THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

CENTURY READINGS
IN
UNITED STATES HISTORY

A series, made up from the best on this subject in The Century and St. Nicholas, for students of the upper grammar grades and the first year high school. Profusely illustrated.

EXPLORERS and SETTLERS
THE COLONISTS AND THE REVOLUTION
A NEW NATION
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
THE CIVIL WAR
THE PROGRESS OF A UNITED PEOPLE

12mo. About 225 pages each.

D. APPLETON-CENTURY CO.

From the sculpture by Frederick Mac Monnies.
Kit Carson, the Pioneer.
See pages [173] and [174].

CENTURY READINGS IN UNITED STATES HISTORY

THE
WESTWARD MOVEMENT

EDITED BY

CHARLES L. BARSTOW

D. Appleton-Century Company
INCORPORATED

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY THE CENTURY CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK, OR PORTIONS THEREOF, IN ANY FORM. 326

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgment is made of the courtesy of Archer B. Hulbert in granting permission to use the articles on "Early Western Steamboating," and "Boone's Wilderness Road," from his book "Historic Highways."

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

PEOPLING THE WEST

From Europe's proud, despotic shores
Hither the stranger takes his way,
And in our new-found world explores
A happier soil, a milder sway,
Where no proud despot holds him down,
No slaves insult him with a crown.
From these fair plains, these rural seats,
So long concealed, so lately known,
The unsocial Indian far retreats,
To make some other clime his own,
Where other streams, less pleasing, flow,
And darker forests round him grow.
No longer shall your princely flood
From distant lakes be swelled in vain,
No longer through a darksome wood
Advance unnoticed to the main;
Far other ends the heavens decree—
And commerce plans new freights for thee.
While virtue warms the generous breast,
There heaven-born freedom shall reside,
Nor shall the voice of war molest,
Nor Europe's all-aspiring pride—
There Reason shall new laws devise,
And order from confusion rise.

Philip Freneau.

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

BEGINNINGS OF THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

By S. E. Forman

In 1636 Thomas Hooker, the pastor of the church at Newton (now Cambridge), moved with his entire congregation to the banks of the Connecticut and founded the city of Hartford. Hooker did not like the way the Puritans acted in matters of government. He thought religious affairs and state affairs in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were bound too closely together. He thought also that more people ought to be allowed to vote than were allowed that privilege in the Puritan colony. Besides, was not the rich valley of the Connecticut a better place for homes than the rocky and barren hills around Boston? Hooker and his followers took their wives and children with them. They carried their household goods along and drove their cattle before them. As they moved overland through the roadless forests of Massachusetts, they took the first step in that great Westward Movement which continued for more than two hundred years and which did not come to an end until the far-off Pacific was reached.

At the opening of the eighteenth century in almost every colony there were great areas of vacant land, and colonial growth for many years consisted mainly in bringing these lands under cultivation and filling them with people. This development necessarily took a westward course, for if the English colonists went far to the north they met the French, and if they went far to the south they met the Spanish. In New York the Westward Movement between 1700 and 1740 was very slow, because the progress of the English was opposed not only by the French, but also by powerful tribes of Iroquois Indians. But in the western part of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina the Indians were less troublesome and there were as yet no French at all. So it was from Pennsylvania and from the southern colonies that the settlers first began to move in considerable numbers toward the West.

Savannah in 1741.

The first important westward movement of population began with the settlement of the beautiful valley which lies between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany Mountains and which is drained by the Shenandoah River. In 1716 Governor Spotswood of Virginia, with fifty companions, entered this valley near the present site of Port Republic, and with much ceremony took possession of the region in the name of King George of England. His purpose in pushing out into the valley was to head off the French, who at the time had already taken possession of the country west of the Alleghanies and were pushing east as fast as they dared.

Soon after the expedition of Spotswood the settlement of the Shenandoah began in earnest. First came a few settlers from the older parts of Virginia. Then came large numbers of the Scotch-Irish and Germans from Pennsylvania. These enterprising people by 1730 had crossed the Susquehanna and were making settlements in the Cumberland valley. In 1732 they began to move down into the Shenandoah valley and build rude cabins and plant corn-fields. In a few years so many people—Virginians, Scotch-Irish, and Germans—had settled in the valley that it became necessary for them to have some form of government. So in 1738 Virginia took the matter in hand and organized the Shenandoah region as a county and provided it with a regular government. Thus between 1700 and 1740 the strip of English civilization along the Atlantic seaboard was greatly widened, and the Frontier Line was carried westward over the Blue Ridge Mountains to the eastern base of the Alleghanies.

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT IN COLONIAL TIMES.

Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The progress of the Westward Movement in colonial times was slow. A hundred and fifty years passed before the frontier line was pushed beyond the Appalachian ridge. This slowness was due in part to the action of the English government. Soon after England (in 1763) came into possession of the country west of the Alleghanies the king issued a proclamation reserving most of the newly acquired territory for the use of the Indians and forbidding the governors of the colonies to grant lands to white men west of the mountains. If this plan had been carried out, English civilization would have been confined to the seaboard, and the richest and fairest portions of the earth would have been permanently reserved as a hunting-ground for savages and as a lair for wild beasts. But the War of the Revolution took the Western country from England and gave it to the United States. The Ohio valley was then thrown open to settlers, and white men from all parts of the world rushed into the new lands like hungry cattle rushing into new pastures. In twenty years after the acknowledgment of our independence (in 1783) the Frontier Line moved farther westward than it had moved in a century under British rule.

KENTUCKY.

The first great stream of Western emigration after the Revolution flowed into the region now included within the borders of Kentucky and Tennessee. This territory was a neutral hunting-ground for Northern and Southern Indians. The red men hunted over it, but did not live permanently upon it or claim it as their own. The district, therefore, was easier for the white man to settle than were the surrounding regions in which the Indians had permanent homes.

The settlement of the Kentucky region really began several years before the Revolution. In 1769 Daniel Boone, a great hunter and one of the most interesting of American pioneers, left his home on the Yadkin River, in North Carolina, to seek the wilderness of Kentucky. With five companions he passed through the gorges of the Cumberland Gap and reached the blue-grass region, "a land of running waters, of groves and glades, of prairies, cane-brakes, and stretches of lofty forests."

Daniel Boone.

Boone returned to North Carolina, but not to remain. His restless spirit still yearned for the beautiful banks of the far-off Kentucky. In 1773 he sold his farms, and with wife and children and about fifty persons besides started for Kentucky with the purpose of making a permanent settlement there. On the way, however, the party was attacked by Indians—for even in this neutral territory the Indian was sometimes troublesome—and Boone and his companions were compelled to turn back.

But the fame of the Kentucky country was now widespread, and its settlement was near at hand. In 1774 James Harrod of Virginia, with fifty men, floated down the Ohio River in flatboats, and, ascending the Kentucky River, selected the present site of Harrodsburg as a place for a settlement and built some cabins. The place was given the name of Harrodstown (afterward Harrodsburg) and was the first permanent settlement in Kentucky. The next year Boone safely reached Kentucky and founded the town of Boonesborough. In 1775 Lexington also was founded. "When the embattled farmers fired the shot heard round the world, a party of hunters heard the echo and baptized the station they were building Lexington." Louisville was founded in 1777.

While Boone and his followers were laying the foundation for a State on the banks of the Kentucky, other pioneers from North Carolina and Virginia were laying the foundations for another State on the banks of streams that flow into the Tennessee. In the very year (1769) that Boone visited the blue-grass region, William Bean of Virginia built himself a log cabin on the Watauga River. Pioneers came and settled near Bean, and in a short time several hundred people had their homes on the banks of the Watauga. This Watauga settlement was the beginning of the State of Tennessee.

North Carolina continued to let her Western children shift for themselves, until at last for their own defense and safety they organized as a separate State, and called the new State Franklin, in honor of Benjamin Franklin. John Sevier, the greatest of the early leaders in Tennessee, was elected governor of Franklin, and Greenville was made the capital of the State. But the State of Franklin had only a short life. North Carolina came forward promptly and asserted her rights, and by 1788 the officers of Franklin were all driven from power, the new State was dead, and North Carolina was again in full control of Tennessee.

Kentucky, Tennessee, and Early Ohio.

In the rapid and wonderful growth of Kentucky and Tennessee we see the first-fruits of the Westward Movement. Here out of the wilderness south of the Ohio had sprung up, almost overnight, two prosperous, populous, well-organized commonwealths, States that almost at once could hold their heads as high as the oldest and proudest of their sisters.

THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY; THE ORDINANCE OF 1787.

While pioneers from Virginia and North Carolina were moving into Kentucky and Tennessee, emigrants from the Northern States were moving into western New York, or were crossing the Alleghanies and settling the upper valleys of the Ohio. The settlement of western Pennsylvania began even before the Revolution. In 1770 Washington revisited the scenes of his early youth and found Pittsburgh a village of twenty houses. Fourteen years later he would have found it a town of two hundred houses and a thousand inhabitants. Western Pennsylvania filled rapidly with settlers, and soon pioneers began to float down the Ohio in flatboats and build their homes on the soil of the Northwest Territory. In a few years so many white people were living in this Western domain that it became necessary for them to have some form of government. So Congress (in 1787) passed the law known as the Ordinance of 1787, the most important law ever passed by a lawmaking body in America.

Emigrants descending the Tennessee River.

The great law of 1787 provided that, as the Northwest Territory filled up with people, it should be divided into States—not fewer than three and not more than five. Each State was to be governed according to the will of its voters; there was to be no slavery; religious liberty was guaranteed; education was to be encouraged; Indians were to be justly treated. When a community came to have as many as 60,000 inhabitants it was to be admitted into the Union as a State, with all the rights of the older States; during the time in which a community was too small for statehood it was to be governed as a Territory.

Such were the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787. The law breathed the spirit of freedom, and showed plainly that Western settlers could look forward to fair treatment at the hands of the national government. The Western communities were not to be dependent colonies; they were to be self-governing States.

THE BEGINNINGS OF OHIO.

The first community to be built up in the Northwest Territory was Ohio. In 1788 a party of forty-eight New Englanders, the Pilgrim Fathers of Ohio, landed at the mouth of the Muskingum in a bullet-proof barge which bore the historic name of Mayflower. It was well that the barge was bullet-proof, for white men passing down the Ohio in boats were in constant danger of being shot by Indians lurking along the shore. The Mayflower party went ashore opposite Fort Harmar, where there was a regiment of soldiers. In the winning of Ohio, soldiers and settlers went hand in hand, for everywhere through the Northwest there were Indians, and every acre of land won by the ax and plow had to be guarded and defended by the rifle.

Under the protection of the soldiers, the New Englanders began to fell trees and build houses, and to lay the foundation of Marietta, the oldest of Ohio towns and a place that in the history of the West holds a rank similar to that held by Jamestown and Plymouth in the history of the East. At Marietta the wheels of territorial government for the Northwest Territory were set in motion (July, 1788). General Arthur St. Clair, who had climbed the rock of Quebec with Wolfe, and who was a warm friend of Washington, had come out as governor of the Territory.

Cincinnati was founded about the same time as Marietta. In December, 1788, twenty-six settlers landed at the foot of what is now Sycamore Street in Cincinnati, and began to build a town which they called Losantiville, but which afterward received its present name. Other settlements on the Ohio quickly followed those of Marietta and Cincinnati. The towns of Gallipolis, Portsmouth, Manchester, and South Bend all appeared within a few years after the founding of Marietta.

The Ohio settlers had to meet the Indians at every step, and as the white men became more numerous the red men became more troublesome. In 1791 Governor St. Clair was compelled to march against the Indians, but near the place where the city of Fort Wayne now stands he suffered a terrible defeat. General Anthony Wayne—"Mad Anthony"—the hero of Stony Point, was next sent against the red warriors, and at Fallen Timbers (in 1794) he met them and dealt them a blow that broke their power completely in Ohio and drove them from the country.

With the Indians out of the way, the settlement of Ohio could go on much faster. Towns began to be built farther up the streams and farther inland. In 1795 Dayton and Chillicothe were founded, and the next year General Moses Cleveland, with a few companions, founded, at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, a town to which he gave his name. In 1800 the original Northwest Territory was divided, and the eastern portion—the portion that is now Ohio—was set off as the Territory Northwest of the Ohio, and was given a territorial government of its own. The population of this new Territory was more than 40,000, and its people were already beginning to think of statehood.

Marietta, Ohio, in 1790.

THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST

By Emerson Hough

I. THE PATHWAY OF THE WATERS

It is pleasant to dwell upon the independent character of Western life, and to go back to the glories of that land and day when a man who had a rifle and a saddle-blanket was sure of a living, and need ask neither advice nor permission of any living soul. These days, vivid, adventurous, heroic, will have no counterpart upon the earth again. These early Americans, who raged and roared across the West, how unspeakably swift was the play in which they had their part!

No fiction can ever surpass in vividness the vast, heroic drama of the West. The clang of steel, the shoutings of the captains, the stimulus of wild adventure—of these things, certainly, there has been no lack. There has been close about us for two hundred years the sweeping action of a story keyed higher than any fiction, more unbelievably bold, more incredibly keen in spirit.

WHAT WAS THAT WEST?

Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest may attach to a quest which goes further than a mere summons on the spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West? What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run wider than the West, and, indeed, wider than America.

One of the old-time
long-haired
men of the West.

We are all, here,—Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World or the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,—but the result of that mandate which bade mankind to increase and multiply, which bade mankind to take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken over temporarily that portion of earth and its fullness which was allotted or which was made possible to him by that Providence to which both belong. We have each of us done this along the lines of the least possible resistance, for this is the law of organic life.

The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax, of linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of trolley-cars and self-binder, of purple and fine linen, it must be observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work, and back of all these causes were the original law and the original mandate. The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.

WHAT, THEN, WAS THE FIRST TRANSPORTATION OF THE WEST?

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 travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation?

The answer would seem easy. They traveled in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters.

THE RECORD OF THE AVERAGE LINE OF WEST-BOUND TRAVEL.

Bishop Berkeley, prophetic soul, wrote his line, "Westward the course of empire takes its way." The public has always edited it to read that it is the "star of empire" which "takes its way" to the West. If one will read this poem in connection with a government census map, he will not fail to see how excellent is the amendment. Excellent census map, which holds between its covers the greatest poem, the greatest drama ever written! Excellent census map, which marks the center of population of America with a literal star, and which, at the curtain of each act, the lapse of each ten years, advances this star with the progress of the drama, westward, westward!

WHY THIS AVERAGE LINE TOOK THE COURSE IT DID.

The first step of this star of empire (that concluded in 1800) barely removed it from its initial point upon the Chesapeake. The direction was toward the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The government at Washington, young as it was, knew that the Ohio River, reached from the North by a dozen trails from the Great Lakes, and running out into that West which even then was coveted by three nations, was of itself a priceless possession. It was a military reason which first set moving the Pennsylvania hotbed of immigrants. The restless tide of humanity spread from that point according to principles as old as the world. Having a world before them from which to choose their homes, the men of that time sought out those homes along the easiest lines. The first thrust of the outbound population was not along the parallels of latitude westward, as is supposed to have been the rule, but to the south and southeast, into the valleys of the Appalachians, where the hills would raise corn, and the streams would carry it. The early emigrants learned that a raft would eat nothing, that a boat ran well down-stream. Men still clung to the seaboard region, though even now they exemplified that great law of population which designates the river valleys to be the earliest and most permanent centers of population. The valleys of Virginia and Maryland caught the wealthiest and most aristocratic of the shifting population of that day. Daniel Boone heard the calling of the voices early, but not until long after men had begun to pick out the best of the farming-lands of North and South Carolina and lower Virginia. The first trails of the Appalachians were the waterways, paths which we do not follow or parallel, but intersect in our course when we go by rail from the Mississippi valley to that first abiding-place of the star.

Early Pioneers on the Blue Ridge.

The real mother of the West was the South. It was she who bore this child, and it has been much at her expense that it has grown so large and matured so swiftly. The path of empire had its head on the Chesapeake. But let us at least be fair. New England and New York did not first settle the West, not because the Chesapeake man was some superhuman being, but because the rivers of New England and New York did not run in the right direction. We may find fate, destiny, and geography very closely intermingled in the history of this country, or of any other. Any nation first avails itself of its geography, then at last casts its geography aside; after that, politics.

PORTRAIT OF THE FIRST WEST-BOUND AMERICAN.

