“We, however, do not indorse the concealing of flour under floors or haystacks when the article is up to the present price. We know of no parties that were holders of flour that could not have realized a handsome profit at seventy-five dollars per sack; but in favor of merchants that have invested in this staple at high figures, we should state that we have known flour to be sold within a circumference of a few hundred miles at the rate of five dollars per pound, and no raiders in the market.”
“Virginia City, M. T., May 6, 1865.
“The business of the week is a slight improvement over many weeks past, owing to the fine weather sending miners all to work.
“Flour. Still continues very scarce, three small lots, only one hundred and twenty-one sacks in all, having arrived from over the range, and were rapidly sold at seventy-five dollars per sack. The want of this staple is very much felt, as all substitutes for this article are about exhausted.”
These curious and rapidly forgotten records of another day show us clearly that, even as late as the Civil War, there was a vast land beyond the Missouri whose people and whose customs were different from those of the East; which had earned its own right to be different; which was as strong and self-reliant and resourceful as though it were part of another sphere; and which might claim that it had solved its own problems for itself and asked no aid. Yet it was this very aloofness and independence that had always threatened, in one way or another, the secession of the West in fact or in sympathy from the East. Therefore we count that a great day—a day fatal for the West, but glorious for America—when the heads of the streams were reached and the mountains overrun. It was a great day, an important date—though unrecorded in any history of this land—when the West had gone as far away as it could, and at last had turned and begun to come back home!
At the end of the Civil War the West had exhausted all the possibilities of down-stream and up-stream transportation. It had developed its resources to a remarkable degree. But now the time was come for newer, more rapid, and more revolutionary methods. The West was at the beginning of another and not less interesting era, a time of swift and startling change.
If our theory regarding Western transportation and Western emigration has been correct, we should now be able to check back on the census map, and expect to find a certain verification of our conclusions. It is curious to observe that the path of the star, which marks on the census charts the center of population, in reality has followed much the same line as the early west-bound movement with which we have been principally concerned. The star moves slowly westward, across the Alleghanies, as did the first pioneers. Then it follows down the valley of the Ohio, as did the early down-stream population under our theory of the transportation of that day.
In 1860 the center of population is situated on the Ohio River, perhaps a hundred miles east of the city of Cincinnati. In 1860 the colors thicken deeply along the river valleys; and far up the streams, even toward the heads of the Mississippi and the Missouri, the map tells us that the population is denser than it is in regions remote from any waterways. In 1870 the face of the map remains, for the most part, bare west of the Missouri, except where the Indian reservations lie.
On the Pacific coast, in California and Oregon, there is a population in some districts of forty-five to ninety persons to the square mile. Around Helena, Deer Lodge, and other mining towns of Montana, there is a faint dash of color showing a population of two to six souls to the square mile, which is beyond the average of all but a few localities west of the Missouri River. At Salt Lake, at Denver, at Santa Fé, termini of transportation in their day, as we have seen, there are bands of a similar color. The total population of America, which in 1810 was 7,239,881, and in 1820, the beginning of our up-stream days, was 9,633,822, is in 1860 31,443,321 and in 1870 38,558,371.[[27]] Nearly all of this population shows on the census map as east of the Missouri River. Out in the unsettled and unknown region west of the Missouri there still lay the land that to the present generation means the West, appealing, fascinating, mysterious, inscrutable; and for that West there was to come another day.