Chicago has a great advantage over St. Louis in her comparative freedom from the cholera, which yearly attacks the Missourian city. During my stay in St. Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were known to have reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by flight to 180,000. A quarantine was established on the river; the sale of fruit and vegetables prohibited; prisoners released on condition that they should work at burying the dead; and funeral corteges were forbidden. Chicago herself, unreached by the plague, was scattering handbills on every Western railroad line, warning immigrants against St. Louis.
The Missourians have relied overmuch upon the Mississippi River, and have forgotten that railroads are superseding steamboats every day. Chicago, on the other hand, which ten years ago was the twentieth city in America, is probably by this time the third. As a center of thought, political and religious, she stands second only to Boston, and her Wabash and Michigan Avenues are among the most beautiful of streets.
One of the chief causes of the future wealth of America is to be found in the fact that all her “inland” towns are ports. The State of Michigan lies between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but the single State has upon the great lakes a coast of 1500 miles. From Fort Benton to the sea by water is nearly 4000 miles, but the post is a much-used steamboat port, though more distant, even in the air-line, from the nearest sea upon the same side the dividing range, than is the White Sea from the Persian Gulf. Put it in which way you would, Europe could not hold this river.
A great American city is almost invariably placed at a point where an important railroad finds an outport on a lake or river. This is no adaptation to railways of the Limerick saying about rivers—namely, that Providence has everywhere so placed them as to pass through the great towns; for in America railways precede population, and when mapped out and laid, they are but tramways in the desert. There is no great wonder in this, when we remember that 158,000,000 acres of land have been up to this time granted to railroads in America.
One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few lines will be made, and trade being thus driven into certain unchanging routes, a small number of cities will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing stations or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and population. Where a system of cheap railways is adopted, there will be year by year a tendency to multiply lines of traffic, and consequently to multiply also ports and seats of trade—a tendency, however, which may be more than neutralized by any special circumstances which may cause the lines of transit to converge rather than run parallel to one another. Of the system of costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India, where we see the creation of Umritsur and the prosperity of Calcutta alike due to our single great Bengal line; of the converging system we have excellent instances in Chicago and Bombay; while we see the plan of parallel lines in action here in Kansas, and causing the comparative equality of progress manifested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, in Omaha. The coasts of India swarmed with ports till our trunk lines ruined Goa and Surat to advance Bombay, and a hundred village ports to push our factory at Calcutta, founded by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown to be the third or fourth city of the empire.
Of the dozen chaotic cities which are struggling for the honor of becoming the future capital of the West, Leavenworth, with 20,000 people, three daily papers, an opera house, and 200 drinking saloons, was, at the time of my visit in 1866, somewhat ahead of Omaha, with its 12,000, two papers, and a single “one-horse” theater, though the northern city tied Leavenworth in the point of “saloons.”
Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte, Atchison, Topeka, Lecompton, and Lawrence, each praises itself and runs down its neighbor. Leavenworth claims to be so healthy that when it lately became necessary to “inaugurate” the new grave-yard, “they had to shoot a man on purpose”—a change since the days when the Southern Border Ruffians were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of abolitionists stuck on poles. On the other hand, a Nebraska man, when asked whether the Kansas people were fairly honest, said: “Don‘t know about honest; but they do say as how the folk around take in their stone fences every night.” Lawrence, the State capital, which is on the dried-up Kansas River, sneeringly says of all the new towns on the Missouri that the boats that ply between them are so dangerous that the fare is collected in installments every five minutes throughout the trip. Next after the jealousy between two Australian colonies, there is nothing equal to the hatreds between cities competing for the same trade. Omaha has now the best chance of becoming the capital of the far West, but Leavenworth will no doubt continue to be the chief town of Kansas.
The progress of the smaller cities is amazing. Pistol-shots by day and night are frequent, but trade and development are little interfered with by such incidents as these; and as the village cities are peopled up, the pioneers, shunning their fellows, keep pushing westward, seeking new “locations.” “You‘re the second man I‘ve seen this fall! Darn me, if ‘taint ’bout time to varmose out westerly—y,” is the standing joke of the “frontier-bars” against each other.
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At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepworth Dixon, just out from England, and with him I visited the Kansas towns, and then pushed through Waumego to Manhattan, the terminus (for the day) of the Kansas Pacific line. Here we were thrust into what space remained between forty leathern mail-bags and the canvas roof of the mule-drawn ambulance, which was to be at once our prison for six nights, and our fort upon wheels against the Indians.