In the great river valleys there will be an enormous thickening of the population; so that it may yet be many years before the center of population, which in 1900 was near the little town of Columbus, Indiana, shall have passed the Mississippi River in its west-bound course.[[59]] We have yet to learn to save our potato-peelings. We are yet to go more and more under task-masters, are to learn more and more the value of the penny, that coin once so bitterly scorned in all the West. We are to work out the problems bequeathed humanity with the passing years; and in the end we are to ask, as we ask to-day, that unanswered question, Why? Policies and politics can not change these things. The wheels have run too far. Let fall the little words of our talking men; let wave the tiny swords of those who are called our warriors; and let the writers rage. Back and beyond their trivial and transient deeds runs the broad, somber flood of fate. Humanity, not political divisions, is the concern of time. The individual yields to the section, the section to the nation, the nation to the world, the world to the plans of fate, of Providence.

There is another, a lighter and more cheerful side to the conclusions that we may draw from our study of the way in which the West was made—the side that has to do with the growth of the newer portions of this country in all the liberal arts, in that noble flowering of the human imagination, which is most naturally to be expected of an environment of ease and a time of leisure. Art rests ever upon the material, the imagination dates ever back to actual deeds. The gentler days of the West are no better than its ruder times, but the one is as good as the other, since each came in its proper period. It was the railway that developed the West in artistic things as well as in material things. It was as long ago as 1870 that a Western man, Justice Paine of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, found occasion to speak of the vast influence of these civilizing agencies. He said:

“They have done more to develop the wealth and resources, to stimulate the industry, reward the labor, and promote the general comfort and prosperity of the country than any other, perhaps than all other mere physical causes combined. There is probably not a man, woman or child whose interest or comfort has not been in some degree subserved by them. They bring to our doors the productions of the earth. They enable us to anticipate and protract the seasons. They enable the inhabitants of each clime to enjoy the pleasures and luxuries of all. They scatter the productions of the press and of literature broadcast through the country with amazing rapidity. There is scarcely a want, wish, or aspiration of the human heart that they do not in some measure help to gratify. They promote the pleasures of social life and of friendship; they bring the skilled physician swiftly from a distance to attend the sick and the wounded, and enable the absent friend to be present at the bedside of the dying. They have more than realized the fabulous conception of the Eastern imagination, which pictured the genii as transporting inhabited palaces through the air. They take a train of inhabited palaces from the Atlantic coast, and with marvelous swiftness deposit it on the shores that are washed by the Pacific sea. In war they transport the armies and supplies of the government with the greatest celerity, and carry forward, as it were on the wings of the wind, relief and comfort to those who are stretched bleeding and wounded on the field of battle.”

He has not read well the history of his country, has not learned the intricate web of the commercial system of to-day, has surely not studied the developments of the third age of American transportation, who can believe that there exists any longer any considerable difference between the most widely separated parts of America in matters of the gentler life. The publisher of a noble periodical controls an agency the influence of which is as valuable and as much desired in the West as in the East, and which is felt as quickly and as sensitively in the one region as the other. The art and literature of the time belong to the West as much as to the East, and in its due time the West will produce as well as consume in the matters of art and literature. There were Western artists, Western painters, Western sculptors on the plains before the buffalo were gone.

It is a matter of wonder that any American literature could ever speak of the American West in anything but terms of pride and honor. There is a certain literature, color-crammed, superficial, and transient, because wrong, that affects to believe that there is still a West that is a land of crude souls exclusively and of little hope for a hereafter. If the good folk who so believe lack the great privilege of actual American travel, they have at least left for them the resources of an American railroad map. Let them study; and even if they study no deeper than the map, they must come to see that the West is no more as once it was.

Changed unspeakably and utterly, the old West lies in ruins. To pick about among those ruins may, indeed, be to find here and there a bit of local color; but were it not better to reflect that this color may be only the broken bits of a cathedral pane? Restore that cathedral, in recollection, in imagination at least, if it be within the skill of art or literature to do so. Restore it, and write upon its arch the thought that history may be more than a mere recital of wars and religions; that the destruction of human life may be nationally not so great as the development of human character. Give the men of the old West, parents of the men of the new West, this epitaph: They had character. Let the heroes have place of honor in their own cathedral; and so may the Western earth lie light above them, and the Western skies smile over them rememberingly.

[48] The Century Magazine, January, 1902.
[49] Another instance of changed standards in the West may be seen in the revolution as to petty prices. Up to twenty years ago, in most Rocky Mountain communities, the quarter-dollar was the smallest coin in circulation. With the railroads came the dime, the nickel, and at last the penny; but they came to a West that was no more. A Montana periodical thus comments on these matters as they appeared at the time when the railroad reached Miles City: “The advent of the Northern Pacific Railroad, in November, 1881, brought about a complete change in the methods and manners of the people. The railroad brought the community at once in touch with the more concise and narrower life of ‘the States’; the ‘nickel’ displaced the ‘quarter’ as the smallest coin in use, and prices shrunk accordingly. . . . This proposed innovation was hotly contested for a while by the adherents of the ‘two-bit’ theory, resulting finally in a compromise that established ‘two-for-a-quarter’ as the going rate. It would be hard to describe the feeling of dejection that overwhelmed the old-timers when this conclusion was reached. It was accepted by them as a pronounced and evident sign of decadence.”
[50] A settler who moved, in 1854, from Virginia to Iowa complained that for a whole year in that frontier country he saw no fruit except a half-peck of crab-apples. It was much the same in Minnesota at that time; yet, in the year 1900, the city of St. Paul alone used one thousand dollars’ worth or grapes each day for fifty days, all imported, and at an average price of only fifteen cents per basket. This fruit was largely imported from the state of New York.