Frederic L. Paxson

“ An English observer, hopeful for the worst, announced in the middle of the war that "When that 'late lamented institution,'226 the once United States, shall have passed away, and when, after this detestable and fratricidal war—the most disgraceful to human nature that civilization ever witnessed—the New World shall be restored to order and tranquility, our shikaris will not forget, that a single fortnight of comfortable travel suffices to transport them from fallow deer and pheasant shooting to the haunts of the bison and the grizzly bear. ”

“ Complexity, class interest, and the problems at once of labor and of capital, thrust themselves upon a society that had occupied its continent and used most of its free land. The Centennial had revived the study of American history from patriotic reasons. An intense interest in self-analysis now kept this alive, as Henry Adams, James Schouler, and John Bach McMaster devoted themselves to a scrutiny of historic facts, as colleges began to create chairs of American history, as James Ford Rhodes retired from his office to his study to write the history of his own times. ”

“ Running to the north and draining the valley were the Powder and Tongue rivers, both tributaries of the Yellowstone. Here were water, timber, and forage, coal and oil and game. It was the garden spot of the Indians, "the very heart of their hunting-grounds." In a single day's ride were seen "bear, buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, rabbits, and sage-hens." With little exaggeration it was described as a "natural source of recuperation and supply to moving, hunting, and roving bands of all tribes, and their lodge trails cross it in great numbers from north to south." ”

“ Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for the gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Swept off its feet by the enthusiasm for silver, and having no other candidate in view, the convention nominated Bryan on the fifth ballot, selecting Arthur Sewall, of Maine, as his companion. ”

“ Building a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean was easily the greatest engineering feat that America had undertaken. In their day the Cumberland Road, and the Erie Canal, and the Pennsylvania Portage Railway had ranked among the American wonders, but none of these had been accompanied by the difficult problems that bristled along the eighteen hundred miles of track that must be laid across plain and desert, through hostile Indian country and over mountains. ”

“ Men had worked with their own hands and with the labor of their beasts of burden, as men had ever worked. Their land had appeared, indeed, to be the land of opportunity. Population had doubled itself in a short generation, and America had called upon the oppressed of Europe to aid in reclaiming the plains and forests. With all the labor and opportunity, there had rarely been either an overproduction or a lack of work.
The industrial revolution changed the nature of American society in many directions. ”

“ The country was strewed with the skeletons and carcases of cattle, and the graves of the early Mormon and California pilgrims lined the roadside. This is the worst emigrant route that I have ever travelled; much of the road is through deep sand, feed is very scanty, a great deal of the water is alkaline, and the snows in winter render it impassable for trains. ”

“ In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the fur traders, those nameless pioneers who possessed an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of every hill and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before the surveyor and his transit brought them within the circle of recorded facts. ”

“ In 1898 the first State, South Dakota, adopted the principle of initiative and referendum in a constitutional amendment. To those who attacked the device as only mechanical it was answered: "Direct legislation is not a panacea for all national ills. In fact it is not a panacea at all. It is merely a spoon with which the panacea can be administered. Specific legislation is the panacea for political ills."
The West was more ready than the East to break from existing practice and take up the new reforms. It had always been the liberal section of the United States. ”

“ In twenty-four miles he passed seventeen abandoned wagons and twenty-seven dead oxen.
Beyond Fort Hall, with the journey half done, came the worst perils. In the dust and heat of the Humboldt Valley, stock literally faded away, so that thousands had to turn back to refuge at Salt Lake, or were forced on foot to struggle with thirst and starvation.
The number of the overland emigrants can never be told with accuracy. Perhaps the truest estimate is that of the great California historian who counts it that, in 1849, 42,000 crossed the continent and reached the gold fields. ”

“ Like every other West, the West of 1868 was in debt; like every other debtor community, it was liable to yield to theories of inflation, and was prone to look to politics for redress of grievances. The farmers of Massachusetts and Connecticut had followed Shays for this purpose in 1786; Ohio and Kentucky had attacked the second Bank of the United States when it forced their banks to pay their debts; and now the Northwest listened to politicians who told them that more greenbacks would cure their ills. ”

