Indianapolis and Madison are examples of town sites staked out in virgin forests by ambitious and imaginative speculators, and, before a house could be built, set aside by statute as capitals of their respective young commonwealths. It is not always that towns thus artificially planted have similarly thriven. Under normal conditions, a successful city is as much a matter of natural growth as a tree, whose germ has chanced to fall in favored soil. Many, perhaps most, Western towns of importance, that were planted before the days of the railroad, when waterways were highways, are upon the sites of early villages of aborigines, who made their stands at natural vantage points—at a river mouth, convenient for transportation, or close to considerable fishing grounds; at a waterfall, because here fish are plenty, and canoes must be carried around the obstruction, so that the villagers are masters of the highway; upon a portage path, because of ease in reaching and controlling divergent water systems; upon a bluff overlooking waterways, for facility of observation and control; upon a fertile river bottom, because of good corn lands. In due time, whites came to such a centre of population and established a trading post; here and there, as at Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Vincennes, and Kansas City (Westport), the post in due time developed into a garrisoned fort; and the surrounding community, at first dependent on the fur trade or the military, under modern conditions became a town of importance. Scores, possibly hundreds, of such examples might be cited; and even when some thrifty towns of the West appear at first sight to have no connection with such a past, antiquarians have not infrequently discovered evidences that substantially the same reasons which before the railway era had led civilized men to select the site, caused its previous occupancy by aborigines—sometimes at so early a day that the only remaining relics are the curious earthworks which the progenitors of our Western Indians, prompted by religious fervor, constructed anywhere from two and a half to ten centuries ago.
Minneapolis and Spokane, both of them old Indian sites, are the direct outgrowth of the superb waterpowers which have given them pre-eminence in the industrial world.
We have seen that the Great Lakes and the great rivers were the paths to the Mississippi basin in the days of the canoe, the bateau, and the pack-horse. The early movement of population over the trans-Mississippi plains and through the passes of the Rockies was by means of wagons along well-worn buffalo traces, which Indians had followed in the pursuit of game. Where rivers intersected these overland trails, ferries were instituted, their keepers doing a thriving business in helping upon their way fur traders, explorers, miners, and settlers. Such was the origin of Kansas City and Omaha, which naturally developed, with the rush of immigration, into great centres of distribution. In every quarter of our land, from the earliest colonial days, the frontier ferryman, with his tavern and trading house, has been a town builder.
The discovery of precious metals in the hills of Colorado gave life to the mining camp of Denver, which in time became the metropolis of a wide district, to which irrigation brought a wealth more enduring than gold and silver.
Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are the open doors of the Pacific Coast, and their growth is thus easily accounted for. Prophecies are current of the possible commercial supremacy of these Pacific-coast towns, as a consequence of our new interests in the Far East. It is curious, in this connection, to remember that Spain's motive in founding her California colonies, four generations ago, was, on the temporal side, the more strongly to establish herself in the Philippines.
Strangest of all stories is that of Salt Lake City, the product of religious zeal seeking a supposedly inaccessible desert as a haven from persecution. Finally, when the laborious development of the wilderness has brought rich fruitage, this hermit city finds itself a station on one of the world's most-traveled highways.
The coming of the railway, and the consequent practical abandonment of the waterway, wrought a profound change in the fortunes of the Western towns. The railway paid small heed to watercourses, save in mountainous country; it struck out upon short-cuts over the plains and prairies, almost regardless of topography. Hundreds of staid and promising river and lake towns received a staggering blow when, for various reasons,—sometimes their own failure to encourage the enterprise,—the railway passed them by and entered rival and often less pretentious communities, which now were quickened into new vigor. A more favorable situation for a bridge across the stream was often the determining factor which caused several towns upon a river to die and the fortunate one to be transformed into a metropolis. The arbitrary erection throughout the West of new paths of commerce, of new centres of distribution, during the decade and a half before the War of Secession, was of itself a revolutionary element in urban history.
Almost as profound in its effects was the practically contemporaneous dispersion through this vast territory of millions of European immigrants, who came to open farms, to practise trades, and in city and in village to carry forward, often to inaugurate, hundreds of new commercial and industrial enterprises. The new-comers brought strange habits of thought and social customs; some of the most desirable of these they engrafted upon their American neighbors, while at the same time they themselves were being consciously or unconsciously remoulded into American citizens—who, whatever may be said, will always be essentially but transplanted Englishmen modified by environment and political education.
Of the many nationalities of the European continent which have planted stakes in North America, the Germans and the Scandinavians, closely allied to our Anglo-Saxon stock, have been the most numerous and have exercised the greatest influence. Many considerable towns, like Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis, and Omaha, have become strongly German, with not a few of the characteristics of old Germany, such as are evinced in a general fostering of music and rational outdoor recreation. The Scandinavian element vies good-naturedly with the German, as at Madison and Chicago; while Minneapolis may be considered as the centre of Scandinavian influence, fostering sturdy democracy and tenacious enterprise.
In the large towns which have their roots planted in New France, the French element is no longer of considerable importance. The French borderer was a vivacious, fun-loving, easy-going fellow, and upon the road to modern opulence and power has long since been passed; to-day, as an urban dweller, he is not seriously reckoned with by the politician, and this is a safe guide to the relative standing of a race in any American city. The towns which we have more recently inherited from Spain still possess, in their older quarters, strong characteristics to link them with the past. Here and there, as with the French, individual Spaniards or mixed-bloods rise into prominence in our modern life—but only through the channel of Americanization, which means effacement of the old régime. Spanish traits have left permanent traces on the Southwest and the Pacific, as some French traits are a part of the lasting heritage of the Old Northwest; but Spaniards and Frenchmen as such are rapidly fading from our historic towns.