Midwest of the United States

“ The only states wholly or partly west of the Mississippi River were Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas. Louisiana, Texas, California, and Oregon. Kansas territory extended from Missouri to the Rocky Mountains. Nebraska territory included the region from Kansas to the British possessions, and from Minnesota and Iowa to the Rocky Mountains. New Mexico territory stretched from Texas to California, Utah territory from the Rocky Mountains to California, and Washington territory from the mountains to the Pacific. ”

“ Anthony have expanded into the Twin Cities of the Northwest; the marshy prairie by the side of Lake Michigan, where the Indians fought around old Fort Dearborn, has come to be one of the world’s mighty centers of urban population—and all this transformation within the memory of men now living. ”

“ The Northwest presents a series of very interesting race problems. The first one, chronologically at least, is the problem that the American Indian presents. It is not so long ago since the Indian was in possession of a very large portion of the region we are now considering. A number of tribes were gradually removed further West, or were assigned to districts in the Indian Territory. But most of them were concentrated in large reservations in Minnesota, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. ”

“ When I first saw the country west of the Missouri River it was without civil government, inhabited almost exclusively by Indians. The few white men in it were voyageurs, or connected in some way with the United States army. It was supposed to be uninhabitable, without any natural resources or productiveness, a vast expanse of arid plains, broken here and there with barren, snow-capped mountains. Even Iowa was unsettled west of the Des Moines River. ”

“ There is some justification for those who say that the north central portion of the United States is more fortunate than any other part of the earth. Nowhere else, unless in western Europe, is there such a combination of fertile soil, fine climate, easy communication, and possibilities for manufacturing and commerce. Iron from that outlier of the Laurentian highland which forms the peninsula of northern Michigan can easily be brought by water almost to the center of the prairie region. ”

“ We thus see, that, in the Northwest, cities do grow up, in the midst of the wilderness, and the wilderness itself soon blooms as the rose. To say, then, that a point affording every natural and commercial advantage for the growth of a large city is not now a city, is to say nothing against its position or prospects. Within the memory of a generation the five great States, (which have heretofore been termed the Northwest,) contained less then a half a million of people, and Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. ”

“ That portion of the Northwest coast which was long known as the "Oregon territory" enjoys the distinction of having been fathered by more men with a greater variety of purposes and ambitions than any other of the family of commonwealths under the United States flag. First, there were the English and the American explorers, Gray and Vancouver, and Lewis and Clark, in the employ of their respective companies or governments, whose acts formed the foundation of opposing claims to the northwest, and particularly the region drained by the Columbia River. These form a class by themselves. ”

“ Two decades hence no man will question the quality of Northwestern civilization. If the East is losing something of its distinctive Americanism through the influx of foreign elements and the decay of its old-time farming communities, the growth of the Northwest, largely upon the basis of New England blood and New England ideas, will make full compensation. ”

“ The Northwest owes its life and owes its abounding strength and vigorous growth to the action of the nation as a whole. It was founded not by individual Americans, but by the United States of America. The mighty and populous commonwealths that lie north of the Ohio and in the valley of the Upper Mississippi are in a peculiar sense the children of the National Government, and it is no mere accident that has made them in return the especial guardians and protectors of that government; for they form the heart of the nation.
Unorganized Settlements West of the Ohio. ”

“ Looking at the Northwest as a whole, one sees, in the character of its industries and in the elements of its population, it is identified on the east with the zone of States including the middle region and New England. Cotton culture and the negro make a clear line of division between the Old Northwest and the South. ”

“ As people in the early pioneer days had talked of settling in Nebraska and Kansas and the eastern Dakotas, they now talked about the country lying farther on—the western Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado. Over the Midwest the homestead idea was spreading rapidly to farm and hamlet and city. One heard a great deal about families leaving their farms and going west to get cheap land; of young college men who went out to prove up a quarter-section. The land would always be worth something, and the experience, even for a short time, was a fruitful one in many ways. ”

“ The large towns of the Northwest are notable for the great numbers of the brightest and most energetic of the young business and professional men of the East that they contain. While they lack the leisure class and the traditions of culture that belong to older communities, they may justly claim a far higher percentage of college-bred men and of families of cultivated tastes than belong to Eastern towns of like population. The intense pressure of business and absorption of private pursuits are, for the present, seeming obstacles to the progress of Western communities in the highest things ”

“ Furthermore, the Mississippi had ceased to be a boundary. A magnificent vista reaching off to the remoter West and Northwest had been opened up; the frontier had been pushed far out upon the plains of Minnesota and Iowa. Decade after decade the powerful epic of westward expansion, shot through with countless tales of heroism and sacrifice, had steadily unfolded before the gaze of an astonished world ”

“ It was the glory of the Northwest to offer a competence to the needy, the baffled, the discouraged, the tormented of the eastern States and 188 of Europe. The bulk of its fast-growing population consisted, it is true, of ordinary folk who could have lived on in fair comfort in the older sections, yet who were ambitious to own more land, to make more money, and to secure larger advantages for their children. ”

“ These drawbacks to health and comfort in travelling are measurably avoided when journeying in or to the Northwest during the season of navigation. The Ohio River furnishes such an escape to the invalid seeking this region from the central belt of States; and the great lakes supply a more northern range of country; while less than a half day's ride from Chicago places one at either Dubuque, Prairie du Chien, or La Crosse, where daily boats may be had for St. ”

