The original lines of this road were laid out in the form of a large Y, one leg of which ran from Dubuque, Iowa, southward, meeting the other leg, which extended south from Chicago. The two legs of the Y met at what is now Central City, and thence the line ran south to Cairo. This road was one of the earliest attempts to parallel the old water-highways that had once carried the freight of a riparian population. Its first grant was made in 1850, and its first train was run in 1855. During the war this line was of much service in transporting troops and material to the southward.
Yet, in spite of its well-conceived plan, and in spite of the natural wealth of the country it traversed, the road as a property was a source of perpetual anxiety to its shareholders. It needed a great mind to straighten out its problems, and Mr. Sturges thought that his son-in-law had that mind. He therefore despatched Mr. Osborn to Chicago, and gave him full charge of the system. The choice was a wise one. Mr. Osborn brought the property through the panic of 1857, when all securities were falling in ruins, and weathered even an assignment, which was made by the company during his absence in England. He backed his faith in his judgment by negotiating a personal loan of three million dollars, out of which he paid the matured coupons that were pressing for payment. He secured a new loan of five million dollars, paid off all the smaller debts, established the credit of the company, and set its affairs thenceforth upon a secure footing.
All these details were such as might perhaps have been accomplished by another. It was not only in these executive matters that the genius of this captain evinced itself. He saw at once to the marrow of the difficulties that had caused this embarrassment. There had now been built around the foot of Lake Michigan those east-and-west through lines that killed the lake carriage just as his own road had killed the river carriage on the Mississippi trail. These roads reached out after their own business, and did not depend upon the traffic the north-and-south line carried. It was easy to foresee a failing business, but not so easy to name a remedy for it. Mr. Osborn found his remedy in the idea of a north-and-south transcontinental line. Between Cairo and the town of Jackson, Tennessee, there was a gap over which no railroad passed, though from Jackson as far south as New Orleans there ran the rambling lines of a system controlled by H. S. McComb, of Crédit Mobilier fame. Mr. Osborn secured the immature Southern roads, built the connection from Cairo to Jackson, and in 1873 had a completed line from the Lakes to the Gulf.
It all sounds easy, but it took one man’s brain and one man’s life to do it. The story of the road and of the man that made it is not yet told, but it will be written in the development of one of the richest sections of America. It is writing daily in the trains that come from North to South, from South to North, agencies that daily break down and pass through any sectional barrier and bring about the better understanding which makes kin one with the other the sons of the old riflemen and the old axmen who built the West.
Thus are the trails of the two forever interwoven. Beside this trail of commerce runs the old trail of the Mississippi, whose tawny flood still carries its burden of adventure and romance. Robertson, Thomas, Whitney, Osborn,—these are the names of a few of the prophets, forgotten men of the early and the modern days, who blazed the intercurrent trails where now march the feet of those living under a complex civilization.
From these crude studies of early Western history we may gather one very significant fact, which will mean more a hundred years from now than it does to-day. It is that America got her territory first, and then her transportation and her population. She bought on a rising market, and her purchase was of territory, land, the only thing on earth that can not be increased or multiplied. Moreover, her land was such as the earth has never duplicated and can never duplicate. The magnificent American West was a realm unrivaled, and it was originally settled by men who had the most priceless of all possessions, a splendid ancestry. Providence held back the wheels for a hundred years while the Western character was forming.
Let us, even though by dint of effort, fling away the personal plaint. It is un-American to snivel, and as the old-time Western men would not have done so, neither shall we. The West is not dead. It is immortal. We have come upon a century of force. The conflict is to be the bitterest the world has ever known; not the conflict of man with beast, or with savage nature, but the conflict of masses of men, masses of things, one combination against another, one wedge of impact, head on, against another. It is too late to call out for an America like that of Washington or Jefferson; too late to ask for a practical Monroe doctrine; too late to speak of policies or politics gone by.
With Europe in fear of our Western products, and yet dependent upon those products; with America coming each day, by causes “providential or evolutionary,” into the plans of the world, of what possible avail is it to cry out for a West or for an America that is gone forever? Call back the armies if you wish, but you can never call back the wheels. The pathway points now not out into the West, but out into the world. Never doubt that the sons of the West, sons of this Anak, sons whose fathers are in Valhalla to-day, will follow that road as far and as fearlessly as they did the path across the continent. In the veins of these men runs the riot unconquerable, the distillation of the skies and winds. Their feet march now to the rhythm of phantom footfalls, those of the men that marched before from home out into the perilous unknown. Black men, yellow men, peasant men—all these must take their chances. There are no longer any vacant lands. Europe, which sent to the West some of its best and its poorest population, will have more to fear at the hands of the West than China has to dread to-day. Europe has to combat not only the West, but all the heredity of the West.
This, then, is where the eagle-faced pioneers of America will find their last trail. This is how the king will at last come again into his own. Peoples may pass away, monarchies may fall, but above them there will stand the only aristocracy fit to survive; not a false democracy that nominates all men as equal, but the aristocracy of survival. You may abolish many things, and in the future enact many things of which we of to-day may not guess; but never shall there utterly perish the strong blood that got its survival by fitness, and its education by continuous conflict with mighty things. The largest, the most compact, and the most closely knit Caucasian population of the world to-day, is that of America, and to-day America is potentially the most powerful of all the world-powers. Why? Because her unit of population is superior. The reason for that you may find yourself if you care to look into the great movements of the west-bound population of America.
As to the future steps in the development of the West, we may perhaps be indulged in a hazard of opinion, as our fathers were before us. It would seem sure that every inch of our agricultural lands must come under the plow of Belgium, and be tilled inch by inch. The vast Delta of the Mississippi, from Memphis south, the richest soil the world ever saw, will be a continuous garden, supporting a great population of its own, and feeding thousands in the cities, in full verification of the wisdom of the man who foresaw that the South must be joined to the North, even as the West to the East. Perhaps some of the more barren steppe country of the West will ultimately be abandoned in spite of scientific irrigation, just as some of the slashed-off timber-lands of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota are now being abandoned, in sequel to the ruinous American lumbering operations.[[58]]