“ The conflict between the Indian tribes and the whites could not have ended in any other way than that which has come to pass. A handful of savages, knowing little of agriculture or manufacture or trade among themselves, having no conception of private ownership of land, possessing social ideals and standards of life based upon the chase, could not and should not have remained unaltered at the expense of a higher form of life. The farmer must always have right of way against the hunter, and the trader against the pilferer, and law against self-help and private war. ”

“ The South no sooner saw the possibility that the negro vote might hold a balance of power between two equal white factions than it took steps to remove itself from temptation and to disfranchise the undesired class. ”

“ The men who exploited California had generally been amateur miners, acquiring skill by bitter experience; but the next decade developed a professional class, mobile as quicksilver, restless and adventurous as all the West, which permeated into the most remote recesses of the mountains and produced before the Civil War was over, as the direct result of their search for gold, not only Colorado, but Nevada and Arizona, Idaho and Montana. Activity was constant during these years all along the continental divide. ”

“ Agriculture was the main reliance of the wave of pioneers that poured over the plains along the lines of the railroads. In the valley of the Red River of the North, wheat-farming was their staple industry. As the Old South had devoted itself to the staple crop of cotton, so this new region took up the single crop of wheat, bringing to its cultivation great machines, white labor, and a modified factory system. South of the wheat country, corn dominated in Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, and went to market either as grain or in the converted form of hogs or stock. ”

“ The degree of provocation is uncertain, but the disposition of Tucson, as Mowry has phrased it, was not such as to strengthen belief in the justice of the attack: "There is only one way to wage war against the Apache. A steady, persistent campaign must be made, following them to their haunts—hunting them to the 'fastnesses of the mountains.' They must be surrounded, starved into coming in, surprised or inveigled—by white flags, or any other method, human or divine—and then put to death. ”

“ Men who survived from the generation that flourished before the war found their cherished ideas undermined or shattered. In public life, administration, literature, and religion the old order was being swept away. The United States had become a nation because it could not avoid it. Even the Congregational churches, with whom parish autonomy was vital, had seen fit to erect a National Council. Every important activity of trade had become national, and the only agency that retained its old localism was the law, which must cope with the new order. ”

“ The continental frontier, whose isolation the Union Pacific had threatened in 1869, was easily accessible by 1884. Along six different lines between New Orleans and St. Paul it had been made possible to cross the sometime American desert to the Pacific states. No longer could any portion of the republic be considered as beyond the reach of civilization. Instead of a waste that forbade national unity in its presence, a thousand plains stations beckoned for colonists, and through lines of railway iron bound the nation into an economic and political unit. ”

“ The office-holders were in no sense the leaders of their communities. Industry, social life, education, and religion had parted company with politics since the decline of the Union issue, and unless a new political alignment could be found there was a prospect of continued rivalry for offices alone. Yet men were beginning to realize that a new period of growth had begun during the Hayes Administration, and that American institutions, formulated before the Civil War, had ceased to meet industrial needs. ”

“ The Mormon hegira planted the first of the island settlements in the heart of the desert. The very isolation of Utah gave it prominence. What religious enthusiasm lacked in aiding organization, shrewd leadership and resulting prosperity supplied. The first impulse moving population across the plains had been chiefly conquest, with Oregon as the result. Religion was the next, producing Utah. The lust for gold followed close upon the second, calling into life California, and then in a later decade sprinkling little camps over all the mountain West. ”

“ The long list of breaches of trust, revealed in the seventies, had made reformers feel that incompetence and spoils endangered the life of the nation. As late as 1880, they had heard a delegate in the Republican Convention, when asked to vote for a civil service plank, exclaim indignantly: "Mr. President, Texas has had quite enough of the civil service.... We are not here, sir, for the purpose of providing offices for the Democracy.... After we have won the race, as we will, we will give those who are entitled to positions office. What are we up here for?" ”

“ Here was a new settlement far away from the seat of territorial government, while the government itself was impotent. Kansas had no legislature competent to administer law at home—far less in outlying colonies. But spontaneous self-government came easily to the new town. "Just to think," wrote one of the pioneers in his diary, "that within two weeks of the arrival of a few dozen Americans in a wilderness, they set to work to elect a Delegate to the United States Congress, and ask to be set apart as a new Territory! But we are of a fast race and in a fast age and must prod along." ”

