive to go in and bring out beef. The 
 ranch and range area of our country is about 
 forty-four per cent of the whole, excluding Alaska,
 
 THE KAIL WAY SYSTEM OF THE AVEST. ooO 
 
 and lies in fifteen States and Territories, Abroad 
 it would cover Great Britain and Ireland, France, 
 Germany, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Austria, 
 Hungary, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and one fifth of 
 Russia in Europe, combined. One is pardonable 
 for being sceptical over this statement. The rail- 
 roads are in good progress toward making this 
 once immense waste land serviceable to mankind, 
 and many of the 49,417,782 head of cattle which 
 were on it in 1884 are already on the way to the 
 great meat markets of America, and to family 
 tables on both sides of the Atlantic. 
 
 The increase of railroads and of agricultural 
 products in the United States has moved off into 
 our new country with an even pace, and indeed the 
 evenness is remarkable. The number of miles of 
 new road each year is inevitably followed by a pro- 
 portional increase in the tonnage of products put on 
 the market. A glance at Poor's Railway Manual, 
 and the census returns and tabulated market re- 
 ports for our national centres, will make this evi- 
 dent. In 1880 there were exported $389,000,000 
 in value of grains, meats, and dairy products. How 
 impossible to have brought so much from inland 
 to tide-water by the old methods, by horse and 
 wheel and boat, and how senseless in the producers 
 to have produced it for export ! That year the 
 tonnage of wheat alone raised in the country was 
 seventy millions. The idea of its movement to a 
 market in the old wavs would have been a com-
 
 336 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 merciul absurdity ; but it is now carried as Hour 
 a thousand miles, at a cost of from five to seven 
 dollars a ton. In other words, a barrel of flour 
 can be carried from IMinneapolis, where they can 
 manufacture twenty-seven thousand barrels a day, 
 to New York, for a price varying from fifty cents 
 to seventy-five. And it is stated on good authoi- 
 ity that during the last twenty years no prices, in 
 leading interests, have fallen like those of trans- 
 portation ; so that it is said that his fair wages for 
 one day will freight to his depot the supplies of a 
 a laboring man for a year. His breakfast and 
 dinner and supper and household comforts are 
 brought to his family door at very low rates, and 
 where Vanderbilt gains his penny by the trans- 
 portation, the workingman gains fifty or a hun- 
 dred. With many in New England tlie memory 
 is still fresh, when the great sleicjh, with its load 
 of beef, pork, poultry, butter, cheese, and oats, 
 glided from the hills over snow-banks to go " be- 
 low." After ten days, or twenty of them, it re- 
 turned with West India goods and groceries, 
 cottons, cloths, and prints. The " good old times " 
 returned, as some sigh for them, would put the 
 old sleigh on the road again, and there would 
 come back in it what we saw in the stores in the 
 Aroostook twenty-five years ago, — hand-cards and 
 flax-wheels and the family loom. 
 
 The sighing for other days to come back, and 
 the mourning of the aged, and of the fossil young,
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 337 
 
 over sad and degenerate changes, usually gives 
 amusement in quiet. Every age has it, and every 
 improvement is admitted with regrets and under 
 protest. In 1673 there was published " The 
 Grand Concern of England Explained." It gravely 
 shows the miseries and trials, and the ruin of trade, 
 •occasioned by the invention and use of coaches. 
 
 For the present, and for a long time to come, 
 in the United States, it cannot be a question of 
 production of the cereals, meats, and articles of 
 heavy manufacture, for which we have the raw 
 material in the natural state and in great abun- 
 dance, but it will be a question of transportation 
 and delivery. The annihilation of space and time 
 will continue and probably be intensified, and our 
 broad domain will become more and more as one 
 place for the market of our products with one 
 price. During tlie last ten years the cost of dis- 
 tribution by the longer and combined railroads 
 has been reduced one half, and we are warranted 
 in hoping for increased reduction. 
 
 Probably not more than one sixth of our arable 
 knd is yet under the plough, so that we may 
 anticipate not only a continuous but large expan- 
 sion of the railway system. Mr. Atkinson, in his 
 admirable pamphlet above quoted, estimates that 
 within the present century tlie development and 
 wants of the country will demand and add about 
 one hundred and twenty thousand miles more to 
 the present system of railroads. As our growth in 
 
 22
 
 338 THE UAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 the line of new settlements, agriculture, and manu- 
 factures has usually exceeded even ardent predic- 
 tions, the above estimate will probably prove to 
 be moderate if not timid, compared with final 
 fact. 
 
 Nor let it be supposed that these anticipations 
 and predictions rest wholly in the region beyond 
 the Mississippi. It is thought that a region could 
 be outlined with a centre in the Cumberland 
 Mountains, and margins running into Virginia, the 
 Carolinas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky, em- 
 bracing several fold more wheat acreage than Great 
 Britain, and quite as good, not to mention its 
 adaptation to the production of tobacco, hemp, 
 corn, cattle, horses, and mules. Of the mineral 
 resources there but little is known, yet enough 
 to establish large expectations in the line of 
 coal, iron, copper, and salt. Tlie area might be 
 as large as Great Britain and Ireland, — one hun- 
 dred and twenty thousand square miles. This 
 region is but little known, sparsely populated, and 
 the inhabitants of one half of it are so isolated 
 that they are said to be clothed in homespun and 
 have yet to see the first wheeled carriage and loco- 
 motive. Probably by many American travellers 
 the Swiss mountains are much better understood 
 than the Cumberland, and the railroad has yet 
 much to do in exploring and opening up our own 
 country to our own people. 
 
 This steady growth of the railway system into
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 339 
 
 our new territory is an exceedingly interesting 
 manifestation of modern civilization, and a few 
 diagrams of its progress would be impressive. Let 
 them indicate the movement of railroads westward 
 from the Alleghanies to the Pacific in periods of 
 ten years each, beginning with 1840, when the 
 locomotives were taking first looks into the great 
 West. A skeleton map with state boundaries, 
 principal rivers, and the railway growth for each 
 successive period of ten years — four periods down 
 to 1880 — would be a surprising story and study 
 east of the Alleghanies, and especially east of the 
 Hudson. Each decade should be marked in differ- 
 ent colors. No large portion of the world ever 
 took on so great a change in four successive 
 decades. 
 
 How like some living thing this railway crea- 
 ture has rushed off into space, this way and that, 
 across plains, over rivers, and through mountains, 
 reaching out with its tentacles, feeling for a way 
 and a place, and making fast. One cannot avoid 
 thinking of the simile of Ezekiel, when in his 
 vision he saw the living creatures on wheels. At 
 first "a whirlwind came out of the north, a great 
 cloud, and a fire infolding itself. And the crea- 
 tures went every one straight forward. Wliither 
 the spirit was to go, they went ; and they turned 
 not when they went. Their feet were straight 
 feet. The spirit of the living creature was in the 
 wheels ; and the living creatures ran and returned
 
 340 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST, 
 
 as the appearance of a flash of lightning." Did 
 Ezekiel ever see a locomotive ? 
 
 One must not be sceptical over the continuance 
 of this settlement of wild country, and develop- 
 ment of its resources, and consequent supply of 
 the markets of the world. Five sixths of the ara- 
 ble land of the United States is yet waiting for 
 the plough. Vast tracts, once called desert, wait 
 only for irrigation, to be ploughed ; and when the 
 Government organizes a water system, as it has a 
 land system, it will be found that, with rainfall 
 and rivers, the land and the water of our country 
 are in fair proportions. The Missouri, the Colo- 
 rado, and the Columbia, starting near together, 
 central for the regions needing irrigation, and ten 
 thousand feet above tide- water, may be, and yet 
 will be, made to do much in wetting this country. 
 Already the Western farmer, with this process and 
 that, and this product and that, has driven the 
 Great American Desert from our school geogra- 
 phies. " Whither the spirit was to go they went, 
 and they turned not when they went ; " and the 
 doomed lands of Pike and Long and Hazen, not 
 farmers but soldiers, are controlling the prices of 
 meats and breadstuffs in foreign markets. 
 
 Moreover, the United States has the multiplying 
 population and the national policy to continue 
 this wonderful development. In the decade end- 
 ing with 1879, our increase in population was 
 11,920,000.
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE ^VEST. 341 
 
 A few comparisons will aid in forecasting our 
 growth by showing how largely the chances are 
 with us. Leaving out Alaska from the United 
 States, and Russia and Turkey from Europe, let 
 us set in contrast in several particulars the two 
 countries. As to area, the United States has two 
 square miles to Europe's one, as above reduced, 
 while the arable land in the two is equal. Europe 
 has one hundred and forty-five persons to the square 
 mile, and the United States about sixteen. The 
 debt of Europe averages to the individual (1880) 
 $74.64, and that of the United States, $36.85. 
 Since 1848, when the United States had compara- 
 tively no debt, the European has increased three- 
 fold, and is still increasing. In 1866 our war 
 debt averaged $83.35 to a person, but in 1880 had 
 been reduced to the above figures. The national 
 expenditures in Europe averaged $10.15 to the 
 person, and in the United States, $5.35. Taxes 
 on the earnings of the people in Italy, France, and 
 Great Britain averaged twenty per cent, and in 
 the United States nine and one fourth. In Eu- 
 rope, one man in five of all fit to bear arms is a 
 soldier in active service, and in the United States, 
 one in four hundred. In the army and navy of 
 Europe there are, in camp and barracks and on 
 shipboard, 2,100,000 able-bodied men. These are 
 not producers, and so not only detract so much 
 from the producing forces of these European na- 
 tions, but consume the labors of very many in
 
 342 TllK UAiLWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 their support. The standing army of tlic United 
 States is twenty-five thousand only. Wliile the 
 Avar policy and the war footing- of these European 
 states withdraw so much from their progressive 
 I'orce, the United States, with her peace policy and 
 small army, is left quietly to develop the conti- 
 nent and enlarge the nation. If thej^ go to war, 
 and we continue at work,' who can doubt our con- 
 tinued progress, in which Gladstone said we were 
 passing Great Britain " in a canter " ? 
 
 Some per cents of growth given in the census 
 of 1880 are worthy of grateful memory. In the 
 decade of 1870-1880, New Mexico had increased 
 'SO per cent ; Nevada, 47 ; California, 54 ; Utah, 66 
 Montana, 90; Oregon, 92 ; Texas, 94; Idaho, 117 
 Wyoming, 128 ; Kansas, 173 ; Washington, 214 
 Nebraska, 268; Arizona, 319. These figures war- 
 rant some ardent anticipations for the census of 
 1890. 
 
 There is no one power in the country which 
 carries civilization so fast, and disseminates it so 
 widely, as the railroad. In 1870 the Atchison, 
 Topeka, and Santa Fe was open as far as Las 
 Animas, in Colorado, and it was exceedingly in- 
 teresting to study the effects of its advent. It 
 began at once to reconstruct the plan of the old 
 Mexican town, with its streets and lanes begin- 
 ning anywhere and ending nowhere, in vanishing 
 lines. Its only feature, evidently designed, was 
 its plaza, or atomic centre and original camping-
 
 THE UAIUVAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 343 
 
 ground, from which the town had been evolved, 
 as in a spider's web. The engineers and locomo- 
 tive marked out tlie first straight line in Las 
 Animas ; and the ^■illage, when we were there, 
 was trying to make other straight lines, and right 
 angles, and fronts to the houses, adapted to the 
 railroad, the regenerator. This movement was 
 compelling obvious and sometimes violent dis- 
 tinctions between front and back yards ; also pro- 
 ducing some wooden houses among the adobes. 
 It does not often happen that the traveller can 
 see the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries 
 so blended in one village, and so struggling to- 
 gether for the mastery. Chairs, ploughs, and bed- 
 steads had arrived from the States, and some 
 wheels which had spokes and iron tires. The 
 great American time-keeper had arrived, the loco- 
 motive, and the natives were awkwardly getting 
 used to it. They had been living on the time-table 
 introduced into New Spain by Cortez and Coro- 
 nado, which was exact enough to recognize sunset 
 and sunrii?e. In later excursions we found that 
 this road had gone along to Pueblo and Santa Fe 
 and Albuquerque and El Paso, running vigorously 
 there into the Europe of the sixteenth century, 
 and working revolution enough to haul in the 
 nineteenth century. It had introduced the kitchen 
 from the North, to the bewilderment of men and 
 women ; and we shall not soon forget with what 
 satisfaction and idea of advancinrj civilization a
 
 344 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 gentleman at Albuquerque showed ns through his 
 new adobe, ornamented with cabinet furniture, 
 upholstery, and all that and all that, from the 
 States. He had, indeed, the white elephant of tlie 
 old Aztec country. Tliis must not seem so strange 
 in the rising man, for as late as 1846 the adobe 
 palace in Santa ¥6 was said to be the only build- 
 ing in New Mexico which had window-glass. 
 
 Not only has the railroad system been the great, 
 if not tlie greatest, civilizing means and power in 
 our new and wild country, but it is the binding 
 power for the union of the States. It may be 
 gravely doubted whether sixty millions, so free in 
 all their civil action, and so widely scattered, 
 could be kept willingly under one government 
 without easy and speedy intercourse through all 
 sections. 
 
 Moreover, the railway system makes it impos- 
 sible that any one point in the country should 
 be fatally vulnerable to the whole. Such a body 
 politic as ours has no heel of Achilles. It was 
 before we had railroads that Jefferscfn said so 
 wisely in a letter to Livingstone, at Paris, in 1802 : 
 " There is on the globe one single spot, the pos- 
 sessor of v/hich is our natural and habitual enemy. 
 It is New Orleans, through which the produce 
 of three eighths of our territory nmst pass to mar- 
 ket; and from its fertility it will ere long yield 
 more than half of our whole produce, and contain 
 more than half of our inhabitants."
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 345 
 
 Jefferson had heard with regret and anxiety 
 that France had recovered her ancient Louisiana. 
 But with railways radiating from that fertile val- 
 ley to each ocean, the Lakes and the Gulf of 
 Mexico, his anxieties would be readily abated, 
 since they could concentrate the strength of tlie 
 whole nation at the most needy point. To be 
 of one mind and under one law, statesmen, busi- 
 ness men, scholars, and educators need to meet 
 and know each other, see face to face that they 
 have one interest, and so come to a union in 
 purposes and plans and action. When a country, 
 under one government, is too large to have na- 
 tional men, it is too large for prosperity and 
 perpetuity. When John Bright was discussing the 
 question of Canadian fortifications in the House 
 of Commons, in 18G5, he spoke of Englishmen 
 as a people '' who appear to have more sense 
 the farther they go from their own country." He 
 might safely have extended that remark to all 
 who speak English. Calhoun's life worked in 
 three centres, — his home in the hill country of 
 South Carolina, luxurious and aristocratic Charles- 
 ton, and Washington. The first two places were 
 all of our country which he could carry to the 
 third. Hence the able provincial was unfortu- 
 nate in his lack of travel, and as narrow as he was 
 strong in his sectional movements. liandolph 
 well states the case of so many radical and provin- 
 cial extremists in the North and in the South :
 
 34G THE UAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 " With regard to tlic Ijattlo cry of ' State Eiglit,' 
 seven tenths of the voters of the North hardly 
 know what a Southern man means when he pro- 
 nounces the words. Thus we presented to the 
 world the curious spectacle of a people so ignorant 
 of one another, so little homogeneous, that nearly 
 all on one side of an imaginary line were willing 
 to risk their lives for an idea which the inhabitants 
 on the other side of the line not only did not en- 
 tertain, but knew nothing about." 
 
 It now seems very strange to us that Massachu- 
 setts should have instructed her representatives in 
 Congress in 1813 to ask for the repeal of the bill 
 wliich admitted the State of Louisiana to the 
 Union the preceding year ; but Louisiana then was 
 as fiir off as China is to-day. The trip from Boston 
 to New York required more time and discomfort 
 than the one now to San Francisco. Travellers were 
 called at three in tlie morning, and with a farthing 
 candle and horn lantern got under way, and toiled 
 over miserable roads till ten at night. The use of his 
 slioulder or a rail by the passenger to pass a quag- 
 mire is no original custom of the Western prairie. 
 Like so many of their hardy virtues and practices 
 for hard places, our frontier men inherited them 
 from New England. If the travellers were fairly 
 fortunate they would arrive in New York on the 
 sixth or seventh day out of Boston.^ 
 
 ^ Life of Josiah Qiutk^v, hy Eiltnund Quincy, pp. 47, 48. 
 See also "Eecollections of Samuel Breck," who says, "I have my-
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 347 
 
 On one occasion, and about the time when Mas- 
 sachusetts was moving this action on Louisiana, 
 Mr. Quincy spent a month in his own carriage in 
 going from Boston to Washington. In those times 
 the rates of public conveyance over the AUegha- 
 nies was forty miles in twenty-four hours, and the 
 round trip between Cincinnati and New Orleans 
 was about six months. A Eussian post in Siberia 
 is to-day no farther from Massachusetts than 
 Louisiana then was. As to travel in earlier days 
 a friend gives me this interesting note. On the 
 first of May, 1819, a near relative of his i'amily, 
 Mr. John Shackford, left Portsmouth, N. H., for 
 St. Louis, Mo. "He had a big strong stage wagon, 
 with three seats and an open front, and a pair of 
 horses. The load consisted of himself and wife, 
 an adult female friend, with four children, from 
 two to eight years of age, and several trunks. 
 The route was direct as far as practicable across 
 the country to St. Louis, but subject to many de- 
 la3's, with so heavy a load, bad roads, and a sin- 
 gle team, to make the entire distance. The actual 
 travel fell between sixty and seventy days." 
 
 It was this distance and inaccessibility of the 
 Southwest from New England, which make some 
 views and remarks of Eastern men in those earlier 
 
 self been nine days going from New York to Boston " (pp. 90-99, 
 100-103, 271-273). And more generally on travel in those times, 
 see "Letters of Aaron Burr to his Wife," and " Life of Benedict 
 Arnold."
 
 348 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OV THE WEST. 
 
 days surprising and amusing, and always pardon- 
 able. 
 
 Only railroads were needed to convert such 
 fears into glowing visions, which to-day are real- 
 ized in grand national facts. The Baltimore and 
 Ohio, the Louisville and Cincinnati, the Chicago, 
 St. Louis, and New Orleans, — these or other roads 
 have put Louisiana and the mouth of the Missis- 
 sippi and the Missouri nearer to Mr. Quincy's old 
 home than New York was when he so eloquently 
 expressed his anxieties. The revolution in travel 
 and the condensation of the country by steam 
 have been wonderful, and beyond the comprehen- 
 sion of business men born since those days ; and 
 the opposition to the revolution and condensation 
 was equally wonderful. Of the scheme for the 
 Boston and Albany Railroad, the " Boston Courier" 
 says : " A project which every one knows, who 
 knows the simplest rules of arithmetic, to be 
 impracticable." And as late as 1842 the town of 
 Dorchester voted : " That our representatives be 
 instructed to use their utmost endeavors to pre- 
 vent, if possible, so great a calamity to our town 
 as must be the location of any railroad through 
 it; and if that cannot be prevented, to 'diminish 
 this calamity as far as possible," by locating it 
 along the marsh. 
 
 Webster, when speaking in the Senate in 1838, 
 on Pre-emption, said : " Of the Southwest I know 
 but little." When, however, nine years later, he
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 349 
 
 was making remarks at the New England dinner 
 in Charleston, South Carolina, he expressed these 
 very excellent views : " I concur with you cor- 
 dially, gentlemen, in the sentiment that mutual 
 intercourse strengthens mutual regard, and that 
 the more citizens of different parts of the country 
 see one another, the more will asperities be soft- 
 ened and differences reconciled." ^ 
 
 It is to be deeply regretted that such inter- 
 course between the North and the Soutli could 
 not have been had all througli the first half of 
 the present century. Possibly some other inter- 
 course would have had its asperities softened if 
 not wholly prevented by it. In the introduction 
 to Webster's " Southern Tour," 1847, the editor 
 remarks that " the receptions were rendered pecu- 
 liarly interesting by the unusual nature of such 
 an occurrence as the visit of a highly distinguished 
 New England statesman to the South." That lack 
 of intercourse was no good omen for the interests 
 of either section, or of the whole country. Yet 
 the breadth of domain and the infelicities and 
 sometimes impossibilities of travel kept the North 
 and the South and the East and the West in great 
 ignorance of one another. Happily for the im- 
 mensity of the public domain those obstacles are 
 now removed, and one may reach any of the great 
 centres between the two oceans, and the Canadian 
 and Mexican borders, in six or eight days. The 
 
 1 W^ebster's Works, vol. ii. p. 376.
 
 350 TlIK li.ULWAY SYSTEM OF TIIK WEST. 
 
 liannoiiy and strengthening and prosperity of the 
 T^nioii lie in this speedy and easy travel between 
 all parts of it. 
 
 The outlook for the United States would be 
 better, let it be added, if there M'ere more home 
 travel by her citizens. Scholarly pursuits of 
 ancient and foreign history, and pleasurable ram- 
 bles in foreign climes, add an estimable charm to 
 companionship and general society ; while states- 
 manship and serviceable citizenship call for the 
 ornament and the strength which come from 
 personal knowledge of one's own land. The 
 American exchange at London reports astonishing 
 expenditures in Europe by Americans. Basing 
 the estimate on letters of credit to European 
 banking-houses, the number of travellers from 
 America has been marked as high as sixty thou- 
 sand in one year, and their expenditure as high 
 as one hundred and eighty million dollars, — 
 probably an overestimate. 
 
 An extract will not be out of place here from 
 a letter of Washington to the tutor of young 
 Curtis, Washington's step-son, when the question 
 of foreign travel by him was under consideration : 
 " It is to be expected that every man who travels 
 with a view of observing the laws and customs of 
 other countries should be able to give some de- 
 scription of the situation and government of his 
 own." 1 
 
 1 *[rving's Life of Washington, vol. i. p. 367.
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE AYEST. 351 
 
 This sixty thousand might perhaps furiiisli a 
 select audience of such of their number as have 
 not been a thousand miles from home in their 
 own country, to hear what the liev. Dr. Bushnell 
 says : " The sooner we have railroads and tele- 
 graphs spinning into the wilderness, and setting 
 the remotest hamlet in connection and close prox- 
 imity with the East, the more certain it is that 
 light, good manners, and Christian civilization 
 will become universally diffused." ^ 
 
 It is thought and hoped that the railroads of 
 the country will have no little to do in harmoniz- 
 ing the theological sects, and so in economizing 
 the religious and financial forces of the church in 
 the United States. The religious w^ars by the 
 sword in olden times, and those by the pen then 
 and now, have come more from the cloister and 
 priest and divine, than from the wide observa- 
 tions of life, or from diverse causes among ordi- 
 ■ nary and good people. Men, religious, so-called, 
 have quietly, and in the solitariness of study, run 
 their thouglits along in the lines of musty parch- 
 ment or of letter-press, and have framed and mas- 
 tered sentences, and then marshalled them into 
 polemical theology, and so led to the organization 
 of denominational skirmishers. Hence the wars 
 of the phrases and of the paragraphs, which waste 
 so much good feeling and strength and sacred 
 money, ink, paper, and type. These struggles 
 
 1 Barliarism the First Danger, 1847.
 
 352 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 
 
 come on tlie l)attlefield.s of belief, not of life. If 
 reverend and cloi^-ter and lectnre-rooin dogmatists 
 had moved freely and freqnently and observingly 
 among the people who arc living a Christian and 
 exemplary life, they could not have organized the 
 sects from any differences in their living. It is 
 a catechism, and not difference in Christian life, 
 which starts theological campaigns, and makes 
 great church expenses for holy wars. Travel 
 among other religious bodies, and candid, domestic 
 observation on their religious life, broadens and 
 softens the local and the i)rovincial religion. 
 This travel and these observations are apt to slip 
 one's theological phrases and devout mannerisms 
 out of the quotation marks in wliicii one has re- 
 ceived tliem by inheritance. He is exposed in 
 travel to doing his own thinking and expressing, 
 which is always dangerous to religious sects cre- 
 ated by phrase-makers among people who are 
 living the same Christian life. 
 
 We therefore give the hand' of Christian fellow- 
 ship to the locomotive as a peacemaker between 
 religious denominations, in harmonizing and econ- 
 omizing Christian forces. It brings new currents 
 of thought to the cloister, hangs new pictures of 
 holy faiths and life in the galleries of the old 
 masters, and reveals a Christian kinsliip broader 
 than any holy league and covenant. The railroad 
 does vastly more than to work for commerce and 
 dividends and civilization. It is an evauiielist.
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM OF THE WEST. 353 
 
 California and Oregon and Washington would 
 have been an impossibility without our Pacific 
 railways. A quick circuit of thought and feeling 
 between the old Atlantic and the new Pacific 
 homes was a demand as inexorable as a necessity 
 of nature. The new West, to thrive, must have 
 the footsteps and voices of the old homestead 
 as next-door neighbors. The early French and 
 Spanish colonies in America pined and dwarfed 
 by isolation; and those splendid Dutch and Chris- 
 tian farmers contemporary with the oSTew England 
 fathers degenerated into the present semi-civilized 
 Boers of South Africa, because they lost contact 
 and close communication with the fatherland. 
 With education and Christianity coming tardily to 
 the rescue of cities and villages springing from 
 gold mines, the railway is their greatest hope for 
 law, order, equity, 'morality, and more than all 
 for the recognized and sanctified home of marriage, 
 without which there is no civilization. For all 
 the high and noble ends of society a bonnet is 
 more than a gold mine. 
 
 The social and moral and religious benefits of 
 our flowing together are already happily obvious 
 in a thousand modern ways of union where theol- 
 ogy gives place to religion, and living is more 
 than believing. A railroad between Jerusalem 
 and Samaria would be a wonderful aid for the 
 passengers and freiglit in the great business and 
 commerce of godliness. Voltaire puts the point 
 23
 
 334 THE Il.VlLWAY SYSTEM UF THE WEST. 
 
 well in his definition of an educated man,— and 
 we would include religious, — as "one who is not 
 satisfied to survey the universe from his parish 
 belfry." We assent to the text of this chapter : 
 " If there were to be no railroads, it was, on the 
 whole, rather an impertinence in Columbus to 
 discover America."
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 355 
 
 CHAPTEK XIII. 
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 IN" 1849 the Sons of New Hampshire held a great 
 festival in Boston. Of course, Webster was the 
 orator. Eeferring to our country, in its present 
 attainments and prospects, he said : " With regard 
 to this country, there is no poetry like the poetry 
 of events, and all the prophecies lag behind the ful- 
 fihnent." And rounding up a glowing anticipation 
 of our future, he remarked : " The prophecies and 
 the poets are with us." These are not merely rhe- 
 torical ornament, introduced to grace an oration, 
 but they set forth a grand fact in our history. The 
 auguries of a growing and grand future for the 
 United States need not be regarded as dreamy and 
 visionary. They are more like logical deductions 
 from our history, where the reasoning compels us to 
 anticipate. These prophecies of coming empire are 
 not so much drawn from visions of a future, which 
 a warm imagination has peopled, as from a past, 
 which the energies of a young nation have filled 
 up with seminal and germinant facts. In such 
 case what we call prophecy is akin to inference. 
 So Webster, in his address delivered at the laying
 
 356 THE E.MriRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 of the corner-stone of the addition to the Capitol, 
 July 4, 1851, called the noted prophecy of Bishop 
 Berkeley " the result of long foresight and uncom- 
 mon sagacity." One line will bring the prophetic 
 poem to mind : — 
 
 " Westward the course of empire takes its wa}^" 
 
 Seeing room for continued growth, and no fair rea- 
 son for discontinuance, the assumption of the con- 
 tinuance of the previous order is not so much the 
 M'ork of a seer as of a philosopher. Milton says it 
 well : — 
 
 "That old experience does attain 
 To something like prophetic strain." 
 
 In this chapter, therefore, on The Empire of 
 the Future, attention is not called to poetic and 
 visionary indulgences of enthusiastic men, but 
 rather to the reflections and inferences and expec- 
 tations of cool, studious, and reasoning men. The 
 authors whom I am about to quote, excepting a 
 cluster of poets, had been accustomed to pay 
 much attention to the established order of things, 
 where cause and eff'ect commonly warrant the 
 continuance of a long established order. A proph- 
 ecy, strictly speaking, is of divine inspiration, and 
 totally above human and logical deduction. These 
 opinions or judgments, which we call prophecies 
 by accommodation, are as when one studies care- 
 fully the head-waters of the Missouri and Missis- 
 sippi, and then says, there must somewhere and 
 
 ii
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTUKE. 357 
 
 sometime be a bay or gran'cl outlet, such as we call 
 the Gulf of Mexico. 
 
 Some earliest poets on the New World, quite 
 as indetlnite in their predictions as was the New 
 World, geographically, when they wrote, we pass 
 along in a cluster. It was in 1595 when Chap- 
 man, the Greek scholar, foretold coming empire 
 in America, after this strain : — 
 
 " Guicana, whose rich feet are mines of gold, 
 Stands on her tiptoe at fair England looking. 
 
 And there do palaces and temples rise 
 
 Out of the earth, and kiss th' enamour'd skies, 
 
 Where new Britannia humbly kneels to Heaven." 
 
 Samuel Daniel, poet-laureate to Elizabeth, proud 
 of his mother tongue, and ambitious to hear it on 
 as many human lips as possible, thus utters his 
 prophetic anxieties : — 
 
 "Who in time knows whither we may vent 
 The treasures of our tongue ? To what strange shores 
 This gain of our best glory shall be sent, 
 T' enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? 
 What worlds in the yet unformed Occident 
 May 'come refined with th' accents that are ours ■* 
 Or who can tell for what great work in hand 
 The greatness of our style is now ordained ? " ^ 
 
 Contemporary with Milton, but the opposite in 
 the warui politics of that day, and partaking of the 
 
 1 Anderson's British Poets (Musophilu?), vol. iv. p. 217.
 
 358 THE EMI'IRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 mixed patronage and neglect of Charles II., was 
 Cowley, the botanical poet. In 1G67 he set forth, 
 in Latin, his " History of Plants," a poem in six 
 books. He thus prophetically addresses the New 
 World: — 
 
 "Meanwhile your rising glory you .shall view : 
 Wit, learning, virtue, discipline of war, 
 Shall for protection to your world repair, 
 And fix a long illustrious empire there. 
 Your native gold (I would not have it so, 
 But fear th' event) in time will follow too. 
 Oh, .should that fatal prize return once more, 
 'T will hurt your country, as it did before ! " i 
 
 Sir Thomas Browne, born two years before the 
 planting of the Jamestown Colony, ranks high 
 among the leading thinkers of his times. He pre- 
 sumed to indulge in prophesying under the title 
 itself: "A Prophecy concerning the Future State 
 of Several Nations ; " and Dr. Johnson, in his Life 
 of Sir Thomas, says that he makes the expectation 
 plain in his Prophecy " that America will be the 
 seat of the fifth empire." The Prophecy is an 
 interpretation or paraphrase of some verses which 
 the author professes to have received from a friend. 
 Possibly the text is of his own inspiration, that he 
 might have something conveniently arranged on 
 which to spread out his own expectations. Com- 
 menting on the verses, he says that when New 
 England has so increased " that the neighboring 
 
 1 Anderson's British Poets (Cowlej^), vol. v. p. 373.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 359 
 
 country will not contain them, they will range still 
 farther, and be able in time to set forth great 
 armies, seek for new possessions, or make consid- 
 erable and conjoined migrations, and may not im- 
 probably erect new dominions in places not yet 
 thought of, and yet for some centuries beyond 
 their power or ambition." Enlarging and pro- 
 longing his vision to something of a continental 
 scope, he proceeds to predict that " when America 
 shall be better civilized, new policied, and divided 
 between great princes, it may come to pass that 
 they will no longer sutfer their treasure of gold 
 and silver to be sent out to maintain the luxury 
 of Europe and other ports, but rather employ it to 
 their own advantages, in great exploits and under- 
 takings, magnificent structures, wars, or expeditions 
 of their own. . . . When America shall be so well 
 peopled, civilized, and divided into kingdoms, they 
 are like to have so little regard for their originals 
 as to acknowledge no subjection unto them : they 
 may also have a distinct commerce themselves, or 
 but independently with those of Europe." ^ 
 
 Very near the close of the seventeenth century 
 (1697) Samuel Sewall wrote on the New Heaven 
 and the New Earth. He was a Judge of the Su- 
 preme Court of Massachusetts, and at one time 
 Chief Justice. He was of the court which con- 
 demned the witches, from which delusion he 
 recovered, but never from the sorrow for their con- 
 
 ^ Sir Thomas Browne ; ^Vorks, vol. iv. pp. 231-238.
 
 360 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 demnation. Of tlie New England Colonies he 
 says : " I can't but hope that the plantation has 
 gained a very strong Crasis ; and tiiat it will not be 
 of one or two or three centuries only, but by the 
 Grace of God it will be very long lasting. ... As 
 one that has been born or has lived in America 
 more than tlireescore years, it may be pardonable 
 for him to ask, Why may not that be tlie place of 
 New Jerusalem ? . . . Mr. Eliot was wont to say 
 the New English Churches are a preface to the 
 New Heavens." ^ 
 
 About the year 1726 Bishop Berkeley was work- 
 ing over plans for a college in An:ierica. The study 
 given to such a purpose and plan would naturally 
 lead him to estimate the importance of the Colo- 
 nies here, and to forecast their growth and ulti- 
 mate place and power among the nations. Found- 
 ing colleges is apt to lead one to those broad and 
 long plans which run down the ages, and so endue 
 one with forecast and prophecy. The Bishop's 
 " Proposal " for his Indian College is a chapter 
 of exceeding interest on " the Indian Question." ^ 
 With an ardent and glowing mind he anticipated 
 a magnificent future for the plantation in the New 
 World, and turned prophet in certain celebrated 
 stanzas, of which this is the last : — 
 
 1 New Heaven and New Earth. Second Edition. Boston, 
 1727. pp. 1, 2. 
 
 2 The Works of George Berkeley, D.D. Eraser's Edition. 
 Oxford, 1871. vol. iii. pp. 2ir)-231.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 361 
 
 " Westward the course of empire takes its way ; 
 The first four acts ah-eady past, 
 A fifth shall close the drama with the day ; 
 Time's noblest offspring is the last." i 
 
 One George Webb, too much of a poet to be a 
 scholar, quitted Oxford for the wilds of America, 
 and in 1728 gave forth a couplet, for the preser- 
 vation of which, or at least the publication, the 
 world seems to be indebted to Franklin : - 
 
 " Rome shall lament her ancient fame declined, 
 And Philadelphia be the Athens of mankind." 
 
