The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson

by Emerson Hough

It was once four weeks from Maine to Washington; it is now four days from Oregon. The total wealth of all the cities, all the lands, all the individuals of that once despised West, runs into figures that surpass all belief and all comprehension. And this has grown up within less than a hundred years. The people have outrun all the wisdom of their leaders. What would Daniel Webster, famous New Englander, doubter and discreditor of the West, say, were he to know the West to-day?

Yet the men of that day were not so much to blame, for they were in the infancy of transportation, and as no army is better than its commissary trains, so is no nation better than its transportation. We were still in the crude, primitive, down-stream days. Steam had not yet come upon the great interior waterways. The west-bound mountain roads across the Alleghanies were still only narrow tracks worn by the feet of pack-horses that carried mostly salt and bullets. The turnpikes fit for wagon traffic were Eastern affairs only. The National Road, from Wheeling to the westward, was restricted in its staging possibilities.

Between the hardy Western population and its earlier home there rose the high barrier of the Appalachians, to ascend whose streams meant a long, grievous and dangerous journey, a Journey commercially impracticable. The first traffic of the old mountain road was in salt and bullets, and it was a traffic that all went one way. The difficulties of even this crude commerce led to the establishment, as the very first manufacture ever begun in the West, of works for the production of salt. Bullitt’s Lick, on Salt Creek, was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, manufacturing community west of the Alleghanies, and part of the downstream trade of the day was in carrying kettles from Louisville down the Ohio and up Salt Creek to the lick. This route was in hostile Indian country, and every voyage held its own terrors.

We may note, then, the beginning of the commercial West in the local necessities of that West. For the first west-bound generation the problem of transportation had been largely a personal one. The first adventurers, with little baggage but the rifle and the ax, able to live on parched corn and jerked venison, with women almost as hardy as men, neither possessed nor cared for the surplus things of life. They subsisted on what nature gave them, seeking but little to add to the productiveness of nature in any way.

But now we must, presently, conceive of our Western man as already shorn of a trifle of his fringes. His dress was not now so near a parallel to that of the savage whom he had overcome. There was falling into his mien somewhat more of staidness and sobriety. This man had so used the ax that he had a farm, and on this farm he raised more than he himself could use—first step in the great future of the West as storehouse for the world. This extra produce could certainly not be taken back over the Alleghanies, nor could it be traded on the spot for aught else than merely similar commodities.

Here, then, was a turning-point in Western history. There is no need to assign to it an exact date. We have the pleasant fashion of learning history through dates of battles and assassinations. We might do better in some cases did we learn the time of certain great and significant happenings.

It was an important time when this first Western farmer, somewhat shorn of fringe, sought to find market for his crude produce, and found that the pack-horse would not serve him so well as the broad-horned flat-boat that supplanted his canoe. The flat-boat ran altogether down-stream. Hence it led altogether away from home and from the East. The Western man was relying upon himself, cutting loose from traditions, asking help of no man; sacrificing, perhaps, a little of sentiment, but doing so out of necessity, and only because of the one great fact that the waters would not run back uphill, would not carry him back to the East that was once his home.

So the homes and the graves in the West grew, and there arose a civilization distinct and different from that which kept hold upon the sea and upon the Old World. The Westerner had forgotten the oysters and shad, the duck and terrapin of the seaboard. He still lived on venison and corn, the best portable food ever known for hard marching and hard work. The more dainty Easterners, the timid ones, the stay-at-homes, said that this new man of the Western territory was a creature “half horse and half alligator.” It were perhaps more just to accord to him a certain manhood, either then or now. He prevailed, he conquered, he survived, and therefore he was right. There grew the aristocracy of ability.

The government at Washington saw this growing up of a separate kingdom, and sought to shorten the arc of this common but far-reaching sky; it sought to mitigate the swiftness of these streams, to soften the steepness of these eternal hills. Witness Washington’s forgotten canal from the headwaters of the James River—a canal whose beginning or end would puzzle the average American of to-day to define without special study. Witness many other canal and turnpike schemes, feeble efforts at the solution of the one imperishable problem of a land vast in its geography.

Prior to the Louisiana Purchase no man could think of a civilization west of the Mississippi; but there were certain weak attempts made by the government to bind to itself that part of the new lands that lay in the eastern half of the Mississippi valley. The “Ordinance of the Northwest,” done by the hand of Thomas Jefferson himself, makes interesting reading to-day. This ordinance sought to establish a number of states in the great valley “as soon as the lands should have been purchased from the Indians.”