The pioneer West

by Unknown

VITAL PAGES IN AMERICAN HISTORY

The history of America is the story of trail-makers, pioneers in every sense of the word. Our forefathers had trails to make in new fields of government, of invention and in city building, but before all, smoothing the way for all, came the men and women who explored and ploughed and planted the wilderness. Their story will grow in interest as the years pass. Their deeds have already taken on something of the dim quality of heroic myths. They form the most distinctive of our contributions to history and poetry.

Many of the most stark and stirring of these chronicles of the border have passed out of print and are now inaccessible even to the painstaking student. It is from among these almost forgotten, yet vital records that Mr. French has selected the chapters of his book of narratives of the Pioneer West. I am personally grateful to him for rescuing for me several of these chronicles of which I had heard but which I had not been able to read until they came to me in this volume. I perceive in this collection another link in the lengthening chain of our traditional story. The Great War has thrown the events of our early settlement suddenly into remote distance. It is as if an extra half-century had been abruptly interposed, and this added perspective has given us a new and keener interest in the beginnings of our nation.

No one who has spent a recent summer in Europe can fail to perceive the change of sentiment which has come, since the war, to the peoples of the Old World. To them America is admittedly the dominating economic force of to-day. No well-informed European writer or speaker now pretends to patronize the United States as a young and unformed colony. The foundation stages of American history have acquired new value in the minds of many English and French readers, and such students this book which Mr. French has built up of scattered and neglected chronicles will stimulate to wider research. I commend it to all Americans who have neither time nor opportunity to read in their entirety the volumes from which these notable and representative chapters have been lifted. Broadly chronological in arrangement, they suggest a panorama of the rigorous Westward march of the hunters, woodsmen, planters and gold-miners who were chief actors of the century which ended with the outbreak of the Spanish War in 1898.

With regard to the inclusion of a section from one of my own books I can only say that when approached for a grant of copyright I suggested something to offset the many chapters of life in the mining camps and on the trail, something which should tell of the homely methods of settling the plains. Beyond this suggestion, I did not care to go. The excerpt which the editor has used is a leaf out of my personal experiences in Brown and MacPherson counties in Dakota, in the spring of 1883, and is a faithful picture of the life we led while holding down our homestead claims.

Hamlin Garland.

PREFACE

Oh, that glorious West! The magic and the memory of it! How it thrilled us in our boyhood, how it held us in our youth, how the dream of it filled our young pulsing manhood, till there was none other! “O, to be in England now that April’s there!” once sang Browning, but the song in the heart of young America, forty years ago and more, was the great glorious, boundless West! I crossed the bare Kansas and Colorado plains in the month of March, 1880,—when the Great West was still a vision, yet largely a dream; when scarce small clumps of buffalo could still be seen from the car windows. I shook hands at the bar of the St. James Hotel in Denver with Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack in full buckskin regalia,—still to be seen and known in their habit as they lived.

Yet it was the dawning of a new day for the West and all men knew it. The old order passeth, and so it was here; a new West was coming in, and the great pioneer heroes of an earlier day shook hands with the derby-hatted tenderfoot from the East and tilted glasses in friendly companionship. But the old West—the great, the never-to-be-forgotten epic of our newer civilization—still lingered; and happy, yes, a hero of sorts was he of the East who still sniffed the footprints. Railroads were still largely a dream; the Union Pacific had cut the boundless wastes of the great desert and made travel to California an actuality; but a second great transcontinental iron path was still largely a possibility. The footprints of the pioneers were everywhere; echoes of the pathfinder were yet in the air; gold and silver were being found every day in the wilderness of the Rockies; new camps—reachable only by the primitive stagecoach, whose final departure in an older realm had been magniloquently signed over by old Sir Walter—were springing up overnight; Leadville had a population of thirty thousand and not a score of streets named; Buena Vista, at eleven thousand feet above sea level, was a dream of the gods! Away to the South were Silver Cliff and Rosita, with their hitherto uncombed rocks pouring out fortunes. Ouray was an acknowledged bonanza; and into the Gunnison country poured a steady stream of prairie-wagons over mountain trails that the Indian himself did not know. The plains held unlimited resources in the golden imagination of the pioneer! Was there ever such a dream as his—of sheep and cattle by the thousands—such flocks as Abraham never dreamed of; and away to the South, boundless, unconceived-of possibilities, an absolute Eldorado! Such was the great, the Golden West—to make no concrete mention of California—when the compiler of these pages first felt the urge and the surge toward it. Horace Greeley’s pæan was in the air: “Go West, young man.” And most of us did; and whether fortune or its reverse came, there is not a man of us in whom the red blood flows still that can ever forget that splendid scene. If to the survivor, as to the more or less belated traveler, some echo of it lives in these pages, he has done his work faithfully.

This, then, is an outdoor book. The breath of the prairie, the mountain, the desert, the lake, the sea blows through its pages. It describes for the most part an outdoor life,—a life that in its main aspects and features is the most stirring and eventful chapter in the history of any new civilization. All the elements of romance were crowded into the making of our great West; not a single one is lacking. It was the last great scene in the history of world-pioneering, and contains episodes, like the discovery of gold in California, that are epic. The tale in its infinite variety has been told by many writers; some of whom have passed into oblivion, but have left us living pages; others of them belong to our best literary tradition; a few are among our immortals. It is impossible in a volume of this size to give more than a vivid glance at the scope and importance of this vast literature. The compiler has endeavored to convey an impression of the general scene inspired by the men who were themselves its living actors. “All of which I saw, and part of which I was” has been his motto in gathering his material. He has therefore some hope that he has presented, at least in degree, a living picture of a great drama, now vanished forever, and which undoubtedly can never be paralleled in the annals of world civilization.