 This was evidently written in colonial days and 
 on the border, for it has something of the poetic 
 frenzy of the frontier, in cities which start like 
 Jonah's gourd, but grow and endure like the oaks 
 of Baslian, and promise to live like the cedars 
 of Lebanon. And in the speech already quoted, 
 Webster makes us familiar with another inspiring 
 couplet from colonial days, all the more inspiring 
 from his own rich setting of it : — 
 
 " In other lands another Britain see. 
 And what thou art Ameiica shall be." 
 
 It is quite a variation in our line of prophets 
 from an Irish prelate and Ehode Island pilgrim 
 to a French reformer. Marquis d'Argenson was 
 of the Court of Louis XIV., and the companion of 
 Richelieu, Voltaire, and Eousseau. The profound 
 scholar in statesmanship, who wrote elaborately on 
 
 1 Berkeley's Works, vol. iii. p. 232.
 
 362 THE EMHRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 the political reconstruction of nations, especially 
 France and Italy, sought the renaissance of Greece 
 and the suppression of barbaric power in northern 
 Africa by the union of the civilized powers of Eu- 
 rope in a Christian republic, and who correctly 
 anticipated the decay of the Turkisli Empire, would 
 not be likely to leave America out of the scope of 
 his vision. When he spoke, however, for the New 
 World, some time between 1740 and 1750, France 
 was the greatest claimant in North America; 
 but within a decade or so of years slie lost all 
 her territory in it save three petty islands off 
 Newfoundland. 
 
 After the following strain he utters his oracles, 
 when he turns his face westward, in the course of 
 Berkeley's Empire : " Another great event to arrive 
 upon the round earth is this : The English have in 
 North America domains great, strong, rich, well- 
 regulated. There are in New England a parlia- 
 ment, governors, troops, white inhabitants in 
 abundance, riches and mariners, which is worse. 
 I say that some bright morning these dominations 
 can separate from England, rise and erect them- 
 selves into an independent republic. AVhat will 
 happen from this ? Do people think of this ? A 
 country well regulated by the arts of Europe, in 
 condition to communicate with it by the present 
 perfection of its marine, and which by this will 
 appropriate our arts in proportion to their improve- 
 ment. Patience ! Such a country in several ages
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTUKE. 363 
 
 will make great progress in population and in 
 politeness [civilization] ; such a country will ren- 
 der itself in a short time master of America, and 
 especially of the gold mines. . . . And you will 
 then see how the earth will be beautiful ! What 
 culture ! What new arts and new sciences ! What 
 safety for commerce ! Navigation will precipitate 
 all the people toward each other. A day will 
 come when one will go in a populous and w"ell- 
 regulated city of California as one goes in the 
 stage-coach of Meaux." He was prepared to 
 say these things after he had thoughtfully, and 
 by geographical comparisons, made the remark, 
 "What a small corner Europe has on the round 
 earth ! " 
 
 Here are several most wonderful facts published 
 in advance of their existence. The " great event " 
 came in two instalments, seventeen years apart, — 
 the Plains of Abraham and Bunker Hill ; " an in- 
 dependent republic " some bright morning for the 
 nations ; " the gold mines " in the hands of the 
 new-born nation; and a San Francisco, suggestive 
 of the comforts of old Meaux. The " several ages " 
 of our prophet are run through in less than a hun- 
 dred years. Before the round century was through, 
 the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had assigned the 
 gold-fields of the Pacific to the independent repub- 
 lic, and San Francisco was founded for something 
 better than the stage-coach of Meaux. Why 
 exclude the other prediction from the prophetic
 
 364 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 chapter ? " Such a country will reuder itself in 
 a short time master of America." ^ 
 
 Turgot followed close upon D'Argenson, and 
 closed a career of reform as a statesman in advance 
 of his age, two years before our era of peace opened 
 with Great Britain. As early as 1750 he foresaw 
 and announced the independence of the English 
 colonies in America, and twenty years later he de- 
 clared with much satisfaction that that separation 
 "will be followed soon by that of all America from 
 Europe." Of the young republic, as yet only in 
 vision, he said : " It is the hope of the human race. 
 It can become its model. ... It must give the 
 example of political liberty, of religious liberty, of 
 commercial and industrial liberty." ^ 
 
 Of course John Adams speaks to the point in 
 hand often and enthusiastically, yet always as a 
 broad statesman. He opened his prophecies when 
 only twenty years of age, and a schoolmaster. 
 Eeferring to the arrival of the early colonists in 
 the New World he remarked : " Perhaps this ap- 
 parently trivial incident may transfer the great 
 seat of empire to America. It looks likely to me."^ 
 This was in 1755. Ten years later the possibility 
 has grown with his knowledge and patriotism and 
 fervor : " I always considered the settlement- of 
 
 ^ Prophetic Voices concerning America. By Charles Sum- 
 ner. Boston, 1874. pp. 32-38. 
 2 Ibid., p. 45. 
 ^ Works of John Adams, vol. i. p. 23.
 
 THE empirp: of the future. 365 
 
 America with reverence, as the opening of a grand 
 scheme and design in Providence for the illumi- 
 nation of the ignorant and the emancipation of 
 the slavish part of mankind all over the earth." ^ 
 And in 1780 : " America is most undoubtedly 
 capable of being the most independent country 
 upon earth. . . . Could undoubtedly maintain a 
 regular army of twenty thousand men forever." ^ 
 
 When Minister to England, he wrote his " De- 
 fence of the American Constitutions," 1787, and in 
 it says that the governments therein set forth 
 " are destined to spread over the northern part of 
 that whole quarter of the globe," ^ — embracing 
 the entire northern continent. " A prospect into 
 futurity in America is like contemplating the 
 heavens through the telescope of Herschel. Ob- 
 jects stupendous in their magnitudes and mo- 
 tions strike us from all quarters and fill us with 
 amazement." * 
 
 In a letter written in 1818 his heart is still 
 more aglow with his visions : " The American 
 Revolution was not a common event. Its effects 
 and consequences have already been awful over a 
 great part of the globe. And when and where 
 are they to cease ? " ^ 
 
 In 1759-60 an intelligent English gentleman 
 made travels through the middle settlements of 
 
 1 Works, vol. i. p. 66. ^ Ibid., vol. iv. p. 293. 
 
 2 Ibid., vol. vii. pp. 275, 276. * Ibid., vol. vi. p. 218. 
 
 * Ibid., vol. X. p. 282.
 
 366 THE E.Mriitt: ok the future. 
 
 North America, and he observes : " Every one is 
 h)oking forward with eager and impatient expec- 
 tation to that destined moment when America is 
 to give law to the rest of the worhl." ^ 
 
 It was the Abb6 Raynal who offered a prize of 
 twelve hundred francs for tlie best essay on the 
 question, Has the discovery of America been hurt- 
 ful or useful to the human family? The Acad- 
 emy of Lyons was to be umpire. The Abbd, in 
 one of his works published in 1770, offers his 
 own essay on the question. From his standpoint, 
 as a student of America, a prediction in the con- 
 cluding book of his works will have its force : 
 " A new universe will proceed from their hands 
 [America's] for the glory and happiness of hu- 
 manity." 
 
 Hugh Henry Brackinridge, a native of Scotland, 
 was graduated at Princeton College in 1771, and 
 delivered for a Commencement poem The Rising 
 Glory of America. In it occur lines quite in the 
 tone and manner of an old Roman vates : — 
 
 " New States, new Empires, and a line of Kings, 
 High raised in glory, cities, palaces, 
 Fair domes on each long bay, sea, shore, or stream. 
 . . . the slow-paced caravans return 
 O'er many a realm from the Pacific shore. 
 
 'T is but the morning of the world with us, 
 And Science yet but sheds her orient rays ; 
 I see the age, the hapj)y age roll on. 
 
 1 Travels in the Interior of North America, 1809-11. By 
 John Biirnaby. London, 1817. p. 115.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE, 367 
 
 Hail, happy land, 
 The seat of Empire, the abode of Kings, 
 The final stage, where Truth shall introduce 
 Renowned characters, and glorious works of art, 
 Which not the ravages of Time shall waste, 
 Till he himself has run his long career." 
 
 A most remarkable address was delivered in 
 1773, in London, by Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of 
 St. Asaph. Tlie time will indicate that the Min- 
 istry were then making strenuous efforts to hold 
 the Colonies in America in a vassalage to the 
 Crown, humiliating to all Englishmen ; and the 
 fidelity to convictions and the boldness shown in 
 the address are quite of the quality of the real 
 prophets. 
 
 " When we see many great and powerful causes 
 constantly at work, we cannot doubt of their pro- 
 ducing proportionable effects. . . . They [the Colo- 
 nie.s] seem to have been intended as a solitary 
 experiment to instruct the world to what improve- 
 ments and happiness mankind will naturally at- 
 tain when they are suffered to use their own 
 prudence in search of their own interest. 
 
 " The Colonies in North America have not only 
 taken root and acquired strength, but seem has- 
 tening with an accelerated progress to such a pow- 
 erful state as may introduce a new and important 
 change in human affairs. Descended from ances- 
 tors of the most improved and enlightened parts 
 of the Old World, they receive, as it were by in- 
 heritance, all the improvements and discoveries of
 
 ;;G8 TIIK i:.Ml'Il!K OK THE Fl'TURE. 
 
 lliuir muLlier ctmnlry. Aucl it liappens fortunately 
 for them to commence their flourishing State at a 
 time when the human understanding has attained 
 to the free use of its powers, and has learned to 
 act with vigor and certainty. . . . The vast conti- 
 nent itself, over which they are gradually spread- 
 ing, may be considered as a treasure, yet untouched, 
 of natural productions, that shall hereal"ter afford 
 ample matter for commerce and contemplation. 
 ... It is didicult even to imagine to what height 
 of improvement their discoveries may extend. 
 And perhaps they may make as considerable ad- 
 vances in the arts of civil government and the 
 conduct of life. . . . But must they rest here, as 
 in the utmost effort of human genius ? . . . The 
 diversity of new scenes and situations, which so 
 many growing States must necessarily pass through, 
 may introduce changes in the fluctuating opinions 
 and manners of men which we can form no con- 
 ception of; and not only the gracious disposition 
 of Providence, but the visible preparation of causes, 
 seems to indicate strong tendencies towards a gen- 
 eral improvement. ... To wliatever limits the 
 populations of our Colonies, whatever States and 
 Kingdoms they may form, through all the progress 
 of their fortunes and prosperity, the labors of this 
 Society will probably continue to operate with an 
 increasing influence." ^ 
 
 1 A Sermon pi'eached before the Society for the Propagation 
 of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Feb. 19, 1773, by the Kight
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 369 
 
 Horace Walpole, son of the eminent Prime Min- 
 ister, Sir Robert, was a free knight on any field 
 where justice and liberty were put on tlie defen- 
 sive. With visor up he carried a long lance, and 
 was found, of choice, in the thickest of the fight. 
 • For the Colonies he was friendly, it might be said 
 ardent, l)ut tliat his ardor in their defence partook 
 of the ardor of assault on the Ministry. Of the 
 destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor he has 
 this chatty remark in one of his letters : "There is 
 an ostrich egg laid in America, where the Bosto- 
 nians have canted three hundred chests of tea into 
 the ocean, for they will not drink tea with our 
 Parliament. . . . Lord Chatham talked of conquer- 
 ing America in Germany. I believe England will 
 be conquered some day in New England or Ben- 
 gal." ^ Nearly four years later, Dec. 11, 1777, he 
 wrote to the Countess of Ossory : " Well, Madam, 
 as I told Lord Ossory t' other day, I am satisfied. 
 Old England is safe, that is, America, whither the 
 true English retired under Charles I. This is Nova 
 Scotia, and I care not what becomes of it. ... I 
 am at last not sorry you have no son, and your 
 daughters I hope will be married to Americans, 
 and not in this dirty, despicable island." ^ And 
 two years afterward : " Liberty has still a conti- 
 
 Reverend Jonathan Sliipley, Lord Bishop of St. Asaph. Lon- 
 don, pp. 6, 7, 8. 
 
 1 Letters to Horaee Mann, Feb. 2, 1774, vol. ii. p. 263. 
 
 2 Letters to Countess of Ossory. 
 
 24
 
 370 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 neiit to exist in. I do not care a straw who 
 is Minister in this abandoned country. It is 
 the good old cause of freedom that I have at 
 heart." ^ 
 
 A passage from John Cartwright, Reformer, 
 should have place here : "When we talk of assert- 
 ing our sovereignty over the Americans, do we 
 foresee to what fatal lengths it will carry us ? 
 Are not those nations increasing with astonishing 
 rapidity ? Must they not, in the nature of things, 
 cover in a few ages that immense continent like a 
 swarm of bees ? " 
 
 The Declaration of American Independence, and 
 the " Inquiry into the Nature and Sources of the 
 Wealth of Nations," were published to the world 
 the same year. Adam Smith, author of the 
 " Inquiry," urged that the Colonies should be rep- 
 resented in Parliament, and continue to be, in 
 proportion to taxation ; and he has this passage : 
 " The distance of America from the seat of govern- 
 ment — the natives of that country might flatter 
 themselves, with some appearance of reason too — 
 would not be of a very long continuance. Such 
 has hitherto been tlie rapid progress of that coun- 
 try in wealth, population, and improvements, that 
 in the course of little more than a century, per- 
 haps, the produce of America might exceed that 
 of British taxation. The seat of empire would" 
 then naturally remove itself to that part of the 
 
 1 Letters to Countess ol Onsor}', cxxix.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 371 
 
 empire which contributed most to the general 
 defence and support of the whole." ^ 
 
 John Adams, making estimations on the same 
 basis, and for not a long period, till the Colonies 
 surpass the mother country in taxable property, 
 then puts the home question : " What will become 
 of your supreme legislature ? It will be translated, 
 crown and all, to America." 
 
 Perhaps no foreigner has been more ardent in 
 his friendship for the United States, and more 
 prophetic iu his expectations for the young nation, 
 than Dr. Eichard Price the Welchman. In de- 
 clininsf an invitation of Congress to become an 
 American citizen and assist in regulatins; our 
 finances, he says that he looks " to the American 
 States as now the hope and likely soon to become 
 the refuge of mankind." In 1776 he began to 
 write tracts in the interest of the Colonies, and in 
 his first prophecy he says, " The probability is that 
 they will go on to increase, and that in fifty or 
 sixty years they will be double our number, and 
 form a mighty empire."^ A second tract and 
 prophecy followed in 1784, in which he predicts 
 that the independence of the Colonies will begin 
 a new era in the annals of mankind, and produce a 
 revolution more important, perhaps, than any that 
 
 1 Wealth of Nations, Book IV. chap, vii.pt. iii. McCuUoch's 
 4th Edition, p. 282. 
 
 2 Justice and Policy of the War with America. 4th Edition. 
 London, 1776. pp. 43, 44.
 
 372 THE KMI'IItE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 has happened in liunian affairs. After the recog- 
 nition of American Independence, his heart and 
 vision came out once more : " A revolution which 
 opens a new prospect in human affairs, and begins 
 a new era in the history of mankind. . . . Perhaps 
 I do not go too far when I say that, next to 
 the introduction of Christianity among mankind, 
 the American Revohition may prove the most im- 
 portant step in the progressive course of human 
 improvement. . . . Perhaps there never existed 
 a people on whose wisdom and virtue more de- 
 pended, or to whom a station of more importance 
 in the plan of Providence has been assigned." 
 " Providing, in a sequestered continent, possessed 
 of many singular advantages, a place of refuge 
 for oppressed men in every region of the world, 
 by laying the foundation there of an empire which 
 may be the seat of liberty, science, and virtue, and 
 from whence there is reason to hope these sacred 
 blessings will spread till they become universal." ^ 
 
 Galiani the N"eapolitan, and yet French much 
 by office and domicile, a man of letters, and a good 
 student in the civil and social state of Europe, 
 prophesied most hopefully for the United States, 
 and yet partly because so despondent for Europe. 
 After quoting what Livy said of decaying Eome, 
 " We have fallen on times when we can neither 
 
 ^ Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution 
 and the Means of making it a Benefit to the World, Lon- 
 don, 1784. pp. 2, 3, 7, 8.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 3/3 
 
 endure our vices nor their remedies," he says, in 
 one of his letters : "Do you know the reality ? 
 The epoch has come of the total fall of Europe 
 and of transmigration into America." Tliis was 
 before our Revolution ; and when it was two years 
 under way, he wrote again : " You will at this time 
 have decided the greatest revolution of the globe; 
 namely, if it is America which is to reign over 
 Europe, or if it is Europe which is to continue 
 to reign over America. I will wager in favor of 
 America." ^ 
 
