Where is the "Far West" of song and story? Where are the scenes of Fenimore Cooper's charming descriptions, which have thrown a halo of romance over the homes of the early settlers who first explored those unknown regions?
For the most part they are gone for ever, as they appeared to the eyes of the pioneers and pathfinders, who wandered for weeks through the wilderness, without hearing the sound of any human voice but their own. Now on forest and prairie land stand great cities, equal in population and wealth to many famous places, which were grey with age before the New World was discovered. The trading posts, once scattered over a wide region, where Indians and white hunters met to barter the skins of animals for fire-water and gunpowder, have disappeared before the advances of civilisation, and the uninhabited wilderness of fifty years ago has become the centre of busy industries of world-wide fame and importance.
Sixty years ago, fifteen of the largest cities in the United States had no existence. They were not born. Living men remember when they were first staked out on the unbroken prairie, and the woodsman's axe was busy clearing the ground for the log huts of the first settlers who founded the cities of to-day.
At that period, Chicago, now a "Millionaire city," and the second in America, consisted of a little fort and a few log huts. There was scarcely a white woman in the settlement, and no roads had been constructed. The ground on which the great city now stands could have been bought for the sum now demanded for a few square feet in one of its busy streets.
No wonder the American people are proud of "the Queen City of the West." It stands far inland, a thousand miles from the ocean, and yet it is an important port on the shores of Lake Michigan, and steamers from London can land their cargoes at its quays. More than twenty thousand vessels enter and leave the port in one year. It is the greatest grain and provision market in the world.
It may with truth be said that in America cities rise up almost in a night-time. The forest and the prairie are one day out of the reach of civilisation, and the next they are one with the throbbing centres of life and progress. The railway, the means of communication, changes all as by a wizard's touch.
One day the news spread through a certain district, that two lines of railway were to cross at a certain point in the wilderness. Settlers at once crowded to the place, and next day the land was staked out in town lots, with all the details of streets, squares, and market-place. Soon afterwards, shanties were seen on the prairies, moving with all speed, on rollers, towards the new town. On the second day a number of houses were under construction, while the owners camped near by in tents. In a few months hundreds of dwellings had been erected, and a newspaper established to chronicle the doings of the inhabitants.
"The old nations of the earth creep on at snail's pace: the Republic thunders past with the rush of an express," says a recent American writer. "Think of it!" he continues; "a Great Britain and Ireland called forth from the wilderness, as if by magic, in less than the span of a man's few days upon earth."
This marvellous growth and rapid change from wilderness to cultivation must be known and understood by readers on this side of the Atlantic, they can appreciate the story of a Lincoln or a Garfield who began life in a log hut in a backwoods settlement in the Far West, and made their way to the White House, the residence of the ruler of an empire as large as the whole of Europe.