“ WHAT, THEN, WAS THE FIRST TRANSPORTATION OF THE WEST?
When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was the Alleghanies, how then did the West-bound travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation?
The answer would seem easy. They traveled in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters. ”

“ The natural desert, indeed, abounds in a strange and beguiling beauty of its own that lays hold upon a man's spirit, perhaps rudely at first, yet with a growing fascination that, once deeply felt, forever calls and calls the wanderer home again. In the spell that it weaves over a man, it is like the sea: the love of the sailor for his life is not more faithful than that of those bronzed, silent riders of the desert for the long hot stretches of their open land.
Water is the key to the desert. All the life of the desert rests upon its power of resistance to thirst. ”

“ The raw stuff might still be American, the producer of it might still be American. So these busy, thrifty, ambitious men came up and stood back of the vanguard that held the flexible frontier. Silently men stole out yet farther into what West there was left; but they always looked back over the shoulder at this new thing that had come upon the land.
Thinking men knew, half a century ago, that there must be an iron way across the United States, though they knew this only in general terms, and were only guessing at the changes which such a road must bring to the country at large. ”

“ Within the memory of comparatively young men a third of the territory of the United States beyond the Mississippi bore the name of the "Great American Desert." It was a region vast beyond accurate human conception, in extent as great as half of Europe, midribbed with the stupendous, shaggy bulk of the Rocky Mountains, from which it descended in both directions in illimitable rolling plains and rugged mesas, rising here to the height of snow-crowned mountains, and falling there to the ancient salty beds of lost seas, lower than the level of the ocean. ”

“ The government at Washington, young as it was, knew that the Ohio River, reached from the North by a dozen trails from the Great Lakes, and running out into that West which even then was coveted by three nations, was of itself a priceless possession. It was a military reason which first set moving the Pennsylvania hotbed of immigrants. The restless tide of humanity spread from that point according to principles as old as the world. Having a world before them from which to choose their homes, the men of that time sought out those homes along the easiest lines. ”

“ The road itself is of little consequence—it is what the early founding of the commonwealth of Kentucky meant to the East and to the West. When the armies of the Revolutionary War are counted, that first army of twenty-five thousand men, women, and children which hurried over Boone's little path, through dark Powel's Valley, over the "high-swung gateway" of Cumberland Gap and down through the laurel wilderness to Crab Orchard, Danville, Lexington, and Louisville, must not be forgotten. No army ever meant more to the West. ”

“ Let us picture for ourselves this first restless American, this West-bound man. We must remember that there had been two or three full American generations to produce him, this man who first dared turn away from the seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the sun, toward the dark and mysterious mountains and forests which then encompassed the least remote land fairly to be called the West. Two generations had produced a man different from the Old-World type. ”

“ During the fall and winter of that year came an unexampled tide of emigrants, who, exchanging all the comforts of their native society and homes for settlements for themselves and their children here, came like pilgrims to a wilderness to be made secure by their arms and habitable by the toil of their lives. Through privations incredible and perils thick, thousands of men, women and children came in successive caravans, forming continuous streams of human beings, horses, cattle and other domestic animals all moving onward along a lonely and houseless path to a wild [74] and cheerless land. ”

“ I stand in the gray sand; nothing but sand in every direction as far as the eye can reach—sand, a few sentinel yuccas, a sprawling mesquit-bush, with a gopher darting underneath, and a cholla cactus, gray with dust. Here, I say, is the waste place of all the ages; no man ever has set foot here before, and it is likely that no man ever will again. But what is that sound—click, click, click—that comes from the distance? It is no kin to the noises of the desert. Climb the ridge there, the one that trembles with heat; take it slowly, for the sun is blinding hot, and the dry air cracks one's lips. ”

“ Who can convey the feeling of the mysterious night on the desert, suddenly and sweetly cool after the burning heat of the day, the sky a deep, clear blue above—nowhere so blue as in this dry, pure air—the stars almost crowding down to earth in their nearness and brilliancy, a deep and profound silence round about, broken occasionally by the far-off echoing scream of some prowling coyote or the hoot of an owl? ”