 It is very gratifying to introduce the judgments 
 of one who not only combined scholarship with 
 statemanship, but, with these, long experience 
 in American affairs. Thomas Pownall was secre- 
 tary of the Commission for Trade and Plantations as 
 early as 1745 ; as Commissioner for Massachusetts 
 Bay in 1755, he arranged with New England, New 
 York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania for the 
 expedition against Crown Point. He was Crown 
 Governor, moreover, of Massachusetts Bay, New 
 Jersey, and South Carolma. After this he was 
 impressed further into the study of statemanship 
 by being Comptroller-General of the Army in 
 Germany, 1761, and in three Parliaments, ending 
 in 1780. He was in advance of many Eastern 
 and public Americans of to-day in understanding 
 our geography. He showed to the English Parlia- 
 ment the necessity of an early and equal union 
 
 1 Prophetic Voices, By Charles Sumner, p. 106.
 
 :-;74 THE EMriiii'] of the future. 
 
 of tlic colonies with Great Britain, or the certainty 
 of an American and rorniidable union. Foreseeing 
 tlic new and hastening nation in the European 
 family of them, ho called the attention of the 
 governments of the Old World to the inevitable 
 fact, in " A Memorial to the Sovereigns of Europe, 
 1780." He solicited their attention and comity 
 and high international policy for the event. 
 " North America has become a new primary 
 planet in the system of the world, which, while it 
 takes its own course, must have effect on the orbit 
 of every other planet, and shift the common cen- 
 tre of gravity of the whole system of the European 
 world." It is interesting to notice how intelligent, 
 broad, and forecasting writers on the United States 
 resort to astronomical spaces for room to open up 
 their theme. A bold passage has been quoted 
 from John Adams. Pownall continues : " The 
 independence of America is fixed as fate. She is 
 mistress of her own future, knows that she is so, 
 and will actuate that power which she feels she 
 hath, so as to establish her own system, and to 
 change the system of Europe."^ In the Hiilse- 
 mann Correspondence "Webster gives an illustra- 
 tion of this. In that rare specimen of diplomatic 
 writing, so free of all ambiguity and so clearly and 
 energetically set forth in clean Saxon, our Secre- 
 tary of State thus meets the Austrian complaint 
 
 1 Three Memorials to the Sovereigns of Europe, Great Britain, 
 and North America. London, 1784. pp. 4, 5.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTUKE. 375 
 
 that the United States were somewhat the source 
 of the uneasiness in Europe in 1848, which cul- 
 minated in the Hungarian revolt under Kossuth. 
 " True, indeed, it is, that the prevalence on the 
 other continent of sentiments favorable to republi- 
 can liberty is the result of the reaction of America 
 upon Europe ; and the source and centre of this 
 reaction has doubtless been, and now is, in these 
 United States." ^ 
 
 To return to Governor Pownall : "North America 
 has advanced, and is every day advancing, to 
 growth of State, with a steady and continually 
 accelerating motion, of whieli there never yet has 
 been an example in Europe." ^ When the treaty of 
 peace was concluded, he congratulated Franklin on 
 the successful conclusion of " a Revolution that has 
 stronger marks of Divine interposition, supersed- 
 ing the ordinary course of human affairs, than any 
 other event which this world has experienced." 
 
 After this manner he expresses his wish to 
 revisit America : " If there ever w^as an object 
 worth travelling to see, and worthy of the con- 
 templation of a philosopher, it is that in whicli 
 he may see the beginning of a great empire at 
 its foundation."^ In a letter two years later to 
 Franklin, who was about to return to America, he 
 says : " You are going to a New World, formed to 
 
 1 Webster's Works, vol. vi. p. 495. Edition of 1851. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 56. 
 
 8 Sparks's Works of Franklin, vol. ix. p. 491.
 
 376 TIIK E.MI'IUK UF THE FUTUKE. 
 
 exhibit a scene which the Old World never yet 
 saw." ^ " America will become the arbitress of the 
 commercial, and perhaps the mediatrix of peace, 
 and of the political business of the world." ^ 
 
 With singular foresight, and taking a figure of 
 speech from the cherubim at Eden, he thus antici- 
 pates the incoming tides of immigration : " Unless 
 the great potentates of Europe can station some 
 such universal and equally efficient power of re- 
 straint to prevent man's quitting the Old World, 
 multitudes of their people will emigrate to the 
 New One." 3 
 
 How fulfilment chases up prediction on our 
 continent ! " Do you know," said John Bright at 
 Bii^mingham, in 1862, "that in fifteen years two 
 million five hundred thousand persons — men, 
 women, and children — have left the United 
 Kingdom to find a home in the Free States of 
 America ? This is a population equal to eight 
 great cities of the size of Birmingham. What 
 would you think of eight Birminghams being 
 transplanted from this country and set down in 
 the United States ? " * 
 
 Or, quoting from another, and taking the whole 
 Old World as an emigrating point, and a wider 
 
 1 Spark's Works of Franklin, vol. x. p. 343. 
 
 2 Memorial, p. 77. 
 8 Ibid., p. 87. 
 
 * Speeches of John Bright, ]\I. P., on the American Ques- 
 tion. Boston, 1865. p. 121.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 377 
 
 sweep of time : " During the last sixty years no 
 less than sixteen millions of people have left the 
 Old World for homes in America and the British 
 Colonies, of whom nearly eleven millions have 
 landed on the shores of the United States." ^ 
 
 A French voice should here be heard. Cerisier 
 was a well-bred scholar and writer on national and 
 civil questions. Before the acknowledged inde- 
 pendence of the United States, he said, in an elab- 
 orate disquisition on 'Eepublics : " The influence 
 of America will become preponderant in Parlia- 
 ment, and can perhaps transport the seat of em- 
 pire to their country, and so, without danger and 
 without convulsive agitation, render this immense 
 continent, already so favored by nature, the thea- 
 tre of one of the greatest and freest governments 
 which ever existed." And in another smaller 
 work, soon following : " Tliis revolution is, then, 
 the most happy event which could arrive to the 
 human species and to all the States separately." ^ 
 Of course we .make abatement from all these 
 French writers, as speaking of the interests and 
 policies of a rival nation. 
 
 One of the most efficient men in Europe in 
 national and international affairs during the last 
 
 1 The West : From the Census of 1880. By Robert P. Por- 
 ter. Chicago and London, 1882. p. 9. Here is a number of 
 immigrants seven times greater than the entire jjopulation of 
 the thirteen revolting Colonies at that time when Pownall 
 served his warning on the sovereigns of Europe. 
 
 '^ Sumner's Prophetic Voices, pp. 131, 132.
 
 378 THE EiMI'IUE OF THE FUTUHE. 
 
 half of the last century was Count de Vergennes, 
 Minister of Foreign Affairs to Louis XVI. on his 
 accession, 1774. He liad previously been French 
 Minister at Treves, and Amljassador to Constan- 
 tinople, holding England and Prussia in check 
 against his own country. He aided our Colonies 
 variously till independence was assured, and was 
 efficient for the young Kepublic in the treaties of 
 peace, 1782 and 1783. He was therefore versed 
 in statecraft, skilled in promoting, checking, and 
 guiding European politics, and was peculiarly well 
 fitted from experience to forecast national inter- 
 ests. As such he is here introduced. It will 
 be noticed that he exercises friendship only for 
 France ; all else is policy. 
 
 The Count had visions of colonial independence 
 before the battle of Lexington, but that fight 
 made them clearer, and he thus wrote to the 
 French Ambassador at London : " We must be on 
 our guard, that the independence which produces 
 so terrible an explosion in North America may 
 not communicate itself to points that interest 
 us in the hemispheres, . . . We have a presenti- 
 ment that it may be followed by more extensive 
 consequences." ^ 
 
 Later in the same year, October, 1775, he said 
 to Lord Stormont, British Ambassador in France : 
 "I see the consequences that must follow the 
 
 1 Bancroft's History of the United States, vol. vii. p. 352. 
 12th Edition.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTUUE. 379 
 
 independence of North America, if your Colonies 
 should carry that point at which they now so 
 visibly aim. They might, when they pleased, 
 conquer both your islands and ours. I am per- 
 suaded that they would not stop there, but would, 
 in process of time, advance to the southern con- 
 tinent of America, and either subdue its inhabi- 
 tants or carry them along with them, and in the 
 end not leave a foot of that hemisphere in the 
 possession of any European power. All those 
 consequences will not, indeed, be immediate. 
 Neither you nor I shall live to see them ; but for 
 being remote they are no less sure." ^ 
 
 In 1778 Spain became anxious for the politi- 
 cal consequences that might follow independence, 
 and desired that England should hold afterward 
 Ehode Island, New York, and other sections of 
 the coast. To this Vergennes objected for the 
 king, on account of the French pledges given to 
 the Colonies, but added : " We are very far from 
 desiring that the nascent Kepublic should re- 
 main the exclusive mistress of all that immense 
 continent." ^ 
 
 This able statesman was not the man idly to 
 foresee dangers for France. He therefore culti- 
 vated and returned the anxieties of Spain, and 
 suggested methods for keeping the liepublic from 
 obtaining too much territory ; and he proposed that 
 
 1 Bancroft's History of the United States, vol, vii. p. 164. 
 
 2 Ibid., vol. X. pp. 182, 183.
 
 380 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 England, Spain, HollaiKl, and France combine to 
 assign it narrow limits, and then hold it rigidly to 
 them. One result of this proposal was the most 
 strenuous endeavor of the English, aided by the 
 Count, to shut olf the United States from the 
 Great Lakes, and keep the new nation to the east 
 of all waters flowing into the Ohio. It was barely 
 short of a failure of a treaty that Oswald, the 
 English commissioner, yielded, and the liepublic 
 moved up to the centre of the great chain of lakes 
 and to the forty-ninth parallel, and West to the 
 Mississippi River. It is all the same that our 
 growth of empire was resisted ; enough for our 
 purpose now that it was anticipated, and that 
 anxieties and fears became prophecies. 
 
 The Count Aranda signed the Treaty of Peace 
 of 1783 for Spain, and, he says, with grief and 
 dread. These feelings and their causes, too, are 
 made obvious in a Memoir which he secretly ad- 
 dressed to his king, Charles III., soon after. With 
 France withdrawn from North America, and Eng- 
 land no longer holding the Colonies in check, he 
 fears for the security of New Spain. " This Fed- 
 eral Republic is born a pygmy, so to speak. A day 
 will come when it will be a giant, even a Colossus. 
 . . . The first movement of this power, when it 
 has arrived at its aggrandizement, will be to obtain 
 possession of the Floridas, in order to dominate the 
 Gulf of Mexico. After having rendered commerce 
 with New Spain difficult for us, it will aspire to the
 
 THE KMPIKE OF THE FUTURE. 381 
 
 conquest of this vast empire. . . . These fears are 
 well-founded. Sire : they will be changed into 
 reality in a few years." ^ A prophecy so soon 
 fulfilled ! 
 
 William Paley, in his " Moral Philosophy," 1785, 
 combines a rebuke and a prophecy in the chapter 
 on Slavery. Referring to the English introduction 
 and support of human bondage in the Colonies, 
 and to their recently acknowledged independence, 
 he expresses a doubt " whether a legislature which 
 had so long lent its assistance to the support of an 
 institution replete with human misery, was fit to 
 be trusted with an empire the most extensive 
 that ever obtained in any age or quarter of the 
 world." 2 
 
 We must not omit David Hartley from the 
 noble roll of Englishmen who favored American 
 Independence and predicted and assumed most 
 liopefully for our future. He was the British 
 plenipotentiary who signed the treaty of peace. 
 In a letter written in 1785 he gives admonition to 
 those who were to shape the yoimg nation, never 
 too much heeded then or now : " Those who have 
 the first care of this New World will probably give 
 it such directions and inherent influences as may 
 guide and control its course and revolutions for the 
 ages to come," and then refers to its " unwieldy 
 magnitude of empire, and the future population of 
 
 1 Sumner' .<? Prophetic Voices, p. 142. 
 
 2 Paley's AVorks, vol. iii. p. 173. Boston, 1811.
 
 382 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 millions superadded to millions." He thinks tliat 
 " the immense cession of territory to the United 
 States at the late peace is a point which will per- 
 haps in a few years become an unparalleled phe- 
 nomenon in the political world. . . . Here will be 
 a nation possessed of a new and unheard-of finan- 
 cial organ of stupendous magnitude, and in process 
 of time of unmeasured value." 
 
 Referring in this connection to the plans and 
 proposals of Congress to put these lands on the 
 market of the world at low rates and for all immi- 
 grants, he adds : " These are such propositions of 
 free establishments as have never yet been offered 
 to mankind, and cannot fail of producing great 
 effects in the future progress of things." ^ 
 
 The Abb^ Grdgoire, sometimes called Bishop, 
 eminent in several public positions, sacred and sec- 
 ular, in France, has put a daring question on the 
 future of the United States. 
 
 " When an energetic and powerful nation, to 
 which everything presages high destinies, stretch- 
 ing its arms upon the two oceans, Atlantic and 
 Pacific, shall direct its vessels from one to the 
 other by an abridged route ... it will change 
 the face of the commercial world and the face of 
 empires. Who knows if America will not then 
 avenge the outrages she has received, and if our 
 
 * Prophetic Voices concerning America. By Charles Sumner. 
 Boston, 1874. pp. 99-103. Mr. Sumner gives this letter its first 
 publication.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 383 
 
 old Europe, placed in the rank of a subaltern 
 power, will not become a colony of the New 
 World ? " 1 
 
 Thomas Jefferson never rose to the grand con- 
 ception of our national domain as inter-oceanic. 
 He could anticipate free States on the Pacific, of 
 our blood and after our model, but not outfrrowth 
 or enlargement of the original republic. His let- 
 ters of 1812 and 1813 to John Jacob Astor show 
 this. Yet he varied, as a diseased eye, between 
 long and short sight, and sometimes caught a vis- 
 ion in the prophetic distance. So in his letter 
 to Livingstone in 1824 he urges him to cherish 
 " every measure which may foster our brotherly 
 union, and perpetuate a constitution of government 
 destined to be the primitive and precious model of 
 what is to change the condition of man over the 
 globe." ^ 
 
 So, writing of the Spanish possessions on our 
 southwest in 1786, he says : "We should take care 
 not to think it for the interest of that great conti- 
 nent to press too soon upon the Spaniards. Those 
 countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is 
 that they are too feeble to hold them until our 
 population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it 
 from them piece by piece." ^ 
 
 First of all foreign modern students of American 
 
 ^ Sumner's Prophetic Voioes, p. 154. 
 
 2 Works, vol. vii. p. 344. Washington, 1854. 
 
 3 American State Papers, Boston Edition, vol. v. p. 94.
 
 384 THE KMI'IRE OF THK FUTUllE. 
 
 institutions, after some experience had removed 
 in a measure our rawness and uncertainty, was De 
 Tocqueville. Though of the nobility, he was dem- 
 ocratic in his sympathies and labors. A great stu- 
 dent, he came to the United States in 1831, as to a 
 school where theories were in practice, and he could 
 take lessons from actual life. The result was 
 his "Democracy in Amai-ica," 1835, and another 
 publication in the same line and with the same 
 title in 1840. Having had an extensive range in 
 public offices and labors for France, he was re- 
 strained much from writing as only a theorist. It 
 will be seen, therefore, tliat he was well qualified 
 to utter some of those human prophecies whicli are 
 but condensed judgments and inferences from a 
 wide knowledge as to the future of the United 
 States. And in this catalogue of predictions, culled 
 from the progressive writers of more than two 
 hundred years, I doubt whether any will out- 
 rank, in studious judgment and reliability, these 
 about to be quoted from De Tocqueville : " The 
 Americans of the United States must inevita- 
 bly become one of the greatest nations in the 
 world ; their offspring will cover almost the whole 
 of North America; the continent which they in- 
 habit is their dominion, and it cannot escape 
 them.^ ... In the midst of the uncertain future, 
 one event, at least, is sure. At a period which 
 
 ^ Democracy in Aineiii;;i, vol. i. p. 519. Boweu'.s Edition, 
 1862.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 385 
 
 may be said to be near, — for we are speaking of 
 the life of a nation, — the Anglo-Americans alone 
 Avill cover the immense space contained between 
 the polar regions and the tropics, extending from 
 the coasts of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific 
 Ocean. The territory which will probably be occu- 
 pied by the Anglo-Americans may perhaps equal 
 three quarters of Europe in extent." ^ It is much 
 more than the whole of Europe. 
 
 The United States held but little territory on 
 the Pacific at that time, and the statesman-seer 
 could not have been expected to specify San Diego, 
 Behring's Strait, and Point Barrow as bounds. 
 The present area of the United States is larger 
 than the whole of Europe by the area of New Eng- 
 land, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and 
 both the Virginias. And he continues with the 
 same clear vision : " The time will therefore come 
 when one hundred and fifty millions of men will 
 be living in North America, equal in condition, 
 all belonging to one family, owing their origin to 
 the same cause, and preserving the same civili- 
 zation, the same language, the same religion, the 
 same habits, tlie same manners, and imbued with 
 the same opinions, propagated under the same 
 forms. The rest is uncertain, but this is certain ; 
 and it is a fact new to the world, — a fact which 
 the imagination strives in vain to grasp." ^ 
 
 1 Democracy in America, p. 557. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 558. 
 
 25
 
 386 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTUltE. 
 
