Far West

“ 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. ”

“ I have seen too many evidences of wealth, natural and acquired, to doubt of the greatness of the future which is opening in the Far West to the citizens of the Republic; but I also have witnessed, even from the windows of a railway train, sufficient to make me aware of the great struggles which must be made by pioneers, and by the early colonists and settlers in 223 these distant regions, before the conditions of civilised life be fulfilled. ”

“ General Chittenden, our first authority on the history of the fur trade, says of the mountain men: "It was the roving trader and the solitary trapper who first sought out these inhospitable wilds, traced the streams to their sources, scaled the mountain passes, and explored a boundless expanse of territory where the foot of the white man had never trodden before. The Far West became a field of romantic adventure, and developed a class of men who loved the wandering career of the native inhabitant rather than the toilsome lot of the industrious colonist. ”

“ In no other part of the chain are the grand characteristics of the Far West more strikingly displayed than from this pass. The mountains here rise on the eastern side abruptly from the plain, and the view over the great prairies is not therefore obstructed by intervening ridges. To the westward the eye sweeps over the broken spurs which stretch from the main range in every direction ”

“ He had scoured the continent from Canada to Mexico, from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast. He had associated with many redoubtable characters of the old West—with men like Kit Carson, Bill Williams, the Bents, the Sublettes, Joe Meek, St. Vrain, Fitzpatrick, Killbuck, and La Bonté. Pie was equally at home among Americans, Canadians, Creoles, Mexicans, Spanish Californians, and Indians. Each of these picturesque types he has shown to the life. No narrative or formal history of that time has described the pioneers of the Far West with such actual truth and fidelity. ”

“ A prominent feature in the character of the hunters of the Far West is their quick determination and resolve in cases of extreme difficulty and peril, and their fixedness of purpose, when any plan of operations has been laid requiring bold and instant action in carrying out. It is here that they so infinitely surpass the savage Indian in bringing to a successful issue their numerous hostile expeditions against the natural foe of the white man in the wild and barbarous regions of the West. ”

“ Most of the members of that large company now sleep in death, their waking ears no longer to be filled with the death-telling yell of the savage. The manly hearts that shrunk from no danger have ceased to beat; their bones whiten in the gloomy fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains, or moulder on the ever-flowering prairies of the far West. ”

“ Having colonized the Far West, having mastered its internal resources, the nation turned at the conclusion of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century to deal with the Far East to engage in the world-politics of the Pacific Ocean. ”

“ Where now intelligent and wealthy merchants walk erect, in conscious substantiality of purse and credit, and direct the commerce of a vast and well-peopled region, there stalked but the other day, in dress of buckskin, the Indian trader of the west; and all the evidences of life, mayhap, consisted of the eccentric vagaries of the different bands of trappers and hardy mountaineers, who accompanied, some for pleasure and some as escort, the periodically arriving bateaux, laden with the beaver skins and buffalo robes collected during the season at the different trading posts in the Far West. ”

“ It has not been possible to eliminate from the blood of the American West, diluted though it has been by far less worthy strains, all the iron of the old home-bred frontiersmen. The frontier has been a lasting and ineradicable influence for the good of the United States. ”

“ She feels that we're so awfully strict—about certain things. It must be so different in the Far West—I suppose—so much freer.
MARTHA— [Acidly.] Then you believe broad-mindedness and clean thinking are a question of locality? I can't agree with you. I know nothing of the present Far West, not having lived there for ten years, but Curt and I have lived in the Far East and I'm sure he'd agree with me in saying that Chinese ancestor worship is far more dignified than ours. After all, you know, theirs is religion, not snobbery. ”

“ The impression of the North-west, thus far seen, is that of tremendous energy, material refinement, much open-mindedness, considerable self-appreciation,’ uncommon sagacity in meeting new problems, generous hospitality, the Old Testament notion of possessing this world, rather more recognition of the pecuniary as the only success than exists in the East and South, intense national enthusiasm, and unblushing and most welcome “Americanism.” ”

“ 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? ”

“ For forty years this work of investigation went on; for forty years there took place a peopling of the new West by men who were in very deed the bravest and most adventurous of our brave and hardy border population. They scattered over the plains and through the mountains; they trapped the beaver and fought the Indian and guided the explorers; and took to themselves wives from among their very enemies, and raised up broods of hardy offspring, some of whom we7 may yet meet as we journey through the cattle and the farming country which used to be the far West. ”

“ The wedge of settlement was driven through the heart of the Alleghanies because there dwelt at the 50 foot of the mountains a people more aggressive, more daring, and more independent than the tidewater stock. This people acted on its own initiative, not only without government aid, but sometimes in defiance of government. It won to the American flag not only the central West, but the Northwest and Southwest as well; and it was, for the most part, the lineal descendants of these men that first, of Americans, explored the far West, and subdued it for future settlement. ”

“ A very large proportion of the people now residing in the Far West are descendants of emigrants who came by the precarious means afforded by ox-team conveyances. For some three-score years the younger generations have heard from the lips of their ancestors enough of that wonderful pilgrimage to create among them a widespread demand for a complete and typical narrative. ”

