The proof you may find by seeing the cities that have grown, the fields which bear them tribute. North and south, and east and west the prairie roads run. The long trail of the cattle-drive is gone, and the cattle no longer walk a thousand miles to pasture or to market. Once, twice, thrice, the continent was spanned, the dream of Robertson made manifoldly true, and the path across the continent laid well and laid forever.[[56]] In the Middle West the Great American Desert was cross-hatched with iron lines and dotted full with homes that never could have been but for those iron lines. In the Northwest lay a land of almost arctic winters, with little or no shelter, with short and torrid summers, the land of the Red River carts, where the fur traders were at last replaced by the raisers of number two hard wheat.
Into this region came a large foreign population, sought out in the Old World by the diligent agents of a common carrier needing business. The hard plains of the North were literally stocked with these people. They came with their tickets bought through to such or such a point in Minnesota or Dakota. It was foreseen that the mere raising of wheat could not build up a permanent civilization, and the railway did the thinking for the blind ones who had taken its word and risked their lives and fortunes in the removal to that America which had so wide and various an interpretation. The railway sent out, free and unsolicited, seed wheat and choice breeding-stock, dropping these contributions wisely, here and there, into such communities as most needed them. The railway was explorer, carrier, provider, thinker, heart, soul, and intellect for this population that in another generation was to be American. No wonder these folk stand and stare when the railway-train goes by. It has been Providence to them. It is a Providence that has given to Europe what America might have had.
To-day towns do not grow merely because of their location, and this factor of location will become less and less important as the years go by. St. Louis was a city of location; Chicago is a city of transportation. Chicago is situated upon the most impossible and unlovely of all places of human habitation. She is simply a city of transportation, and is no better than her rails and boats, though by her rails and boats she lives in every Western state and territory. The same is true now of St. Louis and the vast Southwest.
One railroad recently planned for a Western extension, and laid out along its lines the sites of thirty-eight new towns, each of which was located and named before the question of inhabitants for the towns was ever taken up. Another railway in the Southwest has named fifty cities that are yet to build; and still others have scores of communities that in time are to be the battle-grounds of human lives, the stages of the human tragedy or comedy. The railways have not only reached but created provinces; they have not only nourished but conceived communities. Out of that cold upper land of the Northwest, which was thus fostered and nurtured into strength, there came, in one year, one hundred and ten million bushels of wheat to feed the world, and that in a year when the crop shortage was over one hundred million bushels. This is only a part of the output of that land, for the railway showed these farmers long ago that diversified farming was their hope and their salvation.
Past one of those forts which in 1812 the United States erected to protect her fur traders and to keep out her covetous rivals, there came in the same year from the far Northwest, once home of the buffalo, the Indian, and the scout, twenty-five million two hundred fifty-five thousand eight hundred and ten tons of freight, nearly all of the long-haul sort, and hence to be taken as showing in part the product of the far Northwest itself. Three transcontinental roads, the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Southern Pacific, in 1899 carried twenty million one hundred forty-six thousand four hundred and ten tons of freight, with a haul averaging about three hundred miles in length.
Nearly a thousand millions of dollars is represented in the capitalization of these roads—far more than is demanded by the free roadway of the Great Lakes, the modern freight traffic of which is really a development subsequent to that of the railway exploitation of the West. This perhaps suggests a day when Chicago may come to be as closely connected with New Orleans as was the latter city with Kentucky in the day of Wilkinson.[[57]] It is impossible to study the industrial history of the West without studying also that of the South, for though the two sections are far apart and utterly unlike, they yet have the intercurrent soul of twins. No part of America is less known and more misunderstood than the South, and surely it must be one of the most cheering reflections to conclude that yearly the South comes closer to the North, and the North to the South. Statesmanship could not in a century so fully have accomplished this great and desirable result. The railroads are doing what statecraft could not do.
It is the part of the great captains of transportation to live strenuous lives, to work out great problems faithfully and patiently, to accomplish great results mysteriously, to live, to die, and to be forgotten. The heroes of the hustings, the heroes of our wars, are remembered and immortalized. The man that makes possible their triumphs finds no record on the page of time. His obituary is only the passing chronicle of the daily press, feverishly concerned with what is known as news.
To-day James F. Joy, the father of the Michigan Central Railroad, is little known by the general public, though his was a far greater work than that of seeking public office. John Murray Forbes, father of the great Burlington and Quincy system, is a man too much forgotten. As these lines are written comes the news of the death of Henry Villard, the man that solved so many problems for the Northern Pacific. Dropped for the time out of sight, he will now shortly follow the fate of his compeers, and soon be dropped forever. William Henry Osborn died only a few years ago, yet there are many who make the winter trip to the Gulf coast that do not know who planned the flight of rails that runs from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. It is a duty and a pleasure to mention the names of such great and useful men, if only to ask that their work be held in understanding memory.
Especially significant now is the memory of Mr. Osborn, and we might well speak of him as assistant and coadjutor of such men as Lincoln and Grant, and the statesmen who since the war have sought to unite North and South. As we find that it was the South that first marched westward, and a Southern man who first planned a great highway of iron into the West, we may state with equal pleasure and confidence that it was the East, and an Eastern man, that made the South a portion of the West, and both a part of a united America.
William H. Osborn was a native of Massachusetts, and was by birth of no exalted position in the world. His chief capital was a clear brain and an unclouded purpose, which later ripened into a farsightedness in large affairs that has rarely been equaled in the ranks of practical American men. Sent to the East Indies as the representative of a New York firm, he got a good insight into the trade in spices, and was successful in its operation. Later he married the second daughter of that sterling American merchant, Jonathan Sturges of New York, whose first daughter was the first wife of J. Pierpont Morgan. Mr. Sturges was heavily interested in the young Illinois Central Railroad, the first of the land-grant railways, the original seven hundred and five miles of which were intended to develop the agricultural lands of the great prairie state of Illinois, and to bear the products of that state up to the water-transport of the Great Lakes, which then carried most of the long-haul business from the West to the East.