 Lucas Alaman was pvomiiicut in Mexico, where 
 so many have gained a brief prominence and given 
 place to others since her independence, 1824. A 
 paragraph concentrates all he says in our present 
 line of thought. " Mexico will be without doubt 
 a land of prosperity from its natural advantages, 
 but it will not be so for the races which now in- 
 habit it." 1 
 
 Alaman expands this Jeremiad in his fifth vol- 
 ume of the " History of Mexico," published in 1852. 
 We can fancy the sorrow of the patriot scholar as 
 he wrote out that sad refrain. The treaty of Gua- 
 dalupe Hidalgo was then but three years old, 
 which transferred nearly half of the Mexican Fed- 
 eral Eepublic to a conquering neighbor. An illus- 
 tration here of what Webster said of progress in the 
 United States, — " The prophecies lag behind the 
 fulfilment." 
 
 In 1863, and near its close, when the American 
 future showed by no means a perfectly clear sky, 
 John Bright uttered some words, each of which 
 Avas worth a thousand men for our threatened 
 Union. It was at Eochdale : " Will anybody deny 
 now that the Government at Washington, as regards 
 its own people, is the strongest government in the 
 world, at this hour, — and for this simple reason, 
 that it is based on the will, and the good-will of an 
 instructed people ? Look at its power. . . . They 
 have brought more men into the field, built more 
 
 1 Suinuex"'s Prophetic Voices, p. 169.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 387 
 
 ships for their navy, they have shown greater re- 
 sources, than any nation in Europe is capable of. 
 . . . Then Europe and England may learn that an 
 instructed democracy is the surest foundation of 
 government, and that education and freedom are 
 the only sources of true greatness and true happi- 
 ness among any people." 
 
 And two months later, at Birmingham, 1864, 
 when the English recognition of the Confederacy 
 was under discussion : " I am myself of opinion, 
 as I have been from the first, that the people of 
 America, so numerous, so pow^erful, so instructed, 
 so capable in every way, will settle the difficulties 
 of that continent without asking the old countries 
 of Europe to take any share in them." ^ 
 
 Eor the International Committee of the World's 
 Exposition at Paris in 1867, Michel Chevalier 
 made a report, and it contains some most re- 
 markable passages for European nations to read : 
 " It seems that the supreme authority is about 
 to escape from Western and Central Europe, to 
 pass to the New World. In the northern part of. 
 that other hemisphere offshoots of the European 
 race have founded a vigorous society, full of sap, 
 whose influence grows with a rapidity that has 
 never yet been seen anywhere. In crossing the 
 ocean it has left behind on the soil of old Europe 
 traditions, prejudices, and usages which, as impedi- 
 
 1 Speeches of John Bright, M.P., on the American Ques- 
 tion. Boston, 1865. pp. 257, 258, 259, 263.
 
 388 THE EMPIRE 01'- THE FUTUIIE. 
 
 inents heavy to move, would have embarrassed its 
 movements and retarded its progressive march. 
 In about thirty years the United States will have, 
 according to all probability, a hundred millions of 
 population, in possession of the most powerful 
 means, distributed over a territory which would 
 make France fifteen or sixteen times over [nineteen 
 times], and of the most wonderful disposition. . . . 
 Vainly do the occidental and central nations of 
 Europe attribute to themselves a primacy which 
 in their vanity they think sheltered from events, 
 and eternal ; as if there were anything eternal in 
 the grandeur and prosperity of societies, the works 
 of men ! " 
 
 Some of these bright and stirring anticipations 
 for America surprise us by coming from lands 
 where growth and progress and anticipation are not 
 the normal state of things. In this light a quo- 
 tation is presented from a speech in the Spanish 
 Cortes, in 1871, by Emilio Castelar: "America, 
 and especially Saxon America, with its immense 
 virgin territories, with its republic, with its equi- 
 librium between stability and progress, with its 
 harmony between liberty and democracy, is the 
 continent of the future, — the immense continent 
 stretched by God between the Atlantic and the 
 Pacific, where mankind may plant, essay, and re- 
 solve all social problems. Europe has to decide 
 whether she will confound herself with Asia, pla- 
 cing upon her lands old altars, and upon the altars
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 389 
 
 old idols, and upon the idols immovable theocra- 
 cies, and upon the theocracies despotic empires, or 
 whether she will go by labor, by liberty, and by 
 the republic, to collaborate with America in the 
 grand work of universal civilization." 
 
 At the Festival of the New England Society, 
 New York, 1850, Webster thus unites the historian 
 and the prophet : " Hitherto the extension of our 
 race, following our New England ancestry, has 
 crept along the shore. But now it has extended 
 itself. It has crossed the continent. It has not 
 only transcended the Alleghanies, but has capped 
 the Eocky Mountains. It is now upon the shores 
 of the Pacific. It shall yet go hard, if the three 
 hundred millions of people of China, provided they 
 are intelligent enough to understand anything, 
 shall not one day hear and know something of the 
 Eock of Plymouth, too. 
 
 "The emergence of this country from British 
 dominion is one of the most fortunate, the most 
 admirable, the most auspicious occurrences which 
 has ever fallen to tlie lot of man. The power of 
 this Eepublic at the present moment is spread 
 over a region, one of the richest and most fertile 
 on the globe, and of extent in comparison with 
 which the possessions of the House of Hapsburg 
 are as but a patch on the earth's surface." ^ 
 
 But necessity compels abbreviation in these quo- 
 
 ^ Webster's Hiilsemann Correspondence ; Works, vol. vi. 
 p. 496.
 
 390 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 tations from the prophets on America. A group 
 or constellation must be passed along at the same 
 time, with only a sentence and reference for each. 
 It " will make a glorious country," said William 
 Penn, wlien the Treaty of Utrecht and the Valley 
 of the Mississippi were the topic.^ When the 
 Washingtons and Dinwiddle were proposing to 
 colonize the Ohio, in order to secure it for the 
 English (1749), Earl Halifax, head of the Board 
 of Trade and Plantations, made this remark : " The 
 country west of the great mountains is the centre 
 of the British Dominion." ^ 
 
 , We have already quoted what Washington said 
 to the Chevalier de Chastellux, 1783, when speak- 
 ing of the limits of the treaty about to be pro- 
 claimed as those " which have given bounds to a 
 new empire." ^ When the sale of Louisiana to the 
 United States was about to be concluded, April 30, 
 1803, Napoleon said to Livingstone, the American 
 Commissioner, that he " was desirous of giving to 
 the United States a magnificent bargain, an em- 
 pire for a mere trifle." * And at another time : 
 " The day may come when the cession of Louis- 
 iana to the United States shall render the Ameri- 
 cans too powerful for the continent of Europe."^ 
 
 1 Bancroft's United States, vol. iii. p. 233. 
 
 2 Ibid., vol. iv. p. 42. 
 
 •i Ii'ving's Life of Washington, vol. iv. p. 434. 
 
 * Monette's History of the Mississippi Valle)-, vol. i. p. 552. 
 
 ^ Gayarre's History of Louisiana, vol. iii. p. 526.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 391 
 
 It is in place to remark here on the wealth of 
 the United States in 1880, It then headed the 
 valuation list of the nations, and we could have 
 bought out, according to Mulhall, the empires of 
 Eussia and Turkey, as well as the kingdoms of 
 Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, Australia, 
 South Africa, and all South America, — everything 
 valuable in each and all to which a dollar and 
 cent estimate could be attached. But as Napo- 
 leon's conception of our future power was doubtless 
 military, it is well to recall what Bright said of 
 our capability for land and sea forces in 1863, — 
 " greater resources than any nation in Europe is 
 capable of." Of course Napoleon was then looking 
 down the future in the line of armies and navies, 
 and across battlefields and new international boun- 
 daries, and over thrones destroyed, and new ones. 
 In this scoj)e of vision and thought he was no 
 doubt correct. lu such affairs the United States 
 has become too powerful for European intermed- 
 dling. She commands her situation, and if at all 
 interested in any "balance of power," it is simply 
 to balance the New World against the Old. The 
 forces extemporized in the late Civil War are a fair 
 index of the power to which Napoleon referred, 
 and show our country to be too large for a Water- 
 loo of the allies. 
 
 I have therefore refrained from prophecies and 
 growths in this line for the coming empire. As 
 rulers of this world the race of Anak is gone by,
 
 392 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 and the bedstead of Og, King of Bashan, is out of 
 style and use, and brain is nobly taking the ascen- 
 dency over muscle. It suits the genius of Amer- 
 ica to ship wheat and beef rather than soldiers and 
 the munitions of war to an inferior and needy 
 people ; and it is to be hoped that the augury of 
 tlie noblest in these later times is neither Amer- 
 ican nor delusive, — that the highest mastery 
 among the nations lies in the highest service to 
 all nations. 
 
 When the American and French Commissioners 
 had affixed their signatures to the papers cover- 
 ing the sale of Louisiana, Livingstone remarked : 
 " From this day the United States take their place 
 among the powers of the first rank." These in- 
 struments "prepare ages of happiness for innumera- 
 ble generations of human creatures." ^ 
 
 We may here incidentally remark on the quiet- 
 ness with which great events pass along in the 
 United States. The transfer of Louisiana from 
 nation to nation was made at New Orleans, Dec. 
 20, 1803, at meridian. At that time on the dial 
 the French flag was lowered and the American 
 was raised, passing eacli other midway on the flag- 
 staff. " No emotion was manifested by any other 
 part of the crowd " than by a small group of 
 Americans on a corner.^ And great events are 
 still taking place in the United States quite unob- 
 
 1 Gayarre's History of Louisiana, vol. iii. p. 525. 
 
 2 Maibois's History of Louisiana, vol. ii. 197-199.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 393 
 
 served except by small groups of Americans here 
 and there. 
 
 In a tract entitled " Reflections on the Cession 
 of Louisiana to the United States," by " Sylvestris," 
 1803, occurs this sentence : "Never since the com- 
 mencement of the annals of mankind did any 
 civilized nation possess so advantageous a position. 
 . . , Who that looks westward can fail to dis- 
 cover an unbounded territory, etc. ... I will not 
 affirm that the purchase cannot be made [it had 
 been already]. It is clear that we cannot offer a 
 consideration that is adequate ; the value of this 
 Province to the French surpasses the reach of 
 mere money." ^ 
 
 " The northern Pacific Ocean, and in the course 
 of time, probably, the eastern shores of Asia, 
 will find their masters in the country north of 
 California." 2 
 
 When President McCosh was preaching in his 
 former pulpit in Brechin, Scotland, in 1884, he re- 
 marked : " I have now fewer readers than I could 
 wish in this country. Thank God, I am getting a 
 hearing in the wider America." 
 
 As to the possibility suggested by Napoleon, 
 that the Americans might become too powerful 
 for tlie continent of Europe, some passages from 
 
 ^ Monroe's Embassy, etc. By Poplicola. 1803. pp. 14, 
 35, 45. 
 
 ^ Lord Ashburton to Mr. Sturgis, 1845 ; Berlin Arbitration, 
 p. 37.
 
 394 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 an article by Gladstone read quite like fulfilment. 
 Alluding to the marvellous growth of this nation, 
 he speaks of " the menace wliich, in the prospec- 
 tive development of her resources, America offers 
 to the commercial pre-eminence of England. On 
 this subject I will only say that it is she alone 
 who, at a coming time, can and probably will 
 wrest from us that commercial primacy. We 
 have no title, I have no inclination, to murmur 
 at the prospect. If she acquires it she will take 
 the acquisition by the right of the strongest ; but 
 in this instance the strongest means the best. 
 She will probably become what we are now, — the 
 head servant in the great houseliold of the world, 
 the employer of all employed, because her service 
 will be the most and the ablest. We have no more 
 title against her than Venice or Genoa or Holland 
 has had against us." 
 
 It is interesting to note some of the early am- 
 bitions of Great Britain for commercial supremacy 
 about the time she was planting those Colonies 
 which, her Premier now intimates, they may take 
 from her : " His Majesty is now absolute com- 
 mander of the British Isle, and hath also enlarged 
 his Dominions over a great part of the Westerne 
 Indies ; by means of which extent of Empire 
 (crossing in a manner the whole Ocean) the trade 
 and persons of all Nations (moving from one part 
 of the World to the other) must of necessitie, first 
 or last, come within compasse of his power and
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 395 
 
 jurisdiction. And therefore the Sovereignty of our 
 Seas being the most precious Jewell of his Majes- 
 tie's Crowne, and (nex under God) the principall 
 meanes of our Wealth and Safetie, all true English 
 hearts and hands are bound by all possible meanes 
 and dilligence to preserve and maintain the same, 
 even with the uttermost hazzard of their lives, their 
 goods, and their fortunes. "^ 
 
 Gladstone continues : " She has, taking the ca- 
 pacity of her land into view, as well as its mere 
 measurement, a natural base for the greatest con- 
 tinuous empire ever established by man. And 
 it may be well here to mention, what has not 
 always been sufhciently observed, that the dis- 
 tinction between continuous empire and empire 
 severed and dispersed over sea is vital." This is 
 a significant observation for the Premier. When 
 he wrote it the fragmentary colonial possessions 
 of Great Britain were forty. Burmah has since 
 been added. The colonies and dependencies of 
 the Queen equal about one seventh of the land of 
 this world, and embrace about one fourth of its 
 population. 
 
 Would Mr. Gladstone have us connect his 
 remark about a severed empire with his remark 
 closely preceding ? " One great duty is entailed 
 
 1 The Sovereignty of the British Seas, proved by Records. 
 
 History and the Municipal Lawes of this Kingdom. By that 
 
 Learned Knight, Sir John Boroughs. London, 1651. pp. 163- 
 165.
 
 396 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 upon US, which we unfortunately neglect, — the 
 duty of preparing, by a resolute and sturdy effort, 
 to reduce our public burdens in preparation for 
 a day when we shall probably have less capacity 
 than we have now to bear them." 
 
 But to return to his observations on the United 
 States. " The development which the Eepublic 
 has effected has been unexampled in its rapidity 
 and force. While other countries have doubled, 
 or at most trebled their population, she has risen, 
 during a single century of freedom, in round num- 
 bers, from two millions to forty-five. As to riches, 
 it is reasonable to establish, from the decennial 
 stages of the progress thus far achieved, a series 
 for the future ; and, reckoning upon this basis, I 
 suppose that the very next census, in the year 
 1880, will exhibit her to the world as certainly 
 the wealthiest of all the nations. . . . Yet even 
 now the work of searching the soil and the bowels 
 of the territory, and opening out her enterprise 
 throughout its vast expanse, is in its infancy. 
 The England and the America of the present are 
 probably the two strongest nations of the world. 
 But there can hardly be a doubt as between the 
 England and the America of the future, that the 
 daughter, at some no very distant time, will, 
 whether fairer or less fair, be unquestionably yet 
 stronger than the mother." ^ Gladstone was right 
 in his anticipations. In the census of the nations 
 
 1 North American Review, 1878, pp. 179-181.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 397 
 
 in 1880, as above stated, the United States stood 
 at the head in the column of wealth. 
 
 Of course in colonial days, and in the early 
 days of the Eepublic, and even hitlierto, men have 
 not been wanting, ranking well in scholarship and 
 official position, who had only the foresight of 
 discouragement and left-hand omens. To round 
 up this chapter of happy anticipations, one author 
 of the ill-boding, who has never lacked a successor, 
 may be quoted. 
 
 The Baron Sheffield published his anxieties in 
 1783 : "It is difficult to see the advantage the 
 New England Provinces will derive from inde- 
 pendence and separation from this country. Such 
 lights as we have point out that it must be ruin- 
 ous to them, and that nothing could be more to 
 their advantage than to become again part of the 
 empire." The American republic " will assume 
 a tone of importance ; she will partake of the 
 nature of new men; she has indulged and will 
 indulge herself in puerile insolence ; in that, per- 
 haps, she will not show herself much unlike her 
 parent, but she has sense and information." Ee- 
 ferring to American independence as conceded by 
 the Crown, the Baron says : " Yet the gift, how- 
 ever disgraceful to ourselves and unnecessary, will 
 be vain and useless to the new sovereign," — the 
 sovereign people. " The authority of the Con- 
 gress can never be maintained over thdse distant 
 and boundless regions." But it extends over a
 
 398 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTUHE. 
 
 region much larger than all Europe. " The emi- 
 grants from Europe to the American States will 
 be miserably disappointed ; however, having got 
 into a scrape, tliey may wish to lead others after 
 them ;" and since this was written eleven millions 
 have followed them in a marvellous continuing 
 through a hundred years. " It will not be an easy 
 matter to bring the American States to act as a 
 nation ; they are not to be feared as such by us." 
 
