Bottomland

“ 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. ”

“ Cheap sugar and high wages, as compared with old times of slavery—but then the enormous cost of keeping up the levees, and above all, the continued peril to life and property, with a mile of swift, muddy water sweeping seaward high above your head—these things are making a desert of the richest lands on earth. We are gaining ground in the West, but we are losing ground in the South, the great, silent South. ”

“ Hard by the tropic he will pass into a land of grass prairies and flooded streams—the promised land of the desert-worn hosts. He will here find himself—'most ingenious paradox'—in a region where live stock are high-priced, but where 'country' is cheap. ”

“ There is a strange fascination in the idea, "Wheresoever my horse wanders there is my home;" stronger perhaps is that thought than any allurement of wealth, or power, or possession given us by life. Nor can after-time ever wholly remove it; midst the smoke and hum of cities, midst the prayer of churches, in street or salon, it needs but little cause to recall again to the wanderer the image of the immense meadows where, far away at the portals of the setting sun, lies the Great Lone Land. ”

“ When one thinks of the generations of our old New England stock, who contrived to live and prosper over our ridges of sand and gravel, and our rocky pastures where the hungry ribs of the earth seem actually to have broken through its skin, we are provoked at the thought of having our teeming regions of the West turned into a mighty poor-farm. ”

“ And presently the South will bloom like the bursting bud of a flower. The immense resources of the soil will, as by enchantment, spring to light under the magic touch of free labor, and her riches will be enjoyed by a free, happy, and—who doubts it?—loyal people. ”

“ Pouring along in its deep bed the heaped-up waters of streams which drain the broadest valley on the globe; sweeping onward in a boiling mass, furious, turbid, always dangerous; tearing away, from time to time, its deep banks, with their giant colonnades of living verdure, and then, with the stern despotism of a conqueror, flinging them aside again; governed by no principle but its own lawless will, the dark majesty of its features summons up an emotion of the sublime which defies contrast or parallel. ”

“ In the remoter West, the restless, rushing wave of settlement has broken with a shock against the arid plains. The free lands are gone, the continent is crossed, and all this push and energy is turning into channels of agitation. ”

“ Years ago, when the supply of government land had seemed inexhaustible, the tide of settlers had swept around the forgotten frontier, on beyond the arid and semi-arid land to the fertile soil and the gold fields on the Pacific Coast. But the time had come when this neglected prairie was the only land left for a land-hungry people. ”

“ Whether the stream shall be a curse or a blessing, depends upon man's labour, and administrating intelligence. For centuries after centuries, great districts of the world, rich in soil, and favoured in climate, have lain desert under the rage of their own rivers ”

“ Thus, at length, has been produced what may be called the bowie-knife style of civilization, and the new west of the south is overrun by it,—a spirit of blood which defies all laws of God and man;—honorable, but not honest; prompt to resent an injury, slack to discharge a debt; educated to ease, and readier, of course, when the means of living fail, to find them at the gambling table or the race-ground, than in any work of industry,—probably squandering the means of living there, to relieve the tedium of ease itself. ”

“ And to the West, the nation’s pleasure ground, with its extensive plains, carpeted with luxuriant grasses, with valleys unsurpassed in fertility, many of them overlooked and sheltered by pine-covered mountains in which lies hidden a wealth of nations, can come millions more of our people and live in peace. ”

“ But, so far from being exterminated, the individual members were merely scattered north, south, east, and west, each forming a nucleus around which gathered and clustered the very worst of the offscouring of humanity. ”

“ We have no frontier now, we are told,—except a broken fragment, it may be, here and there in some barren corner of the western lands, where some inhospitable mountain still shoulders us out, or where men are still lacking to break the baked surface of the plains and occupy them in the very teeth of hostile nature. But at first it was all frontier,—a mere strip of settlements stretched precariously upon the sea-edge of the wilds: an untouched continent in front of them, and behind them an unfrequented sea that almost never showed so much as the momentary gleam of a sail. ”

“ When, upon a map of the world's eastern hemisphere, we behold, not far from its centre, on the confines of barbarism and civilisation, a spot, black with mountains, and marked "Circassia;" when we contrast this petty nook with the vast territory stretching from the Black Sea to the Northern Ocean, from the Baltic to Behring's Straits, we admire and wonder at the inflexible resolution and determined gallantry that have so long borne up against the aggressive ambition, iron will, and immense resources of a czar. ”

“ So have I assured myself of the rightness of my intention, that I shall publish a novel presently which will carry on this human narrative of the West into still another stage-that of the present, when railways are intersecting each other, when mills and factories are being added to the great grain elevators in the West, and when hundreds and thousands of people every year are moving across the plains where, within my own living time, the buffalo ranged in their millions, and the red men, uncontrolled, set up their tepees. ”

“ The boarding-houses were corralling the easy dollars of the gamesome lawmakers. The greatest state in the West, an empire in area and resources, had arisen and repudiated the old libel of barbarism, lawbreaking, and bloodshed. Order reigned within her borders. Life and property were as safe there, sir, as anywhere among the corrupt cities of the effete East. ”

“ And well it may be, for nearly all of the inlets are flanked by notched and peaked mountains, shooting into the sky with shoulders and necks wrapped in eternal frosts. When our great Republic shall have its boundary lines marked only by oceans and seas, then these bold highlands should be set apart as a continental park for the free people of the Western hemisphere. ”

