Great West

“ Not the railway, not the cattle trail, not the path of forward-marching empire purposely hewing a way through the wilderness, opened the West. It was the fur trade that found the West. It was the fur trade that explored the West. It was the fur trade that wrested the West from savagery. The beginning was in the little fort built by Radisson and Groseillers. No great factor in human progress ever had a more insignificant beginning. ”

“ How can the truth be told about the pioneering of the West if the struggle, the fight, the blood be left out? It cannot be done. How can a novel be stirring and thrilling, as were those times, unless it be full of sensation? My long labors have been devoted to making stories resemble the times they depict. I have loved the West for its vastness, its contrast, its beauty and color and life, for its wildness and violence, and for the fact that I have seen how it developed great men and women who died unknown and unsung. ”

“ The West would divide from the East, the Atlantic States from the Lake States, the Mississippi States from the Pacific, the North Pacific States from the South Pacific, and where would be the end? Already the great West has learned her own gigantic strength, which before she knew not that she possessed, and if the time should come when her interests should apparently point in a different direction from those of the East, with such a precedent before her, would she not avail herself of that new-found strength? ”

“ In his disappointment, Hearne learned what every other discoverer in North America had learned—that the Great Northwest was something more than a bridge between Europe and Asia, that it was a world in itself with its own destiny. ”

“ While the great West suffers from a want of the virtues that attend a fixed society, as it undoubtedly does, it does not find itself obliged to contend against its prejudices. There are no arbitrary lines drawn, based upon mere ideas—no venerable fictions in the way. ”

“ The West is forcing itself into the East, with all its restless activity. In the time to come this whole broad continent is destined to be covered with railroads as with a vast spider-web; new industries will be established, machinery introduced, and the great region of the steppes, famous in the past only as the starting-point of conquering migrations, must in the end become an active centre of industry, the home of peace and prosperity, a new-found abiding-place of civilization and human progress. ”

“ Now the world recognizes and gives tardy but sincere applause to the venturesome spirits that first directed the attention of the world to the grandeur and latent power of the great West. Occasionally a noble of the East, in search of sport and adventure, visited this new country and, returning, told of its vastness and magnificence. Romancers, upon a few facts, accepted with hesitation, built stories which, though thoroughly entertaining, were regarded as novels, never as histories. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Under the caption of The West, we arbitrarily are grouping all of the states lying west of a line running north and south from the western borders of the Dakotas to the eastern edge of New Mexico. This excludes part of that great region long known in America as the Great West,—a country that is no more, and never again can be on the face of this earth, unless war and pestilence one day shall quite remove our present human population. ”

“ When the Western man goes East he carries the consciousness of playing a great part in the making of an empire; his horizon is large; but he finds himself surrounded by an atmosphere of indifference or non-comprehension of the prodigiousness of his country, of incredulity as to the refinement and luxury of his civilization ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the old West—the great, the never-to-be-forgotten epic of our newer civilization—still lingered; and happy, yes, a hero of sorts was he of the East who still sniffed the footprints. Railroads were still largely a dream; the Union Pacific had cut the boundless wastes of the great desert and made travel to California an actuality; but a second great transcontinental iron path was still largely a possibility. The footprints of the pioneers were everywhere; echoes of the pathfinder were yet in the air; gold and silver were being found every day in the wilderness of the Rockies ”

“ Here in the West you are near the centre of a vast empire, you feel its mighty pulse, the throb and heartbeat of its immense and growing strength. Some of you have seen this great civilization actually grow on the vacant prairies, in the unoccupied wilderness, on the sandy shores of the inland seas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As we find that it was the South that first marched westward, and a Southern man who first planned a great highway of iron into the West, we may state with equal pleasure and confidence that it was the East, and an Eastern man, that made the South a portion of the West, and both a part of a united America. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This promising lad is only a faint intimation of what we are all coming to when we fully acquire the freedom of the continent, and come into that expansiveness of feeling and of language which characterizes the Great West. It is a burst of joyous exuberance that comes from the sense of an illimitable horizon. It shows itself in the tender words of a local newspaper at Bowie, Arizona, on the death of a beloved citizen: "'Death loves a shining mark,' and she hit a dandy when she turned loose on Jim." ”

