The industrial revolution of the West was subsequent to the Civil War, and was, to large extent, caused by the Civil War, or, rather, was dependent upon the same conditions that had part in bringing forth that war. The vast and virgin West, “confessedly but little known,” lay waiting for a population. The Eastern portion of the Northern States had its own population. The South, under the conditions of that day, offered incalculably more opportunity for crude labor than did the West; but it offered no security for either capital or labor. Therefore it was that the Old World was called upon to furnish the raw labor requisite to subdue this wild land.
It can be only with horror that we reflect that the Old World was called upon also to furnish us a people to replace the more than half-million dead of as grand a population as the world ever knew, the flower of America, North, South, East, and West. It would have been this splendid army of men that would have settled the West, had it not been for the war, which a few years later would have been an impossible thing. Could that half-million dead have arisen from the grave in the decade following that truly cruel war, the nomenclature of many Western cities would be different to-day, and the face of the census maps would show a different story. To-day the whole upper portion of the population chart of the United States is black with the indication of a foreign-born population. The only part of this country that the census map dares call American is a thin, wavering line along the plateaus of Tennessee and Kentucky,—the land that the first adventurers sought out when they crossed the Alleghanies. It is the South alone that is to-day American. It was the South that gave us the new-American, that splendid figure in the history of the world.
Within two months in the year 1899, fifty-seven thousand foreigners were brought to this country to be made over into Americans. Among these were Croatians, Slavs, Armenians, Bohemians, Servians, Montenegrins, Dalmatians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Moravians, Lithuanians, Magyars, Jews, Syrians, Turks, Slovaks, with others of the better-known nationalities, such as English, Germans, French, and Scandinavians. Of the total number of these immigrants, less than one-tenth had a capital as great as thirty dollars with which to begin life in the new land. Many of these immigrants from lower Europe linger in the cities of the West, and do not become a part of the agricultural communities; but the indirect tax on the agricultural communities none the less remains. They become only parasites upon the parasitic middlemen, and all these must be supported by the farms.
It must be conceded that the new problems assigned to the West in the way of absorption and assimilation of alien population in these days of rapid transportation are nothing short of serious and perplexing. These new people, brought out in swarms by means of the rapid wheels of steam-locomotion, are like the early Americans who settled first a real America. They are very poor; their fare must be coarse, their garb mean, their opportunities for self-improvement but meager. Yet how different are they, the product of the third age of transportation, from those Argonauts, the Southern riflemen and the Northern axmen, who toiled with oar or slow-moving wheel across this land in the days so recently gone by!
There are three great pictures of the West—one that was, one that is, and one that might have been. This last picture is a sad one to any thinking man not concerned in politics. The West of steam-transportation has not so much impressed itself, and in reason could not be expected so to impress itself, upon its population as did that West reached by slow-moving wheels when the natural difficulties to be overcome were so vastly greater for the individual. The old West begot character, grew mighty individuals, because such were its soil and sky and air, its mountains, its streams, its long and devious trails, its constant stimulus and challenge.
That which was to be has been. The days of the adventurers are gone. There are no longer any Voices to summon heroes out on voyage of mystic conquest. It now costs not so much heroism, but so much money, to get out into the West, and it costs so much to live there. As a region the West offers few special opportunities. It is no longer a poor man’s country, nor is any part of America a country good for a poor man. It is all much alike. Our young men of the West are as apt to go East to seek their fortunes as to try them near at home. There is no land of the free. America is not American. Food must digest before it can be flesh and blood, and our population must digest before it can be called American.
Twelve years ago money brought two per cent. a month west of the Missouri River, and it earned it. To-day you can get a barrelful at five per cent. a year. It is only free men who can afford to pay two per cent. a month—men who still have open lands to settle, much raw wealth to dig out of the earth and a future to discount. There are no more Oklahomas now. We have stolen most of the reservations from the Indians, and a few men have stolen most of the pine,[[53]] and nothing short of a syndicate will do for a mine to-day. You may search far for eagle faces, such as came from Maine and Carolina, the men that followed the westward course of the young star of America.
Away with the saddle-blanket! The beaver are gone, and the range cattle are all fenced in. Hang up the rifle, for our great game is vanishing. If you seek a pleasant picture, gaze on the accumulating balance-sheets of some monopolist’s millions. If you wish to hear a soothing sound, listen to the wheels that go and come. Content yourself with these things; else you must admit that, however strong, brilliant, and consistent was our Western drama in the more slowly moving days, history has made anticlimax in the days of steam. Carry your conclusions out whimsically if you like, and reflect that in the year 1900 not only our own Western cow-punchers, but also the samurai of Japan, were riding bicycles, and the newspapers of Japan were reporting the prize-fights of America! This is civilization, but the view of it is not altogether comforting.[[54]]
Augur of what might have been, but for our Civil War, was that long line of white-topped wagons that streamed westward across Illinois, Iowa, across the Missouri River, out into the West, the still glorious and alluring West, immediately upon the close of the war. This was not an influx of foreigners, but a hejira of native Americans, a flood-tide that could not wait for the railroads that were now so swiftly taking up the new and mighty problems of a convalescent country. “By an impulse, providential or evolutionary, but irresistible,” said an American statesman of that decade,[[55]] “civilization has, during the present generation, moved all at once and in concert, in a process of territorial expansion as sudden and inexplicable as that which at the close of the fifteenth century impelled the nations of Europe to voyages which, resulted in the discovery and occupation of America. . . . The United States will command the greatest part of the trade with the Chinese Orient. We can produce every article that can be sold in this now and limitless market.” Not bad reiteration, this, of the prophecy of our historian of 1855. The latter did not foresee our Civil War, nor could he have foreseen our armies across seas. They are there not so much by reason of political mistakes or political wisdom as by an impulse “providential or evolutionary.” In 1865, upon the plains, or in 1900, in the Asian islands, the army was only the escort. It is not our army that will conquer new provinces and create new opportunities in place of those with which we have been so sadly careless and so lavishly generous; it is our railways and our steamships that are to prove our conquering agencies. Thereby we shall recoup ourselves at the coffers of the world.
We lose all sentimental regrets and superficial reservations when we come to examine closely the tremendous revolutions created by the genius of modern transportation. With the era of steam came a complete reversal of all earlier methods. For nearly a century following the Revolutionary War the new lands of America had waited upon the transportation. Now the transportation facilities were to overleap history and to run in advance of progress itself. The railroad was not to depend upon the land, but the land upon the railroad. It was strong faith in the future civilization that enabled capitalists to build one connected line of iron from Oregon down the Pacific coast, thence east of the mouth of the Father of Waters, in all over thirty-two hundred miles of rail. Then came that daring flight of the Santa Fé across the seas of sand, a venture derided as folly and recklessness.