 " No quantity of beef was exported from any 
 Colony but Connecticut. The merchants of New 
 York, Philadelphia, and Rhode Island were sup- 
 plied from thence, and New Jersey. Massachusetts 
 salted some for exportation and for the navy, of 
 an inferior quality to that of Ireland, and not so 
 well cured. There is but little in Virginia. The 
 beef of the Provinces south of Pennsylvania is not 
 good." Yet now Europe has a deficit of 853,000 
 tons of meat annually, and the United States has a 
 surplus of 1,076,000. "Excepting the instance of 
 three or four years, there never was any market in 
 Europe for the wheat and wheat-flour of America, 
 except in Spain, Portugal, and the ports of the 
 Mediterranean." Now Europe has an annual de- 
 ficit of 380,000,000 of bushels of wheat, and the 
 United States has a surplus of 370,000,000.1 
 
 But enough from the prophets on the United 
 
 1 Observations on the Commerce of the American States. 
 By I. B. Holroyd, Baron Sheffield. The Second Edition, London 
 1883, pp. 63, 100, 104, 105, 106, 109, 71, 44.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 399 
 
 States of America. It remains only to confront 
 the preceding chapters of predictions with some 
 fulfilments into which we have lived. As to ex- 
 tension of domain, the anxieties of Oswald and 
 Vergennes have been immensely realized. Instead 
 of being confined to the eastward of the watershed 
 of the Great Lakes and the Ohio, we have the 
 springs and the mouths of the waters flowing into 
 the Pacific and Arctic along a coast of 6,411 miles. 
 The entire western coast of Europe is only about 
 10,000 miles. The treaty of 1783 assigned to the 
 young nation an area of 820,680 square miles ; 
 now the nation has about 4,000,000. Taking one 
 State as a measuring unit, the original area equalled 
 one hundred and two States like Massachusetts, 
 wdiile it has been increased to equal four hundred 
 and ninety-seven, 
 
 A few comparative facts, taken from tables made 
 up for all the nations, and from a well-accredited 
 author, will best set things which have come to 
 pass over against things predicted. The citations 
 are made from " The Balance Sheet of the World 
 for Ten Years, — 1870-1880." By Michael G. 
 Mulhall, F. S. S. : London, 1881. " It would be 
 impossible to find in history a parallel to the pro- 
 gress of the United States in the last ten years." ^ 
 During those ten years the increase of population 
 in the United States has been "three times the 
 European rate of increase, and double that of Eng- 
 
 1 Mulhall, p. 108.
 
 400 THE EMriKE OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 laud or Germany." ^ " Ten years ago the balance 
 of trade was against the country, but now (1880) 
 tlie exports are tliirty-one per cent over imports.^ 
 . . . The Americans now make one lii'th of tlie 
 iron and one fourth of the steel of the world, . . . 
 one half the gold and one lialf the silver of the 
 world's supply. . . . Taking, in gloho, all the min- 
 ing interests of the world, the United States repre- 
 sents thirty-six, Great Britain tliiity-three, and the 
 other nations tliirty-one per cent of the total.^ . . . 
 In these ten years farming stock has increased 
 thirty-three per cent. In 1880 the United States 
 had: horses, 12,250,000; cows, 33,600,000; sheep, 
 38,000,000 ; hogs, 35,000,000.* . . . liailways have 
 doubled in ten years. . . . This is more than tlie 
 entire increase in Europe for the same ten 
 years." ^ 
 
 In the United States taxation on the earnings 
 of the people is 9^ per cent, as against 31 in Italy, 
 17'i in France, and 12 in Great Britain, and 15^ 
 for Europe.^ 
 
 The grain-supply is 18i per cent above con- 
 sumption, and the meat-supply 36 per cent. " The 
 United States produces 30 per cent of the grain 
 and 30 per cent of the meat of the world." '^ In 
 1870 the wheat crop of the United States was 
 
 1 Miilball, pp. 117, 118. * Ibid., p. 111. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 109. 6 Ibid., pp. 113, 114. 
 
 3 Ibid., pp. 110, 111. 6 ibia.^ pp. 11^ 78, 116. 
 
 7 Ibid., p. 118.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 401 
 
 231,000,000 bushels ; in 1880, 496,000,000 bushels. 
 In 1870 the corn was 992,000,000 bushels, and in 
 1880 it was 1,480,000,000 bushels. 
 
 " The Americans are apparently the best fed of 
 all the nations." The average annual consump- 
 tion of grain to the person is 40^^^^^ bushels, while 
 the average in Europe is 17^^^^^ bushels. The con- 
 sumption of meat in the United States averages 
 120 pounds to the person, and in Europe 57i 
 pounds.i " Europe has a deficit of 380,000,000 
 bushels of grain, and 853,000 tons of meat an- 
 nually. The United States have a surplus of 
 370,000,000 bushels of grain, and 1,076,000 tons 
 of meat.2 . . . The increase of population in the 
 United States exceeds the agarregate number of in- 
 
 Do O 
 
 habitants in three kingdoms of Europe; namely, 
 Holland, Denmark, and Portugal." ^ 
 
 The praise of rivals may well be welcomed, if 
 not coveted ; and when the London " Times," not 
 given to overestimates of American prosperity, 
 indulges in grateful commendations and emi- 
 nent hopes for the United States, we may give 
 its words the full weight and worth of their 
 face. In one of its issues for January, 1881, it 
 expresses the following sentiments, historic and 
 prophetic : — 
 
 "The details we publish this morning of the 
 principal facts elicited by last year's census of the 
 
 1 Mulhall, pp. 38, 39, 119. 2 ibid., p. 12. 3 Ibid., p. 6. 
 26
 
 402 THE EMTIUK OF THE FUTL'KE. 
 
 United States coiilinu the impression the original 
 suniniary of results produced. A nation has never 
 exhibited a more magnificent picture of material 
 progress for ten years. Since 1870 more than 
 eleven and a half millions have been added to the 
 population, at a rate of thirty per cent increase. 
 E.\cei)t China and Great r>ritain and Piussia, no 
 government can count more subjects. In the 
 number of citizens moved by similar impulses, and 
 recognizing common ends, the British Empire it- 
 self yields to the great licpublic. Fifty millions 
 of human beings in a land like America more than 
 match the eighty-six millions of European and 
 Asiatic Eussia. The four hundred and twenty-five 
 millions of China are not to be compared with 
 them as a force among mankind. The growth of a 
 population may generally be understood to imply 
 the growth of wealth and resources. As each cen- 
 sus in a European State indicates a numerical 
 advance, it may for the most part be inferred that 
 fresh means of support have been made available. 
 When, however, every successive census in the 
 United States reveals an expansion by bounds 
 and leaps, faith in the instinct of human nature 
 not to multiply beyond the power of existence is 
 scarcely needed to reassure anxiety. The granary 
 which is to feed the new millions which have 
 come, the millions which are to follow, piles its 
 stores for the whole world to certify them. Each 
 added American citizen has not to search for the
 
 . THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE. 403 
 
 livelihood nature hides somewhere or other for all 
 its children. He is born or imported with his 
 inheritance labelled and allotted. He has but to 
 go West, or North, or South ; there it is awaiting 
 his advent."
 
 404 CONCLUSION. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 WE lind ourselves at tlie conclusion of an 
 exceedingly interesting historical study. 
 As wide, and covering long lapses of time, and 
 under pressure for brevity, the survey has been 
 necessarily hurried, liice landscape studies from an 
 express train of cars. In "The Eailroad and the 
 Farmer " Edward Atkinson remarks that " this na- 
 tion has a function in the world that is yet almost 
 a vision." We have now come to a position where 
 the visionary may be seen to be taking on the 
 real. 
 
 True prophecy is involuntary utterance under 
 divine pressure and dictation ; but there are human 
 prophecies almost equally irresistible and reliable. 
 When tlie careful student of events notices that he 
 is following an unbroken series of growths in a 
 nation, down the decades of years, he cannot resist 
 the foreseeing and foretelling of events as logical 
 sequents. Such was that inspiration of John 
 Bright, when speaking at Birmingham, on the 
 American question, in 1862, — midway in our 
 darkest hours : " It may be but a vision, but I will
 
 CONCLUSION. 405 
 
 cherish it. I see one vast confederation stretching 
 from the frozen North in one unbroken line to the 
 glowing South, and from the wild billows of the 
 Atlantic westward to the calmer waters of the Pa- 
 cific main ; and I see one people, and one law, and 
 one language, and one faith, and over all that wide 
 continent the home of freedom, and a refuge for 
 the oppressed of every race and of every clime." ^ 
 
 A very large extent of land in the public do- 
 main still remains in Government hands unsold, 
 awaiting the realization of John Bright's vision. 
 2,889,000,000 acres had been sold down to June 
 30, 1880. At the same time 1,270,000,000 acres 
 remained unsold, — about three sevenths of the 
 whole domain. Or, to state this in a more intel- 
 ligible and popular form, the United Kingdom 
 — Great Britain and Ireland — has an area of 
 77,332,480 acres, but the United States has on 
 hand, unsold, sixteen times that amount of land. 
 Our Government has still, in an absolutely wild 
 state, over which the public surveyor has not yet 
 travelled with compass and chain, thirteen times 
 the area of the United Kingdom. It should, how- 
 ever, be added that the proportion of good land 
 sold is greater than the proportion of it in the 
 sections unsold. 
 
 Into this most immense national field, where 
 such unsold areas are awaiting the coming nation, 
 
 1 Speeches of John Bright, M. P., on the American Question. 
 Boston, 1865. pp. 128, 129.
 
 406 CONCLUSION. 
 
 we are moving with a speed exceeding that of the 
 leading government of the workl. In the decade 
 ending with 1880 our increase in population was 
 three times the European rate, and double that of 
 England and Germany — the leading nations of 
 Europe — in growth. The significance of this, as 
 to our future, is seen, if we remember our excess 
 of area over tliat of the United Kingdom as above 
 stated, and then consider that in 1880 their popu- 
 lation was only thirty-five millions to our fifty 
 millions. 
 
 In indulging visions of our national growth, al- 
 lowance should be made for portions of our terri- 
 tory, uninviting for human homes, and some even 
 uninhabitable. Yet since Eastern energy has set- 
 tled Vermont, and Western enterprise has conquered 
 the Great American Desert, we do not feel con- 
 strained to yield much land permanently to wild 
 animals and American Arabs. Gladstone takes 
 the quality as well as the quantity of our territory 
 into view when he says that we have " a natural 
 base for the greatest continuous empire ever estab- 
 lished by man." If the British or the Eussian 
 Empire be put in comparison with us in extent, 
 either is double our own ; but when we consider 
 how much of the latter is arctic and how much 
 of the former is arctic and torrid, their quantity 
 must be estimated in view of our quality. The 
 two persons to a square mile in Asiatic Eussia give 
 no rich promise for the future of those regions, and
 
 CONCLUSION. 407 
 
 British North America is less promising ; for, in- 
 cluding even the old Canadas as well as the Hud- 
 son Bay and Polar sections, it has a density of only 
 1^2_4_ of Q^ person to the square mile. The popula- 
 tion in Manitoba in 1881 was only one person to 
 two square miles, in British Columbia one to 
 seven, and in the Territories one to forty. 
 
 Moreover, in forecasting the empire of the 
 future, as the preceding chapters compel us to do, 
 it is to be well considered that our dominion is not 
 fractional. With the exception of Alaska, it lies 
 in one undivided body, animated practically by one 
 blood, using one national tongue, and living under 
 one law, enacted at one common centre. In this re- 
 gard our homogeneity is remarkable as in contrast 
 with the colonial and heterogeneous composition 
 of the British Empire. Her composite dominion 
 lies scattered about tlie world in forty-one parcels, 
 not including the home kingdom, — in Europe three, 
 in America eleven, in Africa nine, in Asia nine, 
 in Australia nine. The advantage from this unity 
 for symmetrical development is beyond estimate 
 to the American nation, in aid of consolidation and 
 vigor of national life. If, instead of our thirty-eight 
 States, constituting a federal unit in one undivided 
 territory, we were so many colonies and outlying 
 provinces, separated each from every other by in- 
 tervening and foreign sovereignties, each having 
 a different blood, language, religion, and the rem- 
 nants of an ancestral government, the hope of
 
 408 CONCLUSION. 
 
 union, prosperity, and perpetuity would be ex- 
 tremely frail. Old World wars and the overthrow 
 of governments liave sprung from tliese military 
 unions of discordant and antagonistic materials. 
 Tlie rise of such a colony or dependency toward 
 the higher civilization is a menace to the head 
 government of independence and home rule. 
 
 One has but to consider this amount of unsold 
 country, sixteen times the area of the United 
 Kingdom of Great Britain, and the high tide of 
 population flowing into it at the present time, to 
 feel that we have a magnificent future, and near at 
 hand. What Samuel Adams, in the Congress at 
 Philadelphia, wrote to James Warren, president of 
 the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts in 1775, 
 is pre-eminently true to-day : " The wheels of 
 Providence seem to be in their swiftest motion." 
 Our increase in population, natural and imported, 
 is now about two millions a year ; so that the 
 growth of two years would more than equal all 
 we had in the days of the Eevolution. 
 
 Such increase of new settlements and filling 
 up of the older ones are without precedent or 
 parallel in history. What a Congressional Com- 
 mittee on the development of the West reported 
 in 1816 might be repeated to-day with emphasis: 
 "The rapidity of its growth is such that even 
 whilst we are employed in drawing the portrait, 
 the features continue to enlarge, and the picture 
 becomes distorted." In September, 1884, there
 
 CONCLUSION. 409 
 
 was spread out, near Devil's Lake, Dakota, an 
 immense wheat-field, with only here and there 
 a rude shelter for man and beast. Within nine 
 months a city had sprung up at the terminus of a 
 new railroad into that wheat-field, containing three 
 hotels, a bank, roller-rink, five lumber-yards, two 
 elevators, two churches, and numerous stores, with 
 a population to correspond, and had already handled 
 eight hundred thousand bushels of wheat. In 
 this way, to use the words of a very eminent 
 English statesman, America "bravely and vigor- 
 ously grapples with the problem of making a 
 continent into a State." 
 
 There is a suggestive incident floating down to 
 us from the English Parliament of 1846, as to 
 our rapidity of growth. Sir Robert Peel, then dis- 
 cussing the corn-laws, mentioned two young and 
 border towns in America that would by and by 
 rival Odessa and Danfzic in the crrain markets of 
 the world ; and he named Chicago and Milwaukee. 
 It is said that those two cities had never before 
 been mentioned in the House, and members 
 whispered, "What did he call them?" "Oh, 
 Indian towns," was the reply. That was only 
 forty years ago, and now the two places have 
 their seven hundred thousand and two hundred 
 thousand inhabitants. English dealers in grain 
 now catch those names with painful distinctness 
 sometimes, when America rules the prices of 
 wheat.
 
 410 CONCLUSION. 
 
 The sudden massing of peoples in newly dis- 
 covered or newly opened countries has always 
 marked the opening of a new era in human pro- 
 gress. At such times the race gathers fresh force 
 for another career, and begins to make material for 
 another volume of history. The reason for this 
 lies much in the fact that those who emigrate are 
 usually the more energetic portion of a community. 
 They are the spirited and ambitious, who weary 
 of grooves, and have more independence and ex- 
 pectation than they have reverence and tenacity 
 for the past or content with the present. Our 
 vast expanses of newly opened country, so dwarf- 
 ing the nations of Europe in comparative extent, 
 and the millions gathering in them by both natural 
 increase and immigration, show plainly to the 
 statesman that we are working on the crude 
 foundations of a new empire, unprecedented in 
 extent, population, and wealth. For a century 
 and a half it was doubted whether the English 
 Colonies could rise above suppressed dependencies 
 under Great Britain, and break the will of Pitt by 
 making a nail for a horseshoe in America. 
 
 It was by slow growth that the knowledge of 
 the existence of the United States as a nation 
 became common in Europe. "Once a colony al- 
 ways a colony " was an axiom then as it is to-day 
 in the Old World. In 1797 John Quincy Adams 
 entered Berlin as American Minister to Prussia. 
 He was questioned at the gates by a dapper lieu-
 
 CONCLUSION. 411 
 
 tenant, who did not know, until one of his private 
 soldiers explained to him, what the United States 
 of America were.^ When in the same city George 
 Bancroft put before the Emperor William, as 
 umpire between the United States and Great 
 Britain, the Northwestern Boundary Question, 
 the unknown Ptepublic had become a nation in 
 the first rank ; and to-day it heads the list in the 
 financial valuations of the nations of the earth. 
 
 Eeasonable anticipations gf our future, fairly 
 put, seem visionary and even boastful to foreign 
 statesmen, and almost as much so to our own 
 provincial and untravelled citizens. A playful 
 allusion to our national bird will neutralize with 
 many a chapter of august facts ; nevertheless, that 
 bird is as yet only in the callow and downy 
 stage of development. 
 
 When Canon Farrar was lately leaving America, 
 he put this glowing passage among his farewell 
 words : " I have stood astonished before the growth, 
 the power, the irresistible advance, the Niagara 
 rush of sweeping energy, the magnificent appar- 
 ent destiny of this nation, wondering whereunto it 
 would grow." 
 