“ Montana, Washington Territory, Idaho and New Mexico are now more easily accessible than Ohio and Indiana were at the beginning of this century, and the same process which resulted in crowding the Indians out of these States has begun and is rapidly going on in those Territories. ”

“ Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennesee in the east, Iowa and Missouri, and a part of Arkansas in the west, are situated within the temperate zone. Agriculture and civilisation are extending there. These States, like their neighbouring States in the east, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, constitute the great corn-magazine of America, and the central portion of the Mississippi Valley. Beyond these, to the east, extend the Alleghany Mountains, and the Eastern or Atlantic States. Beyond the Mississippi States, to the west, extends the Indian Wilderness, Nebraska, and the Rocky Mountains. ”

“ There is nothing to connect "the dark backward and abysm" of mound-building times with those of the red race of the Northwest; and all that is known of the latter dating earlier than their first discovery, is exceedingly dim and shadowy. Upon the extended area bounded by Lake Superior on the north, Lake Michigan on the east, wide-spreading prairies on the south, and the Mississippi river on the west, there met and mingled two distinct Indian families—Algonquins [viii] and Dakotas. Concerning the various tribes of these families, nothing of importance could be gleaned by the earliest explorers ”

“ Under the influence of migration to Oregon and California the real character of the Far West became known, but not until the continental railways were finished did many inhabitants enter it. In 1889 and 1890 the "Omnibus" States were admitted, embracing all the northwest half of the old desert. Utah followed in 1896. Arizona and New Mexico and Oklahoma developed rapidly after 1890 and were all demanding statehood in 1902.
The advance of population into the Far West revealed the existence of large areas in which an [Pg 291] abundant agriculture could be produced through irrigation. ”

“ Iris was from the Middle West, from a rich suburb of Detroit. This interested me in many ways, for there still existed in those days a real disaffection between East and Midwest and Far West which is hard to conceive nowadays in that gray homogeneity which currently passes for a civilized nation. I was an Easterner, a New Yorker from the valley with Southern roots, and I felt instinctively that the outlanders were perhaps not entirely civilized. ”

“ The Northwest, in particular, had been settled by people drawn from every older portion of the country, and as the frontier receded and society took on a more matured aspect, differences of habits and ideas were accentuated rather than obscured. Men can get along very well with one another so long as they live apart and do not try to regulate their everyday affairs on common lines.
The great human streams that poured into the Northwest flowed from two main sources—the nearer South and New England. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were first peopled by men and women of Southern stock. ”

“ Paul-Minneapolis, and Duluth-Superior dominate its western areas; Cincinnati and St. Louis stand on its southern borders; and Chicago reigns at the center. What Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are to the Atlantic seaboard these cities are to [127] the Middle West. The Great Lakes and the Mississippi, with the Ohio and the Missouri as laterals, constitute the vast water system that binds the Middle West together. It is the economic and political center of the Republic. At one edge is the Populism of the prairies; at the other, the capitalism that is typified in Pittsburgh. ”

“ These people move with an alert vigor, their cheeks are rosy, their eyes are snappy, and I like the swing of their shoulders as they step briskly along the streets. Mankind migrates along earth’s parallels of latitude, so ’tis said—and Minnesota and the great Northwest is but another New England and New York. ”

“ Minnesota at its commencement among the hills, Louisiana at its outlet into the sea. Between these two States, Minnesota in the north, and Louisiana in the south, flows the Mississippi through a variety of regions distinguished by dissimilar climates and natural productions. Minnesota is its north, with the pine-forests of the north, and northern winters, with bears and elks, with the wild roses and the berries of the north, with primeval forests and Indians. ”

“ Paul, great city of the Northwest that it is. We came over from West Superior by the “Great Northern” route, very comfortably in a new and fresh-kept sleeper—a night’s ride. I was early awake and sat for an hour watching the wide flat farming country of Minnesota. Not much timber, never a cornfield, much wheat and oats and hay land. A black, rich soil. Still a good deal of roll to the landscape, and, at the same time, a certain premonition of the greater, more boundless flatness of the land yet further west. ”

“ No large city has grown up in the Northwest on the site of the great water powers of the Columbia, Fraser, Willamette or smaller streams. Also, excepting Victoria and New Westminster, no large city has grown up on the site of the trading posts of the Hudson's Bay Company or the villages first started by the American settlers in the Willamette valley or on Puget Sound. ”

“ As these movements in population and products have passed across the Middle West, and as the economic life of the eastern border has been intensified, a huge industrial organism has been created in the province,—an organism of tremendous power, activity, and unity. Fundamentally the Middle West is an agricultural area unequaled for its combination of space, variety, productiveness, and freedom from interruption by deserts or mountains. The huge water system of the Great Lakes has become the highway of a mighty commerce. ”

“ The physical geography of the Northwest shows a country so rich and varied in diversity of surface, of wide plains, smiling valleys, dense forests, broad rivers and rushing torrents, that the influence of the face of nature is inspiring. We look from some high mountain summit over the grand forests and valleys of our country, watching the clouds chase their shadows across the gorges and canyons, and, as the voices of the swaying pines, the murmur of a torrent or roar of some unseen waterfall falls upon our ear, our minds are full of thoughts that words fail to express. ”