“ When we contemplate the wide field open before us for missionary labours, even between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, and the large sums yearly spent in various parts of the world for the purposes of instructing 311and converting the heathen, shall we not then hope and expect that at some future day those blessings may be extended to the Far West? ”

“ If every state and territory in the Far West could command such efficient service in the literature of immigration as is rendered by Colonel Frost, there would be an appreciable increase of their settlers. ”

“ It is difficult to-day, when this "Far West" is in possession of the agriculturist, the merchant, and the miner, dotted with cities and flourishing towns, and cut in all directions by railroads, which have made pleasure routes for tourists of the trail over which the pioneers of half a century ago toiled with difficulty and danger, to realize how vague were the ideas of even the best informed in the thirties and forties about the physical characteristics of that country and its future possibilities. ”

“ In the decade of 1820-1830, fur-traders threaded the dark and forbidding defiles of the mountains, unfolded the secrets of the Great Basin, and found their way across the Rockies to California and Oregon; the government undertook diplomatic negotiations to safeguard American rights on the Pacific, and extended a line of forts well into the Indian country; while far-seeing statesmen on the floor of Congress challenged the nation to fulfill its destiny by planting its settlements boldly beyond the Rocky Mountains on the shores of the Pacific. ”

“ Here they found several trapping bands already arrived; and a trader from the Uintah country, with store of powder, lead, and tobacco, prepared to ease them of their hardly-earned peltries.
Singly, and in bands numbering from two to ten, the trappers dropped into the rendezvous; some with many pack-loads of beaver, others with greater or less quantity, and more than one on foot, having lost his animals and peltry by Indian thieving. Here were soon congregated many mountaineers, whose names are famous in the history of the Far West. ”

“ Half your fighting men are gone; and if you turn to the West to seek out strong young men from the other tribes, which of them will come to sit by your fires and be your brothers? The war trails of the Nations have gone to the West as far as the Great River. ”

“ Riding carelessly along, and breathing the cool and bracing mountain air which came down from the slopes, I felt as only a man can feel who is roaming over the prairies of the far West, well armed and mounted on a fleet and gallant steed. ”

“ A more satisfactory dividing line, however, is the historical line of demarcation between the East and West which moved toward the mountains in the proportion that the western section became connected with the East and indoctrinated by its proslavery propagandists. In none of these parts, however, not even far south, were the eastern people able to bring the frontiersmen altogether around to their way of thinking. ”

“ Even now, every time Marion let him take her to the turn of the road past Roothing, where he could show her the oak cut like a club on a playing-card and aflame with autumn that stood on the hill's edge, against the far grey desolation of Kerith Island and the sunless tides, he knew such joy as one would have thought beyond a child's achievement. He would get as much out of life as any man that ever lived. ”

“ With a plentiful supply of dry pine-logs on the fire, and its cheerful blaze streaming far up into the sky, illuminating the valley far and near, and exhibiting the animals, with well-filled bellies, standing contentedly at rest over their picket-fire, I would sit cross-legged, enjoying the genial warmth, and, pipe in mouth, watch the blue smoke as it curled upwards, building castles in its vapoury wreaths, and, in the fantastic shapes it assumed, peopling the solitude with figures of those far away. ”

“ First there was the fur trade, whose birth was in the North. Next there was the trade of mercantile ventures to the far Southwest. Lastly there was to grow up the freighting trade to the mining regions of the West. The 192 cattle-growing, farming, or commercial West of to-day was still a thing undreamed.
In every one of these three great lines of activity we may still note what we may call the curiously individual quality of the West. The conditions of life, of trade, of any endurance on the soil, made heavy demands upon the physical man. ”

“ But now the snow on the ridge of the Sierra Madre, and the nightly frosts; the angular flights of geese and ducks constantly passing overhead; the sober tints of the foliage, and the dead leaves that strew the ground; the withering grass on the plain, and the cold gusts, sometimes laden with snow and sleet, that sweep from the distant snow-clad mountains;—all these signs warn us to linger no longer in the tempting valley of San Fernando, but at once to pack our mules to cross the dreary and desert plains and inhospitable sierras ”

“ For many of his acts and much of his work he will occupy a distinguished place in the history of his country and of this great dependency; but with the Treaty of Washington he takes a high and distinguished position, one never to be lost, in the history of the progress of mankind. That progress, gentlemen, as we must hope, must involve at no very distant stage a universal or at any rate far more widely extended peace than has hitherto been known. ”

“ Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade — as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done. ”

“ Whilst the tired mountaineer breathes heavily in his dream, careless and unconscious that a living soul is near, his mule on a sudden pricks her ears and stares into the gloom, whence a figure soon emerges, and with noiseless steps draws near the sleeping hunter. ”

“ The Government of India in that resolution insist on greater efforts being made towards moral training in schools and colleges. Now, moral training, in so far as it relates to the mere mechanical obedience to rules, can very well be put into formulas, and can very well be enforced in schools; and I do think that that part of the resolution of the Government of India, which directs or recommends that the teachers should spend some time in normal schools before they enter on the practice of their profession, is a thing most desirable in itself and which all our experience must confirm. ”