There is something in mere land to me—any kind of land—soil, you may call it—dirt—I care not what. But I love it just as I hate brick walls and city pavements. There is something about it, from the rocks and hills to the level, plowed valleys, that is clean and good. It means independence and honesty and clean living. It may not mean shrewdness and polish and that smart education which comes from living by one’s wits in a great walled-in home of wits, but it means independence and the rest that made Shakespeare.
When I saw the Dakotas, I wondered how the white man had stayed away from them as long as he had. Perhaps it were better for the staying, starving, striving quality of our forefathers that this grand garden spot of the Northwest lay hid between the mountains and the sea, instead of stretching up and down the coast. It were better for their children that fathers should toil in sand and flint. It puts flint into the children—steel—gameness—the spirit to do.
One generation of striving poverty makes flint; two, steel; three, well, you have heard of Andrew Jackson, of Lincoln, perhaps. Study the poverty of their pedigrees, for it takes poverty to make a pedigree.
The first immigrants to our shores came solely for gold, it is said. What kind of a republic would we have to-day if they had landed on the Pacific slope of gold instead of the Atlantic slope of rocks?
And yet, America is run over with people to-day who think that gold is everything. They think it so hard that the land is filled with trusts and steals and the things which breed greed and guilt. They should learn—they must learn—that, as the making of money is the lowest of all human talents—the talent of self first, which is the lowest instinct of all life—so is its talent for getting the lowest, meanest of all talents. “All my life,” says Edison, “I have been trying to keep away from mean people who make money.”
Fargo I found to be a beautiful and prosperous city, and the soil of the country around it, as it had been for two hundred miles, truly a glory and an inspiration. If this land had the climate of the South it could feed the world. As it is, Nature, who adjusts herself to environments, acts quickly here, and I was surprised at the stories of its productiveness in the short season it had. Nay, mine own eye beheld it, for never had I seen such wheat, barley and small grain, such cabbage, beets, turnips, vegetables of all kinds.
There was a greatness and vastness everywhere. As far as the eye could see, even beyond the rim of the horizon, it was vast—vast. And that always affects me peculiarly. After I have seen as far as the eye will reach, I become homesick. I have a sacred, sad longing to see and go farther and uplift the veil.
I rejoiced in the fact that there were no trees, no high hills, nothing to break the great canvas of vastness—a bivouac of eternity dotted with millions of camps of wheat shocks, fringed with the splendor of a vast, pure sky, and framed in the purpling splendor of a horizon of blue and gold. The little ten acre lots of dwarf trees the Government has forced the settlers to plant, I liked them not. They were warts, merely, on the brow of Eternity. The great, rich, boundless, beautiful prairies were there as God had Intended them to be—Nature’s handiwork, with splendid harmony in its whole.
No picture ever painted has equalled it—for Nature never makes a mistake in her pictures. She never sticks a bunch of dwarf trees where the great, grand prairies should roll away.
There is but little difference between the Dakota prairies and the ocean. The difference is that only between the imagination and the fact. And looking over them, standing in them, seeing the ceaseless waves rippling across the seas of wheat or the white caps come spinning from the uplifted heads of them, again and again I caught myself repeating Byron’s lines: