American West

“ It is that America got her territory first, and then her transportation and her population. She bought on a rising market, and her purchase was of territory, land, the only thing on earth that can not be increased or multiplied. Moreover, her land was such as the earth has never duplicated and can never duplicate. The magnificent American West was a realm unrivaled, and it was originally settled by men who had the most priceless of all possessions, a splendid ancestry. ”

“ Born at a time, and reared in an atmosphere, the most romantic and adventurous known in the history of our American frontier, when the tidal wave of human progress, sweeping westward, was making history faster than the historians could record it—it was his fate to be in the field, and his fortune to grasp the opportunities to meet the situation’s requirements, and, in the beaten path of what seemed ordinary daily duty, to rise, by reason of his sterling qualities, his daring, and his courage, to the distinction of a leader. ”

“ The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development. A glance at the map of the United States reveals the truth. To write of a "Western sectionalism," bounded on the east by the Alleghanies, is, in itself, to proclaim the writer a provincial. What is the West? What has it been in American life? To have the answers to these questions, is to understand the most significant features of the United States of to-day.
The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an area. ”

“ Decade after decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society has gone on, has left its traces behind it, and has reacted on the East. The history of our political institutions, our democracy, is not a history of imitation, of simple borrowing; it is [206] a history of the evolution and adaptation of organs in response to changed environment, a history of the origin of new political species. In this sense, therefore, the West has been a constructive force of the highest significance in our life. ”

“ American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with [3] the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. ”

“ It is a matter of wonder that any American literature could ever speak of the American West in anything but terms of pride and honor. There is a certain literature, color-crammed, superficial, and transient, because wrong, that affects to believe that there is still a West that is a land of crude souls exclusively and of little hope for a hereafter. If the 380 good folk who so believe lack the great privilege of actual American travel, they have at least left for them the resources of an American railroad map. ”

“ To the wild and half-savage trapper, who may be said to exemplify the energy, enterprise, and hardihood characteristic of the American people, divested of all the false and vicious glare with which a high state of civilisation, too rapidly attained, has obscured their real and genuine character, in which the above traits are eminently prominent—to these men alone is due the empire of the West—destined in a few short years to become the most important of those confederate states composing the mighty union of North America. ”

“ He died disappointed, died poor, and in large part forgotten. At a later day some sculptor may arise, and erect in Washington some statue of distorted horse, impossible man and absurd garb, and we will call that indicative of what the American West once was. ”

“ Indeed, we find it difficult to study even our grim 426 columns of figures, our unimaginative records of events, without still retaining the curious and awesome feeling that heretofore the settlement of the American West, the birth and growth of the American man, has been a matter of fate, of destiny. ”

“ And yet in important historical ideals—in the process of expansion, in the persistence of agricultural interests, in impulsiveness, in imperialistic ways of looking at the American destiny, in hero-worship, in the newness of its present social structure—the Old Northwest has much in common with the South and the Far West.
Behind her is the old pioneer past of simple democratic conditions, and freedom of opportunity for all men. Before her is a superb industrial development, the brilliancy of success as evinced in a vast population, aggregate wealth, and sectional power. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In short, things are what we make them at the moment, what we believe them to be. In my grandfather's youth the West was in the neighborhood of Port Byron, New York, and when he journeyed thither from Massachusetts in the eighteen-twenties, the glory of adventure enfolded him as completely as the boys of the preceding generation had been glorified in the War of the Revolution, or the boys of the next generation when they went gold-seeking in California in 1849. The West, in short, means simply the retreating horizon, the beckoning finger of opportunity. ”

“ Far to the north, the Oregon trail led to California and the Orient. The Santa Fé trail, broken as it was in its transcontinental flight, points now in the same direction. The only ignoble part of the 285 American story is the history of American politics. All politics aside, is it not easy to see that the old broken trail is a fate-finger pointing to Mexico and the trans-Isthmian canal; to an America wholly American; and to an Orient that again and by another trail is destined to be our West? ”

“ The rise of the new west was the most significant fact in American history in the years immediately following the War of 1812. Ever since the beginnings of colonization on the Atlantic coast a frontier of settlement had advanced, cutting into the forest, pushing back the Indian, and steadily widening the area of civilization in its rear. ”

“ Best of all, the West gave, not only to the American, but to the unhappy and oppressed of all lands, a vision of hope, and assurance that the world held a place where were to be found high faith in man and the will and power to furnish him the opportunity to grow to the full measure of his own capacity. Great and powerful as are the new sons of her loins, the Republic is greater than they. The paths of the pioneer have widened into broad highways. The forest clearing has expanded into affluent commonwealths. ”

“ Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. ”

“ Each plucky Diogenes sat in its own tub, saying to its neighbors, “Get out of my sunshine!”
It was only as they turned westward that Americans discovered America,—a discovery which in some instances has been long delayed. “The West” is not merely a geographical expression, it is a state of mind which is most distinctive of the national consciousness. It is a feeling, an irresistible impulse. It is the sense of undeveloped resources and limitless opportunities. It is associated with the verb “to go.” To the American the West is the natural place to go to, as the East is the place to come from. ”

“ As a region the West offers few special opportunities. It is no longer a poor man’s country, nor is any part of America a country good for a poor man. It is all much alike. Our young men of the West are as apt to go East to seek their fortunes 359 as to try them near at home. There is no land of the free. America is not American. Food must digest before it can be flesh and blood, and our population must digest before it can be called American.
Twelve years ago money brought two per cent. a month west of the Missouri River, and it earned it. To-day you can get a barrelful at five per cent. ”

“ You and your fathers who built up the West did more even than you thought; for you shaped thereby the destiny of the whole Republic, and as a necessary corollary profoundly influenced the course of events throughout the world. More and more as the years go by this Republic will find its guidance in the thought and action of the West, because the conditions of development in the West have steadily tended to accentuate the peculiarly American characteristics of its people. ”

“ THE FATE OF LOVEJOY'S PRINTING-PRESS
Ever since the thirteen colonies that lay along the Atlantic coast had become a nation ambitious men had heard the call, "Go West, young man, go West!" There was plenty of fertile land in the country beyond the Alleghany Mountains, and it was free to any who would settle on it. Adventure beckoned men to come and help in founding new states, and many, who thought the villages of New England already overcrowded, betook themselves to the inviting West. ”

“ Such is American character, in the manifestations which have most affected the settlement and development of the West; a compound of many noble qualities, with a few—and no nation is without such—that are not quite so respectable. All these, both good and bad, were possessed by the early pioneer in an eminent, sometimes in an extravagant degree; and the circumstances, by which he found himself surrounded after his emigration to the West, tended forcibly to their exaggeration. ”

“ The cherished relic is thrown out to scorch and crack on the hot prairie.” What a world of suggestion there lies in this chance picture of the desert—what a world of American history it covers! Perhaps one day the American people will come to take interest in a past so curious and so striking as its own.
There was a time when every Western man, still restless, still unsettled, still under the mysterious west-bound impulse, thought in terms of Oregon and California. No wall could have stopped these men. No political doctrine could have restrained them. ”

“ Out of the West, from which we had had only sheep and cattle, there were coming men destined to be [285] leaders in the affairs of the country. As men had risen from the ranks to guide the destinies of the Colonies, so men appeared from the West to shape this new America.
They came from a world where land was king. It was a boundless territory. A large section of it, which was once marked on the map as the Great American Desert, had been left untouched, a dead possession and a problem to the government, who did not know what use to make of it until the homesteaders pushed west. ”

“ So patriotic and so thoroughly American is the Central West today, that it is also difficult to realize by what a slender thread it hung to the fragile republic east of the mountains, during the two decades succeeding the Revolutionary War. The whole world looked upon the East and West as realms distinct as Italy and France, and for the same geographical reason. ”

“ The fortunes of the West are guided by emigrants and the descendants of emigrants from New England, the Middle and the border States, and while adopted citizens, nearly all of a desirable class, are in a majority in many parts of the West, most of the western men and women also, of national fame, can trace an American pedigree for several generations. ”

“ But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the land-seeking man, the type of the American, began to alter distinctly. The million dead of our cruel Civil War left a great gap in the American population which otherwise would have occupied the West and Northwest after the clearing away of the Indians. ”

“ It has State universities, rivaling in conservative and scientific economic instruction those of any other part of the Union, and its citizens more often visit the East, than do Eastern men the West. As time goes on, its industrial development will bring it more into harmony with the East.
Moreover, the Old Northwest holds the balance of power, and is the battlefield on which these issues of American development are to be settled. It has more in common with all parts of the nation than has any other region. It understands the East, as the East does not understand the West. ”

“ Here, then, is the problem of the West, as it looked to New England leaders of thought in the beginning and at the end of this century. From the first, it was recognized that a new type was growing up beyond the seaboard, and that the time would come when the destiny of the nation would be in Western hands. ”

“ Such were the pilgrims of the West. It is interesting to note that these leaders of civilization in the West were true Americans—American born and American bred. It is remarkable that the discoverers of the American central West were either French or American. For the work of exploring this hinterland, England scarcely furnished a man ”

“ The changes since the war are of more social importance, in many respects, than those in the years commonly referred to as the formative period. As a result, the Northwest finds herself again between contending forces, sharing the interests of East and West, as once before those of North and South, and forced to give her voice on issues of equal significance for the destiny of the republic. ”

“ The foregoing volumes are of course but a few among the many scores or hundreds which will have been read avidly by every man concerned with frontier life or with the expansion of the American people to the West. ”

“ In occupying the Mississippi Valley the American people colonized a region far surpassing in area the territory of the old thirteen states. The movement was, indeed, but the continuation of the advance of the frontier which had begun in the earliest days of American colonization. The existence of a great body of land, offered at so low a price as to be practically free, inevitably drew population towards the west. ”