“I remember, with my insatiable love of reading, how my first glance on entering a house was in search of book-shelves. Many a time, though in the house of a man owning hundreds of cattle and a thousand acres of land, I have found no literature beyond a copy of the Bible but little used, the State Agricultural or Mining Reports, or a stray copy of ‘Godey’s Lady’s Book.’
“But, as an offset to this prosaic life, I remember also, as I look back upon it now, the hopefulness and cheerfulness, the ambition and self-sacrifice, and the sturdy courage and self-reliance which all this new Western life engendered.
“There was much that was admirable about it all, and that gave promise of the development of great men and women and a glorious future for that part of our country. Yet I know that in many instances, except where a colony of Eastern people had settled and put up their schoolhouse and church before there was an opportunity to build a gambling den and saloon, the early influences which shaped the future of the towns were like the sowing of dragon’s teeth, which have brought forth, as I have taken pains to learn, most deadly fruit.
“It is more than sixteen years since I have been in the West, and I intend now to revisit it. Of course I shall see an astonishing change. I read of opera houses and electric lights in the places that I remember as mere shabby settlements of a hundred shanties. But the same condition of things that I knew then is still to be found in a thousand places further west, or off the line of the main roads, and it will continue for a half century to come. Hundreds of thousands of ignorant emigrants are pouring into this land, with throngs of alert young business men from the East, all making a breakneck race for wealth. They are buying the
LAST REMNANTS OF GOVERNMENT LAND,
and are developing the material resources of the country at an amazing rate. The shanties will give place to brick blocks, and the sloughs to paved streets, soon enough. I am not concerned as to that.
“The luxuries of civilization will come as rapidly as one could wish, but it is the tendency of things in regard to the development of morals and character that alarms me. When I learn that one third of our school population in this land of boasted educational privileges is ignorant of the alphabet, and that in the Rocky Mountain states and territories there is one saloon for every forty-three voters; when I read how the peasants of Europe are flocking by the hundred thousand to this fair Western land, and I see the possibilities of the future for good or evil, it wakens all my ardor and enthusiasm to be up and doing and lending a hand to help shape its destiny.
“There are many who, not falling under good influences at once, lapse into a selfish indifference to everything but their own worldly advancement if they do not retrograde morally. I do not mean that they are heartless. They have, of course, the proverbial Western generosity and frank cordiality, which is one of the finest things in the world and is very genuine; but it is often coupled with an absolute contempt for everything beyond that which will advance their purely material interests. In short, they are ‘Philistines.’
“I have seen many Western men who have made their ‘pile,’ as they say, who would find it absolutely impossible to believe in any one’s having such a real, disinterested enthusiasm for art, or science, or literature as would permit a man like Agassiz to say:
‘I HAVE NO TIME TO MAKE MONEY.’