“ To-day several million Americans are living in the desert, not temporarily, while they rob it of riches, but for all time, and they love their homes as passionately as any dwellers in the green hills of New England.
A traveler in the West must go far indeed before he find a place where he can say, "This is a worthless and irreclaimable waste, the true desert." There is no faith left in him who speaks of waste places. ”

“ The railroad was not to depend upon the land, but the land upon the railroad. It was strong faith in the future civilization which enabled capitalists to build one connected line of iron from Oregon down the Pacific coast, thence east of the mouth of the Father of Waters, in all over thirty-two hundred miles of rail. Then came that daring flight of the Santa Fé across the seas of sand, a venture derided as folly and recklessness. The proof you may find by seeing the cities that have grown, the fields which bear them tribute. North and South and East and West the prairie roads run. ”

“ It is hardy blood, that of the pioneer, good stock on which to found the development of a country. For years the West has been the lodestone for those adventurous spirits who love the outdoor and exciting life of the mining prospector, the cow-boy, the hunter—a healthy, rugged lot, virtually all pure Americans. ”

“ Here men separate themselves from their homes, from the society of women; they suffer thirst and hardship; they die here in the desert, but they bring in civilization. And the crying wonder of it all is that these are ordinary men, good and evil, weak and strong, who have no idea that they are heroic; who would laugh at the suggestion that they are more than earning a living, making a little money for themselves, and hoping to make more in the future. Yes, the time has come when humanity will not tolerate deserts. ”

“ The year which saw the Mississippi made wholly American was one mighty in the history of America and of the world. The date of the Louisiana Purchase is significant not more by reason of a vast domain added to the West than because of the fact that with this territory came the means of building it up and holding it together. It was now that for the first time the solidarity of this New World was forever assured. We gained a million uninhabited miles—a million miles of country which will one day support its thousands to the mile. ”

“ Herds of horses and cattle feed on the slopes of the mountains. Grain and potatoes are grown by irrigation, and the valley is a source of food-supply for military posts and mining-camps. Hogs are fattened upon peas and wheat, and the flavor of a Bitter Root ham is something altogether unique and appetizing. In June the bitter-root plant, from which the valley gets its name, covers all the uncultivated ground with its delicate rose-colored stars. The blossom, about as large as a wild rose, lies close upon the earth. The long, pipestem-like root is greatly relished by the Indians for food. ”

“ Nature, in the ascent towards the Sierra Madre, presents herself with all her features prominent and strongly marked, her figures bold and colossal. Our progress became slow and laborious. Our track lay through deep mountain gorges, amid towering precipices and beetling crags, and along steep declivities where at any other season it would have been next to impossible to travel, but where now the deep snow afforded a secure foothold. ”

“ Yet, judging by the limited vision of the individual man, there are still desert places in the West. A man is so small and weak, and his physical wants, his need of water and food and a resting-place, are so incessant and commanding, that he can see only a little way around him and creep only a few miles in a day. If he know not the desert, he may be lost within half a dozen miles of a ranch or within a hundred yards of a spring, and die there of thirst. ”

“ They all go off to their camp on the hill near by. Some blue-coated soldiers from the neighboring military post, remembering the roll-call at sunset, swing themselves upon their horses and go galloping off, a little the worse for the bad whisky they have been drinking in the saloons. A miner in blue woolen shirt and brown canvas trousers, with a hat of astonishing dimensions and a beard of a year's growth, trots up the street on a mule, and, with droll oaths and shuffling talk, offers the animal for sale to the crowd of loungers on the hotel piazza. ”

“ In all the West, look as you will, you will find no desert more pitifully forlorn, more deserted, more irreclaimable, and more worthless than the man-made deserts of northern Wisconsin and Michigan, [229] where fire has followed the heedless lumberman and spread a black and littered waste thousands of square miles in extent, where once grew a splendid green forest of pine. One is beautiful with the perfected grandeur into which nature molds even the most unpromising material ”