Let us picture for ourselves this first restless American, this West-bound man. We must remember that there had been two or three full American generations to produce him, this man who first dared turn away from the seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the sun, toward the dark and mysterious mountains and forests which then encompassed the least remote land fairly to be called the West. Two generations had produced a man different from the Old-World type. Free air and good food had given him abundant brawn. He was tall. Little fat cloyed the free play of his muscles, and there belonged to him the heritage of that courage which comes of good heart and lungs. He was a splendid man to have for an ancestor, this tall and florid athlete who never heard of athletics. His face was thin and aquiline, his look high and confident, his eye blue, his speech reserved. You may see this same man yet in those restricted parts of this country which remain fit to be called America. You may see him sometimes in the mountains of Tennessee, the brakes of Arkansas or Missouri, where the old strain has remained most pure. You might have seen him over all the West in the generation preceding our own.

THE EQUIPMENT OF THE EARLY AMERICAN—HIS SKILL WITH IT.

A Missouri hunter.

This was our American, discontented to dwell longer by the sea. He had two tools, the ax and the rifle. With the one he built, with the other he fought and lived. Early America saw the invention of the small-bore rifle because there was need for that invention. It required no such long range in those forest days, and it gave the greatest possible amount of results for its expenditure. Its charge was tiny, its provender compact and easily carried by the man who must economize in every ounce of transported goods; and yet its powers were wonderful. Our early American could plant that little round pellet in just such a spot as he liked of game-animal or of red-skinned enemy, and the deadly effect of no projectile known to man has ever surpassed this one, if each be weighed by the test of economic expenditure. This long, small-bored tube was one of the early agents of American civilization. The conditions of the daily life of the time demanded great skill in the use of this typical arm, and the accuracy of the early riflemen of the West has probably never been surpassed in popular average by any people of the world. Driving a nail and snuffing a candle with a rifle-bullet were common forms of the amusement which was derived from the practice of arms.

In the Alleghany Mountains: The retreat to the blockhouse.

THIS AMERICAN, SO EQUIPPED, MOVES WESTWARD.

When the American settler had got as far West as the Plains he needed arms of greater range, and then he made them; but the first two generations of the West-bound had the buckskin bandoleer, with its little bullets, its little molds for making them, its little worm which served to clean the interior of the barrel with a wisp of flax, its tiny flask of precious powder, its extra flint or so. The American rifle and the American ax—what a history might be written of these alone! They were the sole warrant for the departure of the outbound man from all those associations which had held him to his home. He took some sweet girl from her own family, some mother or grandmother of you or me, and he took his good ax and rifle, and he put his little store on raft or pack-horse, and so he started out; and God prospered him. In his time he was a stanch, industrious man, a good hunter, a sturdy chopper, a faithful lover of his friends, and a stern hater of his foes.

HOW HE FINDS THE WATERWAYS EASY AS PATHS WESTWARD.

In time this early outbound man learned that there were rivers which ran not to the southeast and into the sea, but outward, across the mountains toward the setting sun. The winding trails of the Alleghanies led one finally to rivers which ran toward Kentucky, Tennessee, even farther out into that unknown, tempting land which still was called the West. Thus it came that the American genius broke entirely away from salt-water traditions, asked no longer "What cheer?" from the ships that came from across the seas, clung no longer to the customs, the costumes, the precedents or standards of the past. There came the day of buckskin and woolsey, of rifle and ax, of men curious for adventures, of homes built of logs and slabs, with puncheons for floors, with little fields about them, and tiny paths that led out into the immeasurable preserves of the primeval forests. A few things held intrinsic value at that time—powder, lead, salt, maize, cow-bells, women who dared. It was a simple but not an ill ancestry, this that turned away from the sea-coast forever and began the making of another world. It was the strong-limbed, the bold-hearted who traveled, the weak who stayed at home.

Westward movement of the center of population from 1790 to 1900, indicated by stars.

OTHER DISTANCES, OTHER CUSTOMS, OTHER VALUES.

This was the ancestral fiber of the West. What time had folk like these for powder-puff or ruffle, for fan or jeweled snuff-box? Their garb was made from the skin of the deer, the fox, the wolf. Their shoes were of buffalo-hide, their beds were made of the robes of the bear and buffalo. They laid the land under tribute. Yet, so far from mere savagery was the spirit that animated these men that in ten years after they had first cut away the forest they were founding a college and establishing a court of law! Read this forgotten history, one chapter, and a little one, in the history of the West, and then turn, if you like, to the chapters of fiction in an older world. You have your choice.

Map of the census of 1790.

In those early days there were individual opportunities so numerous in the West that no opportunity had value. A tract of six hundred and forty acres, which is now within the limits of the city of Nashville, sold for three axes and two cow-bells. Be sure it was not politics that made corn worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel, and sold a mile of ground for the tinkle of a bell. The conditions were born of a scanty and insufficient transportation.

Map of the census of 1820.

THE WEST CONTINUED TO GROW DOWN STREAM, NOT UP.

There was a generation of this down-stream transportation, and it built up the first splendid, aggressive population of the West—a population which continued to edge farther outward and farther down-stream. The settlement at Nashville, the settlements of Kentucky, were at touch with the Ohio River, the broad highway that led easily down to the yet broader highway of the Mississippi, that great, mysterious stream so intimately connected with American history and American progress. It was easy to get to New Orleans, but hard to get back over the Alleghanies.

HAVING THE MISSISSIPPI FOR ITS ROAD, THE WEST IS CONTENT.

Meantime the stout little government at Washington, knowing well enough all the dangers which threatened it, continued to work out the problems of the West. Some breathless, trembling years passed by—years full of wars and treaties in Europe as well as in America. Then came the end of all doubts and tremblings. The lying intrigues at the mouth of America's great roadway ceased by virtue of that purchase of territory which gave to America forever this mighty Mississippi, solemn, majestic, and mysterious stream, perpetual highway, and henceforth to be included wholly within the borders of the West. The year which saw the Mississippi made wholly American was one mighty in the history of America and of the world. The date of the Louisiana Purchase is significant not more by reason of a vast domain added to the West than because of the fact that with this territory came the means of building it up and holding it together. It was now that for the first time the solidarity of this New World was forever assured. We gained a million uninhabited miles—a million miles of country which will one day support its thousands to the mile. But still more important, we gained the right and the ability to travel into it and across it and through it. France had failed to build roads into that country, and thereafter neither France nor any other power might ever do so.

The down-river men.

HOW MUCH RICHER WAS THIS WEST THAN DREAMED.

How feeble is our grasp upon the future may be seen from the last utterance. The sum of $15,000,000 seemed "enormous." To-day, less than a century from that time, one American citizen has in his lifetime made from the raw resources of this land a fortune held to be $266,000,000. One Western city, located in that despised territory, during one recent year showed sales of grain alone amounting to $123,300,000; of live stock alone, $268,000,000; of wholesale trade, $786,205,000; of manufactures,—where manufactures were once held impossible,—the total of $741,097,000. It was once four weeks from Maine to Washington. It is now four days from Oregon. The total wealth of all the cities, all the lands, all the individuals of that once despised West, runs into figures which surpass all belief and all comprehension. And this has grown up within less than a hundred years.

THE WESTERNER RAISES MORE THAN HE CAN EAT.

But now we must conceive of our Western man as not now in dress so near a parallel to that of the savage whom he had overcome. There was falling into his mien somewhat more of staidness and sobriety. This man had so used the ax that he had a farm, and on this farm he raised more than he himself could use—first step in the great future of the West as storehouse for the world. This extra produce could certainly not be taken back over the Alleghanies, nor could it be traded on the spot for aught else than merely similar commodities.

Here, then, was a turning-point in Western history. There is no need to assign to it an exact date. We have the pleasant fashion of learning history through dates of battles and assassinations. We might do better in some cases did we learn the times of happenings of certain great and significant things. It was an important time when this first Western farmer, somewhat shorn of fringe, sought to find market for his crude produce, and found that the pack-horse would not serve him so well as the broad-horned flatboat which supplanted his canoe.

HOW HE MIGHT SELL THIS SURPLUS FAR FROM HOME.

The flatboat ran altogether down-stream. Hence it led altogether away from home and from the East. The Western man was relying upon himself, cutting loose from traditions, asking help of no man; sacrificing, perhaps, a little of sentiment, but doing so out of necessity, and only because of the one great fact that the waters would not run back uphill, would not carry him back to that East which was once his home. So the homes and the graves in the West grew, and there arose a civilization distinct and different from that which kept hold upon the sea and upon the Old World.

WHAT WAS THE WEST AT THIS TIME OF DOWN-STREAM?

UNITED STATES CENSUS 1870.

It may now prove of interest to take a glance at the crude geography of this Western land at that time when it first began to produce a surplus, and the time when it had permanently set its face away from the land east of the Alleghanies. The census map (see page 30) will prove of the best service, and its little blotches of color tell much in brief regarding the West of 1800. For forty years before this time the fur trade had had its depot at the city of St. Louis. For a hundred years there had been a settlement upon the Great Lakes. For nearly a hundred years the town of New Orleans had been established. Here and there, between these foci of adventurers, there were odd, seemingly unaccountable little dots and specks of population scattered over all the map, product of that first uncertain hundred years. Ohio, directly west of the original hotbed, was left blank for a long time, and indeed received her first population from the southward, and not from the East, though the New-Englander Moses Cleveland founded the town of Cleveland as early as 1796. Lower down in the great valley of the Mississippi was a curious, illogical, and now forgotten little band of settlers who had formed what was known as the "Mississippi Territory." Smaller yet, and more inexplicable, did we not know the story of the old water-trail from the Green Bay to the Mississippi, there was a dot, a smear, a tiny speck of population high up on the east bank of the Mississippi, where the Wisconsin emptied. These valley settlements far outnumbered all the population of the State of Ohio, which had lain directly in the path of the star, but the streams of which lay awkwardly on the scheme of travel. The West was beginning to be the West. The seed sown by Marquette the Good, by Hennepin the Bad, by La Salle the Bold, by Tonti the Faithful,—seed despised by an ancient and corrupt monarchy,—had now begun to grow.

Illustration: UNITED STATES CENSUS 1890.

ANOTHER WEST BEYOND.

Yet, beyond the farthest families of the West of that day, there was still a land so great that no one tried to measure it, or sought to include it in the plans of family or nation. It was all a matter for the future, for generations much later. Compared with the movements of the past, it must be centuries before the West—whatever that term might mean—could ever be overrun. That it could ever be exhausted was, to be sure, an utterly unthinkable thing. There were vague stories among the hardy settlers about new lands incredibly distant, mythically rich in interest. But who dreamed the import of the journey of strong-legged Zebulon Pike into the lands of the Sioux, and who believed all his story of a march from Colorado to Chihuahua, and thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused for the peaceful settlers of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty miles away, by that ancient saga, that heroically done, misspelled story of Lewis and Clark? There was still to be room enough and chance enough in the West.

II. AGAINST THE WATERS

THE UP-STREAM MAN.

In 1810 the Western frontier of the United States slanted like the roof of a house from Maine to Louisiana. The center of population was almost exactly upon the site of the city of Washington.

That mysterious land beyond the Mississippi was even then receiving more and more of that adventurous population which the statesmen of the Louisiana Purchase feared would leave the East and never would return. The fur-traders of St. Louis had found a way to reach the Rockies. The adventurous West was once more blazing a trail for the commercial and industrial West to follow. This was the second outward setting of the tide of West-bound travel. We had used up all our down-stream transportation, and we had taken over, and were beginning to use, all the trails that led into the West, all the old French trails, the old Spanish trails, the trails that led out with the sun. No more war parties now from the Great Lakes to the Ohio, from the Great Lakes to Mississippi. This was our country. We held the roads.

STEAM HELPS THE UP-STREAM JOURNEYINGS.

But now there were happening yet other strange and startling things. In 1806, at Pittsburg, some persons built the first steamboat ever seen on the Ohio River.

KASKASKIA: THE TURNING OF THE TIDE.

Thanks to the man who could go up-stream, corn was no longer worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel anywhere in America. Corn was worth fifty cents a bushel, and calico was worth fifty cents a yard, at the city of Kaskaskia, in the heart of the Mississippi valley. Kaskaskia the ancient was queen of the down-stream trade in her day.

THE COMMERCE OF THE TRANS-MISSISSIPPI WEST.

Calico was worth fifty cents a yard at Kaskaskia; it was worth three dollars a yard in Santa Fé. A beaver-skin was worth three dollars in New York; it was worth fifty cents at the head of the Missouri. There you have the problems of the men of 1810, and that, in a nutshell, is the West of 1810, 1820, 1830. The problem was then, as now, how to transport a finished product into a new country, a raw product back into an old country, and a population between the two countries. There sprang up then, in this second era of American transportation, that mighty commerce of the prairies, which, carried on under the name of trade, furnished one of the boldest commercial romances of the earth. Fostered by merchants, it was captained and carried on by heroes, and was dependent upon a daily heroism such as commerce has never seen anywhere except in the American West. The Kit Carsons now took the place of the Simon Kentons, the Bill Williamses of the Daniel Boones. The Western scout, the trapper, the hunter, wild and solitary figures, took prominent place upon the nation's canvas.

This Western commerce, the wagon-freighting, steamboating, and packing of the first half of this century, was to run in three great channels, each distinct from the other. 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 cattle-growing, farming, or commercial West of to-day was still a thing undreamed.

CAUSES FOR GROWTH OF SELF-RELIANT WESTERN CHARACTER.

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 upon the soil, made heavy demands upon the physical man. There must, above all things, be strength, hardihood, courage. There were great companies in commerce, it is true, but there were no great corporations to safeguard the persons of those transported. Each man must "take care of himself," as the peculiar and significant phrase went. "Good-by; take care of yourself," was the last word for the man departing to the West. The strong legs of himself and his horse, the strong arms of himself and his fellow-laborers, these must furnish his transportation. The muscles tried and proved, the mind calm amid peril, the heart unwearied by reverses or hardships—these were the items of the capital universal and indispensable of the West. We may trace here the development of a type as surely as we can by reading the storied rocks of geology. This time of boat and horse, of pack and cordelle and travois, of strenuous personal effort, of individual initiative, left its imprint forever and indelibly upon the character of the American, and made him what he is to-day among the nations of the globe.

THE ADVENTUROUS WEST.

There was still a West when Kaskaskia was queen. Major Long's expedition up the Platte brought back the "important fact" that the "whole division of North America drained by the Missouri and the Platte, and their tributaries between the meridians of the mouth of the Platte and the Rockies, is almost entirely unfit for cultivation, and therefore uninhabitable for an agricultural people." There are many thousands of farmers to-day who cannot quite agree with Major Long's dictum, but in that day the dictum was accepted carelessly or eagerly. No one west of the Mississippi yet cared for farms. There were swifter ways to wealth than farming, and the wild men of the West of that day had only scorn and distrust for the whole theory of agriculture. "As soon as you thrust the plow into the earth," said one adventurer who had left the East for the wilder lands of the West, "it teems with worms and useless weeds. Agriculture increases population to an unnatural extent." For such men there was still a vast world without weeds, where the soil was virgin, where one might be uncrowded by the touch of home-building man. Let the farmers have Ohio and Kentucky, there was still a West.

THE WEST OF THE FUR TRADE.

There was, in the first place, then, the West of the fur trade. For generations the wild peddlers of the woods had traced the 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 that savagery which offered so great a fascination, often too strong even for men reared in the lap of luxury and refinement.

TRANSPORTATION OF THE FUR TRADE.

Steam was but an infant, after all, in spite of the little steamboat triumphs of the day. The waters offered roadway for the steamboats, and water transportation by steam was much less expensive than transportation by railway; but the head of navigation by steamboats was only the point of departure of a wilder and cruder transportation. One of the native ships of the wilderness was the great canot du Nord of the early voyageurs, a craft made of birch bark, thirty feet long, of four feet beam and a depth of thirty inches, which would carry a crew of ten men and a cargo of sixty-five packages of goods or furs, each package weighing ninety pounds. This vessel reached the limits of carrying capacity and of portability. Its crew could unload and repack it, after a portage of a hundred yards, in less than twenty minutes. Thousands of miles were covered annually by one of these vessels. The crew which paddled it from Montreal to Winnipeg was then but half-way on the journey to the Great Slave and Great Bear country, which had been known from the beginning in the fur trade.

THE ULTIMATE TRAILS.

Beyond the natural reach of the canot du Nord, the lesser craft of the natives, the smaller birch barks, took up the trail, and passed even farther up into the unknown countries; and beyond the head of the ultimate thread of the waters the pack-horse, or the travois and the dog, took up the burden of the day, until the trails were lost in the forest, and the traveler carried his pack on his own back.

THE FUR TRADE SHOWED US ALSO THE SOUTHWEST.