“ Do you complain of a narrow and jealous policy under Southern rule, in extending and opening new fields of enterprise to your hardy sons in the great West, along the line of the great chain of American lakes, even to the head waters of the Father of Rivers, and over the rich and fertile plains stretching southward from the lake shores? Let the teeming populations—let the hundreds of millions of annual products that have succeeded to the but recent dreary and unproductive haunts of the red man—answer that question. ”

“ Indeed, how could we look for any such organism where small settlements were separated from each other by long spaces and bad roads, and where single cabins were so completely isolated, as in the New England and the Middle and Southern States a century and a half ago, or as in the earlier settled States of the West seventy years ago, or as in the newly-settled States of the West within the present generation, or as on the frontier proper to-day? ”

“ Before we saw white man we dressed in skins and cooked with stones. You found our land on the map and come—since then you have clothed and provided for us. Why should we send you away? We only should be the sufferers—all of us tell you to stay—again we say, stay. We do not wish you to go; no, no—we say to you all, stay; you may plant and build, but the land is ours. ”

“ Under the dominion of this tyranny, the inhabitants of the fertile valleys, bounded by these mountains, are in a state of most frightful poverty and disease. At the foot of this ascent, were cut into the rocks at several places, stories of the misery of the inhabitants, to move the compassion of the traveller. One old man, lame and blind, crawled out of a hole in the rock, wet with the perpetual melting of the snows of above, and dripping like a shower-bath. ”

“ Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these men, we risk poverty and loss. ”

“ It is here that have been spun all the threads of the countless political intrigues, the result of which has been to turn the vipalaces and cottages of Europe alike into shambles, her sunny fields and pastures into a desert deluged with human blood. ”

“ Mountain regions discourage the budding of genius because they are areas of isolation, confinement, remote from the great currents of men and ideas that move along the river valleys. They are regions of much labor and little leisure, of poverty to-day and anxiety for the morrow, of toil-cramped hands and toil-dulled brains. In the fertile alluvial plains are wealth, leisure, contact with many minds, large urban centers where commodities and ideas are exchanged. ”

“ Thousands must sink, thousands starve, for all were drunk with its cruel delusions. Yea, on this deluge the whole Southern social world, with its two distinct divisions—the shining upper—the dark nether—was reeling and careening, threatening, each moment, to turn once and forever wrong side up, a hope-forsaken wreck. ”

“ There is grass and to spare beyond the Queensland border. Thither will many a sorely-oppressed proprietor send a section of flock or herd, availing himself of the time-honoured institution of 'travelling for feed.' Such, neither more nor less, was the last resort of those grand historic sheiks of the desert, even Abraham and Lot, when 'the land was not able to bear them' ”

“ He owned a small house in the neighborhood of that city, and had lived there comfortably several years, when that abominable law was passed, by which the Northern States rendered their free soil a great hunting-ground for the rich and powerful to run down the poor and weak. ”

“ The land itself next falls a prey to the fell destroyer, and that which was once a beautiful, fertile and luxuriant woodland, is soon despoiled of all its treasures, and converted into an eye-offending desert. ”

“ You pronounce the West wild, and you never think of the long winters that bred in silence and brooding solitude those storm-periods which seem so primitively savage; of the days wherein each nature is thrown upon its own resources, with nothing to feed upon but itself and its own personal interests. ”

“ This Land that you claim is gone thro' your Guts; you have been furnished with Cloaths, Meat, and Drink, by the Goods paid you for it, and now you want it again, like Children as you are.—But what makes you sell Land in the Dark? ”

“ Nevertheless, all, I think, must admit that the tendency to gravitation and attraction is to-day as pronounced and as dangerous, especially in the industrial communities of the North, as was the tendency to separation and segregation pronounced and dangerous seventy years ago in the South. ”

“ The borders of this great lost land are not sharply defined. They are continually expanding or contracting. Whenever there is a period of depression in trade, they stretch; when prosperity returns, they contract. ”

“ At the Period of our tale, and, indeed, for half a century later, the whole of that vast region which has been called the West, or the new countries since the war of the revolution, lay a comparatively unpeopled desert, teeming with all the living productions of nature that properly belonged to the climate, man and the domestic animals excepted. ”

“ But why don't the people go to such a spot at once, when land can be had everywhere so readily, as you say; why do they risk having a sickly body when the 'far West' lies open to them, only waiting for the plough? ”

“ The West’s great natural wealth and extraordinary development is nowhere more strikingly denoted than in the thousands of comfortable homes, in hundreds of places, set on forty or eighty foot lots that were tilled land or forest fifty or twenty years ago. ”

“ The small man is in office, but the big man, his master, is outside. The mischief is brought prominently forward in connection with the sale of public lands in the North-West, which have been claimed as the heritage of the people, and indeed of all the nations of the world. The government land attracted the hardy labour of all countries, covering the western west with thriving towns and populous counties. ”

“ However, as the one flows from ignorance, and the other from coldheartedness or jealousy, and neither affords demonstration, we may hope that they will cease, and that a land, too fertile of soil, too rich in the finest harbours in Europe, to have been overlooked in early times, will regain her character which has been lost through the misfortunes of her history. ”