He wore the same long-tailed coat, the same white hat that marked him years ago—tall-crowned, not wide-rimmed; the hat that swept across the Missouri River in the early eighties. His beard was now grown gray, his eye watery, his expression subdued, and no longer buoyantly and irresistibly hopeful. His pencil, as ready as ever to explain the price of lots or land, had lost its erstwhile convincing logic. From his soul had departed that strange, irrational, adorable belief, birthright of the American that was, by which he was once sure that the opportunities of the land that bore him were perennial and inexhaustible. This man sought now no greatness and no glory. He wanted only the chance to make a living. And, think you, he came of a time when a man might be a carpenter at dawn, merchant at noon, lawyer by night, and yet be respected every hour of the day, if he deserved it as a man.
It was exceeding sweet to be a savage. It is pleasant to dwell upon the independent character of Western life, and to go back to the glories of that land and day when a man who had a rifle and a saddle-blanket was sure of a living, and need ask neither advice nor permission of any living soul. Those days, vivid, adventurous, heroic, will have no counterpart on the earth again. Those early Americans, who raged and roared across the West, how unspeakably swift was the play in which they had their part! There, surely, was a drama done under the strictest law of the unities, under the sun of a single day.
No fiction can ever surpass in vividness the vast, heroic drama of the West. The clang of steel, the shoutings of the captains, the stimulus of wild adventure—of these things, certainly, there has been no lack. There has been close about us for two hundred years the sweeping action of a story keyed higher than any fiction, more unbelievably bold, more incredibly keen in spirit. And now we come upon the tame and tranquil sequel of that vivid play of human action. “Anticlimax!” cries all that humanity that cares to think, that dares to regret, that once dared to hope. “Tell us of the West that was,” demands that humanity, and with the best of warrant; “play for us again the glorious drama of the past, and let us see again the America that once was ours.”
Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest may attach to a quest that goes farther than a mere summons for the spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West? What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run wider than the West, and, indeed, wider than America.
In the pursuit of this line of thought we need ask only a few broad premises. These premises may leave us not so much of self-vaunting as we might wish, and may tend to diminish our esteem of the importance of individual as well as national accomplishment; for, after all and before all, we are but flecks on the surface of the broad, moving ribbon of fate. We are all,—Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World or the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,—but the result of the mandate that bade mankind to increase and multiply, that bade mankind to take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken over temporarily that portion of the earth and its fullness allotted or made possible to us by that Providence to which all things belong. We have each of us done this along the lines of the least possible resistance, for this is the law of organic life.
The story of the taking over of the earth into possession has been but a story of travel. Aryan, Cymri, Goth, Vandal, Westerner—they are all one. The question of occupying the unoccupied world has been only a question of transportation, of invasion, and of occupation along the lines of least resistance. Hence we have at hand, in a study of transportation of the West at different epochs, a clue that will take us very near to the heart of things.
We read to-day of forgotten Phenicia and of ancient Britain. They were unlike, because they were far apart. The ancient captains who directed the ships that brought them approximately together were great men in their day, fateful men. The captains of transportation that made all America one land are still within our reach, great men, fateful men; and they hold a romantic interest under their grim tale of material things. You and I live where they said we must live. It was they who marked out the very spot where the fire was to rise upon your hearth-stone. You have married a certain Phenician because they said that this must be your fate. Your children were born because some captain said they should be. You are here not of your own volition. The day of volitions, let us remember, is gone.
The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax, of linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of trolley-cars and self-binders, of purple and fine linen, it must be observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work, and back of all these causes were the original law and the original mandate. The force of this primeval impulse was behind all those early actors, and Roundhead Cavalier, praying man and fighting man, who had this continent for a stage. It was behind the men that followed inland from the sea the first prophets of adventure. It is behind us to-day. The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.
When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was the Alleghanies, how then did the west-bound adventurers travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation? The answer would seem easy. They traveled as did the Cimri, the Goths—in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters.
Bishop Berkeley, prophetic soul, wrote his line: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” The public has always edited it to read the “star” of empire that “takes it way” to the West. If one will read this poem in connection with a government census map, he can not fail to see how excellent is the amendment. Excellent census map, that holds between its covers the greatest poem, the greatest drama ever written! Excellent census map, that marks the center of population of America with a literal star, and, at the curtain of each act, the lapse of each ten years, advances this star with the progress of the drama, westward, westward, ever westward! Excellent scenario, its scheme done in red and yellow and brown, patched each ten years, ragged, blurred, until, after a hundred years, the scheme is finished, and the color is solid all across the page, showing that the end has come, and that the land has yielded to the law!