But now there were happening yet other strange and startling things. In 1806, at Pittsburg, some persons built the first steamboat ever seen on the Ohio River. Its first trip was the occasion of much rejoicing, and was celebrated with fervor, which, however, must have received a certain dampening by the outcome of the experiment. The boat, crowded with excited spectators, ran very handsomely down-stream, but when it essayed to return the current proved too strong, and only setting-poles and rowboats saved the day. This, then, was the precursor of an aristocracy in transportation before which even the haughty keel-boatmen were obliged to abase themselves. In 1811 the steamer New Orleans was built at Pittsburg, and following the guidance of “Mr. Roosevelt of New York,” who had previously investigated the matter, successfully ran the riverway to New Orleans.[[17]] More than that, she proved able to return up-stream.[[18]] What fate then was left for the keel-boats?
In 1819 a steamboat had appeared as far west on the Great Lakes as Mackinaw. In 1826 a steamboat reached Lake Michigan. In 1828 the first steamboat of the American Fur Company mastered the turbid flood of the Missouri, and ascended that stream as far as the Great Falls.[[19]] In 1832 a steamboat arrived at the city of Chicago. The West was now becoming very much a country of itself.
The curious fact continued to be fact—that it was the South that was to open, the North and the East that were to occupy. Of the two essential tools, the Southern man might have left at home his ax, the Northern man his rifle. But it was as yet no time for a North or a South. The Northerners and the Southerners both became Westerners, and if the ax followed the rifle, the plow as swiftly came behind the ax.
Thanks to the man that could go up-stream, corn was no longer worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel anywhere in America. Corn was worth fifty cents a bushel, and calico was worth fifty cents a yard, at the city of Kaskaskia, in the heart of the Mississippi valley. Kaskaskia, the ancient, was queen of the down-stream trade in her day. She was important enough to command a visit from General Lafayette, early in this century; and the governor of Illinois addressed the distinguished visitor with an oratory not without interest, since it was alike full of bombast, of error, of truth, and of prophecy:
“Sir, when the waters of the Mississippi, generations hence, are traversed by carriers of commerce from all parts of the world; when there shall live west of the Father of Waters a people greater in numbers than the present population of the United States; when, sir, the power of England, always malevolent, shall have waned to nothing, and the eagles and stars of our national arms be recognized and honored in all parts of the globe; when the old men and the children of to-day shall have been gathered to their fathers, and their graves have been obliterated from the face of the earth, Kaskaskia will still remember and honor your name. Sir, as the commercial queen of the West, she welcomes you to a place within her portals. So long as Kaskaskia exists, your name and praises shall be sung by her.”
To-day Kaskaskia is forgotten. The conditions that produced her have long since disappeared. The waters, in pity, have literally washed her away and buried her far in the southern sea. Yet Kaskaskia serves admirably as a measuring point for the West of that day. She stood at the edge of civilization on the one hand, of barbarism on the other. Beyond her lay a land as unknown as the surface of the moon, a land that offered alike temptation and promise. Calico was worth fifty cents a yard at Kaskaskia; it was worth three dollars a yard in Santa Fé. A beaver skin was worth three dollars in New York; it was worth fifty cents at the head of the Missouri.
There you have the problems of the men of 1810, and that, in a nutshell, is the West of 1810, 1820, 1830. The problem was then, as now, how to transport a finished product into a new country, a raw product back into an old country, and a population between the two countries. There sprang up then, in this second era of American transportation, that mighty commerce of the prairies, which, carried on under the name of trade, furnished one of the boldest commercial romances of the earth. Fostered by merchants, it was captained and carried on by heroes, and was dependent upon a daily heroism such as commerce has never seen anywhere except in the American West. The Kit Carsons now took the place of the Simon Kentons, the Bill Williamses, of the Daniel Boones. The Western scout, the trapper, the hunter, wild and solitary figures, took prominent place on the nation’s canvas.
This Western commerce, the wagon freighting, steamboating, and packing, of the first half of this century, was to run in three great channels, each distinct from the other. First there was the fur trade, whose birth was in the North. Next there was the trade of mercantile ventures to the far Southwest. Lastly there was to grow up the freighting trade to the mining regions of the West. The cattle-growing, farming, or commercial West of to-day was still a thing undreamed.
In every one of these three great lines of activity we may still note what we may call the curiously individual quality of the West. The conditions of life, of trade, of any endurance on the soil, made heavy demands upon the physical man. There must, above all things, be strength, hardihood, courage. There were great companies in commerce, it is true, but there were no great corporations to safeguard the persons of those transported. Each man must “take care of himself,” as the peculiar and significant phrase went. “Good-by; take care of yourself,” was the last word for the man departing to the West.[[20]]
The strong legs of himself and his horse, the strong arms of himself and his fellow laborers, these must furnish his transportation. The muscles tried and proved, the mind calm amid peril, the heart unwearied by reverses or hardships—these were the items of the capital, universal and indispensable, of the West. We may trace here the development of a type as surely as we may by reading the storied rocks of geology. This time of boat and horse, of pack and cordelle and travois, of strenuous personal effort, of individual initiative, left its imprint forever and indelibly on the character of the American, and made him what he is to-day among the nations of the globe.