It is interesting to notice that when these builders of new States came to devise symbols for their official seals, many of them took the plough, that implement which we know was carried in the first Aryan migration into the plains of Europe, but some of them put a rising sun on the horizon of their shields—the sign of the consciousness of a new day.
The foundation, then, of the new societies was laid in what might be called a concrete of character and lineage—heterogeneous, but all of the neo-American period and not of the paleo-European. Here came the ancestors of Abraham Lincoln, among the axemen from the South, and here the ancestors of General Grant, among the builders of towns, from New England, both born in cabins. And these instances are but suggestive of the conglomerate that was to be as practicable for building purposes (the co- efficient of spirit being once determined) as any homogeneous, age-old rock used in the structure of nations. It became "homogeneous" not as bricks or stones built into a wall by mortar or cement but as concrete, eternal as the hills, needing not to be chiselled and split but only to be moulded and "set" at just the right moment. If this gives any suggestion of want of permanence, of liability of cracking, then the figure is not fortunate. I mean only to suggest, by still another metaphor, that out of the myriad rugged individualities, idiosyncrasies, and independences a new rock has been formed.
How distinctly western this first migration was you may know from the fact that there was frequent talk of secession from the Union by the seaboard commonwealths in the early post-revolutionary days. There were even, as we have seen, hopes and fears that a Franco-American republic might grow out of that solidarity and independent spirit that were ready to forsake the government on the eastern side of the mountains, which seemed to be heedless of western needs. This tells us, who are conscious of the national spirit which is now stronger, perhaps, in that valley than in any other part of the Union, how strong the western, the anti-nationalistic, spirit must have been then.
But that was before the coming of the east-and-west canal and the east- and-west railroads, which virtually upheaved a new watershed and changed the whole physiographic, social, and economic relationships of the west. The old French river Colbert, the Eternal River, was virtually cut into two great rivers, one of which was to empty into the gulf (just as it did in La Salle's day and in Iberville's day), while the other was to run through the valley of the Great Lakes, down through the valley of the hostile Iroquois, into the harbor of New York. This is not observable on the topographical maps simply because of our unimaginative definition of a watershed. A watershed is changed, according to that definition, only by an actual elevation or depression of the surface of the earth, whereas a railroad or canal that bridges ravines and tunnels or climbs elevations, or a freight rate that diverts traffic into a new course, as suddenly raises or lowers and as certainly removes watersheds as if mountains were miraculously lifted and carried into the midst of the sea.
So there came to be not only two rivers but two valleys, the one of the lake and prairie plainsmen and the other of the gulf plainsmen. The steam shuttles flying east and west by land and water wove a pattern in the former different from the latter but on the same warp. Two widely unlike industrial and social systems gradually developed, and they, in turn, struggling for the mastery of lands beyond the Mississippi, divided the nearer west—once a homogeneous state of mind—into two wests and all but disrupted the Union.
Then the direct European immigration began, millions coming from single states of Europe, sifting into the neo-American settlements, but for the most part passing on, in mighty armies, to possess whole tracts farther west, along and beyond the Mississippi. In some parts of the northwest to- day the parents of three men out of four were born in Europe—in Scandinavia, in Germany, in Russia, in Italy.
So France, keeping near her those whom she loves best, her own children, has yet seen her Nouvelle France draw to it the children of all other nations. As from Hagar exiled in the wilderness has a new race sprung—has the wilderness been peopled.
In my boyhood the last division of that great exodus, largely made up of migrants from the eastern half of the valley, was still passing westward. One of the banners which some of the wagons covered with canvas ("prairie- schooners," as they were called) used to fly was "Pike's Peak or Bust," an Americanism indicating the intention of the pilgrims to reach the mountain at the western terminus of the great valley or die in the attempt. Occasionally one came back with the inglorious substitute legend upon his wagon, "Busted"—a laconic intimation of failure. But this was the exception. The west kept, till it had made them her own, most of those who ventured their all for a home in the wilderness.
There were "two great commemorative monuments that arose to mark the depth and permanence of the awe" which possessed all who shared the calamities or witnessed the results of the Tartar migration. One was a "Romanang"—a "national commemoration, with music rich and solemn," of all the souls who departed to the rest of Paradise from the "afflictions of the desert"—and the "other, more durable and more commensurate to the scale of the calamity and to the grandeur of the national exodus," "mighty columns of granite and brass," where the exodus had ended in the shadow of the Chinese wall. The inscription on these columns reads:
By the Will of God,
Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts,
Which from this Point begin and stretch away
Pathless, treeless, waterless,
For thousands of miles, and along the margins of many
mighty Nations,
Rested from their labors and from great afflictions,
Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall,
And by the favor of Kien Long, God's Lieutenant upon
Earth,
The ancient Children of the Wilderness—the Turgote
Tartars—
Flying before the wrath of the Grecian Czar,
Wandering Sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial
Empire in the year 1616,
But are now mercifully gathered again, after infinite sorrow,
Into the fold of their forgiving Shepherd.
Hallowed be the spot forever,
and
Hallowed be the day—September 8, 1771!
Amen.