The fur trade taught us something of our own geography upon the North and Northwest, but it did more. It was a fur-trader who first developed the possibilities of the Spanish Southwest for the second expansion of our Western commerce. In 1823 General William H. Ashley, of the American Fur Company, made an expedition up the Platte, and is credited with first reaching from the East the South Pass of the Rockies, which was soon to become recognized as the natural gateway of the great iron trail across the continent. In the following year Ashley penetrated to the Great Salt Lake, and later reached Santa Fé, situated in territory then wholly belonging to Mexico.

DETAILS REGARDING SOUTHWESTERN WAGON-TRAINS.

The up-river men—cordelling boats on the Yellowstone.

The story of the Santa Fé trail has been told by many writers, and its chief interest here is simply as showing the eagerness with which the men of that day seized upon every means of transport in their power, and the skill and ingenuity with which they brought each to perfection. The wagon-freighting of the Southwest was highly systematized, and was indeed carried on with an almost military regularity. The route was by way of the Council Grove, then the northern limit of the Comanches' range, and it was at this point that the organization of the wagon-train was commonly completed. A train-master or captain was chosen, and the whole party put under his command, each man having his position, and each being expected to take his turn on the night-watch which was necessary in that land of bold and hostile savages. During the day the train moved in two columns, some thirty feet or so apart, each team following close upon the one immediately preceding it in the line. In case of any alarm of Indians, the head and rear teams of the two parallel columns turned in toward each other, and thus there was formed upon the moment a long parallelogram of wagons, open in the middle, and inclosing the loose riding-animals, and closed at the front and rear. The wagons were loaded, to a great extent, with cotton stuffs in bales, and these made a fair fortification. The Indians had difficulty in breaking the barricade of one of these hardy caravans, defended as it was by numbers of the best riflemen the world ever knew. Small parties were frequently destroyed, but in the later days a train was commonly made up of at least one hundred wagons, with perhaps two hundred men in the party, and with eight hundred mules or oxen. The goods in convoy in such a train might be worth half a million dollars. The time in transit was about ten weeks, the out trip being made in the spring and the return in the fall.

The Santa Fé trade lasted, roughly speaking, only about twenty years, being practically terminated in 1843 by the edict of Santa Anna. These difficulties in our Western commerce all came to an end with the Mexican War, and with the second and third great additions to our Western territory, which gave us the region on the South as well as the North, from ocean to ocean.

THE GOLD-BEARING WEST.

This time was one of great activity in all the West, and the restless population which had gained a taste of the adventurous life of that region was soon to have yet greater opportunities. The discovery of gold in California unsettled not only all the West, but all America, and hastened immeasurably the development of the West, not merely as to the Pacific coast, but also in regard to the mountain regions between the Great Plains and the Coast. The turbulent population of the mines spread from California into every accessible portion of the Rockies. The trapper and hunter of the remotest range found that he had a companion in the wilderness, the prospector, as hardy as himself, and animated by a feverish energy which rendered him even more determined and unconquerable than himself. Love of excitement and change invited the trapper to the mountains. It was love of gain which drove the prospector thither. Commercial man was to do in a short time what the adventurer would never have done. California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana—how swiftly, when we come to counting decades, these names followed upon those of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio!

PACK-TRAINS MAKE NEW CITIES.

New cities began to be heard of in this mountain trade, just as there had been in the wagon days of the overland trail to Santa Fé. Pueblo, Cañon City, Denver, all were outfitting and freighting-points in turn, while from the other side of the range there were as many towns,—Florence, Walla Walla, Portland,—which sent out the long trains of laden mules and horses. The pack-train was as common and as useful as the stage line in developing the Black Hills region, and many another still less accessible.

EARLY WHEELED TRANSPORTATION—THE STAGE-COACH.

A prairie schooner.

The transportation of paddle and portage, of sawbuck saddle and panniers, however, could not forever serve except in the roughest of the mountain-chains. The demand for wheeled vehicles was urgent, and the supply for that demand was forthcoming in so far as human ingenuity and resourcefulness could meet it. There arose masters in transportation, common carriers of world-wide fame. The pony-express was a wonderful thing in its way, and some of the old-time stage lines which first began to run out into the West were hardly less wonderful. For instance, there was an overland stage line that ran from Atchison, on the Missouri River, across the plains, and up into Montana by way of Denver and Salt Lake City. It made the trip from Atchison to Helena, nearly two thousand miles, in twenty-two days. Down the old waterways from the placers of Alder Gulch to the same town of Atchison was a distance of about three thousand miles. The stage line began to shorten distances and lay out straight lines, so that now the West was visited by vast numbers of sight-seers, tourists, investigators, and the like, in addition to the regular population of the land, the men who called the West their home.

We should find it difficult now to return to stage-coach travel, yet in its time it was thought luxurious. One of the United States Bank examiners of that time, whose duties took him into the Western regions, in the course of fourteen years traveled over seventy-four thousand miles by stage-coach alone.

DIFFICULTIES OF WAGON-TRAINS.

One who has never seen the plains, rivers, rocks, cañons, and mountains of the portion of the country traversed by these caravans can form but a faint idea from any description given of them of the innumerable and formidable difficulties with which every mile of this weary march was encumbered. History has assigned a foremost place among its glorified deeds to the passage of the Alps by Napoleon, and to the long and discouraging march of the French army under the same great conqueror to Russia. If it be not invidious to compare small things with great, we may assuredly claim for these early pioneers greater conquests over nature than were made by either of the great military expeditions of Napoleon. A successful completion of the journey was simply an escape from death.

LIVING EXPENSES GOVERNED BY TRANSPORTATION.

"In 1865," comments Mr. Langford, "we note that the principal restaurant, 'in consequence of the recent fall in flour,' reduced day board to twenty dollars per week for gold. The food of this restaurant was very plain, and dried-apple pies were considered a luxury. At that time I was collector of internal revenue, and received my salary in greenbacks. I paid thirty-six dollars per week for day board at the Gibson House, at Helena. During the period of the greatest scarcity of flour, the more common boarding-houses posted the following signs: 'Board with bread at meals, $32; board without bread, $22; board with bread at dinner, $25."

III. ACROSS THE WATERS.

The early American life was primitive, but it was never the life of a peasantry. Once there was a time in the West when every man was as good as his neighbor, as well situated, as much contented. It would take hardihood to predict such conditions in the future for the West or for America.

BEGINNING OF WESTERN RAILWAY TRAVEL—THE AMERICAN ÉMIGRÉ.

At the half-way point of this century the early wheels of the West were crawling and creaking over trails where now rich cities stand.

FIRST WESTERN RAILWAY.

The wagon-wheels had overrun the West before the wheels of steam began the second conquest of the West. Wagons were first used on the Santa Fé trail in 1824, but it was not until three years later that there was begun the first of the Western iron trails.

There were grandfathers in Virginia now, grandfathers in New England. The subdivided farms were not so large. There were more shops in the villages. There was demand for expansion of the commerce of that day. The little products must find their market, and that market might still be American. The raw stuff might still be American, the producer of it might still be American. So these busy, thrifty, ambitious men came up and stood back of the vanguard that held the flexible frontier. Silently men stole out yet farther into what West there was left; but they always looked back over the shoulder at this new thing that had come upon the land.

Thinking men knew, half a century ago, that there must be an iron way across the United States, though they knew this only in general terms, and were only guessing at the changes which such a road must bring to the country at large.

This rapid development of the interior region of America which is a matter of common knowledge to all of us to-day was not foreseen by the wisest of the prophets of fifty years ago.

THE RAILWAYS CHANGE AND BUILD THE COMMERCIAL WEST.

With the era of steam came a complete reversal of all earlier methods. For nearly a century following the Revolutionary War the new lands of America had waited upon the transportation. Now the transportation facilities were to overleap history and to run in advance of progress itself. The railroad was not to depend upon the land, but the land upon the railroad. It was strong faith in the future civilization which enabled capitalists to build one connected line of iron from Oregon down the Pacific coast, thence east of the mouth of the Father of Waters, in all over thirty-two hundred miles of rail. Then came that daring flight of the Santa Fé across the seas of sand, a venture derided as folly and recklessness. The proof you may find by seeing the cities that have grown, the fields which bear them tribute. North and South and East and West the prairie roads run. The long trail of the cattle-drive is gone, and the cattle no longer walk a thousand miles to pasture or to market. Once, twice, thrice, the continent was spanned, and the path across the continent laid well and laid forever.

