CHAPTER I
THE IRON TRAILS
At the time of the discovery of gold in California, there had been built up a splendid Western population, hardy, self-confident, able to shift for itself, wholly distinct from that population that it had for a generation left behind at the old starting places of the trails. These trails across the continent, wavering, tortuous, yet practicable, had been fully established. So far as might be within the horizon of those days, all was now ready for the epoch-making event that was to change all the methods of America, that was to make Westerners by wholesale and to draw them swiftly from every corner of the earth.
The great state of California alone was cause and sufficient reason for the swift development of the remoter American West. There can not be denied the tremendous effect produced by the sudden growth of California, coming as it did hard on the time of the annexation of Texas and the widening of our national territory in the far Southwest. As to the discovery of gold and the swift growth of California being unmixed benefits, there may exist at this later day something of a sober doubt.
California marked the beginning of the feverish, insane, excitable type of American, who wishes to do everything at once—and does it! Without California and the Civil War we should to-day still be settling the West. With California we are settling the islands of the Orient. The high-geared life of to-day is part of the corollary of washing a year’s income out of the ground in an hour’s work, of crossing the continent in a week instead of a season, of tearing down mountains by machinery instead of building up homesteads deliberately. Stimulation and destruction do not go so far apart. California gave to the world the spectacle of a nation drunk with energy, using with maddened zeal for a time powers made three-fold, employing an imagination under whose concept naught under Heaven seemed impossible—or was impossible!
This was revolution. There was a demand for revolution of an even pace in all lines of allied industry. It was time for the railroad, and the railroad must now perforce come swiftly. We built better steamships to get out into our new, feverish, golden West. We used the old trails, but they would no longer serve. We employed the old mountain passes, the old grazing and watering places, but neither would these serve. No time now for hoof or wheel, or for the way of the ship upon the sea! No time now for the wayside ranches along the Platte, for the old posts of Laramie and Bridger and Hall! The golden country clamored all too strongly. Therefore, with a leap, the old trails straightened out and shortened. New passes over the Great Divide were found. The long thin line of rails connected the East with a West now swiftly grown mightier than itself. All American morals and manners underwent swift reconstruction. The United States, plus California, plus the Western railways, became a different nation.
It is not necessary to take up in detail the chronological or geographical study of the building of the transcontinental railways. They have done their work. The commercial history of America is sufficiently well written to-day on the face of every country of the globe. We have built our own railroads, and to-day we build and sell railroads and equipment for the Himalayas and the Sudan. We shall build the railroads that will make Africa another America. We shall build the railroads that will at length bring the Anglo-Saxon face to face with the Slav, in that struggle that shall pit the American West against the Russian East.
The West of the midway district between the Missouri and Pacific was largely settled by reflex. The mines of California spilled back men, great, splendid men, to the eastward again, to exploit all those ranges of the Rockies whose wealth the trappers had not suspected. Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada—all these might be called a part of the scheme of California. New and splendid empires were founded, new standards of civilization were erected in the recent wilderness. The grand and alluring story of the West went on apace for yet a little time.
But these times were not to endure. There came swiftly the Western rush of population, which swept off the map the free lands of all our Western empire. The vast American public, mad with the lust of land, raped the Indian reservations from those that had frail title given them in the honor of a great nation; so that thus one more bar was broken between the East and the West. Home-building, farm-making man came close on the heels of trapper and trader and nomad cattle driver. The hordes of the land seekers held their lotteries even in the desert once dreaded by the travelers of the old Santa Fé trail. Incipient cities were built in that waterless waste where Jedediah Smith, the first transcontinental traveler, lost his life in mid-continent. Never a bit of open land was left in all the West; or if there were such land remaining, it was of a quality that would once have been viewed with contempt.
The story of the swift changes wrought by the iron trails is such as not to afford complete satisfaction in the contemplation; yet we may calmly review the different stages of that story. First we had the day of competitive railway building, when there were not enough railroads for the demands of a vast and unsettled region whose resources appealed to a population. Then we came rapidly to the time of too many railroads; of attempts to adjust an unprofitable competition; of combinations, of arrangements, agreements, mergers; and of popular and governmental action upon such mergers. To-day all America is districted and divided among a few great railway systems. Once we were better than our transportation; now we are not so good. Once we depended upon it; now it rules us almost without argument. The swiftness with which these tremendous changes have been brought about furnishes one of the most remarkable phenomena recorded in the history of the world.