THE WEST.
Comprehended within the boundaries of that noble portion of our country called “The West,” is a people who can justly claim to be not only of the best muscle and nerve of the land, but second to none in intellectual vigor and sterling integrity of character. A single thought tells us how just this claim is. The West was settled by the picked men and women of the old States. When the sloping-roofed farmhouses of New England became too circumscribed for the sons and daughters that filled them, the most enterprising members of a household left the rest to till the homestead acres while they went forth into the wilderness to cut the forest trees away, and let sunshine into the shadowy bosom of the woods, to build their log cabins in the first clearing, and so work out a sure independence for themselves, as they became benefactors to the world.
In the end both position and wealth followed these daring pioneers. As the roving Indian slowly retreated from the frontier which was stretching westward every hour, sweeping the wilderness away with it, he found the rich earth lavish of her returns for his self-sacrifice and his labor. He drank in enlargement of thought and purpose from amid the luxuriant prairies and vast wilderness which spread its untrodden bosom between his home and the Rocky Mountains. He watched the Father of Rivers cleaving the best portions of a continent with his broad waters, and drank in lessons of true freedom which will never lose their value to his descendants. With a rifle for his companion and an axe for his best friend, the backwoodsman of America learned the art of border warfare, and trained himself in a school of hardship that made his sinews firm as iron and capable of resisting any fatigue.
With hearts and minds expanding with the boundless scenes around them, these adventurous men grew so careless of danger that the word fear was blotted from their lexicon long before the present generation came into existence.
Is it strange that the descendants of such men should be open-handed, grand-hearted and brave, as we have found them in this war for our common Union? The enthusiasm of the old men who have dropped quietly away into their western graves, has broken forth anew in this younger generation. Like a spark of fire dropped upon a prairie in the autumn, their enthusiasm is easily enkindled. A single word against the old flag, one sacrilegious touch upon its flagstaff, was enough to rouse them into action. Nowhere on earth is the stars and stripes held more sacred than in the West. The first ball that cut through the flag at Fort Sumter aroused the old pioneer blood into determined and terrible resistance.
The history of the Mexican war is a record of what western men can do on the battle-field—charges at which even their countrymen who knew them wondered—sufferings patiently endured, marches that taxed the strongest—all these things have proved of what true metal the West is made. With war-wreaths dyed in blood at Cerro Gordo, baptized in fire at Chapultepec, and rendered immortal at Buena Vista, these men were not likely to see their own Government turned upon without rising as one man to defend it.
Through the golden grain and the rustling cornfields of the West, the news of the bombardment of Sumter, the attack at Baltimore, and the call of the President, rushed like one of its own tornadoes from city to village, from farm-house to cabin. The news ran and the answer came thunder-toned. The old man took down his rifle from the antler bracket on the cabin wall. His son left the plow in its furrow, and all classes and conditions of men came forward with brave hearts and ready hands, and laid them on the altar of their country.
The watchfires of freedom were kindled, and on every hill and through the valleys poured a tide of armed men, unconquerable and resistless. These western men took the field, ready at once for the deadly strife. Their entire lives had been one incessant training for the hardships and dangers of war. They had but one regret—that their march was against brothers armed against the nation—all else was merged in the glorious thought that they, the very children of liberty, had the power to yield up everything, even life, and home, that a great country should be maintained in every inch of its soil and every right of its people.
Long had the great West toiled to feed the starving nations of the earth. Long had she poured from her overflowing storehouses countless millions of food into the waiting lap of the needy manufacturing countries. From her great wealth of food she had always been ready to feed the world. When the war-cry aroused her, she was just as strong and just as prompt to fight the world. The national honor was hers to reverence and avenge. The old flag—its emblem and its glory—who should spring to its rescue if not the West? Did not a chain of crystal lakes crown her at the north, clasped together by the eternal emeralds of Niagara? Was not the Mississippi, her great highway to the gulf, a mighty thoroughfare, which no force should wrest from her while she had power to hold its banks with serried walls of steel? Was this river, the pathway of her greatness, one source of her renown, to be blocked up while she could cleave her own mountains asunder, and force them to give forth iron for gunboats, or gather lead from her bosom to mould into bullets? Not while these people could turn their workshops into manufactories of war-missiles, and their prairie steeds into chargers, should an enemy—brother or stranger—take one right from the West by force. This was the stern resolve of our pioneer men when the war-trumpet rang over the prairies of the West, and quick to act as prompt to resolve, her people arose as one man. There was no cavil about trifles then. Her fertile fields were stripped of their wealth, and her prairies of their cattle to furnish food—not alone to furnish food for themselves, but for the armies of the East. Soon her rivers swarmed with iron-clad gunboats, and her railways became military roads—her cities tented fields, her palaces recruiting offices, her cabins free homes for soldiers when their faces turned toward the war.
The West was impatient of nothing but delay—but she chafed wildly at any obstacle that impeded the progress of her armies.
How well these men have fought, and with what heroism they have suffered, let the record we are about to make of Henry, Donelson, Pittsburgh Landing, and many another bravely contested point, answer. Let the noble hearts stilled in death, and countless graves upon which the tender grass is now springing, answer.
With battle songs on their lips they marched away from their homes, with battle cries upon their lips many of them fell gloriously, never to see those homes again. If the West has been brave in war, so will she prove generous when Peace shall come. The nation they have helped to save, and those in revolt, when true brotherhood comes back, will yet give the West a monument worthy of its fame.