West Country

“ In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow country of the West—the high plains and the lower foothills running from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary. The still more ancient cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never come into acceptance as the Old West. ”

“ The situation is a noble one, commanding a fine prospect of river and plain, and mountains to the west rising from the bluff on a series of gentle hills, with conspicuous heights farther out for public institutions and country houses. ”

“ The West has witnessed more changes than has the East. The common impression, and one to which all Americans are bred, leaves paleface Western occupation to a modern day. Whenever one’s thought wanders to what is old in this country one inevitably sets his face towards the East. ”

“ The East is old, pretty fully peopled, and small. The West is new, vast, and thinly peopled. Our rivers can be measured; yours cannot. We are bounded; you are boundless. The West was, therefore, most deeply interested in this system, though certainly not alone interested, even in such works as had a Western locality. To clear her rivers was to open them for the commerce of the whole country; to construct harbors, and clear entrances to existing harbors, whether on the Gulf of Mexico or on the Lakes, was for the advantage of that whole commerce. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The prevalent character of the whole range of scenery in the region, and the general impression made by it on the eye and mind, were so vividly conveyed that no one familiar with the country can fail to recognise how faithfully the innermost soul of the West Highlands is rendered. ”

“ As a geographical expression, the west has ever been indeterminate. The east has been treading on the heels of the west, yet never has overtaken it. Latterly, the west has taken ship on the Pacific and through one of the movements of history has overtaken the east. America has put a new girdle around the earth and the west has moved on till it has reached the gateway of the morning over by the Orient. Men of Oregon, of Washington, of California, of Idaho, of Montana, of Utah, of Colorado, responding to the call of the country, have carried the west on over seas. ”

“ Although the colony of Western Australia was in a very backward position in those days, the young medical man saw in her expanse of territory the makings of a country rich in all the products valued by mankind. ”

“ They'll be hereabouts some time to-morrow, and probably a lot more, for we caught sight of other parties, not so large, threading the valleys to the west. The whole country north-west of us is rising. ”

“ The revolution which has gone all over the country since the Exposition of 1876 in house-furnishing and decoration is quite as apparent in the West as in the East. The West has not suffered more than the East from eccentricities of architecture in the past twenty years. Violations of good taste are pretty well distributed, but of new houses the proportion of handsome, solid, good structures is as large in the West as in the East, and in the cities I think the West has the advantage in variety. ”

“ They hear the west spoken of as a great, rich, and rising country;{152} pull up their household by the roots, and, ‘westward hold their way.’ I believe no one but our people can thus readily leave their homes, and the graves of their fathers to seek a residence in new and untried regions. Among the emigrants, we were often surprised to see so many from the neighboring States. Hoffman met a man during his ‘winter in the west,’ who had removed his household from one end of the State of Michigan to the other, merely because, the mould was a foot richer at Kalamazoo—his own being eighteen inches. ”

“ They improve on and fulfil the proposals of their fathers. Many are the fine examples of this in Western Australia. Born in the country, they breathed its air and grew in its geniality, and became strong in body and mind. ”

“ The North Country is purple, and it's the Country of the Gillikins. The East country is blue, and that's the Country of the Munchkins. Down at the South is the red Country of the Quadlings, and here, in the West, the yellow Country of the Winkies. ”

“ It is not merely of miles, of scenery, or of manners, or even of enthusiasm. It is, in fact, quite intangible, and yet it exists, as anyone who has dwelt upon both sides of our continent realizes. Aside from the trivialities—which are wrapt up in such words as "culture," "custom," "precedent," and the like—the fundamental, explanatory reason for the intangible differences is one of years. Most of the West is buoyantly youthful, some of it blatantly boyish. Much of the East is in the prime of middle age, some of it senile. ”

“ To get a fair and satisfactory view of the Plain, our route must be to the west side. The east is steep, broken, and thin in depth of soil; the north is, to a large extent, shingly; the west and centre are decidedly the cream of the country. ”

“ ABOUT two years after Major Lockyer founded the King George's Sound Settlement the official application was made to the British Government which resulted in the establishment of the Colony of Western Australia. The story told by Captain Stirling in England had excited that virile quality for colonisation so characteristic of Englishmen. The Swan River country, it was said, offered magnificent opportunities to the wealthy, the energetic, and the courageous. ”

“ In the dusty tramp of civilization westward—which seems to have always been justified by a tradition that men grow up by reason of it—our section was not a favorite, and remained new and unsettled after counties and States farther west had grown old. Every one who came there seemed favorably impressed with the steady fertility of the soil, and expressed surprise that the lands were not all occupied; but no one in the great outside world talked about it, and no one wrote about it, so that those who were looking for homes went to the west or the north, where others were going. ”

“ Although the West will, in the period of reconstruction command the attention of the country at large, there are, nevertheless, problems, particularly those affecting our social and economic life, which will weigh heavily on our Eastern Provinces. ”