“ Every month the Populist party increased in strength, the East watching it with mingled fear and contempt and ignorance. The comic papers pictured as the typical Populist the raw-boned, booted, unkempt farmer, in shirt-sleeves and with flowing beard. ”

“ Here at Independence was done most of the general outfitting in the thirties. For the greater part of the year the town was dead, but for a few weeks in the spring it throbbed with the rough-and-ready life of the frontier. Landing of traders and cargoes, bartering for mules and oxen, building and repairing wagons and ox-yokes, and in the evening drinking and gambling among the hard men soon to leave port for the Southwest,—all these gave to Independence its name and place. ”

“ Tied fast to a system nearly as inflexible as that of the ante-bellum plantation, the South suffered disproportionately in years when cotton was low. Depression in the later eighties and the early nineties intensified the suffering of the debtor class and produced an inflation movement that allied the South and West in the demand for cheaper money and more of it. The Farmers' Alliance, with its demands for railroad control, trust regulation, banking reform, and free silver, was the logical vehicle for the expression of Southern discontent. ”

“ And out of this shifting frontier between man and nature have come the problems that have occupied and directed American governments since their beginning, as well as the men who have solved them. The portion of the population residing in the frontier has always been insignificant in number, yet it has well-nigh controlled the nation. The dominant problems in politics and morals, in economic development and social organization, have in most instances originated near the frontier or been precipitated by some shifting of the frontier interest. ”

“ From the jungle or the mountains they sent bands of guerrillas against the sugar mills and plantations of the ruling class, and when pursued their troops hid their weapons and became, ostensibly, peaceful farmers. A revolutionary government, sitting safely in New York, directed the revolt, raised money by playing on the American love of freedom, and sent cargoes of arms, munitions, and volunteers to the seat of war. Avoiding pitched battles and living off the country, the patriot forces compelled Spain to put some 200,000 troops in Cuba and to garrison every place that she retained. ”

“ THE OVERLAND MAIL
Close upon the heels of the overland migrations came an organized traffic to supply their needs. Oregon, Salt Lake, California, and all the later gold fields, drew population away from the old Missouri border, scattered it in little groups over the face of the desert, and left it there crying for sustenance. Many of the new colonies were not self-supporting for a decade or more ”

“ Throughout the tariff debate no argument had been used more steadily than that of the protectionists that protection to labor was their aim. The degradation of "pauper labor" in Europe was contrasted repeatedly with that prosperity that was typical of America. The insistence upon the argument revealed the desire to conciliate a class that was being noticed in American society for the first time.
The great labor problem before the Civil War had been that of getting enough laborers and meeting the competition which the abundant free lands of the West had offered. ”

“ The United States itself had made no codification of Indian treaties since 1837, and allowed the law of tribal relations to remain scattered through a thousand volumes of government documents. Even Indian agents and army officers were often as ignorant of the facts as was the general public. "All Americans have some knowledge of the country west of the Mississippi," lamented the Nation in 1868, but "there is no book of travel relating to those regions which does more than add to a mass of very desultory information. ”

“ Too much government, with its extravagance and corruption, was a cause in the mind of extreme theoretical democrats. Too little government was equally responsible for the discords, in the eyes of growing groups of socialists and communists.
Before 1890 the United States was involved in an elaborate discussion of its troubles and their causes, but in 1880 the period had only just begun and its trend was not clear to the political leaders who were yet quarreling over the spoils of office. ”

“ We will have a sort of predatory war for years, every now and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder of travellers and settlers, but the country is so large, and the advantage of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a single war and end it. From the nature of things we must take chances and clean out Indians as we encounter them." Although it was the tendency of military control to provoke Indian wars, the army was near the truth in its notion that Indians and whites could not live together. ”

“ Serious students of finance are almost unanimous in their belief that the adoption of free silver would have brought into operation the Gresham Law and would have resulted in a reduction of the value of the dollar. But the motives which divided the United States were less economic law than personal interest. The creditor foresaw the shrinkage of his property, and feared it. The debtor saw the lightening of his debt, and easily convinced himself that the ethics of the case required such relief for him. ”

“ I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry on their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext that they may choose to allege. ”