 Herein is forced on us the great duty of the 
 hour. We are making a nation, and hardly mid- 
 way in the enterprise, and no work more sublime, 
 no call to any labor higher and holier, may justly 
 divert us or claim our forces, 
 
 1 Morse's John Quincy Adams, p. 24.
 
 412 CONCLUSION. 
 
 The providences gone before and preparing the 
 way, the raw material on hand by a natural or 
 divine preparation, the work so auspiciously be- 
 gun and tiie success attained, and the grand op- 
 j)ortunity or chance which beckons us on to a 
 great future, all declare one fact, — that the Ameri- 
 can people have an offer to make a nation to or- 
 der. Separated from the old nations by an ocean, 
 and in a land unencumbered by traditional and 
 inherited regimes ; with none of their wreck and 
 debris on our new building-ground, and in ad- 
 vance of the fossiliferous period of governments, 
 we may build to our own model. Inheriting all 
 the knowledge and experience, but none of the 
 authority or dictation of preceding nations, in an 
 advanced era when civil society has both the right 
 and the duty of improved models, and in a domain 
 new, inviting to human homes, and ample beyond 
 all precedent, the human race never elsewhere had 
 so good a hope of forward movement. The non- 
 governing masses of the Old World hang in anxiety 
 on our experiment. 
 
 AVhile such issues are pending in our struggle 
 to make a continent into a State, we must not be 
 persuaded to fritter away our forces in regulating 
 and reconstructinfT unfortunate and inferior sections 
 of the Old World. While we have a Chicago and 
 San Francisco to build, it is not for us to rebuild 
 Thebes and Carthage. And with hints now and 
 then, in our cities and on our frontier, of mediae-
 
 CONCLUSION. 413 
 
 val civilization in the United States, furnished by 
 nihilists, anarchists, socialists, and atheists, the 
 question grows with our country and its dangers, 
 how much conservating and elevating power we 
 can wisely export. 
 
 The fact must not be forgotten that when a 
 monarchical government weakens or dissolves, the 
 restoration of order usually lies in the line of more 
 liberty for the people. So revolution under mon- 
 archy is never without a possible remedy, and the 
 final rest and ultimate hope are in a government 
 by the people and for the people. If that anchor- 
 age fail, all goes adrift on the sea of anarchy. The 
 American people have now arrived where ^the old 
 question confronts them : Are a people competent 
 for self-government ? Only with a fair and bal- 
 ancing proportion of intellectual and moral force 
 in the body politic ; and during the last two or 
 three decades our Government has had some sug- 
 gestions of great gravity in this direction. With 
 two millions of voters who cannot read and write 
 their own ballots, the United States may well con- 
 sider why there are so many dead republics. 
 
 The marked weaknesses of the Eepublic show 
 themselves in our illiteracy, immorality, and irre- 
 ligion ; and the one continental work of the Ameri- 
 can people will tax the wisest and most benevolent 
 and sacrificing, — to guard the nation against these 
 dangers. This is to be said more emphatically 
 because, under our system of gcvernment, much
 
 414 CONCLUSION. 
 
 of this work must be done, not by statute and tax- 
 ation, but by the benevolent hand and voluntary 
 contributions of the people. The immensity of 
 the field and the success or failure of the Ameri- 
 can endeavor call for a most discriminating pro- 
 portional division of all our charitable contril)utions 
 and endowments and benevolent work. 
 
 Nor will it be enough for the good and the de- 
 vout to hope and trust. There is too much lazy 
 reliance on Providence. That will not save the 
 Eepublic. The Christian creed and practice of 
 such could be improved by using so much pagan- 
 ism as was hinted by Jupiter to the stalled and 
 praying wagoner, — to put his own shoulder to the 
 wheel. When the Boston Port Bill was announced 
 to the Connecticut Assembly, it " appointed a day 
 of humiliation and prayer, and ordered an inven- 
 tory to be taken of the cannon and military stores," 
 — a very sensible combination of forces in saving 
 one's country. And generally, in the Colonies, on 
 that event so menacing the welfare of the country, 
 " bells were muffled and tolled from morning till 
 night, flags were kept at half-mast, streets were 
 dressed in mourning, public buildings and shops 
 were draped in black, large congregations filled 
 the churches." ^ So the Congress in session at 
 Philadelphia made address to the people by the 
 pen of Richard Henry Lee : " Above all things we 
 earnestly entreat you with devotion of spirit, peni- 
 
 1 Frothingliam's Rise of the Republic, p. 324.
 
 CONCLUSION. 415 
 
 tence of heart, and amendment of life, to humble 
 yourselves and implore the power of Almighty 
 God." And when Cornwallis surrendered, Con- 
 gress most properly " went in procession to church 
 to give thanks to Almighty God for the victory." 
 
 But with all this religious devotion and fasting 
 and thanksgiving, no people ever so labored and 
 sacrificed for a desired end, as if the result rested 
 on their struggles. We are yet in the founding of 
 the Eepublic, and by no means past the era of 
 anxiety, with the memory and admonition that 
 of all the European republics, first and last, only 
 three survive. Almost all the members of the 
 republican family of government are dead, as of 
 a short-lived race. They have died, moreover, of 
 illiteracy, immorality, and irreligion. I have al- 
 ready said that the genius of our Government does 
 not provide by constitution or statute for moral 
 or religious qualities in the people, or for the high- 
 est institutions of learning. It approbates and en- 
 courages these, but leaves them to be secured by 
 the voluntary and benevolent action of the people. 
 In later years wealth, scholarship, science, and 
 aesthetics have gained patronage, endowment, and 
 popularity in great advance of those personal qual- 
 ities which ornament life as the beatitudes, and 
 crown manhood. 
 
 Very much work remains to be done, and indeed 
 is constantly accumulating, for which wide popular 
 contributions and single princely gifts must lay
 
 416 CONCLUSION. 
 
 the foundations. The church, the college, and the 
 professional school must have early and command- 
 ing position in the new country west of the Alle- 
 ghanies, as they did in the country east of the 
 Alleghauies when it was new, if we would have 
 men come to the front who are competent and 
 worthy to found and lead a State. It is well 
 enough, and perhaps timely, to repeat here what 
 Benton said in 1844, in his speech in the Senate, 
 on Texas, or Disunion : " Superficial readers be- 
 lieve it was the military men who destroyed the 
 Eoman Eepublic. No such thing. It was the 
 politicians who did it, — factious, corrupt, intriguing 
 politicians ; destroying public virtue in their mad 
 pursuit after office; destroying their rivals by 
 crime ; deceiving and debauching the people for 
 votes ; and bringing elections into contempt by 
 the frauds and violence with which they were 
 conducted." ^ 
 
 Honored names have gone into our new coun- 
 try, as the people have carried the nation that 
 way, and have taken their place in American his- 
 tory in philanthropic, humane, educational, and 
 Christian institutions, just as the names we now 
 honor and love gained their places in the colonial 
 era, and in the years following the colonial. No 
 patriots, in the field or the forum, can be more 
 worthily called the founders of the Eepublic ; and 
 if we would continue to build as wisely as the 
 
 1 Benton's Thirty Years' View, vol. ii. p. 615.
 
 CONCLUSION. 417 
 
 fathers, such meu must be found ; and they must 
 be multiplied, too, for an area five times as large 
 and for a population fifteen* times as large as those 
 fathers had in the lievolutionary epoch. It is 
 all most filial and reverent to enclose expensively 
 Jacob's Well, and erect a noble monument there 
 to the patriarcli. Meanwhile the great American 
 caravan, moving west with the tread of a nation, 
 must have other wells and drinking fountains 
 provided. 
 
 No nation ever yet had so successful a past in 
 a period so brief. In one century we have gone 
 up from a colonial state, where the British Minis- 
 try were unwilling that we should manufacture a 
 teacup, to stand in the first rank of manufacturing 
 a nation. And yet we seem to be but in the be- 
 ginning of our career, as a ship outward bound for 
 the farthest ocean, which is still in sight of home 
 headlands, and has just laid her course. No 
 nation ever had so auspicious a future. Still 
 young and crude, in the gristle rather than the 
 bone, our possible history is mostly before us, in 
 tempting susceptibilities and rude, massive mate- 
 rial. No nation ever came so near to having 
 innumerable possibilities and unlimited area for 
 building itself. 
 
 St. Peter's at Eome was begun nearly four hun- 
 dred years ago — 1506 — and is yet unfinished. 
 The building of it still goes on, according to its 
 
 original and grand plan. Twelve generations of 
 27
 
 418 CONCLUSION. 
 
 workmeu have come and gone over its scaffoldings, 
 and still the work goes ou with a constantly new 
 grandeur and glory. All this is architectural. 
 
 The American structure, sacred and civil, the 
 building of the State, was begun nearly three hun- 
 dred years ago. And still the work goes on. Nine 
 generations of workmen have come and gone over 
 its scaffoldings, and we are the tenth, and, like our 
 fathers, building better than we know. Occasion- 
 ally, in our poor apprentice work, and through the 
 haze of our poor eyes, there comes to view a new 
 corridor or aisle, turret or dome, and often ampler 
 interior courts ; and so there opens up, wider and 
 deeper, the grandeur of the architecture, as on a 
 plan of men inspired for statemanship. So majes- 
 tically has the building of the American State 
 gone on. 
 
 In his first inaugural Washington said : " Every 
 step by which they [the Americans] have advanced 
 to the character of an independent nation seems to 
 have been distinguished by some token of provi- 
 dential agency." It is for us to look back and see 
 these divine tokens in what has been accomplished 
 in founding the State, and so discover the plan on 
 which we are building. So the work already ac- 
 complished will foretell our future labors, which 
 prophetic statesmen have outlined. It is for us 
 to study and comprehend all this, and hasten the 
 enterprise, — the building of the Empire of the 
 Future.
 
 CONCLUSION. 419 
 
 The world of high art cannot afford to leave St. 
 Peter's unfinished, nor the world of highest civili- 
 zation the building of the United States of To- 
 morrow. And when this American structure is 
 finished, it shall be said of it, as Byron says of St. 
 Peter's, though with an import infinitely deeper 
 and nobler : — 
 
 " But thou, of temples old and altars new, 
 Standest alone, with nothing like to thee."
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Page 
 Adams, John, on America's growth and mission . . . 364-366 
 
 John Quincy, anecdote of 410, 411 
 
 Admiralty jurisdiction, slow movement west 301-306 
 
 Alaman, Lucas, predicts the absorption of Mexico by the 
 
 United States 386 
 
 Alaska, purchase, cost, amount, and worth of 38-41 
 
 shore line of 15 
 
 Alaslcans, Christian Missions among, neglected 39 
 
 Alleghauies, large cities beyond 265 
 
 America, the Fifth Empire 358, 359 
 
 as compared with British or Russian territory . . . 406, 407 
 
 American Desert, an unfortunate term 93 
 
 and Pike's, Astor's, and Long's expeditions .... 97-101 
 
 and McDuifie 104 
 
 and the " Edinburgh Review " 104,105 
 
 and the "Westminster Review" 108-112 
 
 and Washington Irving 105-108 
 
 and School Geographies, — Woodbridge and Willard, Olney, 
 
 Smith, Colton 101-104, 109 
 
 States occupied bj', and population and cereals of . . 133-135 
 
 driven before immigrants 127, 134, 136 
 
 Jefferson's original mistake on 96 
 
 of Edward I. Wallace and Governor Simpson .... 108 
 
 professional opinions on 114-119 
 
 reduced 112-120 
 
 yields to farmers 127 
 
 American Independence only second to Christianity in impor- 
 tance 372 
 
 law followed the English 306-308 
 
 passion for more land 27, 44-46 
 
 structure when finished, what 419 
 
 Americans, amusing ignorance of, as to their own country . 18-20 
 Aranda, Count, regards the Republic as a Colossus . . . 380, 381
 
 422 INDEX. 
 
 Page 
 
 Army, standing, in United States and Europe 341, 342 
 
 Astor's trading vessel at Chicago, the first 70 
 
 fur trade at Cliicago 71 
 
 Aztec, Mexican, and Pueblo life 190-193 
 
 Balance of power gone West 309-311 
 
 Uaiiditti, on the border 169-173 
 
 Uannack, Montana, Lynch law in 221-224 
 
 Baptiste, Point de Saible, first settler at Chicago, and first 
 
 owner 59, 60 
 
 Benton, Thomas H., in Eastern hostility to Western land 
 
 sales 283, 284 
 
 Berkeley, Bishop, and his "course of empire" .... 360, 361 
 Bingham, William, and lands in Province of Maine .... 150 
 
 Border men, many of, the refuse of society 174, 175 
 
 Boroughs, Sir John, on England's sovereigntj' of the seas . . 395 
 Brackinridge, Hugh Henry, poem on The Rising Glory of 
 
 America 366 
 
 Bright, John, on America as the strongest government in the 
 
 world 38G, 387 
 
 vision of American future 404, 405 
 
 British America, Pacific coast of 16 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, prophetic views of America . . . 358, 359 
 Bushnell, Dr., on home travel 351 
 
 California hides and the railway 318, 319 
 
 "Camillus " on the Louisiana purchase 270 
 
 Canada, education in, priestly 206 
 
 Cartwright, John, the colonies must control the continent . . 370 
 
 Case}', James P., shoots James King 246 
 
 Castelar, Erailio, that America will lead the world in civiliza- 
 tion 388, 389 
 
 Cattle-drive, and distances of "out West" 20-23 
 
 Cattle shipped at Salina, Kan 332, 333 
 
 Cerisier on American influence in Europe 377 
 
 Chapman on the future of America 357 
 
 Chevalier, Michel, on the United States as leading the nations 387,388 
 
 on the growth of the United States 332 
 
 Chicago, Ancient (1778-1833) 53-92 
 
 and churches , 69 
 
 and San Francisco R. R., no room for, in Europe ... 25, 26 
 
 and the Indian Council in, 1831-33 78 
 
 and the school system 69, 70, 89, 90
 
 INDEX, 423 
 
 Page 
 
 Chicago, as seen by Colonel Long in 1831 68 
 
 becomes a town in 1833 66, 67 
 
 Canal to the Illinois 71 
 
 Directory for 1830 69 
 
 early quiet of 63 
 
 English title to, extinguished in 1795 60 
 
 first occupant of 58 
 
 in 1809 in Wisconsin Territory 71 
 
 in 1825, what 68 
 
 massacre at 65, 66 
 
 not easily found 67 
 
 on early trapper route 56 
 
 once in Virginia, 1778 58 
 
 post-office, once and now 84-87 
 
 route to, explored b}' Logan, 1718 56 
 
 rush of growth in, 1830-36 71 
 
 valuation, extravagance, and debts of 71, 72 
 
 ■wheat trade begins in 1838 75, 88 
 
 Chicago's first saloon-keeper 60, 61 
 
 growth not so singular 54 
 
 Chicagoes, many of, still rising 54 
 
 Clark, Gen. George Rogers, conquers the Northwest Territory . 57 
 Colleges and churches indispensable for the West .... 214-218 
 
 are they too early and too many ? 216-218 
 
 earh' on the frontier 211, 212 
 
 real and sham, out West 216 
 
 Colonies, claim of, to Western lands, and how settled . . 43-45 
 
 Colonists of California, many corrupt 175 
 
 Colorado, and some European areas 10 
 
 Commerce, salt and fresh water 300,301 
 
 Western, and the Courts 301-306 
 
 Common schools and any new State 203 
 
 Conclusion 404-419 
 
 Cowley, Address of, to the New World 358 
 
 Crimes, capital, in Texas 172 
 
 Cumberland Mountains invite to farming 338 
 
 Dakota and some European areas 10 
 
 Daniel, Samuel, on the future of the English language . . . 357 
 D'Argenson, Marquis, predicts very much for the United 
 
