The early American life was primitive, but it was never the life of a peasantry. Look ahead into the future, the time of the second saving of the peelings. Once there was a time in the West when every man was as good as his neighbor, as well situated, as much contented. It would take hardihood to predict such conditions in the future for the West or for America.
For half a hundred years America looked across the Alleghanies. It was nearer to England than to Iowa. Our standards in fashion, in art, in literature, were yet those of an older world. Then came the age of Americanism, when it mattered not to the women of the frontier what were the modes brought in the latest ship from London or Paris. Under the Monroe doctrine of the frontier the women made their petticoats of elkskin, and found it good. Behold now a day when Iowa is as near as England, and England almost as near as New York. Again the contents of the ships are valid matter of curiosity to the women of the West.
We are in the third age, the age of steam. The pack-horse and the sailboat were vehicles of the individual or of the section. Wheeled vehicles afforded a speedier and more flexible intercommunication that made the idea of secession forever impossible, and made us a national America. The common carrier made us and will destroy us as a national entity. The wheels have written epochal record on the surface of the land. Long and devious and delightful, weary and sad and tragic, are the old wheel-tracks of the West, worn deep into a soil red with blood, on paths lined with flowers, and with graves as well.
At the half-way point of the century the early wheels of the West were crawling and creaking over trails where now rich cities stand. The Red River carts from Pembina, their wheels sawn from the ends of logs, and voicing a mile-wide protest of unlubricated axle, crept down to a “St. Paul’s” that had a population of about twelve hundred, mostly halfbreeds.[[50]] A yard of cloth or a butcher-knife still sold for twenty dollars at old Fort Benton in the beaver country.
The Western railroads were only little spurs of iron thrusting out into the prairies. Indeed, they could not always boast rails of iron, as witness the old wooden-railed road from Chicago to Galena. Still eager, still harkening to the Voices of the West, the men who were to make the West pressed on, taking the railway as far as it went, then the stage-coach and the wagon and the horse and the lone path of the farthest venturer.
The man of Virginia heard that the prairies of Iowa would give him a farm for a price per acre less than one-tenth that commanded by the red clay hills of the Old Dominion. He forsook the land of terrapin and peaches, of honeysuckle and sunshine, and started West by rail across the Alleghanies, across Ohio by the early Pennsylvania railway system, beyond the boom town of Chicago, across the Mississippi, and out into the black mud of the prairies for fifty miles or so. Thence by stage he went, the head of his tearful wife against his breast, but in that breast beating a heart whose one thought was the “better chance.” It was the better chance for these babes that tugged at the skirts of their mother—this was what the father wanted, and this was why the mother went with him, grieving, as she yet must, for the home land that she perhaps would never see again.
One such settler, who went West from Virginia into an agricultural state in 1854, said that he came West in order that he might be able to educate his children. He educated them. To-day one child is buried in California, one in Dakota, three live in Iowa, and one in Illinois. Such is the typical record of an American family.
The man of old New England might cross this trail of the Southern man, and find himself betimes in Kansas or Nebraska, forerunner of that day when it was to be said that Massachusetts was west of the Missouri River, as indeed is true to-day. Boston began to build Chicago, and the first of those men went West that were to make the old Red River cart-towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis little else than New England communities—cities of a state which to-day has a permanent school fund of nearly eight million dollars, and a university fund of nearly one million dollars, in securities largely made up of the bonds of other states, among them a large amount of the funding bonds of the ancient state of Virginia. It was a race into the West—a race in which now the North outstripped the South, the commercial outran the heroic, the ax and the plow outstripped the rifle and its creed.
In 1826 arose one Philip Evans Thomas, sometime known as the father of American railroads, son of a Baltimore banker, and living, as we may thus notice as a curious fact, near to that early abiding-place of the star that marked the center of American population, that Ararat from which the Western civilization started outward. Early in his life Philip Evans Thomas saw how excellent it would be if only water could be made to run up-stream. He had seen the use of railroads in England, and had, moreover, noted the beneficial effects upon the trade of Eastern cities of the traffic that was carried by canals. He had the far-reaching mind of the world-merchant, whose problem is ever that of transportation. He saw that railroads can go where canals can not, and he presently resigned his directorship in the Maryland Canal, because he saw that a canal can not climb a hill, and that mankind could not forever go around the hills or up and down the streams.
It was on February twelfth, 1827, that Thomas called together twenty-five of the leading citizens of Baltimore. Comment of the time says that he seemed touched with the spirit of prophecy as he spoke of the enterprise that was to cast aside the mountains, to unite the streams, and to discover what there might be in that mysterious land, the West—the West that was west of the Alleghanies and in or near the Mississippi valley. Beyond the Mississippi, of course, the mind of man might not go! The minutes of this notable railway meeting are preserved in a pamphlet known as “Proceedings of Sundry Citizens of Baltimore, convened for the Purpose of Devising the Most Efficient Means of Improving Intercourse between Baltimore and the Western States.”