Emerson Hough

“ For a generation he could walk, or at least travel by boat. But when he came to the edge of the open country of the plains, when he saw above him the vast bow of the great River of the West, across whose arc he needed to travel direct, then there stood waiting for him, as though by providential appointment, this humble creature, this coward, this hero of an animal, now afraid of its own shadow, now willing to face steel and powder-smoke, patient, dauntless, capable of great exertion and great accomplishment. So in the land of great distances the traveler became a mounted man ”

“ It is un-American to snivel, and as the old-time Western men would not have done so, neither shall we. The West is not dead. It is immortal. We have come upon a century of force. The conflict is to be the bitterest the world has ever known; not the conflict of man with beast, or with savage nature, but the conflict of masses of men, masses of things, one combination against another, one wedge of impact, head on, against another. It is too late to call out for an America like that of Washington or Jefferson; too late to ask for a practical Monroe doctrine ”

“ The West was a distinct section, and it was a section that had begun to develop an aristocracy. We still wore linsey-woolsey in Kentucky; still pounded our corn in a hollow stump in Ohio; still killed our Indians with the ancient weapon of our fathers; still took our produce to New Orleans in flat-boats; still were primitive in many ways.
None the less we had among us an aristocrat, a man who classified himself as better than his fellow men. There had been born that early captain of transportation, the keel-boatman, the man that could go up-stream. ”

“ It has been hitherto in America not so much a 427 question of politics as of roads; but now the roads are builded that shall lead us to our City of Desire or to our Castle of Despair. Steam will establish our doctrines and our tariffs. But steam has no soul. To it, our flap-hatted frontiersman, our new-American, our product of a noble and unparalleled evolution, is but the same as the wrinkled-booted foreigner that puts down his black box in the middle of a Dakota prairie or in the heart of a crowded Eastern city. Steam has no care for the real glory of our flag. It cares naught for character. ”

“ There was, in the first place, then, the West of the fur trade, the trade that had come down through so many vicissitudes, legacy of Louis the Grand Monarch and his covetous intriguers. For generations the coureurs du bois, wild peddlers of the woods, had traced the ultimate waterways of the far Northwest, sometimes absent for one, two, or more years from the place they loosely called home, sometimes never returning at all from the savagery that offered so great a fascination, often too strong even for men reared in the lap of luxury and refinement. ”

“ Davy Crockett, backwoodsman and bear hunter, magistrate, legislator and congressman; a man who at the time of his marriage scarcely knew one letter of the alphabet from the other, yet at middle age was one of the best-known figures of the American political world, and who was even mentioned as a possibility for the presidency of the United States; a man that lived like a savage and died like a hero—one of the uncouthest gentlemen that ever breathed—such a man as this could have been the product of none but an extraordinary day. ”

“ The names of the captains of enterprise are lost in the tawdry modern lists of our so-called captains of industry. To-day, in a time that is fast becoming one of American serfdom, we lose in the haze of a national carelessness the figures of that earlier and more glorious day when the magnificent American West offered free scope and opportunity to a population wholly made up of men of daring, of individuality, of initiative, of self-leadership. ”

“ That was the day of the founding of the American aristocracy, of the birth of the American type, of the beginning of the American character. If we would study an actual American history, we can not leave out the American pioneer; and before, in our humble effort to approach the real genius of our America, we follow the strong sweep of the west-bound beyond the mighty Mississippi and toward the western sea, we shall do best to pause for a space and to make some inquiry into the origin and character of these early apostles of the creed of adventure. ”

“ We throw open the gates of America and invite the sodden hordes of worthless peasantry to flock hither and pillage this country, the choicest of the continent, without let or hindrance, without requiring of them the first standard of fitness for American citizenship; without asking of them even the slightest educational test as to their fitness to enter into and enjoy a part of 402 the once splendid heritage of this American people. The only price we ask is a ticket and a vote. ”

“ The history of the occupation of the West is the story of a great pilgrimage. It is the record of a people always outstripping its leaders in wisdom, in energy and in foresight. A slave of politics, the American citizen has none the less always proved himself greater than politics or politicians. The American, the Westerner, if you please, has been a splendid individual. We shall have no hope as a nation when the day of the individual shall be no more. ”