The largest, the most compact, and the most closely knit Caucasian population in the world to-day, is that of America, and to-day America is potentially the most powerful of all the world-powers. Why? Because her unit of population is superior. The reason for that you may find yourself if you care to look into the great movements of the West-bound population of America.

THE PONY EXPRESS

By W. F. Bailey

In the fall of 1854, United States Senator W. M. Gwin of California made the trip from San Francisco east en route to Washington, D. C., on horseback, by the way of Salt Lake City and South Pass, then known as the Central Route. For a part of the way he had for company Mr. B. F. Ficklin, the general superintendent of the freighting firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell.

Out of this traveling companionship grew the pony express. Mr. Ficklin's enthusiasm for closer communication with the East was contagious, and Senator Gwin became an untiring advocate of an express service via this route and on the lines suggested by Mr. Ficklin.

The methods of this firm can best be illustrated by the pledge they required every employee to sign, namely: "While in the employ of Russell, Majors & Waddell, I agree not to use profane language, not to get drunk, not to gamble, not to treat animals cruelly, and not to do anything incompatible with the conduct of a gentleman," etc. After the war broke out, a pledge of allegiance to the United States was also required. The company adhered, so far as possible, to the rule of not traveling on Sunday and of avoiding all unnecessary work on that day. A stanch adherence to these rules, and a strict observance of their contracts, in a few years brought them the control of the freighting business of the plains, as well as a widespread reputation for conducting it on a reliable and humane basis.

Committed to the enterprise, the firm proceeded to organize the Central Overland California and Pike's Peak Express Company, obtaining a charter under the State laws of Kansas.

Why one rider was late.

The company had an established route with the necessary stations between St. Joseph and Salt Lake City. Chorpenning's line west of Salt Lake City had few or no stations, and these had to be built; also some changes in the route were considered advisable. The service comprised sixty agile young men as riders, one hundred additional station-keepers, and four hundred and twenty strong, wiry horses. So well did those in charge understand their business that only sixty days were required to make all necessary arrangements for the start. April 3, 1860, was the date agreed upon, and on that day the first pony express left St. Joseph and San Francisco. In March, 1860, the following advertisement had appeared in the Missouri Republican of St. Louis and in other papers:

To San Francisco in 8 days by the C. O. C. & P. P. Ex. Co. The first courier of the Pony Express will leave the Missouri River on Tuesday, April 3rd, at—— P. M., and will run regularly weekly hereafter, carrying a letter mail only. The point on the Mo. River will be in telegraphic connection with the east and will be announced in due time.

Telegraphic messages from all parts of the United States and Canada in connection with the point of departure will be received up to 5:00 P. M. of the day of leaving and transmitted over the Placerville & St. Jo to San Francisco and intermediate points by the connecting express in 8 days. The letter mail will be delivered in San Francisco in 10 days from the departure of the express. The express passes through Forts Kearney, Laramie, Bridger, Great Salt Lake City, Camp Floyd, Carson City, The Washoe Silver Mines, Placerville and Sacramento, and letters for Oregon, Washington Territory, British Columbia, the Pacific Mexican ports, Russian possessions, Sandwich Islands, China, Japan and India will be mailed in San Francisco.

Both Sacramento and San Francisco were afire with enthusiasm, and elaborate plans were set on foot to welcome the first express. At the former point the whole city turned out with bells, guns, bands, etc., to greet it. Making only a brief stop to deliver the mail for that point, the express was hurried abroad the swift steamer Antelope, and sent forward to San Francisco. Here its prospective arrival had been announced by the papers, and also from the stages of the theaters, so that an immense as well as enthusiastic crowd awaited its arrival at midnight. The California Band paraded; the fire-bells were rung, bringing out the fire companies, who, finding no fire, remained to join in the jollity and to swell the procession which escorted the express from the dock to the office of the Alta Telegraph, its Western terminus.

All the riders were young men selected for their nerve, light weight, and general fitness. No effort was made to uniform them, and they dressed as their individual fancy dictated, the usual costume being a buckskin hunting-shirt, cloth trousers tucked into a pair of high boots, and a jockey-cap or slouch-hat. All rode armed. At first a Spencer rifle was carried strapped across the back, in addition to a pair of army (Colt's) revolvers in their holsters. The rifle, however, was found useless, and was abandoned. The equipment of the horses was a light riding-saddle and bridle, with the saddle-bags, or mochila, of heavy leather. These had holes cut in them so that they would fit over the horn and tree of the saddle. The mochilas had four pockets, called cantinas, one in each corner, so as to have one in front and one behind each leg of the rider; in these the mail was placed. Three of these pockets were locked and opened en route at military posts and at Salt Lake City, and under no circumstances at any other place. The fourth was for way-stations, for which each station-keeper had a key, and also contained a way-bill, or time-card, on which a record of arrival and departure was kept. The same mochila was transferred from pony to pony and from rider to rider until it was carried from one terminus to the other. The letters, before being placed in the pockets, were wrapped in oiled silk to preserve them from moisture. The maximum weight of any one mail was twenty pounds; but this was rarely reached. The charges were originally $5 for each letter of one half-ounce or less; but afterward this was reduced to $2.50 for each letter not exceeding one half-ounce, this being in addition to the regular United States postage. Specially made light-weight paper was generally used to reduce the expense. Special editions of the Eastern newspapers were printed on tissue-paper to enable them to reach subscribers on the Pacific coast. This, however, was more as an advertisement, there being little demand for them at their necessarily large price.

Wiping out a station.

At first, stations averaged 25 miles apart, and each rider covered three stations, or 75 miles, daily. Later, stations were established at intermediate points, reducing the distance between them, in some cases, to 10 miles, the distance between stations being regulated by the character of the country. This change was made in the interest of quicker time, it having been demonstrated that horses could not be kept at the top of their speed for so great a distance as 25 miles. At the stations, relays of horses were kept, and the station-keeper's duties included having a pony ready bridled and saddled half an hour before the express was due. Upon approaching a station, the rider would loosen the mochila from his saddle, so that he could leap from his pony as soon as he reached the station, throw the mochila over the saddle of the fresh horse, jump on, and ride off. Two minutes was the maximum time allowed at stations, whether it was to change riders or horses. At relay-stations where riders were changed the incoming man would unbuckle his mochila before arriving, and hand it to his successor, who would start off on a lope as soon as his hand grasped it. Time was seldom lost at stations. Station-keepers and relay-riders were always on the lookout. In the daytime the pony could be seen for a considerable distance, and at night a few well-known yells would bring everything into readiness in a very short time. As a rule, the riders would do 75 miles over their route west-bound one day, returning over the same distance with the first east-bound express.

Frequently, through the exigencies of the service, they would have to double their route the same day, or ride the one next to them, and even farther. For instance, "Buffalo Bill" (W. F. Cody) for a while had the route from Red Buttes, Wyoming, to Three Crossings, Nebraska, a distance of 116 miles. On one occasion, on reaching Three Crossings, he found that the rider for the next division had been killed the night before, and he was called upon to cover his route, 76 miles, until another rider could be employed. This involved a continuous ride of 384 miles without break, except for meals and to change horses. Again, "Pony Bob," another noted rider, covered the distance from Friday's Station to Smith's Creek, 185 miles, and back, including the trip over the Sierra Nevada, twice, at a time when the country was infested by hostile Indians. It eventually required, when the service got into perfect working order, 190 stations, 200 station-keepers and the same number of assistant station-keepers, 80 riders, and from 400 to 500 horses to cover the 1950 miles from St. Joseph to Sacramento. The riders were paid from $100 to $125 per month for their services. Located about every 200 miles were division agents to provide for emergencies, such as Indian raids, the stampeding of stock, etc., as well as to exercise general supervision over the service. One, and probably the most notorious, of these was Jack Slade, of unenviable reputation. For a long time he was located as division agent at the crossing of the Platte near Fort Kearney.

The riders were looked up to, and regarded as being "at the top of the heap." No matter what time of the day or of the night they were called upon, whether winter or summer, over mountains or across plains, raining or snowing, with rivers to swim or pleasant prairies to cross, through forests or over the burning desert, they must be ready to respond, and, though in the face of hostiles, ride their beat and make their time. To be late was their only fear, and to get in ahead of schedule their pride. There was no killing time for them, under any circumstances. The schedule was keyed up to what was considered the very best time that could be done, and a few minutes gained on it might be required to make up for a fall somewhere else. First-class horses were furnished, and there were no orders against bringing them in in a sweat. "Make your schedule," was the standing rule. While armed with the most effective weapon then known, the Colt revolver, they were not expected to fight, but to run away. Their weapons were to be used only in emergencies.