“ The old differences between East and West are no more, of course. Except for a trifle more informality under the setting sun, clothes and their wearing are the same. The Queen's English is butchered no more distressingly in California than in Connecticut. Proportionately to resources, educational opportunities are identical. Music and the arts are no longer strangers where blow Pacific breezes, nor have they been for decades. The West is wild and woolly no more, railroads have replaced stagecoaches, fences bisect the ranges, free land is almost a thing of the past. ”

“ Thus the population of the Northwest became largely foreign. Each German or Scandinavian who found himself prospering in this rich new country was himself an immigration agency. He sent back word to his friends and relatives in the Old World and these came to swell the steadily thickening population of the New. ”

“ And yet—well, it is the very spirit of the West, a natural expression of the pride of creation, for these men of to-day are creating homes and towns, and doing it under fiercely competitive conditions. They have builded upon their judgment and staked their all upon the throw of fortune. They are pleased with their accomplishments and vastly determined to bend the future to their ends. ”

“ I have, like a hunted wolf, dressed those wounds in mountain-fastnesses, shunning the abode of man, and eluding pursuers whose mercy I disdained to ask. I have seen my King a prisoner, without power to redress his wrongs; my country a prey to tyrants; all her hallowed institutions overturned; but never till now, Eustace, was I completely wretched; for never did anguish, in its most desperate forebodings, whisper that I could be the parent of a traitor. ”

“ And of this new territory Jackson was made Governor.
Meanwhile more states were being added to the Union.
After the War was over, hundreds of families had found a new home, and a new life, in the unknown wilderness of the West. Indeed, so many people moved westward that the people in the East began to grow anxious. For it seemed to them that soon the eastern states would be left desolate, and they asked their State Governments to stop the people going west. "Old America seems to be breaking up and moving westward," said one man. ”

“ When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.
That’s my Middle West – ”

“ Nearly fifty years have elapsed, since Van Diemen's Land was numbered with the colonies of the British empire. A generation has risen up and is passing away. Thousands, while they venerate the land of their European ancestors, with an amiable fondness love Tasmania as their native country. They will, hereafter, guide its affairs, extend its commerce, and defend its soil; and, not inferior in virtue and intelligence, they will fill an important position in the vast system of Australasia. ”

“ Westward the sun hung like a red shield, close to the horizon, over vast reaches of prairie billowing to the sky-line in the tide of a boundless ocean. Such was the discovery of the Canadian Northwest.
Doubtless the weary gaze of the tired voyageurs turned longingly westward. Where was the Western Sea? Did it lie just beyond the horizon where skyline and prairie met, or did the trail of their quest run on—on—on—endlessly? The Assiniboine flows into the Red, the Red into Lake Winnipeg, the Lake into Hudson Bay. Plainly, Assiniboine Valley was not the way to the Western Sea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Do not foster the notion that the term "extreme" [Pg 6] West really applies, for it doesn't. The West, as I have seen it, is too nervous, socially speaking, to dare extremes. It is too inexperienced to essay experiments, too desirous of doing the correct thing. While it wouldn't for the world admit the fact, socially it is quite content to keep its intelligent eyes on the examples set back East, and even then its replica of what it sees is apt to be a modified one.
A Western mountaineering club on the hike
From a photograph by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore. ”

“ When I see my beloved country seated majestically in her centre of empire, yet thus diffusing the highest blessings she herself enjoys to all who will accept them in this great dependency, I feel myself filled, I confess, with a patriotic pride, which no tales of mere victory could inspire. ”

“ More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society. ”

“ What we value in property, and all those customs which separate us from them in a state of nature, they think lightly of, while they conclude that our crossing the seas to see their country is more the effect of poverty than of industry. To be a man, or what is synonymous with them, to be a great and distinguished character, is to be expert in surprising, torturing, and scalping an enemy; to be capable of enduring severe privations ”

“ You know when one goes into the damp, odorous coolness of a church in a Catholic country and sees the kneeling worshipers, their bodies bent stiffly and reluctantly, and yet with abandonment as though to represent the inevitable bending of the will to a purpose outside the individual person, or when under any sky one sees a mother with her child in her arms, something turns in one's heart like a sword, and one says to oneself, "If humanity forgets these attitudes there is an end to the world." ”

“ Those dreary walls inclosed the wretched heir of the Waverly family. Overwhelmed with horror at having deprived his father of life, the unhappy man abjured a country whose civil wars had given birth to such tremendous crimes. Long the victim of despair, he at last sought a quietus to his ever-gnawing remorse, by flying to the bosom of that church which barters salvation for pecuniary mulcts, and represents penance and subserviency to its schemes of worldly aggrandisement to be the wings which will waft the soul over the gulph of purgatory, and securely lodge it in Abraham's bosom. ”

“ 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.” ”