“ Of a truth, there would be justice in saying that we would better watch not so much South America as Castle Garden. There is where much of the degradation and depression of American life is going on. There is where trades-unionism begins, and indeed must begin. There is where monopolies begin. There is where, indeed, we are being colonized by the European peoples. For those that come here to work, to study, to learn and to grow there may be room yet in this great America. For those that come here to exist as parasites there should be no longer any room. ”

“ It is not too late for revolution in America. There is not justice in the belief that America can to-day be called the land of the free. The individual is no more. He perished somewhere on those heights we have seen him laboriously ascending, somewhere on those long rivers we have seen him tracing. He died in the day of Across the Waters.
To-day we have labor unions, organizations that in the old West would have called forth indignant contempt in the mere suggestion. ”

“ It was one of those first republics west of the Alleghanies, one of those first instances of spontaneous self-government that have so often proved the vital strength of the restless yet self-respecting and law-abiding American character. How the men of the Free State of Franklin loved their little empire, how they defended it against the savages that pressed upon its borders, how they held the soil on which they had set the standard of west-bound civilization—all that is a legitimate part of the birth-history of the West. ”

“ Man and woman together, fearless, changeless, they held the land, giving back not one inch of the west-bound distance they had gained!
In 1791 there were only fifteen persons left alive out of the three hundred and eighty that made this American migration. There had been only one natural death among them. In such a settlement there was no such thing as a hero, because all were heroes. Each man was a master of weapons, and incapable of fear. No fiction ever painted a hero like to any one of these. One man, after having been shot and stabbed many times, was scalped alive, and jested at it. ”

“ A million dead men are forgotten. Our wars are as nothing. But a million live men, taken up bodily from one environment, and set down bodily in another environment in any antipodal quarter of the world—that means history; that spells questions in forethought; that bids rise an American statesmanship big and honest, not selfish, not corrupt, and not afraid! These questions are such as must be approached wholly without reference to party or to politics. ”

“ The pathway points now not out into the West, but out into the world. Never doubt that the sons of the West, sons of this Anak, sons whose fathers are in Valhalla to-day, will follow that 374 road as far and as fearlessly as they did the path across the continent. In the veins of these men runs the riot unconquerable, the distillation of the skies and winds. Their feet march now to the rhythm of phantom footfalls, those of the men that marched before from home out into the perilous unknown. Black men, yellow men, peasant men—all these must take their chances. ”

“ It is this man, this simple, common, plain American citizen who is to-day most vitally concerned. The man we have with us, the man of America, who has helped win and make America, is the one that ought to be 406 protected by America, rather than the one that still has root in the Old World soil that bore him.
This is selfishness; but it is the only plan that offers hope to humanity in either world. The glory, the pride of America, the beauty and the flowering of her growth, have root in her splendid heritage, the heritage of a virile character born of a magnificent environment ”

“ There came swiftly the Western rush of population, which swept off the map the free lands of all our Western empire. The vast American public, mad with the lust of land, raped the Indian reservations from those that had frail title given them in the honor of a great nation; so that thus one more bar was broken between the East and the West. Home-building, farm-making man came close on the heels of trapper and trader and nomad cattle driver. The hordes of the land seekers held their lotteries even in the desert once dreaded by the travelers of the old Santa Fé trail. ”

“ A man reaching the ripe age of eighty-six, with five generations of his family living at the same time; a man snowy haired, yet still of ruddy complexion, of frame still unbent, with kindly and gentle personal habits—this is the real Daniel Boone: no swearer of oaths, no swashbuckler, no roisterer, but a self-respecting, fearless gentleman, steadfast, immovable from his fixed purpose, inalienable from the mission which he conceived to be his own. ”

“ This is the story of a land that even Thomas Benton, a big man, and always a friend of the West, really in his own conscience thought could never, by any possibility, extend its national and civilized limits west of the Rockies! This is the record of a region which, in the beginnings of the Oregon trail, our ablest men of letters and of statecraft thought could never be aught but the home of wandering tribes of savages! Truly the great men of to-day might profitably learn humility from a study of the things which the American people have done in spite of leaders. ”

“ As to the future steps in the development of the West, we may perhaps be indulged in a hazard of opinion, as our fathers were before us. It would seem sure that every inch of our agricultural lands must come under the plow of Belgium, and be tilled inch by inch. The vast Delta of the Mississippi, from Memphis south, the richest soil the world ever saw, will be a continuous garden, supporting a great population of its own, and feeding thousands in the cities, in full verification of the wisdom of the man who foresaw that the South must be joined to the North, even as the West to the East. ”

“ Not all Spain could keep the feet of the young Anglo-Saxons out of that trail. There were always the adventurers; and there were always the trails there, ready, waiting, expectant, prepared for them. There is no reading so thrilling as the bare truth about our West; and the most thrilling part of it is the awesome feeling that our venturers were after all themselves but puppets in a grim and awful game. There lay the Missouri, the Platte, the Arkansas; and stretching out to meet them reached the Columbia and the Colorado. ”

“ It can be only with horror that we reflect that the Old World was called upon also to furnish us a people to replace the more than half-million dead of as grand a population as the world ever knew, the flower of America, North, South, East, and West. ”

“ Moreover, it was only with great difficulty that the frontiersman transported any weighty articles on his Western pilgrimage. Lead was heavy, powder was precious, the paths back to the land of such commodities long and arduous. A marvel of adaptation, the American rifle swiftly grew to a practical perfection. Never in the history of the arms of nations has there been produced a weapon whose results have been more tremendous in comparison to the visible expenditure of energy; never has there been a more economical engine, or an environment where economy was more imperative. ”

“ Humanity, not political divisions, is the concern of time. The individual yields to the section, the section to the nation, the nation to the world, the world to the plans of fate, of Providence.
There is another, a lighter and more cheerful side to the conclusions that we may draw from our study of the way in which the West was made—the side that has to do with the growth of the newer portions of this country in all the liberal arts, in that noble flowering of the human imagination, which is most naturally to be expected of an environment of ease and a time of leisure. ”

“ The railway was explorer, carrier, provider, thinker, heart, soul, and intellect for this population that in another generation was to be American. No wonder these folk stand and stare when the railway-train goes by. It has been Providence to them. It is a Providence that has given to Europe what America might have had.
To-day towns do not grow merely because of their location, and this factor of location will become less and less important as the years go by. St. Louis was a city of location; Chicago is a city of transportation. ”

“ Let us leave to an impartial and intelligent judgment of readers the question whether or not there exists or threatens to exist in America a commercial despotism; whether or not there exists any American people; whether or not we have, in the foregoing pages, found any causes for the changes and tendencies toward change that are to-day unmistakable phenomena—changes so rapid and elemental that any true American ought to be ashamed to say, “I belong without thought to this, that or the other political party.” ”

“ This last picture is a sad one to any thinking man not concerned in politics. The West of steam-transportation has not so much impressed itself, and in reason could not be expected so to impress itself, upon its population as did that West reached by slow-moving wheels when the natural difficulties to be overcome were so vastly greater for the individual. The old West begot character, grew mighty individuals, because such were its soil and sky and air, its mountains, its streams, its long and devious trails, its constant stimulus and challenge. ”

“ The first outshoots of the seaboard civilization to run 40 forth into the West did not trace back to the stern and rock-bound shore where the tolerants were punishing those who did not agree with them.
New York, then, was perhaps the parent of the West? By no means, however blandly pleasant that belief might be to many for whom New York must be ever the first cause and center of the American civilization, not the reflection-point of that civilization. The rabid Westerner may enjoy the thought that neither New England nor New York was the actual ancestor. ”

“ Along this great trail crossing the waters men bent their steps toward Oregon and California, men from the banks of the Missouri, from Illinois, and now even from far-off New England—where at last they had learned the “easy way West” and had begun to travel, as their friends to the southward had been doing for so many years. Thus, then, began the great Oregon trail, this road that might, with justice, have been called an open highway when Frémont “explored” the Rockies, albeit a highway almost unsettled, as it is to-day over much of its length, though peopled thick with mighty memories. ”

“ Sir, when the waters of the Mississippi, generations hence, are traversed by carriers of commerce from all parts of the world; when there shall live west of the Father of Waters a people greater in 190 numbers than the present population of the United States; when, sir, the power of England, always malevolent, shall have waned to nothing, and the eagles and stars of our national arms be recognized and honored in all parts of the globe ”