An incident between stations.

Considering the dangers encountered, the percentage of fatalities was extraordinarily small. Far more station employees than riders were killed by the Indians, and even of the latter more were killed off duty than on. This can be explained by the fact that the horses furnished the riders, selected as they were for speed and endurance, were far superior to the mounts of the Indians.

Many of the most noted of the frontiersmen of the sixties and seventies were schooled in the pony-express service. The life was a hard one. Setting aside the constant danger, the work was severe, both on riders and station employees. The latter were constantly on watch, herding their horses. Their diet frequently was reduced to wolf-mutton, their beverage to brackish water, a little tea or coffee being a great luxury, while the lonesome souls were nearly always out of tobacco.

The great feat of the pony-express service was the delivery of President Lincoln's inaugural address in 1861. Great interest was felt in this all over the land, foreshadowing as it did the policy of the administration in the matter of the Rebellion. In order to establish a record, as well as for an advertisement, the company determined to break all previous records, and to this end horses were led out from the different stations so as to reduce the distance each would have to run, and get the highest possible speed out of every animal. Each horse averaged only ten miles, and that at its very best speed. Every precaution was taken to prevent delay, and the result stands without a parallel in history; seven days and seventeen hours—one hundred and eighty-five hours—for 1950 miles, an average of 10.7 miles per hour. From St. Joseph to Denver, 665 miles were made in two days and twenty-one hours, the last 10 miles being accomplished in thirty-one minutes.

Facsimile of letter sent by pony-express.

EARLY WESTERN STEAMBOATING

By Archer Butler Hulbert.

In the study of waterways of westward expansion, the Ohio River—the "Gateway of the West"—occupies such a commanding position that it must be considered most important and most typical. Such is its situation in our geography and history that it is entitled to a prominent place among Historic Highways of America which greatly influenced the early westward extension of the borders and the people of the United States.

The Ohio River was the highway upon which all the great early continental routes focused. Washington's Road, Braddock's Road, Forbes' Road, and Boone's Road—like the Indian and buffalo trails they followed—had their goal on the glories of this strategic waterway. The westward movement was by river valleys.

The dawning of the era of steam navigation cannot be better introduced than by quoting a paragraph from The Navigator of 1811.

"There is now on foot a new mode of navigating our western waters, particularly the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. This is with boats propelled by the power of steam. This plan has been carried into successful operation on the Hudson River at New York and on the Delaware between New Castle and Burlington. It has been stated that the one on the Hudson goes at the rate of four miles an hour against wind and tide on her route between New York and Albany, and frequently with 500 passengers on board. From these successful experiments there can be little doubt of the plan succeeding on our western waters, and proving of immense advantage to the commerce of our country."

These words came true in a miraculously short space of time. In 1811 the first steamboat was constructed at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela. Several others were built soon after, but it was probably fifteen years before steamboats came into such general use as to cause any diminution in the flat and keel-boat navigation.

By 1832 it was calculated that the whole number of persons deriving subsistence on the Ohio including the crews of steam-and flatboats, mechanics and laborers employed in building and repairing boats, woodcutters and persons employed in furnishing, supplying, loading and unloading these boats, was ninety thousand. At this time, 1832, the boats numbered four hundred and fifty and their burden ninety thousand tons. In 1843 the whole number of steamboats constructed at Cincinnati alone was forty-five; the aggregate amount of their tonnage was twelve thousand and thirty tons and their cost $705,000. This gives an average of about two hundred and sixty-seven tons for each boat and about $16,000 for the cost of each.

In 1844 the number of steamboats employed in navigating the Mississippi and its tributaries was two hundred and fifty. The average burden of these boats was 200 tons each and their aggregate value, at $80 per ton, was $7,200,000. Many of these were fine vessels, affording most comfortable accommodations for passengers, and compared favorably in all particulars with the best packets in any part of the world. The number of persons employed in navigating the steamboats at this time varied from twenty-five to fifty for each boat, a total of 15,750 persons employed.

Early steamboating on a western river.

If, in 1834, the number of steamboats on western waters was two hundred and thirty, the expense of running them could be estimated at $4,645,000 annually. In 1844 the calculation was $9,036,000.... It appears that the steamboat tonnage of the Mississippi valley at this time exceeded, by forty thousand tons, the entire steamboat tonnage of Great Britain in 1834. In other words, the steamboat tonnage of Great Britain was only two-thirds that of the Mississippi Valley. The magnitude of this fact will be best appreciated by considering that the entire tonnage of the United States was but two-thirds that of Great Britain, showing that this proportion is exactly reversed in western steamboat trade.

The history of the Ohio Basin river-men, from those who paddled a canoe and pushed a keel-boat to those who labor to-day on our steamboats, has never been written. The lights and shades of this life have never been pictured by any novelist and perhaps they never can be.

The first generation of river men, excluding, of course, the Indians, would cover the years from 1750 to 1780 and would include those whose principal acquaintance with the Ohio and its tributaries was made through the canoe and pirogue. The second generation would stretch from 1780 or 1790 to 1810, and would include those who lived in the heydey of the keel-and flatboat. The third generation would carry us forward from 1810 to about 1850 and in this we would count the thousands who knew these valleys before the railway had robbed the steamboat of so much of its business and pride.

River life underwent a great change with the gradual supremacy of the steamboat in the carrying trade of the Ohio and its tributaries. The sounding whistle blew away from the valleys much that was picturesque—those strenuous days when a well-developed muscle was the best capital with which to begin business. Of course the flatboat did not pass from the waters, but as a type of old-time river-men their lusty crews have disappeared.

In connection with the first generation of river-men social equality was a general rule. There were no distinctions; every man was his own master and his own servant. In the days of keel-boats and flatboats conditions changed and there was a "captain" of his boat, and the second generation of river-men were accustomed to obey orders of superiors. Society was divided into two classes, the serving and the served. With the supremacy of the steamboat this division is reduplicated over and again; here are four general classes, the proprietors, navigators, operators and deck-hands.

The upper ranks of the steam-packet business have furnished the West with some of its strongest types of aggressive manhood. Keen-eyed, physically strong, acquainted with men and equal to any emergency, the typical captain of the first half-century of steamboating in the West, was a man any one was glad to number among his friends and acquaintances.

GEORGE ROGERS CLARK AND THE CONQUEST OF THE NORTHWEST

By Theodore Roosevelt

In 1776, when independence was declared, the United States included only the thirteen original States on the seaboard. With the exception of a few hunters there were no white men west of the Alleghany Mountains, and there was not even an American hunter in the great country out of which we have since made the States of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. All this region north of the Ohio River then formed a part of the Province of Quebec. It was a wilderness of forests and prairies, teeming with game, and inhabited by many warlike tribes of Indians.

Here and there through it were dotted quaint little towns of French Creoles, the most important being Detroit, Vincennes on the Wabash, and Kaskaskia and Kahokia on the Illinois. These French villages were ruled by British officers commanding small bodies of regular soldiers or Tory rangers and Creole partizans. The towns were completely in the power of the British government; none of the American States had actual possession of a foot of property in the Northwestern Territory.

The Northwest was acquired in the midst of the Revolution only by armed conquest, and if it had not been so acquired, it would have remained a part of the British Dominion of Canada.

George Rogers Clark.

The man to whom this conquest was due was a famous backwoods leader, a mighty hunter, a noted Indian-fighter, George Rogers Clark. He was a very strong man, with light hair and blue eyes. He was of good Virginian family. Early in his youth, he embarked on the adventurous career of a backwoods surveyor, exactly as Washington and so many other young Virginians of spirit did at that period. He traveled out to Kentucky soon after it was founded by Boone, and lived there for a year, either at the stations or camping by himself in the woods, surveying, hunting, and making war against the Indians like any other settler; but all the time his mind was bent on vaster schemes than were dreamed of by the men around him. He had his spies out in the Northwestern Territory, and became convinced that with a small force of resolute backwoodsmen he could conquer it for the United States. When he went back to Virginia, Governor Patrick Henry entered heartily into Clark's schemes and gave him authority to fit out a force for his purpose.

In 1778, after encountering endless difficulties and delays, he finally raised a hundred and fifty backwoods riflemen. In May they started down the Ohio in flatboats to undertake the allotted task. They drifted and rowed down-stream to the Falls of the Ohio, where Clark founded a log-hamlet, which has since become the great city of Louisville.