“ This race gave to the West its real heroes. In frontier cabins they were bred to a free life in a free land—worthy successors to Washington and his school, worthy men to subdue and rule the empire of which they began the conquest. In the form of these sturdy colonizers the American republic stretched its arm across the Appalachian Mountain system and took in its grasp the richest river valley in the world at the end of Boone's Wilderness Road. ”

“ There was, in the first place, then, the West of the fur trade. For generations the wild peddlers of the woods had traced the 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 that savagery which offered so great a fascination, often too strong even for men reared in the lap of luxury and refinement. ”

“ Nor is the forest altogether lonely. Occasionally a pack-train is met, or a party of pedestrians, tramping with blankets, provisions and frying-pans from the settlements or railroad camps west of the mountains to those in the mountain valleys, and sleeping al fresco wherever night overtakes them. Rough fellows these, but good-humored, and in no way dangerous. Indeed, there is no danger in any of the country I traversed on my northwestern pilgrimage, to a traveler who minds his own business and keeps out of drinking dens. ”

“ Daniel Boone will always occupy a unique place in our history as the archetype of the hunter and wilderness wanderer. He was a true pioneer, and stood at the head of that class of Indian-fighters, game-hunters, forest-fellers, and backwoods farmers who, generation after generation, pushed westward the border of civilization from the Alleghanies to the Pacific. As he himself said, he was "an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness." Born in Pennsylvania, he drifted south into western North Carolina, and settled on what was then the extreme frontier. ”

“ It is good to feel that, in spite of human enterprise, there is plenty of desert left for many years to come, a place where men can go and have it out with themselves, where they can breathe clean air and get down close to the great, quiet, simple life of the earth. ”

“ One marvels at the consummate ingenuity with which nature has improved her scant opportunities, turning every capability to the conservation of such little water as there is. Everything in the desert has its own story of economy, patience, and stubborn persistency in the face of adversity. Therefore the individuality of desert life is strong; it is different from all other life. Its necessities have wrought peculiar forms both of plants and of animals, and in time the desert also leaves its indelible marks upon the men who dwell in its wastes. ”

“ In the heart of the buffalo country the buffaloes were an insufferable nuisance. Vast herds were moving across our trail from south to north, trampling the moist and grassy soil into a black paste, and so polluting the streams and springs that drinking-water was often difficult to obtain. The vastness of some of these droves was most impressive, in spite of the calamitous ruin they left behind them. As far as the eye could reach, the surface of the earth was a heaving mass of animal life ”

“ Color, indeed, is one of the great joys of the desert, and one who has learned to love these silent places finds unending pleasure in the changing lights and shades, many of them marvelously delicate and beautiful. ”

“ Mining is one of the most fascinating and exciting of employments. But in the earlier days, when we knew less about genuine indications, mining was, more than now, a species of gambling. The effects are yet to be seen in hundreds of men still living near their old haunts, who, in common phrase, have "lost their grip"; others live in our memories who, after repeated disappointment, sleep on the mountain sides in nameless graves. ”

“ One roadway—the Wilderness Road to Kentucky from Virginia and Tennessee, the longest, blackest, hardest road of pioneer days in America—holds the old-time name with undiminished loyalty and is true to-day to every gloomy description and wild epithet that was ever written or spoken of it. It was broken open for white man's use by Daniel Boone from the Watauga settlement on the Holston River, Tennessee, to the mouth of Otter Creek, on the Kentucky River, in the month preceding the outbreak of open revolution at Lexington and Concord. ”

“ The creation of a new town on a line of railroad pushing its track out into the vacant, treeless spaces of the far West, is an interesting process to observe. A speculator, or a company of speculators, look over the ground carefully fifty or a hundred miles in advance of the temporary terminus of the railroad, [200] and hit upon a site which they think has special advantages, and is far enough away from the last town. They make a treaty with the railroad company for a section of land, agreeing, perhaps, to share the prospective profits on the sale of lots. ”