President Andrew Johnson (who as a congressman, in 1852, made the seven- hundred-year prophecy) estimated that a homestead (of one hundred and sixty acres) would increase every homesteader's purchasing ability by one hundred dollars a year; and if (he argued) the government enacted a 30- per-cent duty it would be reimbursed in seven years in the amount of two hundred and ten dollars, or ten dollars more than the cost of the homestead. By such reckoning he reached the conclusion that the homesteaders would defray the expenses of the government for a period of four thousand three hundred and ninety-two years-each homesteader of the nine millions contributing indirectly twenty-four thousand four hundred dollars in seven hundred years and all of them two hundred and nineteen billion six hundred million dollars—a scheme as ingenious, says one, as Fourier's "scheme to pay off the national debt of France with a setting hen." [Footnote: Speech on the bill to encourage agriculture, July 25, 1850. Speeches on the homestead bill, April 29, 1852, and May 20, 1858.]
There are approximately nine million homes (or homes, tenements, and flats) in that domain to-day, and it is quite easily demonstrable that they not only contribute to the support of government, directly and indirectly, far more than the seemingly fantastic estimates of Andrew Johnson suggested but also give to the world a surplus of product undreamed of even in 1850. It is hardly likely that any system of parcelling would have more rapidly developed this vast domain. There is a question as to whether some more logical, conserving, long-viewed policy might not have been devised for the "common good" of the generations that are yet to occupy that valley with the generation that is there and the three or four generations that have already gone. It is that "common good" that is now engaging the thought of our foremost economists, natural scientists, and public men. Of that I shall speak later.
Here we celebrate merely the fact that there are fifty or sixty million geographical descendants of France living in the midst of the valley at the mouth of whose river La Salle took immediate possession for Louis XIV, but prophetic possession for all the peoples that might in any time find dwelling there.
CHAPTER IX
IN THE TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS
"It is a mistake," said one of the statesmen of the Mississippi Valley, Senator Thomas H. Benton, "to suppose that none but men of science lay off a road. There is a class of topographical engineers older than the schools and more unerring than the mathematicians. They are the wild animals— buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, bears-which traverse the forest not by compass but by an instinct which leads them always the right way-to the lowest passes in the mountains, the shallowest fords in the rivers, the richest pastures in the forests, the best salt springs, and the shortest practicable lines between remote points. They travel thousands of miles, have their annual migrations backwards and forwards, and never miss the best and shortest route. These are the first engineers to lay out a road in a new country; the Indians follow them, and hence a buffalo road becomes a warpath. The first white hunters follow the same trails in pursuing their game; and after that the buffalo road becomes the wagon road of the white man, and finally the macadamized road or railroad of the scientific man." [Footnote: Speech on a bill for the construction of a highway to the Pacific, December 16, 1850.]
A hunter of wild sheep in the Rocky Mountains following their trails wonders if they were made a year, five, or ten years ago, and is told by the scientist at his side that they may have been sixteen thousand years old, so long have these first engineers been at work. In some places of Europe, I am told, their fellow engineers, longer in the practice of their profession, have actually worn paths in the rocks by their cushioned feet.
It is a mistake, therefore, we are reminded, to suppose that the forests and plains of the Mississippi Valley were trackless. They were coursed by many paths. If you have by chance read Châteaubriand's "Atala," you will have a rather different notion of the American forests, especially of the Mississippi Valley. "On the western side of the Mississippi," he wrote, "the waves of verdure on the limitless plains (savannas) appear as they recede to rise gradually into the azure sky"; but on the eastern half of the valley, "trees of every form, of every color, and of every perfume throng and grow together, stretching up into the air to heights that weary the eye to follow. Wild vines … intertwine each other at the feet of these trees, escalade their trunks and creep along to the extremity of their branches, stretching from the maple to the tulip-tree, from the tulip-tree to the hollyhock, and thus forming thousands of grottos, arches and porticos. Often, in their wanderings from tree to tree, these creepers cross the arm of a river, over which they throw a bridge of flowers…. A multitude of animals spread about life and enchantment. From the extremities of the avenues may be seen bears, intoxicated with the grape, staggering upon the branches of the elm-trees; caribous bathe in the lake; black squirrels play among the thick foliage; mocking-birds, and Virginian pigeons not bigger than sparrows, fly down upon the turf, reddened with strawberries; green parrots with yellow heads, purple woodpeckers, cardinals red as fire, clamber up to the very tops of the cypress-trees; humming-birds sparkle upon the jessamine of the Floridas; and bird- catching serpents hiss while suspended to the domes of the woods, where they swing about like creepers themselves…. All here … is sound and motion…. When a breeze happens to animate these solitudes, to swing these floating bodies, to confound these masses of white, blue, green, and pink, to mix all the colors and to combine all the murmurs, there issue such sounds from the depths of the forests, and such things pass before the eyes, that I should in vain endeavor to describe them to those who have never visited these primitive fields of nature." And when René and Atala were escaping through those forests they "advanced with difficulty under a vault of smilax, amidst vines, indigo-plants, bean-trees, and creeping-ivy that entangled our feet like nets…. Bell serpents were hissing in every direction, and wolves, bears, carcajous and young tigers, come to hide themselves in these retreats, made them resound with their roarings." [Footnote: Châteaubriand, "Atala," trans. Harry, pp. 2, 3, 19.]
A trackless, howling wilderness, indeed, if we are to accept this as an accurate description of scenes which, as I have intimated, it is now suspected that Châteaubriand's imagination visited, unaccompanied of his body. But a recent indigenous writer on the valley and its roads—having in mind, to be sure, the forests a little farther north than those in which Atala and René wandered—assures us that they were neither "pathless" nor "howling." He writes that in 1775 (eighteen years before the first white settlement in the State of Ohio) there were probably as many paths within the bounds of that State on which a man could travel on horseback at the rate of five miles an hour as there are railways in that State to-day. And the buffalo paths were-some of them, at any rate—roads so wide that several wagons might have been driven abreast on them—as wide as the double-track railroads. So the Indian farther west had his highways prepared for him by the instincts of these primitive engineers that knew nothing of trigonometry or the sextant or the places of the stars. [Footnote: Hulbert, "Historic Highways," vol. I, pt. II.]
Nor did these first makers of roads howl or bellow their way over them. On this same authority (Hulbert) I am able to assure you that the forest paths were noiseless "traces," as they were originally called, in the midst of silences disturbed only by the wind and the falling waters. Wolves did sometimes howl in the forests or out upon the plains, but it was only in hunger and in accentuation of the usual silence. Neither they nor the bears growled or howled, except when they came into collision with each other, or starvation.