“ THE BALLAD OF EAST AND WEST Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth! ”

“ How vast this republic is, no one can at all appreciate who does not actually travel over its wide areas. To many of us the West is still the West of the geographies of thirty years ago; it is the simple truth to say that comparatively few Eastern people have any adequate conception of what lies west of Chicago and St. Louis: perhaps a hazy geographical notion of it, but not the faintest idea of its civilization and society. Now, a good understanding of each other between the great sections of the republic is politically of the first importance. We shall hang together as a nation ”

“ Since I arrived from my tour through the West scarcely a day passes that there are not some persons, from almost every occupation and position in life, interrogating me as to the chances and prospects in the West. A general answer can not be given, for circumstances vary. Though I can not be as general and emphatic in my advice as was the great Horace Greeley when he said, “Young man, go west and grow up with the country,” I can say from real experience and practical observations that for some toward the Pacific there is wealth. ”

“ Why had the evolution of cultures let to this equilibrium of the two great cultural systems, the occidental and the oriental one, the inductive East and the deductive West, with no third ever been invented? ”

“ They want the cheap lands, the wide acres, the great horizon of a West, even if they must find that West in land other than that which bore them! They do not want irrigated land that is worth one hundred dollars an acre, even though there be an unchanging and pleasant climate as an attraction thereto. They prefer a cold, bleak environment, a rude, hard life, with poorer markets, a looser touch with civilization, but with a bolder, a wider and freer individual horizon. ”

“ It was because of my great interest in the West, and my belief that its development would be assisted by the interest I could awaken in others, that I decided to bring the West to the East through the medium of the Wild West Show. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the old Northwest was carved out of a wilderness, there was no fear in the hearts of our forefathers that was not felt when Louisiana was purchased. The great fear in each case was the same—the British at the north and the Spaniard at the south. And in each case the leaven of the East was potent to leaven the whole lump. Great responsibilities steady nations as well as men; the very fact of [Pg 277] a spreading frontier and a widening sphere of influence—bringing alarm to some and fear to many—was of appealing force throughout a century to the conscience and honor of American statesmen. ”

“ An epic story of the Great West from which the famous picture was made. THE WAY OF A MAN
A colorful romance of the pioneer West before the Civil War. THE SAGEBRUSHER
An Eastern girl answers a matrimonial ad. and goes out West in the hills of Montana to find her mate. ”

“ When, however, we have made all allowance for difference in climate, difference in traditions, total difference in the way of looking at life for a century, it is plain to be seen that a great transformation is taking place in the South, and that Southern society and Northern society are becoming every day more and more alike. ”

“ Toward the south, too, rather than toward the west, speaking in general terms, the gradual conquests of man advance, and therefore there cannot be in the New World, as in the Old, a striking contrast between the Orient and the Occident. East and west, in the New World, are less dependent on each other; they have more individuality, but with a great preponderance of importance in the east over the west side, by reason of the more favorable situation in relation to the sea, less sharpness and boldness of physical features, and a more scanty population. ”

“ The West is always full of hope to the old man as well as to the young one, and the temptation to “own your own home” and to gain land for the asking is very great. But the Eastern man should consider the question very carefully. There is facing the passenger who arrives on the New York train at Sedalia a large black and white sign on which some philanthropist has painted “Go East, Young Man, Go East.” ”

“ This is the heart of what may be called the Old West, which we now call the Middle West, using the term to denote that great group of rich and powerful States which literally forms the [2] heart of the country. It is a region whose people are distinctively American in all their thoughts, in all their ways of looking at life ”

“ The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.
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 adventurers travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation? The answer would seem easy. They traveled as did the Cimri, the Goths—in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, 38 and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters. ”