 States ' 361-364 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, suppression of Lieutenant Stevens's Report 
 
 on lands of the Northwest 126 
 
 Debts, national, of United States and Europe compared . . . 341
 
 424 INDEX. 
 
 Page 
 
 Pocivilization in early Canada 179, 180 
 
 Def^eiKTiition of hnniigrants in tlitir families . 177, 178, 198, 199 
 
 Desert lajuls, sale of 135, 1.36 
 
 De Soto, grant of land to 138, 139 
 
 Do Tocqueviile, and the United States as covering the conti- 
 nent 383-385 
 
 Dinisdale's book, •'Vi,^ri!antes of Montana" 220,227 
 
 Discovery of America and ntility of, topic for a prize . , . 366 
 
 Distances, Surprising, in the United States 18-26 
 
 Domain, I'liblic, extent of 399 
 
 Donations, greatest results of, in the West 312, 313 
 
 Dorciiester and a railroad 348 
 
 Dubuque's, Julion, Spanish grant 147 
 
 Duty of the hour 411, 412 
 
 Eartiiqitake at New Madrid amusingly explained . . 207, 208 
 
 East, incredulity of, about the West 266, 267 
 
 and West, early rivalry of 47-51 
 
 and West, line on the United States, half-way point of . . 25 
 defended by Webster in his great Reply to Hayne . . 284-288 
 
 opposes internal improvements 288-291 
 
 Eastern benevolence fully responsive to facts 218-220 
 
 hostility to the West conceded by Webster .... 287, 288 
 
 Jealousy and Neglect of the West 263-313 
 
 men and frontier work, a failure with Indians 62 
 
 statesmen provincial 291, 292 
 
 Education in early Louisiana Territory 203 
 
 spirit of, heroic on frontier 214-216 
 
 Emigration is moral exposure 178, 194-197 
 
 Emigrants of old often inferior 178 
 
 of fortune and American nomads 197 
 
 usually the most energetic 410 
 
 Empire of the Future 355-403 
 
 Englishmen in the United States 18 
 
 Erie Canal, origin and opening of, in 1825 48 
 
 European and American distances contrasted 18-25 
 
 Events crowding on each other in the United States . . 363, 364 
 
 Exports of the United States in 1880 335 
 
 Expresses and stages, early 47 
 
 Ezekiel the prophet, — did he ever see a locomotive ? . 339, 340 
 
 Farm land of United States and of Europe equal 341 
 
 Farm lands, soldiers not good judges of 125
 
 INDEX. 425 
 
 Farms in Illinois before and after the railroad came . . 321, 322 
 
 now only one sixth of our arable land 337, 340 
 
 Farrar, Canon, and his surprise . . 411 
 
 Florida, early condition and the purchase of by the United 
 
 States 33, 34 
 
 Food supplies, mainly from the West 265, 26G 
 
 Foote's Resolution, hostile to the West . . . . . . 283, 284 
 
 Fort Dearborn built at Chicago, 1803 61 
 
 Fort Miamis, founding of, unknown 56 
 
 Forsyth, Robert A., a teacher in Chicago 70 
 
 France sells Louisiana to the United States 30-32 
 
 loses North America on Plains of Abraham 28 
 
 Franciscan Jlissions in California 146 
 
 Franklin, B., anecdote of, and American Desert . . . 136, 137 
 Freight, costs of, by wagon, canal, and railroad in New York 323, 324 
 
 cost of, over the plains before railroads 320, 321 
 
 on flour from Minneapolis to New York 336 
 
 Frontier, condition of, before the Revolution 42, 43 
 
 Gadsden Purchase, amount, cost, worth, and policy of . . 37, 38 
 
 Galiani's great hope from America 372, 373 
 
 Galisteo, an incident at 169-172 
 
 Gallatin, Albert, on Oregon as a separate government . 279, 280 
 Geograplu' of the United States, early defects of ... . 94-96 
 
 Georgia seizes the public land 152, 153 
 
 Gladstone on America as leading the nations . 393, 394, 396, 397 
 
 Gorges and IMason's grant of wild land 139, 140 
 
 Government as a fur trader, and fails 62 
 
 natural to Americans 245, 246, 253-255, 258 
 
 Grain and mineral region in Southwest equal to Great Britain 
 
 and Ireland 338 
 
 Grants of land by the United States 155-158 
 
 Gregoire, Abbe, presages high destiny to the United States 382, 383 
 
 " Great American Desert," the 93-137 
 
 made green 340 
 
 Great Salt Lake, increase of water in 130 
 
 Growth of population by per cents in some States 342 
 
 of the nation East and West compared 312, 313 
 
 in population 408 
 
 remarkable case of 408, 409 
 
 Guadalupe Hidalgo, treaty of, and amount of territory conveyed 12 
 Guarie, tirst occupant of Chicago 58 
 
 Half-breed life and families 180-182 
 
 Hartley, David, extremely hopeful of the American future 381, 382
 
 426 INDEX. 
 
 Page 
 
 Hartford Convention and Western growth 273-277 
 
 Ilawes, Dr. Joul, and call to Cliicaf,'o 87, 88 
 
 Ilazen, Gen. W. 15., on limits of farming land West . . . 120-126 
 Home missionary work \>y the United Stales for Great Britain 12, 13 
 
 work for Americans atjiiiidant 212, 413 
 
 Horse-tliicf, a general term for a desperate criminal .... 253 
 Hunt, Wilson 1'., expedition of, a calamity to Astor and to 
 American geography 108, 109 
 
 Illinois and Michigan Canal Company 70 
 
 Land Company and immense purchase, 1773 •. . . . 55, 56 
 
 Land Company of 1773 56, 57 
 
 owes growth to railway' 314, 315 
 
 lUitcrac}' in Illinois and Missouri, why 212 
 
 in Southwest under Papal education 207 
 
 Immigration to Chicago great in 1831-34 72-74 
 
 to the United States in fifteen j'ears, and in sixty . 376, 377 
 
 Immigrants, false view of, corrected 277 
 
 hardships of 208, 209 
 
 Indian land purchase, a great 56, 57 
 
 sale of lands to private persons forbidden by Congress in 
 1781 57 
 
 Indians at Chicago in 1831 78 
 
 Independence of American Colonies predicted by Sir Thomas 
 Browne 359 
 
 Introduction vii, viii 
 
 Iowa owes growth to railway 315, 316 
 
 Irrigation from the Missouri, Colorado, and Columbia . . . 340 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, on United States as a model for the world 383 
 wisdom of, in the purchase of Louisiana 275 
 
 Kansas cattle ranges in 1870 21-23 
 
 Kentucky neglected by the East 282 
 
 King, James, shot in San Francisco 246 
 
 Kinzie house of Chicago, romantic histoiy of 90-92 
 
 John, first white family at Chicago 61 
 
 Land grants by France in the Southwest 148-149 
 
 grants confirmed in California and New Mexico . . . 142-147 
 grants by Spanish, French, and English governments 139-150
 
 INDEX. 427 
 
 Page 
 
 Land of the United States unsold 405 
 
 "rings" in old times 140, 141 
 
 seizure in old times also 152-155 
 
 Landholdings, large Eastern 268, 269 
 
 Large, in the United States 138-168 
 
 large, near Washington 141 
 
 Las Animas, first common school in 213 
 
 Latrobe, Charles Joseph, and Chicago in 1833 83 
 
 Law. John, and his Mississippi bubble 148, 149 
 
 Leadville, rough life and moral forces in 260-262 
 
 Lewis and Clark's expedition in 1803 96, 97 
 
 Locomotive as a home missionary 212, 213 
 
 in Las Animas 342-344 
 
 " London Times " on the United States census of 1880 . 401-403 
 
 Louisiana, extent of, westward 30-32 
 
 land sales in, opposed 269-273 
 
 purchase of, by the United States 29-32 
 
 purchase, hostility to, by Josiah Quincy 293-300 
 
 quiet transfer of, to the United States 392, 393 
 
 sold to the United States by Napoleon 30 
 
 settlements in, dangerous to the Union 271 
 
 secret sale of, by France to Spain 29 
 
 Lynch Law ..." 221-262 
 
 and border society 259-262 
 
 continuance of, in Montana 238 
 
 demands for, in Montana 221-226 
 
 in early Kentucky 257, 258 
 
 in San Francisco, origin of 238-244 
 
 more common than supposed 252, 253 
 
 reasons for 228-230, 234, 244-246, 258, 259 
 
 cited in " Boston Review " 227,228 
 
 Macnamara plot in California 147 
 
 Mail facilities for the West refused 282 
 
 Mails and letters, early provisions for 47 
 
 Marquette at Chicago 54 
 
 Mduvaises Terres 113, 115-119 
 
 McDuffie, hostilitj- to Western improvements 287 
 
 Mexican addition to the United States, how much .... 12 
 
 why, and what 34-36 
 
 Military reservations of wild lands 44 
 
 Mississippi and Missouri Valley, the extent of 13, 14 
 
 Mississippi Valley and Roman Empire in comparative areas 13, 14 
 Mowry, Sylvester, on life in Arizona and Sonora 173
 
 428 INDEX. 
 
 Page 
 
 Napoleon's judgment on the American future 390 
 
 Niilional above State power 311,312 
 
 National cxix lulitures in United States and Europe compared . 341 
 
 Nevada City, Montana, Lyncli law in 224 
 
 New Kiigiand, and sale of Western lands 48-50 
 
 New Jerusalem in America 359, 300 
 
 New Mexico long neglected by Christians 213, 214 
 
 New Orleans as a walled town 20G 
 
 early education in 203 
 
 New Spain and Lieutenant Pike's description of ... . 175, 176 
 Northern Pacific K. K., belt and area of 11 
 
 Ohio Companj' and Lynch law 255-257 
 
 and common schools 200 
 
 land grants to 267-269 
 
 opposition to 268 
 
 Ohio Land Company, the first, and crown grant of land to 149, 150 
 
 the second, and Eastern opposition to 49 
 
 the first, 1749 44 
 
 " Old times " sighed for 336,337 
 
 Ordinance of 1787 in Ohio, and education 200, 201 
 
 Oregon as a separate government, favored by some . . 276-280 
 
 Oregon before and after the railway 331, 332 
 
 earh' excursions to, and trials of 19 
 
 negfected by the East 281 
 
 no legislation on till 1843 280 
 
 Outlawry in the new country 172-199 
 
 Outlaws of Montana, arrest, trial, and execution of . . 230-238 
 
 Pacific coast of the United States, length of 14, 15 
 
 Paley, William, regards the extent of empire as unprecedented 381 
 
 Papal control of education in Louisiana 203-205 
 
 Parliament, transfer of, to the Colonies 370, 371 
 
 Peel, Sir Robert, prediction as to Chicago and Milwaukee . . 87 
 
 Penn, William, on our country as magnificent 390 
 
 Philadelphia to be " the Athens of mankind " 361 
 
 Pike, Lieut. Z. M., on the " American Desert " .... 97, 98 
 
 Pioneering in Education 200-220 
 
 Pioneers of the present, worthj' of highest honor 416 
 
 early, hard life of 50-52 
 
 Plains of Abraham and Bunker Hill, seventeen years apart . 363 
 " Population Company'' of Virginia and sharp practice . 154, 155 
 Population, centre of, in United States, where 265
 
 INDEX. 429 
 
 Population, increase of, in the United States as compared with 
 
 European 405, 406 
 
 Populations of the new country mixed 176, 177 
 
 Porter, Rev. Dr. J., and Chicago in 1833 78 
 
 Powell Major J. W., on arid lands and rainfall 127-129 
 
 Pownall, Thomas, who 373 
 
 on the grand destinies of the United States .... 373-376 
 
 Prairies of Illinois in 1840 24 
 
 Price, Dr. Richard, on America as the refuge of mankind . . 371 
 
 Printing-office, first in Canada, 1720, and sent out 20G 
 
 Private schools before the public one 202, 203 
 
 Prophecies of our growth, logical deductions .... 355, 356 
 
 Providence the founder of the United States 418 
 
 Public lands and common schools 200, 201 
 
 QuiNCY, Josiah, journey of, from Boston to Washington . . 347 
 on the West 293-300 
 
 Railroads, amusing dread of 348 
 
 and the workinginan 336 
 
 and religious and theological harmony 351-353 
 
 as a power for national defence 344. 345 
 
 equalize prices 323, 324 
 
 bring the country together 326 
 
 indispensable to develop the West 314 
 
 promote travel, harmony, and so insure the Union . . . 346 
 
 a great power for American civilization 342 
 
 and the exports 335 
 
 bring markets near 329-331 
 
 earlier, might have saved the peace of the country . . . 349 
 
 future growth of 337 
 
 have made the Pacific States possible and prosperous . . 353 
 
 growth of, in the West illustrated 339 
 
 in Missouri 328, 329 
 
 when opened 326, 327 
 
 a binding power for the Union 344, 348 
 
 utilize natural values 321 
 
 Wyoming and the live stock 334 
 
 Railway System of the West 314-354 
 
 Ranges, ranches, and stock-farms 159-168 
 
 Rapidity of settlement 408, 409 
 
 Raynal, Abbe, prediction of, and offered prize 366 
 
 Republic, the weakness of our 413, 414 
 
 Republics, dead, a warning 415, 416
 
 430 INDEX. 
 
 Page 
 
 Roads, national and military 47 
 
 Kocky Mountains placed wrong by Eastern men . . . 278,279 
 liyswick, Treaty of, 1607 58 
 
 Sabbath on the border 183-186 
 
 Salmon lisheries and the railroads 330, 331 
 
 San Francisco, early settlers of 239-244 
 
 early violence in 182, 183 
 
 St. Peter's, the building of 417, 418 
 
 Schoolcraft at Chicago in 1830 68 
 
 Schoolhouse, a prin)itive and typical one 209-211 
 
 Schools scarce on the borders 209 
 
 Selkirk's Red River Settlement 180, 181 
 
 Settlements, growth in 42-52 
 
 position of, at close of Revolution 42 
 
 of wild land, colonial and provincial policy of ... 42-52 
 Sewall, Samuel, on growth of American Colonies . . . 359, 360 
 Shuckford, John, journey of, from Portsmouth, N. H., to St. 
 
 Louis 347 
 
 Shetheld's, the Baron, forebodings of America .... 397, 398 
 Shipley, Jonathan, Bishop, growth, independence, and exam- 
 ple of the American Colonies 367, 368 
 
 Simpson, Sir George, boast of 15, 16 
 
 Smith, Adam, on colonial representation in Parliament . . . 370 
 
 Social life in New Mexico 183 
 
 Society, morals of, in the Southwest 187-190 
 
 Sons of New Hampshire, festival of, and Webster 355 
 
 Spain and the boundary of 1783 28 
 
 Spanish and French colonies in America dwarfed by isolation 353 
 Spanish and Mexican land grants guaranteed by the United 
 
 States in Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 141-146 
 
 Stock-raising in wild land 158, 159 
 
 Sturgis, William, on worth of Oregon 279 
 
 Success of the past of the United States unprecedented . . . 417 
 
 " Sylvestris " on the Cession of Louisiana 393 
 
 on the Louisiana Purchase . . . . ■ 272 
 
 Symmes's land schemes 46 
 
 Taxes in United States and Europe 341 
 
 Tecumseh and the War of 1812 64, 65 
 
 Texas, earlj' condition, and the purchase of by the United 
 
 States 34-36 
 
 area of 9, 10
 
 INDEX. 431 
 
 The Prophet precipitates Indian War at Tippecanoe .... 65 
 
 The West, how large 9-17 
 
 Tippecanoe, battle of 64, 65 
 
 Transportation grades values 318 
 
 the great question in the United States 337 
 
 Travel in old time 346, 347 
 
 more at home, desirable 350, 351 
 
 Turgot's remarkably correct prophecies 364 
 
 United States, area of, in comparison with Europe . . 14, 17 
 
 at close of Revolution 41 
 
 civil and moral power of, in the world 391, 392 
 
 compared variously with other nations 399-401 
 
 domain undivided 407, 408 
 
 and Europe contrasted 340-342 
 
 and France in comparative areas 9 
 
 and pAirope, population to each square mile 341 
 
 "United States of Yesterday and of To-morrow," not a history 
 but illustrative chapters of 54 
 
 United States, the power of, civil, social, and moral .... 391 
 
 six growths of, in territory 27-40 
 
 wealth of, in 1880 . . " 391 
 
 Ursuline Nuns in Louisiana 204, 205 
 
 Utah Basin, and increase of water 130 
 
 Vergennes, Count de, plots against the j'oung Republic . 378-380 
 afraid of the results of independence of the Colonies . 377-380 
 
 Vermont, Southern feeling on the admission of 276 
 
 Vigilance Committee, character and proceedings of . . 235, 236 
 
 of San Francisco 238 
 
 1851, main work of 242 
 
 Vigilance Committee of San Francisco, suspension of . 251, 252 
 
 its designs 240-242 
 
 methods of 246, 250 
 
 Vigilantes of Montana, one of them interviewed 223 
 
 Virginia, scheme of emigration of 45 
 
 City, Montana, Lynch law in 224-226 
 
 Waldo Patent 140 
 
 Walpole, Horace, great friend of the Colonies .... 369, 370 
 
 War debt of United States and of Europe 341 
 
 War of 1812, Indian preparations for 64, 65
 
 432 INDEX. 
 
 Page 
 
 Wasliington and Western travel 2G3-265 
 
 carries first Englisli iUv^ into tlie West 28 
 
 on dan<,fers of tlie frontier 27 
 
 on home travel 350 
 
 on Western development 48 
 
 family and Western lands 44 
 
 Territor}- lumber waiting for railway 317 
 
 Water, increase of, in arid lands 129-133 
 
 Wayne, General, and tlie Indians CO 
 
 Webb, George, and the future of Philadelphia 361 
 
 Webster defends the West 2'J2 
 
 on our growth 355 
 
 on the United States as taking the Continent 389 
 
 Webster's admiration of the vast 16 
 
 defence of the East, weak point in 286, 287 
 
 estimates of the pioneers 277, 278 
 
 West not understood by the East 308, 309 
 
 Western Colleges, Webster's plea for 220 
 
 land fever in early days 44, 45 
 
 land speculators 45, 46 
 
 boundary, struggle for, in the treaty of 1783 .... 27, 28 
 
 limits of' United States in 1783 28, 29 
 
 Whitman, Dr. Marcus, brings Oregon to light, and into the 
 
 Union 280 
 
 Wild Life on the Border 169-199 
 
 Winthrop, Robert C, on Oregon 279, 280 
 
 "Winthrope's, Mrs. Margt," land grant 141 
 
 Work, immediate, energetic, and sacrificing, demanded of 
 American Christians 414, 415 
 
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