Here he halted for some days and was joined by fifty or sixty volunteers; but a number of the men deserted, and when, after an eclipse of the sun, Clark again pushed off to go down with the current, his force was but about one hundred and sixty riflemen. All, however, were men on whom he could depend—men well used to frontier warfare. They were tall, stalwart backwoodsmen, clad in the hunting-shirt and leggings that formed the national dress of their kind, and armed with the distinctive weapon of the backwoods, the long-barreled, small-bore rifle.

Before reaching the Mississippi the little flotilla landed, and Clark led his men northward against the Illinois towns. In one of them, Kaskaskia, dwelt the British commander of the entire district up to Detroit. The small garrison and the Creole militia taken together outnumbered Clark's force, and they were in close alliance with the Indians roundabout. Clark was anxious to take the town by surprise and avoid bloodshed, as he believed he could win over the Creoles to the American side. Marching cautiously by night and generally hiding by day, he came to the outskirts of the little village on the evening of July 4th, and lay in the woods near by until after nightfall.

Fortune favored him. That evening the officers of the garrison had given a great ball to the mirth-loving Creoles, and almost the entire population of the village had gathered in the fort, where the dance was held. While the revelry was at its height, Clark and his tall backwoodsmen, treading silently through the darkness, came into the town, surprised the sentries, and surrounded the fort without causing any alarm.

All the British and French capable of bearing arms were gathered in the fort to take part in or look on at the merry-making. When his men were posted Clark walked boldly forward through the open door, and, leaning against the wall, looked at the dancers as they whirled around in the light of the flaring torches. For some moments no one noticed him. Then an Indian who had been lying with his chin on his hand, looking carefully over the gaunt figure of the stranger, sprang to his feet, and uttered the wild war-whoop. Immediately the dancing ceased and the men ran to and fro in confusion; but Clark, stepping forward, bade them be at their ease, but to remember that henceforth they danced under the flag of the United States, and not under that of Great Britain.

The surprise was complete, and no resistance was attempted. For twenty-four hours the Creoles were in abject terror. Then Clark summoned their chief men together and explained that he came as their ally, and not as their foe, and that if they would join with him they should be citizens of the American republic, and treated in all respects on an equality with their comrades. The Creoles, caring little for the British, and rather fickle of nature, accepted the proposition with joy, and with the most enthusiastic loyalty toward Clark. Not only that, but sending messengers to their kinsmen on the Wabash, they persuaded the people of Vincennes likewise to cast off their allegiance to the British king, and to hoist the American flag.

So far, Clark had conquered with greater ease than he had dared to hope. But when the news reached the British governor, Hamilton, at Detroit, he at once prepared to reconquer the land. He had much greater forces at his command than Clark had; and in the fall of that year he came down to Vincennes by stream and portage, in a great fleet of canoes bearing five hundred fighting men—British regulars, French partizans, and Indians. The Vincennes Creoles refused to fight against the British, and the American officer who had been sent thither by Clark had no alternative but to surrender.

"All the day long the troops waded in icy water."

If Hamilton had then pushed on and struck Clark in Illinois, having more than treble Clark's force, he could hardly have failed to win the victory; but the season was late and the journey so difficult that he did not believe it could be taken. Accordingly he disbanded the Indians and sent some of his troops back to Detroit, announcing that when spring came he would march against Clark in Illinois.

If Clark in turn had awaited the blow he would have surely met defeat; but he was a greater man than his antagonist, and he did what the other deemed impossible.

Finding that Hamilton had sent home some of his troops and dispersed all his Indians, Clark realized that his chance was to strike before Hamilton's soldiers assembled again in the spring. Accordingly he gathered together the pick of his men, together with a few Creoles, one hundred and seventy all told, and set out for Vincennes. At first the journey was easy enough, for they passed across the snowy Illinois prairies, broken by great reaches of lofty woods. They killed elk, buffalo and deer for food, there being no difficulty in getting all they wanted to eat; and at night they built huge fires by which to sleep, and feasted "like Indian war-dancers," as Clark said in his report.

But when, in the middle of February, they reached the drowned lands of the Wabash, where the ice had just broken up and everything was flooded, the difficulties seemed almost insuperable, and the march became painful and laborious to a degree. All day long the troops waded in the icy water, and at night they could with difficulty find some little hillock on which to sleep. Only Clark's indomitable courage and cheerfulness kept the party in heart and enabled them to persevere. However, persevere they did, and at last, on February 23, they came in sight of the town of Vincennes. They captured a Creole who was out shooting ducks, and from him learned that their approach was utterly unsuspected, and that there were many Indians in town.

Clark was now in some doubt as to how to make his fight. The British regulars dwelt in a small fort at one end of the town, where they had two light guns; but Clark feared lest, if he made a sudden night attack, the townspeople and Indians would from sheer fright turn against him. He accordingly arranged, just before he himself marched in, to send in the captured duck-hunter, conveying a warning to the Indians and the Creoles that he was about to attack the town, but that his only quarrel was with the British, and that if the other inhabitants would stay in their own homes they would not be molested.

Sending the duck-hunter ahead, Clark took up his march and entered the town just after nightfall. The news conveyed by the released hunter astounded the townspeople, and they talked it over eagerly, and were in doubt what to do. The Indians, not knowing how great might be the force that would assail the town, at once took refuge in the neighboring woods, while the Creoles retired to their own houses. The British knew nothing of what had happened until the Americans had actually entered the streets of the little village. Rushing forward, Clark's men soon penned the regulars within their fort, where they kept them surrounded all night. The next day a party of Indian warriors, who in the British interest had been ravaging the settlements of Kentucky, arrived and entered the town, ignorant that the Americans had captured it. Marching boldly forward to the fort, they suddenly found it beleaguered, and before they could flee they were seized by the backwoodsmen. In their belts they carried the scalps of the slain settlers. The savages were taken red-handed, and the American frontiersmen were in no mood to show mercy. All the Indians were tomahawked in sight of the fort.

For some time the British defended themselves well; but at length their guns were disabled, all of the gunners being picked off by the backwoods marksmen, and finally the garrison dared not so much as appear at a port-hole, so deadly was the fire from the long rifles. Under such circumstances Hamilton was forced to surrender.

No attempt was afterward made to molest the Americans in the land they had won, and upon the conclusion of peace the Northwest, which had been conquered by Clark, became part of the United States.

BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD

By Arthur Butler Hulbert

Our highways are usually known by two names—the destinations to which they lead. The famous highway through New York State is known as the Genesee Road in the eastern half of the State and as the Albany Road in the western portion. In a number of cities through which it passes—Utica, Syracuse, etc.,—it is Genesee Street. This path in the olden time was the great road to the famed Genesee country. The old Forbes Road across Pennsylvania soon lost its earliest name.... Few roads named from their builders preserved the old-time name.

One roadway—the Wilderness Road to Kentucky from Virginia and Tennessee, the longest, blackest, hardest road of pioneer days in America—holds the old-time name with undiminished loyalty and is true to-day to every gloomy description and wild epithet that was ever written or spoken of it. It was broken open for white man's use by Daniel Boone from the Watauga settlement on the Holston River, Tennessee, to the mouth of Otter Creek, on the Kentucky River, in the month preceding the outbreak of open revolution at Lexington and Concord. It was known as "Boone's Trail," the "Kentucky Road," the "road to Caintuck" or the "Virginia Road," but its common name was the "Wilderness Road." It seems right that the brave frontiersman who opened this road to white men should be remembered by this act.

The road itself is of little consequence—it is what the early founding of the commonwealth of Kentucky meant to the East and to the West. When the armies of the Revolutionary War are counted, that first army of twenty-five thousand men, women, and children which hurried over Boone's little path, through dark Powel's Valley, over the "high-swung gateway" of Cumberland Gap and down through the laurel wilderness to Crab Orchard, Danville, Lexington, and Louisville, must not be forgotten. No army ever meant more to the West.

It was, throughout the eighteenth century, exceedingly dangerous to travel Boone's Road; and those who journeyed either way joined together and traveled in "companies." Indeed, there was risk enough for the most daring, in any case; but a well-armed "company" of tried pioneers on Boone's Road was a dangerous game on which to prey. It was customary to advertise the departure of a company either from Virginia or Kentucky, in local papers, in order that any desiring to make the journey might know of the intended departure. The principal rendezvous in Kentucky was the frontier settlement of Crab Orchard. Certain of these advertisements are extremely interesting; the verbal changes are significant if closely read: