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THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

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CENTURY READINGS IN UNITED STATES HISTORY

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THE
WESTWARD MOVEMENT

EDITED BY

CHARLES L. BARSTOW

D. Appleton-Century Company
INCORPORATED

New York

London

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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.

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THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

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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.

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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[4] 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.

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[5] 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.

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[6] 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[7] 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."

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,[8] 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[9] 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.

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[10] 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.

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[11] 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[12] 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[13] 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.

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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[15] 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.

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[16] 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[17] 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.

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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[20] 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.

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.

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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[23] 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.

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,[24] 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.

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[25] 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.

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[26] 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.

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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[29] 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?

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[30] 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[31] 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.

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[32] 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[33] 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[34] 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[35] 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[36] 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[37] 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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

The transportation of paddle and portage, of sawbuck saddle and panniers, however, could not forever serve except[42] 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[43] 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.

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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[45] 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.

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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[47] 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.

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[48] 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[49] 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[50] 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.

At first, stations averaged 25 miles apart, and each rider[51] 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[52] 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.

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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[55] 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.

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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.

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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.

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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[57] 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[58] 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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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[60] 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.

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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.

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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[63] 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.

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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.

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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[67] 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[68] 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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

NOTICE

Is hereby given, that a company will meet at the Crab Orchard, on Sunday the 4th day of May (1788), to go through the Wilderness, and to set out on the 5th, at which time most of the Delegates to the State convention will go.

A large company will meet at the Crab Orchard on Sunday the 25th of May, in order to make an early start on Monday the 26th through the Wilderness for the old settlement.

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A large company will meet at the Crab Orchard on the 15th of May, in readiness to start on the 16th through the Wilderness for Richmond.

NOTICE

Is hereby given that several gentlemen propose meeting at the Crab Orchard on the 4th of June in perfect readiness to move early the next morning through the Wilderness.

NOTICE

A large company will meet at the Crab Orchard the 19th of November in order to start the next day through the Wilderness. As it is very dangerous on account of the Indians, it is hoped each person will go well armed.

It appears that unarmed persons sometimes attached themselves to companies and relied on others to protect them in times of danger. One advertisement urged that every one should go armed and "not to depend upon others to defend them."

The frequency of the departure of such companies suggests the great amount of travel on Boone's Road. As early as 1788 parties were advertised to leave Crab Orchard May 5, May 15, May 26, June 4 and June 16. Nor does it seem that there was much abatement during the more inclement months; in the fall of the year companies were advertised to depart November 19, December 9 and December 19. Yet at this season the Indians were often out waylaying travelers—driven, no doubt, by hunger to deeds of desperation. The sufferings of such red-skinned marauders have found little place in history; but they are, nevertheless, suggestive. One story is to the point.

In the winter of 1787-88 a party on Boone's Road was attacked by Indians not far from the Kentucky border. Their horses were plundered of goods, but the travelers[72] escaped. Hurrying in to the settlement a company was raised to make a pursuit. By their tracks in the snow the Indians were accurately followed. They were overtaken at a camp where they were drying their blankets before a great fire. At the first charge, the savages, completely surprised, took to their heels—stark naked. Not satisfied with recovering their goods, the Kentuckians pursued the fugitives into the mountains, where the awful fate of the savages is unquestionable.

Before Richard Henderson arrived in Kentucky Daniel Boone wrote him: "My advice to you, sir, is to come or send as soon as possible. Your company is desired greatly, for the people are very uneasy, but are willing to stay and venture their lives with you, and now is the time to frustrate the intentions of the Indians, and keep the country whilst we are in it. If we give way to them now, it will be ever the case."

This letter shows plainly how the best informed man in Kentucky regarded the situation.

What it meant to the American Colonies during the Revolution to have a brave band of pioneers in Kentucky at that crucial epoch, is an important chapter in the history of Boone's Road.

It is interesting to note that the leaders of civilization in the West were true Americans—American born and American bred. It was a race of Americanized Britons who pressed from Virginia to the West. Hardly a name among them but was pure Norman or Saxon. Of the twenty-five members of the Political Club at Danville, Kentucky, which discussed with ability the Federal Constitution, all but two were descendants of colonists from Great Britain and Ireland. Of forty-five members of the convention[73] which framed Kentucky's first constitution, only three could claim Continental ancestry.

This race gave to the West its real heroes. In frontier cabins they were bred to a free life in a free land—worthy successors to Washington and his school, worthy men to subdue and rule the empire of which they began the conquest. In the form of these sturdy colonizers the American republic stretched its arm across the Appalachian Mountain system and took in its grasp the richest river valley in the world at the end of Boone's Wilderness Road.

Yet the road itself was only what Boone made it—a blazed footpath westward. It was but the merest footpath from 1774 to 1792, while thousands floundered over its uncertain track to lay the rude foundations of civilization in the land to which it led. There was probably not a more desperate pioneer road in America than this. The mountains to be crossed, the rivers and swamps to be encountered, were as difficult as any on Braddock's Road; and Boone's Road was very much longer.

A vivid description of what a journey over it meant in the year 1779 has been left by Chief-Justice Robertson in an address given half a century ago:

"During the fall and winter of that year came an unexampled tide of emigrants, who, exchanging all the comforts of their native society and homes for settlements for themselves and their children here, came like pilgrims to a wilderness to be made secure by their arms and habitable by the toil of their lives. Through privations incredible and perils thick, thousands of men, women and children came in successive caravans, forming continuous streams of human beings, horses, cattle and other domestic animals all moving onward along a lonely and houseless path to a wild[74] and cheerless land. Cast your eyes back on that long procession of missionaries in the cause of civilization; behold the men on foot with their trusty guns on their shoulders, driving stock and leading pack-horses; and the women, some walking with pails on their heads, others riding with children in their laps, and other children swung in baskets on horses, fastened to the tails of others going before; see them encamped at night expecting to be massacred by Indians; behold them in the month of December, in that ever-memorable season of unprecedented cold, called the 'hard winter,' traveling two or three miles a day, frequently in danger of being frozen or killed by the falling of horses on the icy and almost impassable trace, and subsisting on stinted allowances of stale bread and meat; but now lastly look at them at the destined fort, perhaps on the eve of merry Christmas, when met by the hearty welcome of friends who had come before, and cheered by fresh buffalo meat and parched corn, they rejoice at their deliverance and resolve to be contented with their lot.

"This is no vision of the imagination, it is but an imperfect description of the pilgrimage of my own father and mother."

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DANIEL BOONE AND THE FOUNDING OF KENTUCKY

By Theodore Roosevelt

Daniel Boone will always occupy a unique place in our history as the archetype of the hunter and wilderness wanderer. He was a true pioneer, and stood at the head of that class of Indian-fighters, game-hunters, forest-fellers, and backwoods farmers who, generation after generation, pushed westward the border of civilization from the Alleghanies to the Pacific. As he himself said, he was "an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness." Born in Pennsylvania, he drifted south into western North Carolina, and settled on what was then the extreme frontier. There he married, built a log cabin, and hunted, chopped trees, and tilled the ground like any other frontiersman. The Alleghany Mountains still marked a boundary beyond which the settlers dared not go; for west of them lay immense reaches of frowning forest, uninhabited save by bands of warlike Indians. Occasionally some venturesome hunter or trapper penetrated this immense wilderness, and returned with strange stories of what he had seen and done.

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In 1769 Boone, excited by these vague and wondrous tales, determined himself to cross the mountains and find out what manner of land it was that lay beyond. With a few chosen companions he set out, making his own trail through the gloomy forest. After weeks of wandering, he at last emerged into the beautiful and fertile country of Kentucky, for which, in after years, the red men and the white strove with such obstinate fury that it grew to be called "the dark and bloody ground." But when Boone first saw it, it was a fair and smiling land of groves and glades and running waters, where the open forest grew tall and beautiful, and where innumerable herds of game grazed, roaming ceaselessly to and fro along the trails they had trodden during countless generations. Kentucky was not owned by any Indian tribe, and was visited only by wandering war-parties and hunting-parties who came from among the savage nations living north of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee.

A roving war-party stumbled upon one of Boone's companions and killed him, and the others then left Boone and journeyed home; but his brother came out to join him, and the two spent the winter together. Self-reliant, fearless, and possessed of great bodily strength and hardihood, they cared little for the loneliness. The teeming myriads of game furnished abundant food; the herds of shaggy-maned bison and noble-antlered elk, the bands of deer and the numerous black bear, were all ready for the rifle, and they were tame and easily slain. The wolf and the cougar, too, sometimes fell victims to the prowess of the two hunters.

At times they slept in hollow trees, or in some bush lean-to of their own making; at other times, when they feared Indians, they changed their resting-place every night, and after making a fire would go off a mile or two in the woods to sleep. Surrounded by brute and human, foes, they owed their lives to their sleepless vigilance, their keen senses, their eagle eyes, and their resolute hearts.

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When the spring came, and the woods were white with the dogwood blossoms, and crimsoned with the red-bud, Boone's brother left him, and Daniel remained for three months alone in the wilderness. The brother soon came back again with a party of hunters; and other parties likewise came in, to wander for months and years through the wilderness; and they wrought huge havoc among the vast herds of game.

In 1771 Boone returned to his home. Two years later he started to lead a party of settlers to the new country; but while passing through the frowning defiles of Cumberland Gap they were attacked by Indians, and driven back—two of Boone's own sons being slain. In 1775, however, he made another attempt; and this attempt was successful. The Indians attacked the newcomers; but by this time the parties of would-be settlers were sufficiently numerous to hold their own. They beat back the Indians, and built rough little hamlets, surrounded by log stockades, at Boonesborough and Harrodsburg; and the permanent settlement of Kentucky had begun.

The next few years were passed by Boone amid unending Indian conflicts. He was a leader among the settlers, both in peace and in war. At one time he represented them in the House of Burgesses of Virginia; at another time he was a member of the first little Kentucky parliament itself; and he became a colonel of the frontier militia. He tilled the land, and he chopped the trees himself; he helped to build the cabins and stockades with his own hands, wielding the long-handled, light-headed frontier ax as skilfully as other frontiersmen. His main business was that of surveyor, for his knowledge of the country, and his ability to travel through it, in spite of the danger from Indians,[79] created much demand for his services among people who wished to lay off tracts of wild land for their own future use. But whatever he did, and wherever he went, he had to be sleeplessly on the lookout for his Indian foes. When he and his fellows tilled the stump-dotted fields of corn, one or more of the party were always on guard, with weapon at the ready, for fear of lurking savages. When he went to the House of Burgesses he carried his long rifle, and traversed roads not a mile of which was free from the danger of Indian attack. The settlements in the early years depended exclusively upon game for their meat, and Boone was the mightiest of all the hunters, so that upon him devolved the task of keeping his people supplied. He killed many buffaloes, and pickled the buffalo beef for use in winter. He killed great numbers of black bear, and made bacon of them, precisely as if they had been hogs. The common game were deer and elk. At that time none of the hunters of Kentucky would waste a shot on anything so small as a prairie-chicken or wild duck; but they sometimes killed geese and swans when they came south in winter and lit on the rivers. But whenever Boone went into the woods after game, he had perpetually to keep watch lest he himself might be hunted in turn. He never lay in wait at a game-lick, save with ears strained to hear the approach of some crawling red foe. He never crept up to a turkey he heard calling, without exercising the utmost care to see that it was not an Indian; for one of the favorite devices of the Indians was to imitate the turkey call, and thus allure within range some inexperienced hunter.

Besides this warfare, which went on in the midst of his usual vocations, Boone frequently took the field on set expeditions[80] against the savages. Once when he and a party of other men were making salt at a lick, they were surprised and carried off by the Indians. The old hunter was a prisoner with them for some months, but finally made his escape and came home through the trackless woods as straight as the wild pigeon flies. He was ever on the watch to ward off the Indian inroads, and to follow the war-parties, and try to rescue the prisoners. Once his own daughter, and two other girls who were with her, were carried off by a band of Indians. Boone raised some friends and followed the trail steadily for two days and a night; then they came to where the Indians had killed a buffalo calf and were camped around it. Firing from a little distance, the whites shot two of the Indians, and, rushing in, rescued the girls. On another occasion, when Boone had gone to visit a salt-lick with his brother, the Indians ambushed them and shot the latter. Boone himself escaped, but the Indians followed him for three miles by the aid of a tracking dog, until Boone turned, shot the dog, and then eluded his pursuers. In company with Simon Kenton and many other noted hunters and wilderness warriors, he once and again took part in expeditions into the Indian country, where they killed the braves and drove off the horses. Twice bands of Indians, accompanied by French, Tory, and British partizans from Detroit, bearing the flag of Great Britain, attacked Boonesborough. In each case Boone and his fellow-settlers beat them off with loss. At the fatal battle of the Blue Licks, in which two hundred of the best riflemen of Kentucky were beaten with terrible slaughter by a great force of Indians from the lakes, Boone commanded the left wing. Leading his men, rifle in hand, he pushed back[81] and overthrew the force against him; but meanwhile the Indians destroyed the right wing and center, and got round in his rear, so that there was nothing left for Boone's men except to flee with all possible speed.

As Kentucky became settled, Boone grew restless and ill at ease. He loved the wilderness; he loved the great forests and the great prairie-like glades, and the life in the little lonely cabin, where from the door he could see the deer come out into the clearing at nightfall. The neighborhood of his own kind made him feel cramped and ill at ease. So he moved ever westward with the frontier; and as Kentucky filled up he crossed the Mississippi and settled on the borders of the prairie country of Missouri, where the Spaniards, who ruled the territory, made him an alcalde, or judge. He lived to a great age, and died out on the border, a backwoods hunter to the last.

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PIONEER FARMING

By Morris Birkbeck (about 1830)

I am now going to take you to the prairies, to show you the very beginning of our settlement. Having fixed on the northwestern portion of our prairie for our future residence and farm, the first act was building a cabin, about two hundred yards from the spot where the house is to stand. This cabin is built of round straight logs, about a foot in diameter, lying upon each other, and notched in at the corners, forming a room eighteen feet long by sixteen; the intervals between the logs "chunked," that is, filled in with slips of wood; and "mudded," that is, daubed with a plaster of mud: a spacious chimney, built also of logs, stands like a bastion at one end: the roof is well covered with four hundred "clap boards" of cleft oak, very much like the pales used in England for fencing parks. A hole is cut through the side, called, very properly, the "door (the through)," for which there is a "shutter," made also of cleft oak, and hung on wooden hinges. All this has been executed by contract, and well executed, for twenty dollars. I have since added ten dollars to the cost, for the luxury of a floor and ceiling of sawn boards, and it is now a comfortable habitation.

We arrived in the evening, our horses heavily laden with our guns, and provisions, and cooking utensils, and blankets, not forgetting the all-important ax. This was immediately put in requisition, and we soon kindled a[83] famous fire, before which we spread our pallets, and, after a hearty supper, soon forgot that besides ourselves, our horses and our dogs, the wild animals of the forest were the only inhabitants of our wide domain. Our cabin stands at the edge of the prairie, just within the wood, so as to be concealed from the view until you are at the very door. Thirty paces to the east the prospect opens from a commanding eminence over the prairie, which extends four miles to the south and southeast, and over the woods beyond to a great distance; whilst the high timber behind, and on each side, to the west, north, and east, forms a sheltered cove about five hundred yards in width. It is about the middle of this cove, two hundred and fifty yards from the wood each way, but open to the south, that we propose building our house.

Well, having thus established myself as a resident proprietor, in the morning my boy and I (our friend having left us) sallied forth in quest of neighbors, having heard of two new settlements at no great distance. Our first visit was to Mr. Emberson, who had just established himself in a cabin similar to our own, at the edge of a small prairie two miles north-west of us. We found him a respectable young man, more farmer than hunter, surrounded by a numerous family, and making the most of a rainy day by mending the shoes of his household. We then proceeded to Mr. Woodland's, about the same distance southwest: he is an inhabitant of longer standing, for he arrived in April, Mr. E. in August. He has since built for us a second cabin, connected with the first by a covered roof or porch, which is very convenient, forming together a commodious dwelling....

There are no very good mill-seats on the streams in our[84] neighborhood, but our prairie affords a most eligible site for a windmill; we are therefore going to erect one immediately: the materials are in great forwardness, and we hope to have it in order to grind the fruits of the ensuing harvest.

Two brothers, and the wife of one of them, started from the village of Puttenham, close to our old Wanborough, and have made their way out to us: they are carpenters, and are now very usefully employed in preparing the scantlings for the mill, and other purposes. You may suppose how cordially we received these good people. They landed at Philadelphia, not knowing where on this vast continent they should find us: from thence they were directed to Pittsburg, a wearisome journey over the mountains of more than 300 miles; at Pittsburgh they bought a little boat for six or seven dollars, and came gently down the Ohio, 1,200 miles, to Shawneetown; from thence they proceeded on foot till they found us....

By the first of March I hope to have two plows at work, and may possibly put in 100 acres of corn this spring. Early in May, I think, we shall be all settled in a convenient temporary dwelling, formed of a range of cabins of ten rooms, until we can accomplish our purpose of building a more substantial house.

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KENTUCKY PIONEER LIFE

By Gilbert Imlay

My Dear Friend,

In some of my first letters I gave you an account of the first settlement of this country. The perturbed state of that period, and the savage state of the country, which was one entire wilderness, made the objects of the first emigrants that of security and sustenance, which produced the scheme of several families living together in what were called Stations.

As the country gained strength the Stations began to break up and their inhabitants to spread themselves and settle upon their estates. But the embarrassment they were in for most of the conveniences of life, did not admit of their building any other houses but those of logs and of opening fields in the most expeditious way for planting the Indian corn; the only grain which was cultivated at that time.

The log house is very soon erected, and in consequence of the friendly disposition which exists among those hospitable people, every neighbor flew to the assistance of each other upon occasions of emergencies.

The next object was to open land to cultivation. The fertility of the soil amply repays the laborer for his toil; for if the large trees are not very numerous, and a large proportion of them sugar maple, it is very likely that from this imperfect cultivation, that the ground will yield from[86] 50 to 60 bushels of corn to the acre. The second crop will be more ample; and as the shade is removed by cutting the timber away, a great part of the land will produce from seventy to one hundred bushels of corn from an acre.

The cattle and hogs will find sufficient food in the woods. The horses want no provender the greater part of the year except cane and wild clover. The garden with little attention, produces him all the culinary roots and vegetables necessary for his table.

In three or four years his flock of cattle and sheep will prove sufficient to supply him with both beef and mutton. By the fourth year, provided he is industrious, he may have his plantation in sufficient good order to build a better house.

Such has been the progress of the settlement of this country, from dirty Stations or forts, that it has expanded into fertile fields, blushing orchards, pleasant gardens, neat and commodious houses, mining villages and trading towns.

A taste for the decorum of the table was soon cultivated; the pleasures of gardening were considered not only as useful but amusing. These improvements in the comforts of living and manners awakened a sense of ambition to instruct their youth in useful and accomplished arts.

The distance from Philadelphia by land is between seven and eight hundred miles, and upwards of five hundred from Richmond. The roads and accommodations are tolerably good to the borders of the wilderness; through which it is hardly possible for a carriage to pass, great part of the way being over high and steep hills, upon the banks of rivers and along defiles which in some places seem to threaten you at every step with danger.

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The wilderness which was formerly two hundred miles through without a single habitation, is reduced from the settlement of Powel's Valley to nearly one half that distance; and it is to be expected that in a few years more the remainder of the distance will afford settlements for the accommodation of people traveling that route.

Upon the arrival of emigrants in the country they generally take a view of that part which it is their object to settle in and according to their circumstances fix upon such a situation as may appear eligible for their business. The greater proportion are husbandmen.

(From A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of America, by Gilbert Imlay, New York, 1793.)

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A PIONEER BOYHOOD

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE WEST IN THE FORTIES

By James Burton Pond

In the autumn of 1843 I was four years old and living in a log house in the town of Hector, Tompkins (now Schuyler) County, New York. One of my earliest recollections is of a conversation between my father and mother regarding the expected visit of an uncle and his family, who were coming to bid us good-by before moving to Illinois. My uncle had the "Illinois fever"; he had just returned from a "land-looking" in Illinois, where he had preëmpted a new farm. I remember listening to my uncle's glowing description of the new country out in the far West beyond the Great Lakes, where he was going to make a new home. When he had gone my father talked constantly of Illinois, and the neighbors said he had Illinois fever.

We passed the long winter in our log house adjoining my grandfather's farm. All the clothing and bedding people had in those days was home-made, and every household had its loom. In our home, in the single room on the first floor were father's and mother's bed, the trundle-bed, where four of us children slept (lying crosswise), the loom, the spinning-wheel for wool and tow, the flax-wheel, the swifts, reeling-bars, and the quill-wheel, besides the table and chairs. We had two rooms in the attic, one a spare room and the other for the hired help. Frequently during the long evenings my grandmother and other neighbors would[89] come in with their knitting and their tow-cards, and either knit or card tow or heckle flax, talking about Illinois, where my uncle had gone. That mysterious word was unfathomable to me. It was finally decided that we should go there too, and all our furniture, with bedding, spinning-wheels, loom, and crockery, was packed up, and on Monday morning, March 20, 1844, we started for the new country. At Ithaca our goods were put on board a canal-boat, and the next morning I awoke to find myself on Cayuga Lake, in tow of a steamer. For days we traveled slowly on the Erie Canal, with no memorable incidents except an occasional "low bridge," one of which swept our provision-chest nearly the length of the deck.

One evening my uncle, he of the Illinois fever, met us with his horses and farm-wagon. Father hired another team, and we started for my uncle's new home near Libertyville, Lake County, Illinois, where we arrived the following morning. The house was a log hut with one room and an attic. We found my aunt sick with fever and ague. She was wrapped in thick shawls and blankets, sitting by the fireplace, and shaking like a leaf. Before supper was over, mother had a chill and a shake which lasted nearly half the night. The next day it rained hard, and we all had chills, and my father and uncle went to town, two miles, for some medicine. They returned with a large bundle of thoroughwort weed, or boneset, a tea made from which was the order of the day. It was very bitter, and I used to feel more like taking the consequences of the ague than the remedy.

It was too late for father to secure a farm during that first summer in Illinois, and he obtained work in the blacksmith's shop in Libertyville, hiring two rooms for his family[90] in the frame court-house, a half-finished building on a high spot of ground. It was neither plastered nor sided, only rough boards being nailed on the frame, and when it rained and the wind blew we might as well have been out of doors. Here our first summer and winter in Illinois were spent.

As father had a shake every other day, he could work only half the time, and we were very poor. The ague was in the entire family, my sister and I invariably shaking at the same hour every alternate day, and my mother's and father's shakes coming at about the same time. I have known the whole family to shake together; nor did the neighbors escape. There were few comfortable homes and few well people. Boneset tea was a fixture on every stove fireplace. When my morning to shake arrived, I used to lie down on the floor behind the cook-stove and almost hug the old salamander, even on the warmest summer days, my sister on the opposite side, my younger brothers snuggling up close to me, and my mother sitting as near the fire as she could get, all of us with our teeth chattering together.

So the long, dreary, rainy, ague summer passed away, to be followed by a wet and open winter. Father's scanty earnings were our only support, and my uncle and his family, who were on a new farm two miles away, were even poorer; for my father occasionally had a few dollars in money, while uncle had nothing but what a farm of "new breaking" produced the first year, and with no market for even the slightest product. My aunt, who was broken down and discouraged, would occasionally walk the two miles to see us, and my mother and she would talk about the false hopes and glittering inducements that had led their husbands to become victims to the Illinois fever.

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The spring came early, and father rented a farm with ten acres already plowed and a log house, about three miles east of the village, and there we moved. He had the use of a yoke of oxen, farm-utensils, one cow, seed-grain, and he was to work the farm for half of all it could be made to produce. He filled in odd moments by splitting rails and fencing the ten acres with a seven-railstaked and ridered fence.

The farm was in the heavy woods near the shores of Lake Michigan. A stream of water ran through a deep gully near the house, and there father caught an abundance of fish, while there was plenty of game in the woods. One day he came in and said he had found a deer-lick, and that night he prepared a bundle of hickory bark for a torchlight, and with that and his rifle he left us for the night, and came in early in the morning with a deer. It was the first venison I had ever eaten, and the best. My father's gun supplied our table with venison, wild duck, and squirrel in abundance. Mother, who had brought a collection of garden seeds from the East, managed the garden, and we had corn, beans, cucumbers, and pease, while tomatoes we raised as ornamental plants and called "love-apples." They were then considered poisonous, and it was some years later before we found out that they were a wholesome table delicacy.

We spent only one summer in this place, and then my father rented a farm on the prairie, in the township of Brooklyn, Lake County, about five miles west of Little Fort (now Waukegan, Illinois), and we went there early in the autumn of 1845. It was a happy day for my mother when we moved from our ague-stricken gully, for she prophesied that out on the prairie, where there was pure[92] air, we might possibly escape fever and ague. Only two years before, mother had come from a refined home in western New York, and she had been shut up in these dreary woods in a log house all summer, living on game and boneset tea.

We were up early, and started at sunrise for the eight-mile ride to our new home. Father had come the day before with two teams and a hired man. The chickens had been caught and put into coops that were fastened on the rear end of the wagon, the "garden sauce" was gathered, and two pigs were put into one of the packing-boxes originally brought from the East. The new home was another log house, but a good one, built of hewn logs, and a story and a half high. The owner had built a tavern and was not going to work his farm any longer, so he rented it to father and kept his tavern across the way.

The minister from Little Fort called, and arrangements were made for a church home, and we used to drive five miles every Sunday to "meeting." There was a school for the children, and surrounded as we were by intelligent and thrifty neighbors, my mother began to wear a cheerful look. At this time the family consisted of six children, of whom I was the second, and the eldest son.

Here father began to utilize me, and I saved him many steps; for he seemed to have something for me to do all the time, both when he was at work and when he was resting. On Mondays I was allowed to stay about the place and help mother, pounding clothes, tending baby, and bringing wood and water. I was able to carry only about a third of the pail of water, but my young legs were expected to make frequent journeys to and from the spring, which was over in the cow-pasture, about thirty rods from[93] the house. It was protected from encroachment of cattle and hogs by a three-cornered rail fence, which I had to climb and lift my pail over every time I went for water.

My brother Homer was my constant companion, and he used to help me with my work. Once I had lifted him over the fence to dip up water for me, when he lost his balance, and fell into the spring. The water was about up to his chin, and very cold. He screamed, and mother ran to help him out, dripping with water and dreadfully frightened. We got into the house as father came in to dinner. I was so sorry and frightened over what had happened that I was already severely punished; but father began to scold, and then decided to give me a whipping. He went out to the pasture near the spring and cut some willow switches, and after giving me a severe talking to, began laying the switches on my back and legs. I feared my father ever afterward. Nothing that I could do to please him was left undone, but it was always through fear.

EMIGRANTS.

We lived on a public thoroughfare where hundreds, and I may say thousands, passed on their way to take up new homes in Wisconsin, then the extreme outskirt of civilization in the Northwest. There was not a day in which several wagon-loads of emigrants did not pass our door, and the road was a cloud of dust as far as one could see over the level prairie country. The usual emigrant wagon contained an entire family, with all its earthly possessions, and in some of them families had lived for many weeks. Occasionally a length of stovepipe protruded through the canvas cover, and it was known that this wagon belonged[94] to an aristocratic family, such a one usually having two wagons, one being used as a living-room. Nearly every family had from one to four cows, a coop of chickens attached to the tail-gate, from two to five pigs traveling under the wagon, and occasionally a drove of sheep and a loose colt near by. There was sometimes a rich caravan, or association of families, which had entered a large tract of land and was moving in a body, with horse-teams, droves of cattle, and horses.

As we lived near the road, people usually stopped at our house, either for a drink of fresh spring-water (a scarcity in those days), or to purchase milk, butter, garden-stuff, or anything that we could spare. These were the pioneers of Wisconsin, and were mostly from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. They were the second generation of pioneers of their native States. In asking where they were from we generally asked, "What are you?" If from New York, it was "Empire State"; if from Pennsylvania, "Keystones"; if from Ohio, "Buckeyes." Many more Illinois pioneers moved on to Wisconsin in those days than remained, owing to the dread of fever and ague. In this endless train of "movers" it was not uncommon for my mother to meet people whose families she had known in western New York.

THE LAND-LOOKER.

The land-looker was as much an occupant of the road as the emigrant. He was the advance-picket who had preceded on foot every family that passed, and had located his quarter-section, built his preëmption shanty, and inhabited it three days, which allowed him to hold it one year, while he could return for his family. These men[95] were passing daily, winter and summer, and the tavern near us was crowded nightly with them and with emigrants. Our house, too, was a shelter for many. Father saw the enterprising home-seekers daily, and heard the accounts of those who were returning from their prospective homes after having located; and their glowing descriptions of the country, the climate, and its freedom from ague, gave him the "Wisconsin fever." Mother, however, looked distrustfully on the favorable reports brought back daily, and she pitied the people moving north.

Father had provided a fair living for his large family—sumptuous, indeed, compared with that of our first year in the West. We had friends and neighbors and schools. The owner of the farm wished my father to hire it for two years more, but father would argue that this was his chance to get a home, and here was an opportunity for his boys; he could make nothing on rented land, and he had only been able to keep his family alive for three years. Mother said: "Supposing we do preëmpt, it is only for a year or two, and then the land must be entered and paid for at one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre. Where is the money coming from?" Father told her that many of the emigrants who had no money got friends or speculators to furnish it for half the land. Mother was not enthusiastic, but she finally consented to go if father could get his sister in Connecticut to enter the land for him when due, and to hold it in her name until father could, at some future time, pay for it.

My aunt consented to this, and in February there came a letter from her inclosing a draft for one hundred dollars, with which to buy a yoke of oxen and a wagon with which to work the farm.

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So my father was fitted out as a land-looker, and mother worked all day and all night to make his knapsack.

Father had been gone three weeks when a letter came telling us that he had located a farm in the town of Alto, the southwest-corner township in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin; that it had a log house on it, twelve by fourteen, which he had bought; that ten acres had already been broken by the man of whom he had bought the claim, and that he would return at once with his wagon and oxen for the family.

In March, 1847, we started for the new home.

We were soon in the long line of dust, making our proportion of what we had been accustomed to see for two years. I was to help drive the cows and pigs. Whoever has attempted to drive a hog knows the discouragements with which I met. Whoever has never attempted it can never know. It seemed that if we had wanted them to go the other way it would have been all right. They scattered in different directions several times, and some of them succeeded in getting back home. My chagrin was increased by passing or meeting other emigrant boys whose pigs and cattle kept quietly near the wagons and walked gently along.

It took all day to go about six miles. We stopped overnight near a farm-house, and father, after getting the cattle and pigs in the barn, built a fire by the roadside and prepared our supper. He made tea, and with the cold chicken and bread and butter which mother had given us for the journey, we fared sumptuously. Father brought an armful of hay from the barn near by, and with plenty of coverlets he made up a bed under the wagon, where we slept soundly. This was my first camping out.

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At Fort Atkinson we met the first band of Indians I had ever seen. There was a chief and three or four young buck Indians, as many squaws, and a number of children, all of the Black Hawk tribe. They were on ponies, riding in single file into the town as we were going out. I was so frightened that I cried, and as the chief kept putting his hand to his mouth, saying, "Bread—hungry—bread—hungry," father gave him a loaf of bread. It was not enough, but it was all father would let him have. Homer and I were in favor of giving him everything we had if he would only move on.

After leaving Watertown we came out on what is known as rolling prairie—for miles in every direction a green, wavy sheet of land. No ornamental gardener could make so lovely and charming a lawn, gently rolling, and sloping just enough to relieve the monotony of the flatness of the long stretches of prairie and openings we had passed through. Father told us that these great prairies would always be pasture-land for herds of cattle, as the farmers could not live where there was no timber. To-day the finest farms I know of in America are on these great prairie-lands, but at that time the prospectors avoided such claims and preëmpted only the quarter-sections skirting the prairies, where the oak openings supplied timber for log houses, fences, and fuel.

Trails were now branching in every direction, and after five days of this travel it seemed as though we had been wandering for months without a home. That day we had started at sunrise, resting for three hours at noon, the usual custom at that time. It was ten o'clock when we reached our home.

We were in another log cabin, twelve by fourteen feet[98] square, with hewn log floor, one door, and one window containing the sash with its four panes of glass which father had brought on his journey.

We boys slept in the low garret, climbing a ladder to go to bed. Owing to the exhaustion and excitement of the night before, we were allowed to rest undisturbed, and the sun was well up and shining through the chink-holes in our garret when we awoke. Father had gone with the team to a spring a mile west for a barrel of water. There was no water on our claim, and we were obliged to haul it on a "crotch," a vehicle built from the crotch of a tree, about six by eight inches thick and six feet long, on which a cross-rail is laid, where a barrel can be fastened. The oxen were hitched to it, and they dragged it to and from the spring.

Two beds were fitted across one side of the single downstairs room in our cabin, and father had to shorten the rails of one bedstead to get it into place. Under it was the trundle-bed on which the babies slept, and when this was pulled out, and with the cook-stove, table, four chairs, wood-box, and the ladder in place, there was very little spare room. By father's order, the lower round of the ladder was always my seat.

THE FIRST SCHOOL AT ALTO.

There were neighbors from a half mile to three and five miles away, and they called and offered their assistance to contribute to our comfort. It was found that there were seventeen children within a radius of five miles, and the subject of starting a school was discussed.

The school-house was a log shanty six logs high, with holes for a window and a door, which had been removed[99] and were now a part of Mr. Boardman's new house. Trees were cut down and the trunks split open and holes bored in the ends of each half of the log; legs were put in, and then they were hewed as smooth as an ax could make them, and placed on the ground for benches. Four of these "puncheon" benches were made, and at half-past nine the teacher took her place on a chair, which had been brought especially for her, and called the school to order.

The first thing to do was to get an idea of what books the pupils had. Mother had sent all her children had ever owned, and so had others, and there were Cobb's Spelling-book, Dayball's Arithmetic, Parley's Geography, McGuffey's Reader, Saunders's Spelling-book, Ray's Arithmetic, Spencer's Spelling-book, Adams's Arithmetic, and Saunders's Reader, gathered from all parts of America. There were no duplicates. The school opened with a prayer by Mr. Wilbur.

We were not long in wearing a well-beaten path between our house and the school, which for a number of years was a thoroughfare for pedestrians.

My chief duty after school was to hunt up the cows and drive them home in time for milking, and I came to know every foot of country within a radius of ten miles. No boy's country life can be complete without having hunted cows. "Old Red" wore the bell. Every neighbor in the country had a bell-cow and a cow-bell, and my friend Matt Wood and I always arranged that our cattle should herd together, and they were invariably driven to the same range in the morning. Each of us boys owned dogs, and we knew not only every cow-bell, but every woodchuck-hole and every gopher-hole, and many a time,[100] I fear, father used to milk after dark because our dog had found a deep gopher-hole, and that gopher must be had, milk or no milk, supper or no supper.

The first summer father planted and raised two acres of potatoes, with some cabbages, onions, beets, carrots, and five acres of corn, and he succeeded in splitting rails and putting a fence around ten acres of land. I was trained to all branches of usefulness on a new farm. Once in two weeks I went for the mail to the nearest village, eleven miles away, often returning to tell father that there was a letter in the office with sixpence postage to pay. In those days there was no compulsory prepayment on letters, and it was sometimes months before a turn of any kind would bring the money to get the letter out of the post-office. The New York Weekly Tribune was always a member of our family, and our copy was read by everybody in the settlement. For three years I walked to the village every week for that paper. We children had to listen to my father read it every Sunday afternoon, as it was wicked to play out of doors, and we had only morning church to attend.

A PIONEER CHRISTMAS.

Father came home from Milwaukee at Christmas-time, bringing the flour of a few bushels of wheat, a pair of shoes for my brother and me, a new pair of boots for himself, and some unbleached muslin. Weren't we happy! It was a day of rejoicing. I remember father's going to the woodpile and in a few moments cutting a pile of wood, which gave us the first hot fire of the season. That afternoon mother made bread, and we had salt, pepper, tea, and fresh meat, for father had bought a quarter of beef.

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A NEW LIFE.

We lived in Alto until 1853, and then the farm was abandoned, and my parents, with all the children except myself, moved to the neighboring city of Fond du Lac, where father could work by the day and earn enough to support the family. I was left to work for a neighbor; but I grew so homesick after a lonely Sabbath in a household where there were no children and it was considered wrong to take a walk on Sunday afternoon, that on Monday I took my other shirt from the clothes-line and started for Fond du Lac. I knew the stage-driver, and he gave me a lift.

As we approached the city the driver made me get down, and he told me to follow the sidewalk along the main street until I came to a foundry, next to which was father's house. I followed close behind the stage, keeping in the middle of the road. Soon I found myself in the city, where there were houses and stores on each side of the street, and board walks for pedestrians. I feared to walk on the sidewalks, for I was barefooted, and my feet were muddy and the sidewalks very clean. The people seemed to be dressed up as if for Sunday, and all the boys wore shoes, which excited my pity, for I knew how hot their poor feet must be.

As I groped my way along Main Street I noticed a sign that stretched nearly across the entire building over three stores. In large wooden letters, at least six feet long, were the words "Darling's block." It was the largest building I had ever seen, three stories high, and I ventured to step on to the sidewalk; and while gazing in awe upon the mighty structure my attention was attracted by a noise[102] inside. I walked in and found myself in a printing-office.

As I was taking in the wonderful scene the pressman spoke to me in a gruff voice, asking me what I wanted. "Nothing," I said, trembling, and starting for the door. "Don't you want to learn the trade?" he shouted. "The editor wants an apprentice."

Just then the editor appeared in the doorway of his sanctum. He was a pleasant-faced man, and he asked me in a kindly tone whose boy I was and where I belonged.

"Why, your father is one of my subscribers. I want an apprentice to learn the printer's trade. I can give you twenty-five dollars for the first year, thirty for the second, and fifty dollars and the carrier's address for the third year, with your board and washing."

"All right." In less time than it takes to write it I was behind the press, and in five minutes I was covered with printer's ink from head to foot.

My pioneer days were over.

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"THE PLAINS ACROSS"

By Noah Brooks

During the ten years immediately following the discovery of gold in California, the main-traveled road across the continent was what was known as the Platte River route. Starting from Council Bluffs, Iowa, a town then famous as the "jumping-off place" for California emigrants, the adventurers crossed the Missouri by a rope ferry and clambered up a steep, slippery bank to the site of the modern city of Omaha. The only building of any considerable dimensions in the early fifties was a large, unpainted, barn-like structure, which, we were proudly told, was to be the capitol of the Territory of Nebraska, the Territorial organization of which was authorized by Congress in 1854.

The trail from the Rocky Mountains to Salt Lake valley grew more and more difficult as we approached the rocky fastnesses of the Wahsatch range of mountains, that defends[104] the land of the Latter-Day Saints on its eastern border. Leaving the valley and skirting the northern end of Great Salt Lake, the route followed the general course of the Humboldt, crossed the dreadful desert which takes its name from the river, and we finally caught sight once more of civilization in Honey Lake valley, at the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada. Here the trail began a toilsome ascent of the gigantic mountain wall, and scaling the roof of the world, as it seemed to us, slid down into the valley of the Sacramento through the wooded ridges of the Plumas mining region.

The average cost of a journey to California in those days did not greatly vary whether one took the water route by the way of Cape Horn or the land route by the trail just described. In either case the emigrants usually clubbed together, and the cost per man was therefore considerably reduced. A party of overland emigrants, supplied with a team of horses or oxen,—preferably the latter,—and numbering four or five men, were expected to invest about five hundred dollars for their outfit. This included the cost of provisions, clothing, tent, wagon, and animals, and a small sum of ready money for emergencies by the way. The necessaries of life were few and simple. The commissariat was slender, and included flour, dried beans, coffee, bacon, or "side-meat," and a few small stores—sugar, salt, baking-powder, and the like. In those days the art of canning goods had not been invented, and the only article in that category was the indispensable yeast-powder, without which bread was impossible. The earliest emigrants experimented with hard bread, but soft bread, baked fresh every day, was found more economical and portable, as well as more palatable.

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But, after all, beans and coffee were the mainstay of each well-seasoned and well-equipped party. In our own experience, good luck (more than good management) furnished us with enough of these two necessaries of life to last us from the Missouri to the Pacific. The coffee, it should be explained, was bought in its green state, and was browned and ground as occasion required. That variety of pork product known as side-meat was a boneless slab from the side of a mast-fed porker, salted and smoked. In western Iowa and Missouri we usually found this meat corded up in piles after it had been cured. Corn-meal, that beloved staff of life on the Western frontier, was an unprofitable addition to the stores of the emigrant. It was not "filling," and its nutriment was out of all proportion to its bulk. Hot flour bread, made into the form of biscuits, and dipped in the "dope," or gravy, made by mixing flour and water with the grease extracted from the fried bacon, was our mainstay.

Does the imagination of the epicure revolt at the suggestion of so rude a dish? To hundreds of thousands of weary emigrants, trudging their way across the continent, spending their days and nights in the open air and breathing an atmosphere bright with ozone, even ruder viands than this were as nectar and ambrosia.

The evolution of cooks, teamsters, woodsmen, and herders from the raw materials of a party of emigrants was one of the interesting features of life on the Great Plains. Here was a little company made up of a variety of experiences and aptitudes. Each man's best faculty in a novel service must be discovered. At the outset, none knew who should drive the oxen, who should do the cooking, or whose ingenuity would be taxed to mend broken[106] wagon or tattered clothing. Gradually, and not altogether without grumbling and objection, each man filled his own proper place. No matter if the members of the party were college-bred, society men, farmers' sons, or ex-salesmen; each man found his legitimate vocation after a while. The severest critic of another's work was eventually charged with the labor which he had all along declared was not rightly performed by others. By the time the journey was fairly undertaken, the company was manned in every section as completely as if each worker had been assigned to his place in a council of the Fates. It was just and fit that he who had steadily derided the cooking of[107] every other should show the others how cooking should be done; and common consent gave to the best manager of cattle the arduous post of driver. There was no place for drones, of course, for this was a strenuous life. Before the continent had been crossed the master spirits had asserted themselves. It was an evolution of the fittest.

I have said that these assignments to duty were not accomplished without grumbling and objection. Indeed, the division of labor in a party of emigrants was a prolific cause of quarrel. In our own little company of five there were occasional angry debates while the various burdens were being adjusted, but no outbreak ever occurred. We saw not a little fighting in the camps of others who sometimes jogged along the trail in our company, and these bloody fisticuffs were invariably the outcome of disputes over divisions of labor.

It should not be understood that the length of time required to traverse the distance between the Missouri and the Sacramento was wholly consumed in traveling. Nobody appeared to be in a feverish haste to finish the journey; and it was necessary to make occasional stops on the trail, where conditions were favorable, for the purpose of resting and refitting. A pleasant camping-place, with wood, water, and grass in plenty, was an invitation to halt and take a rest. This was called a "lay-by," and the halt sometimes lasted several days, during which wagon-tires were reset, ox-yokes repaired, clothes mended, and a general clean-up of the entire outfit completed preparatory to another long and uninterrupted drive toward the setting sun. If the stage of the journey immediately before us was an unusually difficult one, the stop was longer and the overhauling more thorough.

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A day's march averaged about twenty miles; an uncommonly good day with favorable conditions would give us twenty-five miles. The distances from camping-place to camping-place were usually well known to all wayfarers. By some subtle agency, information (and sometimes misinformation) was disseminated along the trail before us and behind us, and we generally knew what sort of camping-place we should find each night, and how far it was from the place of the morning start. So, when we halted for the night, we knew pretty accurately how many miles we had covered in that day's tramp.

Of course riding was out of the question. We had one horse, but he was reserved for emergencies, and nobody but a shirk would think of crawling into the wagon, loaded down as it was with the necessaries of life, unless sickness made it impossible for him to walk. In this way we may be said to have walked all the way from the Missouri to the Sacramento. Much walking makes the human leg a mere affair of skin, bone, and sinew. We used to say that our legs were like chair-posts. But then the exercise was "good for the health." Nobody was ever ill.

Grass, wood, and water were three necessities of life on the trail. But these were sometimes very difficult to find. Usually one or two of the party went on ahead of the rest and looked out a suitable camping-place where those essentials could be found. Fuel was sometimes absolutely unobtainable, possibly a few dry weeds and stalks being the only combustible thing to be found.

Emigrants who were dependent upon open fires for cooking were often in very hard case. We were fortunate in the possession of a small sheet-iron camp-stove, for the heating of which a small amount of fuel was sufficient.[109] This handy little apparatus was lashed to the rear end of the wagon when on the trail, and when it was in use, every sort of our simple cookery could be carried on by it with most satisfactory results. When we were obliged to camp for the night on wet ground after a rain, the flat-bottomed camp-stove, well heated and light, was moved from place to place inside the tent until the surface on which we must make our bed was fairly dry. Sometimes, however, we camped down on the damp ground; and sometimes, before we learned the trick of digging a ditch around the tent when signs of rain appeared, we woke to find ourselves lying in puddles of water. In such a case it was better to lie in the water that had been slightly warmed by the heat of one's body than to turn over into a colder stream on the other side. These experiences were novel and interesting; nobody ever suffered seriously from them.

In the matter of the necessaries of life, we had times of plenty and times of scarcity. There were places where our cattle were knee-deep in wild, succulent grasses, and there were times when they had nothing but the coarse and wilted sheaves of grass carried along the trail from the last camp. Flour, coffee, and bacon never failed us; and there were times when we had more fresh meat than we[110] could eat. In the buffalo country, of course, we had the wholesome beef of that then multitudinous animal in every possible variety. In the Rocky Mountain region, antelope, prairie-dogs, black-tail deer, jack-rabbits, and occasionally sage-hens gave us an enjoyable change from our staple diet of bacon and bread. The antelope were very wild and timid, and no one thought of chasing them; they were brought down by stratagem. A bright-colored handkerchief fastened to a ramrod stuck into the ground was a lure which no antelope could resist. A small drove of these inquisitive creatures would circle distantly round and round the strange flag: but ever drawing nearer, sometimes pausing as if to discuss among themselves what that thing could possibly be, they would certainly come at last within gunshot of the patient hunter lying flat on the ground; a rifle-ball would bring down one of the herd, and the rest would disappear as if the earth had swallowed them.

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In the heart of the buffalo country the buffaloes were an insufferable nuisance. Vast herds were moving across our trail from south to north, trampling the moist and grassy soil into a black paste, and so polluting the streams and springs that drinking-water was often difficult to obtain. The vastness of some of these droves was most impressive, in spite of the calamitous ruin they left behind them. As far as the eye could reach, the surface of the earth was a heaving mass of animal life; the ground seemed to be covered with a brown mantle of fur. As we advanced along the trail, the droves would quietly separate to our right and left, leaving a lane along which we traveled with herds on each side of us. From an eminence, looking backward and forward, one could see that we were completely hemmed in before and behind; and the space left for us by the buffalo moved along with us. They never in the least incommoded us by any hostile action; all they asked, apparently, was to be let alone.

The buffalo is not the clumsy animal he looks in captivity or in pictures. It is a fleet horse that can overtake him; and to see him drop into a wallow while on a keen run, roll over and over two or three times, and skip to his feet and away with his comrades with the nimbleness of a kitten, is a sight to be remembered.

Although we traveled a part of the time through what was known as a hostile Indian country, we were never molested by the red men. Friendly Indians came into our camps to beg, to pilfer, or to sell buckskins and moccasins. Before us and behind us were several attacks upon caravans,[113] the victims usually being few in number and unprepared for a skirmish. But while we were in the region deemed dangerous from Indians we massed in with other companies of emigrants, so that we were seldom less than one hundred and fifty strong; a regular watch was kept by night, and the wagons were parked in a circle which could be used as a defense in case of an attack.

In the course of weeks, the camp, wherever it might be pitched, took on the semblance of a home. The tent was our house; the rude cooking-and eating-apparatus and the comfortable bedding were our household furniture, and the live stock about us was our movable property. Except in the most trying and difficult straits, evening found us busy with household cares and amusements. Our neighbors were changeable, it is true, but we often found new and pleasant acquaintances, and sometimes old friends from whom we had been separated for weeks would trundle up and camp near us.

One of the famous landmarks to which we had looked forward with great interest was the Devil's Gate of the Rockies, through which we passed before beginning the climb of the backbone of the continent. It was a far more impressive spectacle than the pass. The gate is double, and through one of its tall, black portals murmurs the Sweetwater on its way to join the North Platte. The trail lies through the other fissure, trail and stream being only a few hundred rods apart.

Two days from Fort Bridger we entered Echo Cañon, one of the most delightful spots which I remember on the long, long trail. The cañon is about twenty miles long, and could be readily traversed in a single day; but we loitered through it, so that we were more than two days in[114] its charmed fastnesses. On each side of the route the cliffs tower to a great height, marked with columnar formations and clouded with red, white, yellow, and drab, like some ancient wall of brick and stone. The crests of these towers are crowded with verdure, and here and there are trees and vines that line the cañon and climb upward to the flying buttresses of the rocky walls. A delicious stream of water crosses and recrosses the trail; and while we were in the cañon, grass and fuel were abundant. To make our comfort complete, great quantities of wild berries hung invitingly from the bushes by the sides of the way. Silvery rivulets fell from the walls of the cañon, and wild vines and flowers in great variety bloomed against the buttresses and donjon-keeps of the formations through which we threaded our way.

Crossing the Weber, we entered one more cañon, and suddenly, one afternoon, emerging from the mouth of Emigrant Cañon, we looked down upon one of the fairest scenes on which the eye of man has ever gazed—the Great Salt Lake valley. It was like a jewel set in the heart of the continent. Deep below us, stretching north and south, was the level floor of the valley. Far to the westward rose a wall of mountains, purple, pink, and blue in the distance. Nearer sparkled the azure waters of the Great Salt Lake.

The route from the city of the Saints lay around the northern end of the lake, but, in order to reach the road to Bear River, we were obliged to cross a few fenced fields, and this involved long parleys with surly owners. We passed through a string of small towns on our way up to the main-traveled trail, the last of these being Box Elder, now known as Brigham City. Box Elder was[115] a settlement of about three hundred people, and boasted a post-office, a blacksmith's shop, a trading-post, and a brewery. At this last-named establishment we bought some fresh yeast, which served us a good turn in breadmaking for many a day thereafter. We bought new flour in Salt Lake City at a fair price, having skimped ourselves on that article for some time on account of the exorbitant cost of it at the trading-posts on the trail. At Fort Bridger, flour was thirty-five dollars a barrel, and bacon was one dollar a pound.

We were now approaching the edge of the Great Desert, which, stretching from the Bitter Root Mountains,[116] in northern Idaho, to the southern boundary of Arizona, interposed for many years a barrier that was supposed to be impassable to the hardy emigrant. Now came long night marches and dreary days spent in traversing a region intolerable with dust, heat, rocky trails, and sideling hills.

The last day's drive in the desert was the hardest of all. Twenty miles lay between us and the Honey Lake valley. It was to be traveled in the night; and as the numerous trains and caravans swept down into the plain from the point of rocks on which I was sitting, waiting for our wagons to come up, it was pathetic to note the intentness with which this multitude of home-seekers and gold-seekers set their faces westward. There was no haste, no fussy anxiety, but the vast multitude of men, women, and children who had left all behind them to look for a new life in an unknown land trooped silently down into the desert waste. The setting sun bathed the plain in golden radiance, and eastward the rocky pinnacles of the ranges through which we had toiled were glorified with purple, gold, and crimson. It was a sight to be remembered—as beautiful as a dream, hiding a wilderness as cruel as death.

Honey Lake belied the sweetness of its name. It was a small sheet of muddy water, but emptying into it was a sparkling river, or creek, known as Susan's River, which, meandering through an emerald valley and watering many a meadow, gave unwonted beauty to a scene the like of which had not been gazed upon by the toil-worn plainsmen for many a day. Here, too, we got our first glimpse of the Sierra Nevada.

After the privation and poverty of the desert, the wild[117] abundance of the forests of the Sierra was luxury indescribable. We camped by crystal waterfalls with rank and succulent grasses all about us; overhead were the spreading branches of noble pines, and our camp-fires were heaped with an extravagance of fuel. But we soon found how hard it was to climb the mountain-range; and when, after a day's solid rest and comfort, we reached the crest of the ridge, we saw that the trail pitched almost perpendicularly over the sharp backbone of the Sierra. Two or three trees that grew by the place where the track led to the brink were scarred and worn nearly through by ropes that had been wound around them to let down the heavy wagons into the abyss below. The cattle were taken out of the teams and driven down through the undergrowth of thickets; and then, making a rope fast to the rear axle of each wagon, one wagon at a time was carefully lowered down the steep declivity.

That arduous labor over, we passed through the "Devil's Corral" and camped in Mountain Meadows, a very paradise of a spot, in which it seemed as if we were surrounded by every luxury imaginable, albeit we had nothing but what uncultivated nature gave us.

The vale of the new Eldorado was tawny and gold with sear grass and wild oats. In the distance rose the misty mountain wall of the Coast Range; nearer a heroic outline of noble peaks broke the yellow abundance of the valley's floor. This was the group known as Sutter's Buttes, near the base of which was Nye's Ranch (now Marysville), the goal of our long tramp. Dogtown, Inskip, and a little host of other mining hamlets, claimed our attention briefly as we swept down into the noble valley, on whose farther edge, by the historic Yuba, we found our last camp.

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Here we met the wave of migration that earlier broke on the shores of the Pacific. In the winter of 1849-50 two hundred and fifty vessels sailed for San Francisco from the ports of the Atlantic States; and their multitudes of men were reinforced by other multitudes from other lands. In a single year the population of the State was augmented by an influx of more than one hundred thousand persons, arriving by sea and by land.

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THE FIRST EMIGRANT TRAIN TO CALIFORNIA

By John Bidwell (Pioneer of '41)

In the spring of 1839—living at the time in the western part of Ohio—being then in my twentieth year, I conceived a desire to see the great prairies of the West, especially those most frequently spoken of, in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. Emigration from the East was tending westward, and settlers had already begun to invade those rich fields.

Starting on foot to Cincinnati, ninety miles distant, I fortunately got a chance to ride most of the way on a wagon loaded with farm produce. My outfit consisted of about $75, the clothes I wore, and a few others in a knapsack which I carried in the usual way strapped upon my shoulders, for in those days travelers did not have valises or trunks. Though traveling was considered dangerous, I had no weapon more formidable than a pocket-knife. From Cincinnati I went down the Ohio River by steamboat to the Mississippi, up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and thence to Burlington, in what was then the Territory of Iowa. Those were bustling days on the western rivers, which were then the chief highways of travel. The scenes at the wood landings I recall as particularly lively and picturesque. Many passengers would save a little by helping to "wood the boat," i. e., by carrying wood down the bank and throwing it on the boat, a special ticket being issued on that condition.

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In 1839 Burlington had perhaps not over two hundred inhabitants, though it was the capital of Iowa Territory. After consultation with the governor, Robert Lucas of Ohio, I concluded to go into the interior and select a tract of land on the Iowa River. In those days one was permitted to take up 160 acres, and where practicable it was usual to take part timber and part prairie. After working awhile at putting up a log house—until all the people in the neighborhood became ill with fever and ague—I concluded to move on and strike out to the south and southwest into Missouri. I traveled across country, sometimes by the sun, without road or trail. There were houses and settlements, but they were scattered; sometimes one would have to go twenty miles to find a place to stay at night.

On my arrival, my money being all spent, I was obliged to accept the first thing that offered, and began teaching school in the country about five miles from the town of Weston, which was located on the north side of the Missouri River and about four miles above Fort Leavenworth in Kansas Territory. Possibly some may suppose it did not take much education to teach a country school at that period in Missouri. The rapid settlement of that new region had brought together people of all classes and conditions, and had thrown into juxtaposition almost every phase of intelligence as well as of illiteracy. But there was no lack of self-reliance or native shrewdness in any class, and I must say that I learned to have a high esteem for the people, among whom I found warm and lifelong friends.

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In November or December of 1840, while still teaching school in Platte County, I came across a Frenchman named Roubideaux, who said he had been to California. He had been a trader in New Mexico, and had followed the road traveled by traders from the frontier of Missouri to Santa Fé. He had probably gone through what is now New Mexico and Arizona into California by the Gila River trail used by the Mexicans. His description of California was in the superlative degree favorable, so much so that I resolved if possible to see that wonderful land, and with others helped to get up a meeting at Weston and invited him to make a statement before it in regard to the country. At that time when a man moved out West, as soon as he was fairly settled he wanted to move again, and naturally every question imaginable was asked in regard to this wonderful country. Roubideaux described it as one of perennial spring and boundless fertility, and laid stress on the countless thousands of wild horses and cattle. He told about oranges, and hence must have been at Los Angeles, or the mission of San Gabriel, a few miles from it. Every conceivable question that we could ask him was answered favorably. Generally the first question which a Missourian asked about a country was whether there was any fever and ague. I remember his answer distinctly. He said there was but one man in California that had ever had a chill there, and it was a matter of so much wonderment to the people of Monterey that they went eighteen miles into the country to see him shake. Nothing could have been more satisfactory on the score of health. He said that the Spanish authorities were most friendly, and that the people were the most hospitable on the globe; that you could travel all over California and it[123] would cost you nothing for horses or food. Even the Indians were friendly. His description of the country made it seem like a Paradise.

The result was that we appointed a corresponding secretary, and a committee to report a plan of organization. A pledge was drawn up in which every signer agreed to purchase a suitable outfit, and to rendezvous at Sapling Grove in what is now the State of Kansas, on the 9th of the following May, armed and equipped to cross the Rocky Mountains to California. We called ourselves the Western Emigration Society, and as soon as the pledge was drawn up every one who agreed to come signed his name to it, and it took like wildfire. In a short time, I think within a month, we had about five hundred names; we also had correspondence on the subject with people all over Missouri, and even as far east as Illinois and Kentucky, and as far south[124] as Arkansas. As soon as the movement was announced in the papers we had many letters of inquiry, and we expected people in considerable numbers to join us. About that time we heard of a man living in Jackson County, Missouri, who had received a letter from a person in California named Dr. Marsh, speaking favorably of the country, and a copy of this letter was published.

Our ignorance of the route was complete. We knew that California lay west, and that was the extent of our knowledge. Some of the maps consulted, supposed of course to be correct, showed a lake in the vicinity of where Salt Lake now is; it was represented as a long lake, three or four hundred miles in extent; narrow and with two outlets, both running into the Pacific Ocean, either apparently larger than the Mississippi River. An intelligent man with whom I boarded—Elam Brown, who till recently lived in California, dying when over ninety years of age—possessed a map that showed these rivers to be[125] large, and he advised me to take tools along to make canoes, so that if we found the country so rough that we could not get along with our wagons we could descend one of those rivers to the Pacific. Even Frémont knew nothing about Salt Lake until 1843, when for the first time he explored it and mapped it correctly, his report being first printed, I think, in 1845.

At the last moment before the time to start for the rendezvous at Sapling Grove—it seemed almost providential—along came a man named George Henshaw, an invalid, from Illinois, I think. He was pretty well dressed, was riding a fine black horse, and had ten or fifteen dollars. I persuaded him to let me take his horse and trade him for a yoke of steers to pull the wagon and a sorry-looking, one-eyed mule for him to ride. We went via Weston to lay in some supplies. One wagon and four or five persons here joined us.

The party consisted of sixty-nine, including men, women, and children. Our teams were of oxen, mules, and horses. We had no cows, as the later emigrants usually had, and the lack of milk was a great deprivation to the children. It was understood that every one should have not less than a barrel of flour with sugar and so forth to suit; but I laid in one hundred pounds of flour more than the usual quantity, besides other things. This I did because we were told that when we got into the mountains we probably would get out of bread and have to live on meat alone, which I thought would kill me even if it did not others. My gun was an old flintlock rifle, but a good one. Old hunters told me to have nothing to do with cap or percussion locks, that they were unreliable, and that if I got my caps or percussion wet I could not shoot, while if I lost my[126] flint I could pick up another on the plains. I doubt whether there was one hundred dollars in money in the whole party, but all were enthusiastic and anxious to go.

In five days after my arrival we were ready to start, but no one knew where to go, not even the captain. Finally a man came up, one of the last to arrive, and announced that a company of Catholic missionaries were on their way from St. Louis to the Flathead nation of Indians with an old Rocky Mountaineer for a guide, and that if we would wait another day they would be up with us. At first we were independent, and thought we could not afford to wait for a slow missionary party. But when we found that no one knew which way to go, we sobered down and waited for them to come up; and it was well we did, for otherwise probably not one of us would ever have reached California, because of our inexperience. Afterwards when we came in contact with Indians our people were so easily excited that if we had not had with us an old mountaineer the result would certainly have been disastrous. The name of the guide was Captain Fitzpatrick; he had been at the head of trapping parties in the Rocky Mountains for many years. He and the missionary party went with us as far as Soda Springs, now in Idaho Territory, whence they turned north to the Flathead nation. The party consisted of three Roman Catholic priests—Father De Smet, Father Pont, Father Mengarini—and ten or eleven French Canadians, and accompanying them were an old mountaineer named John Gray and a young Englishman named Romaine, and also a man named Baker. They seemed glad to have us with them, and we certainly were glad to have their company. Father De Smet had been to the Flathead nation before. He had gone out[127] with a trapping party, and on his return had traveled with only a guide by another route, farther to the north and through hostile tribes. He was genial, of fine presence, and one of the saintliest men I have ever known, and I cannot wonder that the Indians were made to believe him divinely protected. He was a man of great kindness and great affability under all circumstances; nothing seemed to disturb his temper. The Canadians had mules and Red River carts, instead of wagons and horses—two mules to each cart, five or six of them—and in case of steep hills they would hitch three or four of the animals to one cart, always working them tandem. Sometimes a cart would go over, breaking everything in it to pieces; and at such times Father De Smet would be just the same—beaming with good humor.

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In general our route lay from near Westport, where Kansas City now is, northwesterly over the prairie, crossing several streams, till we struck the Platte River. Then we followed along the south side of the Platte to and a day's journey or so along the South Fork. Here the features of the country became more bold and interesting. Then crossing the South Fork of the Platte, and following up the north side for a day or so, we went over to the North Fork and camped at Ash Hollow; thence up the north side of that fork, passing those noted landmarks[129] known as the Court House Rocks, Chimney Rock, Scott's Bluffs, etc., till we came to Fort Laramie, a trading post of the American Fur Company, near which was Lupton's Fort, belonging, as I understood, to some rival company. Thence after several days we came to another noted landmark called Independence Rock, on a branch of the North Platte called the Sweetwater, which we followed up to the head, soon after striking the Little Sandy, and then the Big Sandy, which empties into Green River. Next we crossed Green River to Black Fork, which we followed up till we came to Ham's Fork, at the head of which we crossed the divide between Green and Bear Rivers. Then we followed Bear River down to Soda Springs. The waters of Bear Lake discharged through that river, which we continued to follow down on the west side till we came to Salt Lake. Then we went around the north end of the lake and struck out to the west and southwest.

For a time, until we reached the Platte River, one day was much like another. We set forth every morning and camped every night, detailing men to stand guard. Captain Fitzpatrick and the missionary party would generally take the lead and we would follow. Fitzpatrick knew all about the Indian tribes, and when there was any danger we kept in a more compact body, to protect one another. At other times we would be scattered along, sometimes for half a mile or more. We were generally together, because there was often work to be done to avoid delay. We had to make the road, frequently digging down steep banks, filling gulches, removing stones, etc. In such cases everybody would take a spade or do something to help make the road passable. When we camped at night we usually drew the wagons and carts together in a hollow[130] square and picketed our animals inside in the corral. The wagons were common ones and of no special pattern, and some of them were covered. The tongue of one would be fastened to the back of another. To lessen the danger from Indians, we usually had no fires at night and did our cooking in the daytime.

The first incident was a scare that we had from a party of Cheyenne Indians just before we reached the Platte River, about two weeks after we set out. One of our men who chanced to be out hunting, some distance from the company and behind us, suddenly appeared without mule, gun or pistol, and lacking most of his clothes, and in great excitement reported that he had been surrounded by thousands of Indians. The company, too, became excited, and Captain Fitzpatrick tried, but with little effect, to control and pacify them. Every man started his team into a run, till the oxen, like the mules and horses, were in a full gallop. Captain Fitzpatrick went ahead and directed them to follow, and as fast as they came to the bank of the river he put the wagons in the form of a hollow square and had all the animals securely picketed within. After a while the Indians came in sight. There were only forty of them, but they were well mounted on horses, and were evidently a war party, for they had no women except one, a medicine woman. They came up and camped within a hundred yards of us on the river below. Fitzpatrick told us that they would not have come in that way if they were hostile. Our hunter in his excitement said that there were thousands of them, and that they had robbed him of his gun, mule and pistol. When the Indians had put up their lodges Fitzpatrick and John Gray, the old hunter mentioned, went out to them and by signs[131] were made to understand that the Indians did not intend to hurt the man or to take his mule or gun, but that he was so excited when he saw them that they had to disarm him to keep him from shooting them; they did not know what had become of his pistol or of his clothes, which he said they had torn off. They surrendered the mule and the gun, thus showing that they were friendly. They proved to be Cheyenne Indians. Ever afterwards that man went by the name of Cheyenne Dawson.

On the Platte River, on the afternoon of one of the hottest days we experienced on the plains, we had a taste of a cyclone: first came a terrific shower, followed by a fall of hail to the depth of four inches, some of the stones being as large as turkeys' eggs; and the next day a waterspout—an angry, huge, whirling cloud column, which seemed to draw its water from the Platte River—passed within a quarter of a mile behind us. We stopped and braced ourselves against our wagons to keep them from being overturned. Had it struck us it doubtless would have demolished us.

Guided by Fitzpatrick, we crossed the Rockies at or near the South Pass, where the mountains were apparently low. Some years before a man named William Subletts, an Indian fur trader, went to the Rocky Mountains with goods in wagons, and those were the only wagons that had ever been there before us; sometimes we came across the tracks, but generally they were obliterated, and thus were of no service. Approaching Green River in the Rocky Mountains, it was found that some of the wagons, including Captain Bartleson's, had alcohol on board, and that the owners wanted to find trappers in the Rocky Mountains to whom they might sell it. This was a surprise to many[132] of us, as there had been no drinking on the way. John Gray was sent ahead to see if he could find a trapping party, and he was instructed, if successful, to have them come to a certain place on Green River. He struck a trail, and overtook a party on their way to the buffalo region to lay in provisions, i. e., buffalo meat, and they returned, and came and camped on Green River very soon after our arrival, buying the greater part, if not all, of the alcohol, it first having been diluted so as to make what they called whisky—three or four gallons of water to a gallon of alcohol. Years afterwards we heard of the fate of that party: they were attacked by Indians the very first night after they left us and several of them killed, including the captain of the trapping party, whose name was Frapp. The whisky was probably the cause.

As I have said, at Soda Springs—at the northernmost bend of Bear River—our party separated.

We were now thrown entirely[133] upon our own resources. All the country beyond was to us a veritable terra incognita, and we only knew that California lay to the west. Captain Fitzpatrick was not much better informed, but he had heard that parties had penetrated the country to the southwest and west of Salt Lake to trap for beaver; and by his advice four of our men went with the parties to Fort Hall to consult Captain Grant, who was in charge there, and to gain information. Meanwhile our depleted party slowly made its way down the west side of Bear River.

One morning, just as we were packing up, a party of about ninety Indians, on horseback, a regular war party, were descried coming up. Some of us begged the captain to send men out to prevent them from coming to us while we were in the confusion of packing. But he said, "Boys, you must not show any sign of hostility; if you go out there with guns the Indians will think us hostile, and may get mad and hurt us." However, five or six of us took our guns and went out, and by signs made them halt. They did not prove to be hostile, but they had carbines, and if we had been careless and had let them come near they might, and probably would, have killed us. At last we got packed up and started, and the Indians traveled along three or four hundred yards one side or the other of us or behind us all day. They appeared anxious to trade, and offered a buckskin, well dressed, worth two or three dollars, for three or four charges of powder and three or four balls. This showed that they were in want of ammunition. The carbines indicated that they had had communication with some trading-post belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company. They had buffalo-robes also, which showed that they were a roving hunting party, as[134] there were no buffaloes within three or four hundred miles. At this time I had spoken my mind pretty freely concerning Captain Bartleson's lack of judgment, as one could scarcely help doing under the circumstances.

We now got into a country where there was no grass nor water, and then we began to catechize the men who had gone to Fort Hall. They repeated, "If you go too far south you will get into a desert country and your animals will perish; there will be no water nor grass."

Our course was first westward and then southward, following a river for many days, till we came to its Sink, near which we saw a solitary horse, an indication that trappers had sometime been in that vicinity. We tried to catch him but failed; he had been there long enough to become very wild. We saw many Indians on the Humboldt, especially towards the Sink. There were many tule marshes. The tule is a rush, large, but here not very tall. It was generally completely covered with honeydew, and this in turn was wholly covered with a pediculous-looking insect which fed upon it. The Indians gathered quantities of the honey and pressed it into balls about the size of one's fist, having the appearance of wet bran. At first we greatly relished this Indian food, but when we saw what it was made of—that the insects pressed into the mass were the main ingredient—we lost our appetites and bought no more of it.

From the time we left our wagons many had to walk, and more and more as we advanced. Going down the Humboldt at least half were on foot. Provisions had given out; except a little coarse green grass among the willows along the river the country was dry, bare, and desolate; we saw no game except antelope, and they were[135] scarce and hard to kill; and walking was very fatiguing. Tobacco lovers would surrender their animals for any one to ride who would furnish them with an ounce or two to chew during the day. One day one of these devotees lost his tobacco and went back for it, but failed to find it. An Indian in a friendly manner overtook us, bringing the piece of tobacco, which he had found on our trail or at our latest camp, and surrendered it. The owner, instead of being thankful, accused the Indian of having stolen it—an impossibility, as we had seen no Indians or Indian signs for some days. Perhaps the Indian did not know what it was, else he might have kept it for smoking. But I think otherwise, for, patting his breast, he said, "Shoshone, Shoshone," which was the Indian way of showing he was friendly. The Shoshones were known as always friendly to the whites, and it is not difficult to see how other and distant tribes might claim to be Shoshones as a passport to favor.

On the Humboldt we had a further division of our ranks. In going down the river we went sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other, but mostly on the north side, till we were nearing what are now known as the Humboldt Mountains. We were getting tired, and some were[136] in favor of leaving the oxen, of which we then had only about seven or eight, and rushing on into California. They said there was plenty of beef in California. But some of us said: "No; our oxen are now our only supply of food. We are doing well, making eighteen or twenty miles a day."

Leaving the Sink of the Humboldt, we crossed a considerable stream which must have been Carson River, and came to another stream which must have been Walker River, and followed it up to where it came out of the mountains, which proved to be the Sierra Nevada. We did not know the name of the mountains. Neither had these rivers then been named; nor had they been seen by Kit Carson or Joe Walker, for whom they were named, nor were they seen until 1845 by Frémont, who named them.

We were now in what is at present Nevada, and probably within forty miles of the present boundary of California.

We went on, traveling west as near as we could. When we killed our last ox we shot and ate crows or anything we could kill, and one man shot a wild-cat. We could[137] eat anything. One day in the morning I went ahead, on foot of course, to see if I could kill something, it being understood that the company would keep on as near west as possible and find a practicable road. I followed an Indian trail down into the cañon, meeting many Indians on the way up. They did not molest me, but I did not quite like their looks. I went about ten miles down the cañon, and then began to think it time to strike north to intersect the trail on the company going west. A most difficult time I had scaling the precipice. Once I threw my gun up ahead of me, being unable to hold it and climb, and then was in despair lest I could not get up where it was, but finally I did barely manage to do so, and made my way north. As the darkness came on I was obliged to look down and feel with my feet lest I should pass over the trail of the party without seeing it. Just at dark I came to an enormous fallen tree and tried to go around the top, but the place was too brushy, so I went around the butt, which seemed to me to be about twenty or twenty-five feet above my head. This I suppose to have been one of the fallen trees in the Calaveras Grove of Sequoia gigantea or mammoth trees, as I have since been there, and to my own satisfaction identified the lay of the land and the tree. Hence I concluded that I must have been the first white man who ever saw the Sequoia gigantea, of which I told Frémont when he came to California in 1844. Of course sleep was impossible, for I had neither blanket nor coat, and burned or froze alternately as I turned from one side to the other before the small fire which I had built, until morning, when I started eastward to intersect the trail, thinking the company had turned north. But I traveled until noon and found no trail; then striking south,[138] I came to the camp which I had left the previous morning. The party had gone, but not where they had said they would go; for they had taken the same trail I had followed, into the cañon, and had gone up the south side, which they had found so steep that many of the poor animals could not climb it and had to be left. When I arrived the Indians were there cutting the horses to pieces and carrying off the meat. My situation, alone among strange Indians killing our poor horses, was by no means comfortable. Afterward we found that these Indians were always at war with the Californians. They were known as the Horse Thief Indians, and lived chiefly on horse flesh; they had been in the habit of raiding the ranches even to the very coast, driving away horses by the hundreds into the mountains to eat. That night after dark I overtook the party in camp.

We were now on the edge of the San Joaquin Valley, but we did not even know that we were in California.

As soon as we came in sight of the bottom land of the stream we saw an abundance of antelopes and sandhill cranes. We killed two of each the first evening. Wild grapes also abounded. The next day we killed thirteen deer and antelopes, jerked the meat and got ready to go on, all except the captain's mess of seven or eight, who decided to stay there and lay in meat enough to last them into California! We were really almost down to tidewater, but did not know it.

The next day, judging by the timber we saw, we concluded there was a river to the west. So two men went ahead to see if they could find a trail or a crossing. The timber seen proved to be along what it now known as the San Joaquin River. We sent two men on ahead to spy[139] out the country. At night one of them returned saying they had come across an Indian on horseback without a saddle who wore a cloth jacket but no other clothing. From what they could understand the Indian knew Dr. Marsh and had offered to guide them to his place. He plainly said "Marsh," and of course we supposed it was the Dr. Marsh before referred to who had written the letter to a friend in Jackson County, Missouri, and so it proved. One man went with the Indian to Marsh's ranch and the other came back to tell us what he had done, with the suggestion that we should go on and cross the river (San Joaquin) at the place to which the trail was leading. In that way we found ourselves two days later at Dr. Marsh's ranch, and there we learned that we were really in California and our journey at an end. After six months we had now arrived at the first settlement in California, November 4, 1841.

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RÉSUMÉ OF FRÉMONT'S EXPEDITIONS

BY M. N. O.

A full account of the exploring expeditions of John C. Frémont would form almost a complete history of the great West during that time—from June, 1842, to February, 1854. The three earlier expeditions were made at the expense and under the direction of the Government. The two later ones were private ventures.

The first expedition left Choteau's Landing, near the site of Kansas City, on June 10, 1842. The party consisted of twenty-eight members, with Frémont in command, Charles Preuss, topographical engineer, Lucien Maxwell, hunter, and Kit Carson, guide. It was accompanied by Henry Brant, a son of Colonel J. H. Brant, of St. Louis, and Randolph Benton, Frémont's brother-in-law, a boy of twelve. The remainder of the party, twenty-two in number, were principally Creole or Canadian voyageurs. The party was well armed and mounted, with the exception of the eight cart-drivers. For some distance the expedition followed very nearly the route taken by the first emigrant train, of which General Bidwell was a member, and, like them, met vast herds of buffaloes and other game.

This route followed the general line of the Kansas and Platte Rivers, and for forty miles beyond the junction of[141] the North and South Forks of the Platte it kept close to the latter. At this point the party separated, Frémont with five men continuing along the South Fork, while the others struck across country to the North Fork, and, resuming the emigrant route, passed by Scott's Bluff, Chimney Rock, and other landmarks. At Fort Laramie they were reunited early in July. Every obstruction was thrown in the way of their advance. The trappers, under the well-known mountaineer, Jim Bridger, warned them against the danger of proceeding; and the Indians at Fort Laramie threatened them with destruction if they insisted upon advancing. But warnings and threats alike failed. In a council held at Fort Laramie Frémont announced his intention of pressing on in pursuance of his original plans.

On the 28th of July it was decided that the party should conceal its impedimenta and push forward in light marching order.

The Rocky Mountains were crossed at South Pass on the 8th of August, and the party then struck northward, now for the first time traveling over untrodden ground. After many adventures and much hardship they reached the Wind River Mountains; the highest peak, named, after the first man to make the ascent, Frémont's Peak, was scaled, and the American flag planted upon its summit. This mountain, perhaps the loftiest in the Rocky Mountain system, is 13,570 feet in height. From this point the party returned by way of the Nebraska River, reaching St. Louis on the 17th of October.

The second expedition started in the spring of 1843. Frémont received instructions to connect his explorations of 1842 with the surveys of Commander Wilkes on the Pacific coast. There were thirty-nine men in the party.[142] Mr. Preuss was again topographical engineer; Thomas Fitzpatrick was guide. Theodore Talbot and Frederick Dwight joined the party for personal reasons. These with thirty-two white men, a free colored man, Jacob Dodson, and two Delaware Indians, completed the number.

The preparations for departure being completed, on the 29th of May the party set out, following the general direction taken by the first expedition but farther to the south, crossing the two forks of the Kansas and reaching Fort St. Vrain on the Fourth of July. Instead of turning directly north to Fort Laramie, as he had done in 1842, Frémont took a westerly course. On the 14th, at the point where the Boiling Spring River enters the Arkansas, the party were delighted to meet Kit Carson, and to secure his services as guide. Several parties had been sent out to secure supplies. Failing in this, they returned to Fort St. Vrain. At this point Alexis Godey was engaged as hunter. Frémont says, "In courage and professional skill he was a formidable rival to Carson." Going through the Medicine Butte Pass, following the Platte and the Sweetwater, they crossed the South Pass and struck directly westward to the Bear River, which, flowing in a southerly[143] direction, empties into Great Salt Lake. After some exploration of its northern end, on the 18th of September the party were again united at Fort Hall on the Shoshone, and preparations were made to push on to the Columbia. The cold and the scarcity of provisions decided Frémont to send back a number of the men who had so far accompanied him. Eleven men, among them Basil Lajeunesse, who was an extremely valuable man, returned, for one reason or another, to their homes. The remnant of the party pushed on, following the course of the Snake River to Walla Walla. On the 4th of November they passed the Dalles of the Columbia, and a few days later reached Fort Vancouver. A number of excursions in the vicinity brought into view the snow-covered peaks of Mount Rainier (Mount Tacoma), Mount St. Helen's, and Mount Hood. On the 25th of November the party began its homeward trip, which was accomplished by a wide southerly sweep, and through much privation, danger, and suffering. The path lay first down through Oregon and California, over the snowy passes of the Sierra Nevada, by[144] the waters of the Sacramento to Sutter's Fort. The experiences of travel on the snow-covered mountains, through which their way had to be broken, were terrible. Worn out, sometimes crazed by exposure and suffering, one man after another would wander off and get lost, and the strength of the rest, which was weakness at best, would be taxed to hunt up the wanderers. At last the stragglers were all gathered in except Baptiste Derosier, who was given up for lost, but who turned up two years later in St. Louis.

This expedition through the great valley lying between the Rockies on the east and the Sierra Nevada on the west opened up a country unknown except to Indians and trappers, and disproved the idea, which had hitherto been accepted as fact, that a great waterway led directly westward through the Sierra to the Pacific coast. After an excursion to San Francisco the route southward was resumed, along the direction of the coast and about one hundred miles east of it, to a point not far from Los Angeles, then curving up and proceeding due northeasterly and then northerly till Great Salt Lake was again reached at its southern extremity. This great reëntrant curve of three thousand five hundred miles was traveled over in eight months, during the severities of a winter in the mountains and never once out of sight of snow. During these eight months no word had come back to the East from the party, and grave fears were entertained for their safety.

The third and last Government expedition set out in the autumn of 1845. The object in view was to follow up the Arkansas River to its source in the Rocky Mountains, to complete the exploration of Great Salt Lake, and to[145] extend the survey westward and southwestward to the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada, in order to ascertain the best route by which to reach the Pacific coast in this lower latitude. Matters were in a very unsettled condition; the Mexican war was impending, and trouble was brooding over our southwestern possessions. Before going on this expedition Frémont was brevetted lieutenant and captain at the same time.

Bent's Fort was reached as expeditiously as possible, since the real object of the exploration lay beyond the Rockies, and the winter was fast approaching. The personnel of the party it is difficult to find. Edward Kern took the place of Mr. Preuss as topographer; he was also a valuable acquisition to the party because of his artistic ability. Lieutenants Abert and Peck were under Frémont's[146] command. Jacob Dodson, the colored man who accompanied the second expedition, and a Chinook Indian who had gone back to Washington with Frémont, and two gentlemen, James McDowell and Theodore Talbot, accompanied the expedition. Fitzpatrick again served as guide and Hatcher as hunter. Later they were joined by Alexis Godey, Kit Carson, and Richard Owens, three men who, under Napoleon, says Frémont, would have been made marshals because of their cool courage, keenness, and resolution. When they set out from Bent's Fort the party numbered sixty members, many of them Frémont's old companions. After a short and easy journey they reached the southern end of Great Salt Lake, and spent two weeks exploring it and fixing certain points. Then they struck out in a westerly direction, across the dreary, barren desert west of Great Salt Lake to the foot of the Sierra, by way of the Humboldt River. When the party, after following two routes, met again at Walker's Lake, Frémont found his men too worn and exhausted and the stock of provisions too low to think of trying to cross the mountains together, so the party was again divided. Frémont with fifteen picked men undertook to cross the mountains, get relief at Sutter's, and meet the other and weaker party. These he ordered to go southward, skirting the eastern base of the Sierra till a warmer climate and more open passes were found, and to meet him at an appointed place. In ten days Frémont reached Sutter's Fort, laid in his supplies of cattle, horses, and provisions, and proceeded to the appointed place, but no signs of Talbot's party were to be seen. Owing to a mistake each party went to a different place. Both halted, and turned about, hoping to effect a junction, but to no purpose. Frémont suffered[147] severely from the attacks of hostile Indians. Finally each party found its way separately to the California settlements. Then followed a conflict concerning which there is much controversy. Frémont was compelled by the Mexican governor to retire to Oregon. After serious conflicts with the Klamath Indians he returned to take part in the Bear Flag insurrection, which was the occasion of the conquest of the territory. A difference as to precedence arose between Commodore Stockton of the naval and General Kearny of the land forces. Frémont chose to serve under Stockton, as it was from him in the first instance, before Kearny arrived, that he had received his orders. He was court-martialed for mutiny and disobedience to his superior officer, and was found guilty, but was pardoned in consideration of his distinguished services to his country. Feeling that the verdict was unjust, he threw up his commission, and so ended the last Government expedition.

The fourth expedition was a private venture made at Frémont's own risk and that of Senator Benton. The party followed for some distance the route along the Kansas, turning southward at the junction of the two forks, and striking across to the Arkansas, and so on as far as Bent's Fort. On November 25, 1848, the party, thirty-two in number, left the upper pueblo of the Arkansas with one hundred good mules and ample provision for crossing the St. Johns Mountains, part of the Rocky Mountain System. They had for guide a well-known mountaineer, Bill Williams, but he proved a blind leader of the blind. Instead of finding a pass, he led the party over the top of the highest mountains, where there was no pasturage and where they were exposed to intense suffering and toil and terrible loss of life: every mule and horse, and one-third of the[148] men, perished from starvation or freezing. The rescued remnant of the party moved southward to Taos, and so by a more southerly route to California. The addition made to geographical knowledge by this disastrous expedition was not great. Frémont believed that if they had not been misled by their guide he would have discovered the best route to California.

In March, 1852, an appropriation was made by the Government for further surveys of the great western routes. A highway and railroad were growing more and more necessary since the acquisition of California. Frémont, on the strength of this, determined to prove his belief about the central route which he had so disastrously failed to find on his fourth expedition. In August, 1853, he set out on his last expedition. After two weeks' detention in consequence of Frémont's illness, the party was again set in motion.[149] It crossed the Rockies at Cochetopa Pass, not far above the scene of the terrible suffering in the preceding exploration. For a time it seemed as though the experiences of the fourth expedition were going to be repeated. Provisions became very scarce, and at last failed entirely, and then the explorers began to kill and devour their horses. Colonel Frémont called his men together and made them take a solemn oath never to resort to cannibalism, no matter what extremities they might reach. Times grew worse; they were reduced to living upon the hides, entrails, and burned bones of their horses. By these and by a certain variety of cactus which they occasionally were able to get from under the snow, life was sustained. In this way the party of twenty-two lived for fifty days, tramping through the snow with Frémont at their head treading out a pathway for his men. At last the entire party became barefoot. On February 1 Mr. Fuller gave out. The snow was very deep; his feet were severely frozen, and he found it impossible to advance. He was put upon one of the remaining horses and the men divided their miserable pittances of rations to increase his. Almost in sight of succor he died,—in Frémont's words,—"like a man, on horseback in his saddle, and we buried him like a soldier on the spot where he fell." Frémont, in the words of Benton, "went straight to the spot where the guide had gone astray, followed the course described by the mountain men, and found safe and easy passes all the way to California through a good country and upon the straight line of 38° and 39°." It probably did not seem such a "safe and easy" thing to the starving and half-frozen men during those fifty days of anguish. At last, after they had been forty-eight hours without a morsel of food, relief came to the party.

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Something of the practical value of these explorations may be inferred from the fact that the great railroads connecting East and West lie in large measure through the country explored by Frémont, sometimes in the very lines he followed; and this is equally true of the highways.

The winter of this last exploration was exceptionally severe; and since the point Frémont wished to demonstrate was the practicability of this route in winter, the season was peculiarly favorable.

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[151]

ROUGH TIMES IN ROUGH PLACES
A PERSONAL NARRATIVE

By C. G. McGehee

[The earlier explorations of Frémont through the Rocky Mountains and into California—those of 1842, 1843, and 1845—were made under the direction and at the expense of the United States Government, and of these we have full reports. Far less is known of the fourth expedition, which he made in 1848-49, at private expense.

The following article is made up of the records and diary of a member of the party, and left at his death.

As far as Pueblo, on the Arkansas River, at the entrance to the Rocky Mountains, this party followed very nearly the same line taken by the expedition of 1844, which in the main follows the present route of railway travel on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé line. The experiences of the party in their slow progress over the plains—their encounters with Indians, buffaloes, elk, antelopes, and wild horses—are not unique, and will, therefore, be omitted. We take up the diary where the old trail is left and the party plunges into the unknown mazes of the Rockies under the guidance of one of the trappers, named Bill Williams,—of a type which has long passed out of existence,—and who is thus described:]

Bill Williams was the most successful trapper in the mountains, and the best acquainted with the ways and habits of the wild tribes among and near whom he spent his adventurous life. He first came to the West as a sort of missionary to the Osages. But "Old Bill" laid aside his Christianity and took up his rifle and came to the mountains[152] He was full of oddities in appearance, manner, conversation, and actions. He generally went out alone into the mountains, and would remain there trapping by himself for several months together, his lonely camps being often pitched in the vicinity of hostile savages. But he was as well versed in stratagem as they, and though he bore the marks of balls and arrows, he was a terror to them in single fight.

He was a dead shot with a rifle, though he always shot with a "double wabble"; he never could hold his gun still, yet his ball went always to the spot on a single shot. Though a most indefatigable walker, he never could walk on a straight line, but went staggering along, first on one side and then the other. He was an expert horseman; scarce a horse or mule could unseat him. He rode leaning forward upon the pommel, with his rifle before him, his stirrups ridiculously short, and his breeches rubbed up to his knees, leaving his legs bare even in freezing cold weather. He wore a loose monkey-jacket or a buckskin hunting-shirt, and for his head-covering a blanket-cap, the two top corners drawn up into two wolfish, satyr-like ears, giving him somewhat the appearance of the representations we generally meet with of his Satanic Majesty, at the same time rendering his tout ensemble exceedingly ludicrous. He was a perfect specimen of his kind, an embodiment of the reckless and extravagant propensity of the mountaineers, and he pursued his lucrative but perilous vocation from an innate love of its excitement and dangers. For twenty-one years he had lived in the mountains without returning to civilized life until he was taken back under guard, a year or two previous, by Captain Cook, for the offense of manœuvering and acting the Indian in his buckskin suit on the plains, thereby deceiving the captain into the belief that[153] he was an Indian, and giving his men a fruitless chase of several miles over the prairies before they could overtake him on his pony, much to his diversion and the officer's chagrin.

Such was old Bill Williams—he who was destined to be our guide at this time. But it was not without some hesitation that he consented to go, for most of the old trappers at the pueblo declared that it was impossible to cross the mountains at that time; that the cold upon the mountains was unprecedented, and the snow deeper than they had ever known it so early in the year. However, Old Bill concluded to go, for he thought we could manage to get through, though not without considerable suffering.

On the 26th of November [1848] we entered the Rocky Mountains, which had been for days looming up before us, presenting to view one continuous sheet of snow. The snow already covered the mountains and was rapidly deepening. I have frequently since called to mind the expression of one of the men as we rode along before entering Hard Scrabble. As we looked upon the stormy mountain so portentous of the future, he said, "Friends, I don't want my bones to bleach upon those mountains." Poor fellow, little did he dream of what the future would be!

In the evening, from our first camp, eight miles in the mountains, several of us climbed to a high point to take a last look at the plains. The sight was beautiful; the snow-covered plain far beneath us stretching eastward as far as the eye could reach, while on the opposite side frowned the almost perpendicular wall of high mountains.

We entered the mountains on foot, packing our saddle-mules with corn to sustain the animals. We traveled on, laboring through the deep snow on the rugged mountain[154] range, passing successively through what are called White Mountain Valley and Wet Mountain Valley into Grand River Valley. The cold was intense, and storms frequently compelled us to lie in camp, from the impossibility of forcing the mules against them. A number of the men were frozen; the animals became exhausted from the inclemency of the weather and want of food, what little grass there was being all buried in the snow. As we proceeded matters grew worse and worse. The mules gave out one by one and dropped down in the trail, and their packs were placed upon the saddle-mules. The cold became more and more intense, so many degrees below zero that the mercury sank entirely into the bulb. The breath would freeze upon the men's faces and their lips become so stiff from the ice that it was almost impossible to speak; the long beard and hair stood out white and stiff with the frost. The aspect of the mules was as bad as that of the men; their eyelashes and the long beard about their mouths were frozen stiff, and their breath settled upon their breasts and sides until they were perfectly white with frost. The snow, too, would clog under their hoofs until it formed a ball six inches long, making them appear as though they were walking on stilts. With the deep snow around us, and the pendant frost upon the leafless trees, Nature and ourselves presented a very harmonious picture. Two trappers, Old Bill informed us, had been frozen to death here the year previous.

After coming through Robideaux's Pass, which was exceedingly difficult, we descended into Grand River Valley. The snow lay deep, as elsewhere, and there was no sign of vegetation. One broad, white, dreary-looking plain lay before us, bounded by lofty white mountains. The Rio[155] Grande lay fifty miles ahead, so we determined to get through the snow-covered plain as quickly as possible. We traveled late and camped in the middle of it, without any shelter from the winds, and with no fuel but some wild sage, a small shrub which grew sparsely around. At night the thermometer stood at seventeen degrees below zero. During the day Ducatel, a young fellow in the company, had come very near freezing to death. By collecting a quantity of the sage we made sufficient fire to cook, or rather half-cook, our supper of deer meat, five deer having been killed that evening by two of the men. Bolting down the half-cooked meat, we quickly turned into our blankets in order to keep tolerably warm and to protect ourselves against the driving snow, for since leaving the States we had scarcely stretched our tents. In the night, as ill luck would have it, our mules, poor creatures, which had stood shivering in the cold with bowed backs and drooping heads, suffering from their exposed situation and half-starved, being now reduced to a pint of corn twice a day, and having no other resource for food, broke loose from their weak fastenings of sage bushes and started off en masse on the back trail. As soon as it was ascertained that they were gone, in the middle of the night, we had to rise from our beds, lifting half a foot of snow with our top blankets, and strike out in pursuit of them. We overtook them several miles from camp, and, taking them back, made them secure. But we rested little the remainder of the night.

The next day we reached the Rio Grande del Norte. This we found frozen over, and we camped on the river bottom, which is thickly timbered with cottonwood and willow. Here my feet and those of several others were frozen—the result in part of wearing boots, for which I quickly[156] substituted moccasins, with blanket wrappers, which are much warmer than socks, and which, with leggings of the same material, afford the best protection for the lower extremities against severe cold.

Continuing up the river two or three days, we again entered the mountains, which soon assumed a very rugged character. Nature, in the ascent towards the Sierra Madre, presents herself with all her features prominent and strongly marked, her figures bold and colossal. Our progress became slow and laborious. Our track lay through deep mountain gorges, amid towering precipices and beetling crags, and along steep declivities where at any other season it would have been next to impossible to travel, but where now the deep snow afforded a secure foothold. In making the ascent of some of these precipitous mountain sides, now and then a mule would lose its footing and go tumbling and rolling many feet down. My saddle mule took one of these tumbles. Losing her foothold, she got her rope hitched upon a large log which lay loosely balanced on the rocks, and, knocking me down and jerking the log clear over my head, they went tumbling down together. But fortunately no one was hurt. A great obstacle to our progress were the rapid, rough-bottomed, but boggy streams which we had frequently to encounter in the deep and narrow ravines, where the mules would get balked, half a dozen at a time, with their packs on. Then we had to wade in up to our middle among the floating ice in the freezing water to help them out.

The farther we went the more obstacles we had to encounter; difficulties beset us so thickly on every hand as we advanced that they threatened to thwart our expedition. The snow became deeper daily, and to advance was but adding[157] dangers to difficulties. About one-third of the men were already more or less frost-bitten; every night some of the mules would freeze to death, and every day as many more would give out from exhaustion and be left on the trail.... Finally, on the 17th of December, after frequent ineffectual attempts, we found that we could force our way no farther. By our utmost endeavors with mauls and spades we could make but half a mile or a mile per day. The cold became more severe, and storms constant, so that nothing was visible at times through the thick driving snow. For days in succession we would labor to beat a trail a few hundred yards in length, but the next day the storm would leave no trace of the previous day's work. We were on the St. John Mountain, a section of the Sierra Madre and the main range of the Rocky Mountains proper. At an elevation of 11,000 feet the cold was so intense and the atmosphere so rare that respiration became difficult; the least exertion became laborious and fatiguing, and would sometimes cause the blood to start from lips and nose. The mercury in the thermometer stood 20° below zero, and the snow was here from four to thirty feet deep. When we built our camp-fires deep pits were formed by the melting of the snow, completely concealing the different messes from each other. Down in these holes we slept, spreading our blankets upon the snow, every morning crawling out from under a deep covering of snow which had fallen upon us during the night. The strong pine smoke,—for here there was no timber but pine,—together with the reflection from the snow, so affected our sight that at times we could scarcely see. The snow drifted over us continually, driven about by the violence of the chill blasts which swept over the mountains.

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Besides ourselves and our mules, no vestige of animal life appeared here in this lofty and dreary solitude; not even the ravens uttered their hoarse cry, nor the wolves their hollow and dismal howl. Finally nearly the entire band of our one hundred mules had frozen to death. After remaining in this condition for five days without being able to move camp, the colonel [Frémont] determined to return as quickly as possible by a different course to the Rio Grande. There we had left game upon which we could subsist until a party, to be previously despatched, should return with relief. So on the 22d of December we commenced our move, crossing over the bleak mountain strewn with the frozen mules, and packing our baggage with us. We were more than a week moving our camp and equipage over the top of this mountain, a distance of two miles from our first camp. The day we began to move (our provisions having been all consumed, except a small portion of macaroni and sugar, reserved against hard times), we commenced to eat the carcasses of the frozen mules. It was hoped we might save the few that yet lived, but this proving impossible, we began to kill and eat the surviving ones. On Christmas Day the colonel despatched a party of four men, King, Croitzfeldt, Brackenridge, and Bill Williams, to proceed down the Rio del Norte with all possible speed to Albuquerque, where they were to procure provisions and mules to relieve us. He allowed them sixteen days to go and return. We made our Christmas and New Year's dinner on mule meat,—not the fattest, as may be judged,—and continued to feed upon it while it was within reach.... At last we reached the river, but we found no game; the deer and elk had been driven off by the deep snow. For days we had been anxiously looking[159] for the return of King's party with relief. The time allotted him had already expired; day after day passed, but with no prospect of relief. We concluded that the party had been attacked by Indians, or that they had lost their way and had perished. The colonel, who had moved down to the river before us, waited two days longer, and then, taking just enough provision before it was all exhausted to last them along the river, himself started off with Mr. Preuss, Godey, Theodore (Godey's nephew), and Sanders, the colonel's servant-man, intending to find out what had become of the party and hasten them back, or, if our fears concerning them proved true, to push on himself to the nearest settlement and send relief. He left an order, which we scarcely knew how to interpret, to the effect that we must finish packing the baggage to the river, and hasten on down as speedily as possible to the mouth of Rabbit River where we would meet relief, and that if we wished to see him again we must be in a hurry about it, as he was going on to California.

Two days after the colonel left we had all assembled on the river. The last of our provisions had been consumed, and we had been living for several days upon parfleche. Our condition was perilous in the extreme. Starvation stared us in the face; to remain there longer was certain death. We held a consultation and determined to start down the river the next day and try to make our way to some settlement where we could get relief; in the mean time keeping as much together as possible, and hunting along as we went as our only chance of safety.

Now commenced a train of horrors which it is painful to force the mind to dwell upon, and which the memory shrinks from. Before we had proceeded far Manuel, a[160] California Indian of the Cosumne tribe, who had his feet badly frozen, stopped and begged Mr. Vincent Haler to shoot him, and failing to meet death in this way turned back to the lodge at the camp we had left, there to await his fate. The same day Wise lay down on the ice and died; and the Indian boys, Joaquin and Gregorio, who came along afterward, having stopped back to get some wood for Manuel, seeing his body, covered it over with brush and snow. That night Carver, crazed by hunger, raved terribly all night, so that some in the camp with him became alarmed for their safety. He told them, if any would follow him back, he had a plan by which they might live. The next day he wandered off and we never saw him again. The next night Sorel, his system wrought upon by hunger, cold, and exhaustion, took a violent fit which lasted for some time, and to which succeeded an entire prostration of all his faculties. At the same time he was almost totally snow-blind. Poor fellow, the next day he traveled as long as his strength would allow, and then, telling us we would have to leave him, that he could go no farther, blind with snow he lay down on the river-bank to die. Moran soon joined him, and they never came up again. Late at night, arriving one by one, we all came into a camp together on the river-bank. Gloom and despondency were depicted on every face. Our condition had become perfectly desperate. We knew not what to do; the candles and parfleche had kept us alive thus far, but these were gone. Our appearance was most desolate as we sat in silence around the fires, in view of a fast approaching death by starvation, while hunger gnawed upon our vitals. Then Vincent Haler, to whom the colonel had left the charge of the camp, and whom for that reason we had allowed to have the chief[161] direction, spoke up and told us that he then and there threw up all authority; that he could do nothing, and knew not what to advise; that he looked upon our condition as hopeless, but he would suggest, as the best advice he could give, that we break up into small parties, and, hunting along, make the best of our way down separately, each party making use of all the advantages that might fall in its way, so that if any should chance to get through to a settlement they could forward relief to the others.... It was curious to hear different men tell of the workings of the mind when they were starving. Some were constantly dreaming or imagining that they saw before them a bountiful feast, and would make selections of different dishes. Others engaged their minds with other thoughts. For my part, I kept my mind amused by entering continually into all the minutiæ of farming, or of some other systematic business which would keep up a train of thought, or by working a mental solution of mathematical problems, bringing in review the rudiments of some science, or by laying out plans for the future, all having a connection with home and after life. So in this way never allowing myself to think upon the hopelessness of our condition, yet always keeping my eyes open to every chance, I kept hope alive and never once suffered myself to despond. And to this course I greatly attribute my support, for there were stronger men who, by worrying themselves, doubtless hastened their death. Ten out of our party of thirty-three that entered the mountains had perished, and a few days more would have finished the others.

Late in the afternoon of February 9, cold, hungry, and weary, with no little joy we all at once hailed the sight of the little Pueblo of the Colorado. We raised a yell as we[162] came in sight which made the Pueblanos stand out and gaze. In a few minutes, with their assistance, we struggled forward with them and sought the comfort which the place afforded.

In sight of Taos, and several miles to the southeast, at the mouth of a deep gorge or cañon by which the Taos River debouches from the mountains, is a walled town or pueblo, one of a great many of the same kind in this country, inhabited by the Pueblos or civilized Indians, a remnant of the race of Montezuma. They live in houses built of stone and earth, or of adobe, most of which at this place were three or four stories high, and some of which even attained the height of eleven stories, each story receding a few feet back from the front of the one below it, and each one reached by a ladder placed against the wall, communicating with the door on top, and capable of being let down or drawn up at pleasure. A high mud wall incloses the buildings, which front towards the center, and in the middle is a lofty church of the same material as the other buildings, with walls six feet thick.

At Taos we first heard with certainty of the abundance of gold in California, the first account of which had reached the States immediately before our departure, but was scarcely believed.

On the 13th of February, having laid in a supply of provisions from the quartermaster's department, being facilitated by the generous kindness of the army officers, and having hired muleteers and a train of mules to take us down to Albuquerque, we set out for Santa Fé.

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KIT CARSON, LAST OF THE TRAIL-MAKERS

By Charles M. Harvey

In his various activities, Carson played many parts, including those of hunter, ranchman, and miner.

As historians and writers of Western romance picture him, Kit Carson was solely an Indian-fighter and scout. Frontier exigencies, indeed, compelled him to be these, but he was much more. He was a sagacious civic chieftain as well as intrepid leader in war, Indian, foreign and civil; a wise counselor of red men and white; a man who touched the West's wild life at more points than any other person of any day; a man who blazed trails on which great commonwealths were afterward built, and who helped to build some of them.

Born in Kentucky ten months later than Lincoln, and seventy-five miles east of Lincoln's birthplace, Kit Carson, at an early age, was carried to Missouri by his parents. He received little school education, but learned to ride, to handle a rifle, and to trap bear and beaver on that borderline of civilization. He was set to work at a trade which had no attractions for him; and his imagination was fired by the tales of the strange and stirring scenes and deeds in the vast expanse off toward the sunset that came to him through passing hunters and traders. The Missouri Intelligencer, a weekly newspaper published in Franklin, on the Missouri River, in its issue of October 12, 1826, tells the sequel:

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Notice is hereby given to all persons that Christopher Carson, a boy about sixteen years old, small for his age, but thick-set, with light hair, ran away from the subscriber, living in Franklin, Howard County, Missouri, to whom he had been bound to learn the saddler's trade, on or about the 1st of September last. He is supposed to have made his way to the upper part of the state. All persons are notified not to harbor, support, or assist said boy, under penalty of the law. One cent reward will be given to any person who will bring back the said boy.

David Workman.

Six years earlier than this, on the banks of the Missouri, and a hundred miles east of Franklin, died Daniel Boone. In the retrospect, Carson's name naturally associates itself with Boone's. On a broader field, in the face of obstacles and perils equally formidable, with a greater variety of resources, and with a far readier adaptability to rapidly changing conditions, Carson continued the rôle of empire-builder which Boone had begun.

In 1826, the only States west of the Mississippi were Missouri and Louisiana, and these, with the Territory of Arkansas, contained not much more than a third as many inhabitants as a single city of that region, St. Louis, has in 1910. Our present Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California, with parts of Colorado and Wyoming, belonged to Mexico, and, with Mexico, had just broken away from Spain. Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with large portions of Wyoming and Montana, were in controversy between the United States and England, and were to remain in that condition for twenty years longer. West and southwest of the Missouri, and on its upper waters for hundreds of miles east of that river, roamed some of the most warlike and powerful Indian tribes of North America. Except that, in the interval, the capital of the[165] southwest territory had swung from Madrid, Spain, to Mexico, no perceptible change had taken place on the western frontier since the days, twenty years earlier, when Lewis and Clark explored the region from the mouth of the Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia; or since Captain Zebulon M. Pike, seeking the sources of the Red River, entered Spanish territory unawares, in the southern part of the present Colorado, and was carried a prisoner before Charles IV's governor-general at Santa Fé. In no age or land did adventure ever offer a more attractive field to daring and enterprise than that which spread itself out before young Carson at the moment when, fleeing from the little saddler's shop, he plunged into the current of the stirring life off to the westward.

First as a teamster on the Santa Fé Trail, of which Franklin was then the eastern terminus, then as a worker at the copper mines on the Gila, and afterward as a hunter, trapper, and guide across the West's wide spaces, Carson traversed a large part of the region from the Missouri to the Sacramento, from the Gulf of California to the upper reaches of the Columbia, and, as exigencies demanded, alternately fighting, fleeing from, or affiliating with Comanches, Apaches, Sioux, Pawnees, and Blackfeet. Thus he was thrown into active association with St. Vrain, the Bents, Ewing Young, Fitzpatrick, Bill Williams, Jim Bridger, the[166] Sublettes, and other well-known plainsmen and mountaineers of the middle third of the nineteenth century, and won a reputation for initiative, versatility, and daring which made him a marked figure among the frontier leaders of his day. Moreover, in the midst of his exciting activities he found time to marry, to establish a home, and to practise the civic virtues which, refusing to lend themselves to picturesque treatment, have eluded the writers of romance.

At this time, May, 1842, Lieutenant John C. Frémont, on his way up the Mississippi with the first of his exploration parties, fell in with Carson and induced him to enter the government service as the official guide of the expedition. He afterward wrote:

On the boat I met Kit Carson. He was returning from putting his little daughter in a convent school in St. Louis. I was pleased with him and his manner of address at this first meeting. He was a man of medium height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a clear, steady blue eye and frank speech and manner—quiet and unassuming.

Carson, then a little less than thirty-three years of age, was already a national character. The association which began at that time lasted to the end of the Mexican War.

Washington, a city which saw many strange spectacles, had a novel sight on the June day of 1847 when Kit Carson entered it with letters from Frémont. In various phrase, this is the substance of what the newspapers of Washington, New York, and Boston said: Here is the man who has blazed paths for the Pathfinder from the mouth of the Missouri to the Golden Gate; who, in 1846, guided General Stephen W. Kearny's column of the Army of the West[167] through New Mexico to the Pacific; who, when Kearny was surrounded and besieged by the Mexicans, brought Commodore Stockton's forces to the rescue; and who has just ridden from Los Angeles, nearly 4,000 miles, with a military escort for the first 1200 miles of the way, eluding or fighting Mexicans and Indians, as circumstances dictated, carrying to President Polk and to War Secretary Marcy the story of the conquest of California and of the raising of the Stars and Stripes along the Pacific coast.

A little knowledge of history, coupled with even a smaller amount of historical imagination, will enable us to picture the sensation which Carson and his story caused at the Capital. Polk, Webster, Clay, and the other statesmen who met him were impressed with his quiet dignity, his candor and the absence of swagger in his demeanor. No longer could Congress listen with the old-time seriousness to the tales of the alleged Sahara barrenness of the western plains, for Frémont's story, just published in its first instalment, told of streams, of occasional tracts of timber, and of vast herds of buffalo. And here in Washington was the man who had piloted Frémont on his expeditions. From this time dates the decline of the myth of the Great American Desert, which the reports of Pike and of Long and Irving's chronicle of the overland march of the Astorians projected across the map of the second quarter of the nineteenth century from the western border of Missouri to the Sierra Nevada. With their imperialist notions, Senators Benton, Cass, and Douglas saw in Carson the advance courier of manifest destiny.

With the modesty which was one of his characteristics, Carson declined to accept himself at the appraisement which Washington gave him. As he viewed them, his[168] achievements were merely part of his day's work, for the performance of which he deserved no special credit. Accordingly he left the Capital gladly with the despatches which Polk gave him for the military commander in California, and then, after another journey back to Washington, he returned, in 1848, to Taos, and resumed the life of a ranchman, which had been interrupted six years earlier.

Once more now, in Carson's case, we see the initiative, the versatility, and the resourcefulness which the frontier conditions of the older day demanded. In their widely different fields, Crockett, Sam Houston, and Lincoln disclosed these qualities. Appointed in 1853 Indian agent for the district of New Mexico and vicinity by President Pierce,—a post which he held till his death, except for the interlude of the Civil War, in which he rose to the rank of a brigadier-general,—he entered a sphere in which he gained a new distinction. The most formidable Indian-fighter of his age, he was equally successful as a counselor and conciliator of Indians. His administration stands guiltless of any complicity in the "century of dishonor."

As a peacemaker between red men and white and between red men and red, Carson was more effective than a regiment of cavalry. This was because he knew the Indian's nature, talked his tongue, took pains to learn his specific grievances, and could look at things from his point of view. The Indian had confidence in Carson in a larger degree than in any other agent of the older day except General William Clark, Lewis's old partner in the exploration of 1804-06, who, from Monroe's days in the Presidency to Van Buren's, was superintendent of Indian affairs, with headquarters at St. Louis. Except Clark, he was more[169] active in treaty-making between the Government and the red man than any other agent down to his time.

Socially as well as physically Carson was a path-blazer. With the Dawes severalty act of 1887 began a revolution in our methods of dealing with the red men. Many years before that statute was dreamed of, Carson recommended that the Indians be taught to cultivate the soil, that allotments of land be given to them as they become capable of using them, that they be trained to become self-supporting, and that they be prepared to merge themselves into the mass of the country's citizenship. In a crude and general way our Indian policy for the last quarter of a century has proceeded along these lines.

More than any other Indian agent of his day or earlier, Carson exerted influence with the national authorities to induce them to listen to the appeals of the country's wards, to remove their grievances, as far as practicable, to deal with them as individuals, and to arouse in them an ambition to rise to the industrial status of their white neighbors.

Although more than forty-two years have passed since Carson's death many of his acquaintances are still living in various parts of the West. In talks which I have had with some of them in the past year or two they revealed him on a side which the historical and fiction writers never disclosed. As a youth on the plains I caught a glimpse of him in the last year of his life, and as he had always been a hero to me as a boy beyond any other frontier character, I was surprised at the absence in his appearance of everything traditionally associated with the aspect of an Indian fighter. Although he was still alert and resolute, his face had the kindly look which reminded me of Father De Smet, the head of the mission among the Flatheads on the Bitter[170] Root River, in Montana, whom I had met shortly before that time.

"One of my most vivid recollections of Carson," says Major Rafael Chacon, of Trinidad, Colorado, who was an officer in his company of scouts in the campaign of 1855 against the Utes and Apaches, and who was a captain and later on a major in the First Regiment of New Mexican Volunteers in the Civil War, of which Carson was the colonel, "was of one day in 1862 in Albuquerque, when I saw him lying on an Indian blanket in front of his quarters, with his children gleefully crawling all over him and taking from his pockets the candy and the lumps of sugar which he had purchased for them. Their mother, his second wife, Dona Josefa Jaamillo, to whom he was ardently devoted, he called by the pet name of Chipita."

Jacob Beard, eighty-two years of age, of Monrovia, California, who became acquainted with Carson at Taos in 1847, says one of his most pleasant memories is of the day in 1852 when, while working on a ranch near San Francisco, he met Carson, who had just reached that city with a great drove of sheep which he and a few men had conducted from New Mexico, nearly a thousand miles over deserts, across swift and dangerous rivers, and through wild mountain passes, a large part of the course being infested by Indians. "Kit, on seeing you I feel homesick," he exclaimed, "and I think I ought to go back with you." Carson became sympathetic at once, and said: "Well, Jake, we have only one life to live, and in living it we should make the most of our opportunities." Beard added, in telling this to me: "That settled the matter. I returned to the ranch, adjusted my affairs there, saddled my mule,[171] caught up with Carson's party, went back to New Mexico, and lived there for many years afterward."

Daniel L. Taylor, mayor of Trinidad, Colorado, who probably stood closer to Carson during the later years of his life than any other man now living, related recently to me an incident showing his dislike of anything which savored of flattery. One day in 1862 the great frontiersman chanced to stop at Maxwell's ranch, on the Cimmaron River, in New Mexico, a well-known point on the Santa Fé trail, when a regular army officer of high rank who was there exclaimed, exuberantly: "So this is the distinguished Kit Carson who has made so many Indians run." Carson silenced his eulogist by quietly remarking: "Yes, I made some Indians run, but much of the time they were running after me."

For his honesty and courage in exposing an official who was defrauding the Government in 1864-65 he was removed by one of his political superiors from the command at Fort Union to Fort Garland, in Colorado, but he never complained, and the cause of the removal, which was eminently creditable to him, was divulged by others, and not by himself.

"In Kit Carson Park, which I have given to the city of Trinidad," said Mayor Taylor to me, "we shall soon erect a monument to Carson, and we shall try to make the affair interesting to the entire West. In many ways he was the most wonderful man that I ever knew."

Even to his old neighbors and associates Carson was a hero during his lifetime. Merit meets no severer test than this.

An old friend of Carson's told me that his dying exclamation[172] to the physician who was with him, was "Doctor, compadre, adios." The date was May 23, 1868. As this last of the great trail-makers was dying, the Union Pacific, pushing westward, and the Central Pacific, moving eastward, were about to meet at Promontory, Utah, and the continent was crossed by rail. The heroic age of western expansion had closed.

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THE MACMONNIES PIONEER MONUMENT FOR DENVER

An Embodiment of the Western Spirit

See Frontispiece.

The pioneer monument of which the equestrian statue of Kit Carson is the crowning figure consists of a granite shaft decorated with buffalo skulls and oak garlands, rising from basins decorated with bronze sculpture groups typifying the prospector, the hunter and the pioneer mother and child. The fountain, the ground-plan of which is hexagonal, will be raised on five granite steps. Water will spout into basins from mountain-lion and trout heads. At the base, the shaft will be decorated with the arms of Denver, and horns of plenty overflowing with fruit, grain, corn and gold and silver money—all being the produce of Colorado.

In developing the main motive of the monument, which seeks to express the expansive character of the West and its people, the sculptor has sought to reconcile sculpturesque quality and decorative style with the portrayal of types of character, without the loss of local definition. He has sought dignity by avoiding momentary, story-telling situations, and in the portrayal of character rather than episode, has endeavored to condense all that is most broadly typical of the West.

In the prospector he has sought to express something of the philosophy of the miner who alone, in the solitude of the desert, is sustained by constant hope, and a prophetic[174] vision which recognizes great possibilities in the smallest indications. In the hunter he has tried to suggest something of the roving life of the pioneer living among primitive conditions, daily menaced by death, either from starvation or from treacherous enemies, and who is only saved from destruction by constant vigilance and superior woodcraft. In the group of the mother and child, he has endeavored to reflect the high qualities of courage and resourcefulness of the pioneer woman, always ready to meet danger in the defense of her child and her home.

In the equestrian statue of Kit Carson, the sculptor's aim was to sum up the sentiment of the whole western movement, "The Call of the West"—"Westward Ho."

The costumes are from actual objects, including a coat worn by Carson, now owned by Mr. John S. Hough, of Lake City, Colorado. Suggestions for the head of the mounted scout were taken from his early portraits; for the hunter, from Jim Baker, an old scout of Colorado; while the head of the prospector was studied from portraits of prominent Colorado pioneers.

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THE DISCOVERY OF GOLD IN CALIFORNIA

By John S. Hittell

In the summer of 1847 the American residents of California, numbering perhaps two thousand, and mostly established near San Francisco Bay, looked forward with hope and confidence to the future. Their government held secure possession of the whole territory, and had announced its purpose to hold it permanently. The Spanish Californians, dissatisfied with the manner in which Mexico had ruled them, and convinced that she could not protect them, had abandoned the idea of further resistance. Notwithstanding the unsettled condition of political affairs, the market prices of cows, horses and land, which at that time were the chief articles of sale in the country, had advanced, and this enhancement of values was generally regarded as a certain proof of the increased prosperity that would bless the country under the Stars and Stripes when peace, which seemed near at hand, should be finally made.

It so happened that at this time one of the leading representatives of American interests in California was John A. Sutter, a Swiss by his parentage; a German by the place of his birth in Baden; an American by residence and naturalization in Missouri; and a Mexican by subsequent residence and naturalization in California. In 1839 he had settled at the junction of the Sacramento and American Rivers, near the site of the present city of Sacramento.

When he selected this site it was generally considered[176] very undesirable, but it had advantages which soon became apparent. It was the head of navigation on the Sacramento River for sailing vessels, and steam had not yet made its appearance in the waters of the Pacific. It had a central position in the great interior valley. Its distance of sixty miles from the nearest village, and its situation on one of the main traveled routes of the territory, gave political and military importance to its proprietor. The Mexican governors sought his influence and conferred power on him. But more important than all these advantages was the fact that the only wagon road from the Mississippi Valley to California first reached the navigable waters of the Pacific at Sutter's Fort. This road had been open for several years and was of much prospective importance. The immigration had been interrupted by the war, but would certainly start again as soon as peace should be restored.

The American residents of California, knowing the feeling prevalent among their relatives east of the Rocky Mountains, expected that at least a thousand immigrants, and perhaps two or three times as many, would arrive overland every year; and they supposed that such additions to the population would soon add much to the value of property, to the demand for labor, and to the activity of general business. The immigration would be especially beneficial to Sutter. At his rancho they would reach the first settlement of white men in the Sacramento Valley. There, after their toilsome march across the desert, they would[177] stop and rest. There, they would purchase supplies of food and clothing. There, they would sell their exhausted horses and oxen, and buy fresh ones. There, the penniless would seek employment. There, those who were ready to continue their journey would separate for the valleys to the northward, westward, and southward. There, parties starting for Oregon or "the States" would obtain their last stock of supplies. The advantages of the site were numerous and evident.

But the advantages of Sutter's Fort imposed certain obligations on its owner. He should be prepared to furnish provisions to the immigrants. He should not expect the Americans to be content with the Mexican system of crushing grain by hand on the metate, as the flat under millstone of the Mexicans and native Californians is called, the upper millstone being cylindrical and used like a rolling-pin. He[178] ought to build a flour-mill in the Sacramento Valley to grind the wheat which he cultivated in considerable quantity. There was no great difficulty about the construction of such a mill. He had a site for it on his own rancho. The necessary timber for it could be found not far away. Among the Americans at the fort there was skill to build and to manage it. These ideas pleased Sutter; he adopted them, and acted on them. He selected a site and made his plans for a flour-mill, and, partly to get lumber for it, he determined to build a saw-mill also.

Since there was no good timber in the valley, the saw-mill must be in the mountains. The site for it was selected by James W. Marshall, a native of New Jersey, a skilful wheelwright by occupation, industrious, honest, generous, but "cranky," full of wild fancies, and defective in some kinds of business sense. By accident he discovered the gold of California, and his name is inseparably connected with her history, but it is impossible to make a great hero of him. The place for his mill was in the small valley of Coloma, 1500 feet above the level of the sea, and 45 miles from Sutter's Fort, from which it was accessible by wagon without expense for road-making. Good yellow-pine timber was abundant in the surrounding hills; the water-power was more than sufficient; there were opportunities to make a secure dam and race with small expense, and there was little danger of loss by flood. Sutter left the plans and construction of the mill, as well as the selection of the site, to Marshall, and on the 27th of August the two signed an agreement of partnership under which Sutter was to furnish money, men, tools and teams, and Marshall was to supply the skill for building and managing.

While the project of the saw-mill was under consideration[179] some Mormons arrived at New Helvetia and solicited employment. They had belonged to the Mormon battalion, which, after enlisting in Nebraska for one year, marching to the Pacific by way of the Gila, and garrisoning San Diego, had been mustered out at Los Angeles on the preceding 16th of July. They were on their way to Salt Lake, but at the fort received letters advising all who could not bring provisions for the winter to remain in California until the following spring. They were sober, orderly, peaceful, industrious men, and Sutter hired them to work at his flour-mill and saw-mill. He sent six of them to Coloma. Besides these, Marshall had three "Gentile" laborers, and about a dozen Indians. All the white men were natives of the United States.

For four months these men worked at Coloma, seeing no visitors, and rarely communicating with the fort. The mill had been nearly completed, the dam was made, the race had been dug, the gates had been put in place, the water had been turned into the race to carry away some of the loose dirt and gravel, and then had been turned off again. On the afternoon of Monday the 24th of January Marshall was walking in the tail-race, when on its rotten granite bed-rock he saw some yellow particles and picked up several of them. The largest were about the size of grains of wheat. They were smooth, bright, and in color much like brass. He thought they were gold, and went to the mill, where he told the men that he had found a gold mine. At the time little importance was attached to his statement. It was regarded as a proper subject for ridicule.

Marshall hammered his new metal, and found it malleable; he put it into the kitchen fire, and observed that it[180] did not readily melt or become discolored; he compared its color with gold coin; and the more he examined it, the more he was convinced that it was gold. The next morning he paid another visit to the tail-race, where he picked up other specimens; and putting all he had collected, about a spoonful, on the crown of his slouch hat, he went to the mill, where he showed them to the men as proof of his discovery of a gold mine. The scantiness in the provision supply gave Marshall an excuse for going to the fort, though he would probably not have gone at this time if he had not been anxious to know Sutter's opinion of the metal. He rode away, and, according to Sutter's diary, arrived at the fort on Friday the 28th. Sutter had an encyclopedia, sulphuric acid, and scales, and with the help of these, after weighing the specimens in and out of water, he declared that they were undoubtedly gold.

[181]

The first record of the discovery, and the only one made on the day of its occurrence, was in the diary of Henry W. Bigler, one of the Mormon laborers at the mill. He was an American by birth, then a young man, and afterwards a citizen of St. George, Utah. He was in the habit of keeping a regular record of his notable observations and experiences, selecting topics for remark with creditable judgment. His journal kept during his service in the Mormon battalion and his subsequent stay in California is one of the valuable historical documents of the State. On the 24th of January, in the evening, Bigler wrote in his diary, "This day some kind of mettle was found in the tail-race that looks like goald."

The artless arrangement of ideas, and the ungrammatical phraseology, accompanied by the regular mental habits that demanded a diary, and the perception that enabled him to catch with his pen the main facts of life as they passed, add much to the interest as well as to the authority of his diary.

For six weeks or more the work on the mill continued without serious interruption. Never having seen placer-mining, and having no distinct idea of the methods of finding and washing gold, the laborers at Coloma did not know how to gather the treasures in their vicinity. The first one to find gold outside of the tail-race was Bigler, who was the hunter of the party, sent out by Marshall at least one day in every week to get venison, which was a very acceptable addition to unground wheat and salt salmon, the main articles of food sent from Sutter's Fort. Deer being numerous in the neighboring hills, it was not necessary that Bigler should go far for game; and more than once he managed, while hunting, to look at the banks[182] of the river and find some of the precious metal. His report of his success stimulated others, and they, too, found gold at various places.

In regard to the beginning of gold washing as a regular occupation there is a conflict of testimony. Bigler says that the first men who, within the range of his observation, devoted themselves to placer-mining were Willis Hudson and five others, all of Sam Brannan's Mormon colony, whom he visited at Mormon Island, on the American River below Coloma, on the 12th of April. On that day, washing the gravel with pans and pan-like Indian baskets, they took out more than two ounces and a half (forty-one dollars) for each man. On the other hand, Isaac Humphrey, who had been a placer-miner in Georgia, and who was the first person to use a rocker in the Sierra Nevada and to teach others there to use it, said that he arrived in Coloma on the 7th of March, and within a week commenced work with a rocker. We may explain the discrepancy between these two authorities by imagining that for some weeks Humphrey purposely avoided observation, as placer-miners often do; or that in the interval of ten years between his first appearance at Coloma and the publication of his reminiscences his memory misled him in the date.

In the spring of 1848 San Francisco, a village of about seven hundred inhabitants, had two newspapers, the Californian and the Californian Star, both weeklies.[183] The first printed mention of the gold discovery was a short paragraph in the former, under date of the 15th of March, stating that a gold mine had been found at Sutter's Mill, and that a package of the metal worth thirty dollars had been received at New Helvetia. Five weeks later the Star announced that its editor, E. C. Kemble, was about to take a trip into the country, and on his return would report his observations. He went to Coloma and either saw nothing or understood nothing of what he saw, for he preserved absolute silence in his paper about his trip. On the 20th of May, after a number of men had left San Francisco for the mines, he came out with the opinion that the mines were a "sham," and that the people who had gone to them were "superlatively silly." The increasing production of the mines soon overwhelmed the doubters; and before the middle of June the whole territory resounded with the cry of "gold! GOLD!! GOLD!!!" as it was printed in one of the local newspapers. Nearly all the men hurried off to the mines. Workshops, stores, dwellings, wives and even fields of ripe grain, were left for a time to take care of themselves.

In 1848 the gold hunters of the Sierra Nevada did not need a scientific education. The method of washing gold was then so simple, and they were so[184] skilful in many kinds of industrial labor, that they learned it quickly. Capital, like scientific education and technical experience, was unnecessary to the early placer-miner. With the savings of a week's work he could buy the pick, shovel, pan, and rocker which were his only necessary tools. As compared with other auriferous deposits of which we have definite knowledge, those of the Sierra Nevada were unequaled for the facility of working. They were not deep under ground, or scantily supplied with water, as in Australia and South Africa; nor in a land of tropical heat, as in Brazil; nor in a region of long and severe winters, as in Siberia. The deposits were on land belonging to the National Government, which, without charge, without official supervision, and without previous permit or survey, allowed every citizen to take all the gold from any claim held in accordance with the local regulations adopted by the miners of his district.

The first gold washing was done on the bars of the rivers, where the gravel was shallow, usually not more than two or three feet deep, and where prospecting was easy, and mining was prompt in its returns and liberal in its rewards. The gravel was rich if it yielded twenty-five cents to the pan; and in favorable situations a man could dig and wash out fifty to sixty pans in a day, while with a rocker he could do three times as much. But on the bars of the American, the Bear and the Yuba Rivers it was no uncommon event to obtain from one dollar to five dollars in a pan, and then the yield for a day's work was equal to a princely revenue.

When the rainy season began in the winter of 1848 the rivers rose and covered their bars, and the miners, compelled[185] to hunt claims elsewhere, found them in ravines which were dry through nine months of the year. These were in many cases almost as rich as the bars. It was not uncommon to hear, on good authority, that this or that man had taken out $1000 in a day, and occasionally $5000 or more would reward the day's work. In 1849 the miners generally got $16 a day or more, and when a claim would not yield that much it had no value.

The successful miners demanded provisions, tools, clothing and many luxuries, for which they offered prices double, treble, and tenfold greater than those paid elsewhere. Sailing vessels went to Oregon, Mexico, South America, Australia and Polynesia with gold dust to purchase supplies, and soon filled all the seaports of the Pacific with the contagion of excitement. The reports of the discovery, which began to reach the Atlantic States in September, 1848, commanded little credence there before January; but the news of the arrival of large amounts of gold at Mazatlan, Valparaiso, Panama, and New York in the latter part of the winter put an end to all doubt, and in the spring there was such a rush of peaceful migration as the world had never seen. In 1849, 25,000—according to one authority, 50,000—immigrants went by land, and 23,000 by sea from the region east of the Rocky Mountains, and by sea perhaps 40,000 from other parts of the world, adding twelve-fold to the population and fifty-fold to the productive capacity of the territory. The newcomers were nearly all young, intelligent, and industrious men. Fortunately the diggings were rich enough and extensive enough to give good reward to all of them, and to much larger numbers who came in later years. The gold yield of 1848 was estimated at $5,000,000; that of 1849[186] at $23,000,000; that of 1850 at $50,000,000; that of 1853 at $65,000,000; and then came the decline which has continued until the present time. In forty-one years the gold yield of California was about $1,200,000,000.

Gold mining was neither novel nor rare, but the unexampled combination of wonderful richness, highly favorable geographical conditions, high intelligence in the miners, and great freedom in the political institutions of California led to such a sudden rush of people, and such an immense production of gold, that the whole world was shaken. The older placers of Brazil and Siberia, and the later ones of Australia and South Africa, had a much smaller influence on general commerce and manufactures.

The discovery of the mines was an American achievement. It was the result of the American conquest, and of preparation for American immigrants. It was made by an American, one of a little group of laborers in which all the white men were Americans, as were the first men who devoted themselves to mining. They also were Americans who subsequently invented the sluice and the hydraulic process of placer-washing, and who planned and constructed the great ditches, flumes, and dams that gave a distinctive character to the placer-mining of California.

Let us now consider the consequences of the discovery. First, as to the men at Coloma in January, 1848, Marshall was not enriched. His lumber was soon in demand at $500 a thousand feet of board measure, or twenty-fold more than he had expected when he commenced his work; but not many months elapsed before all the good timber trees near Coloma had been cut down by the miners, and then the mill had to stop. He turned his attention to mining, but was not successful. When he had money he[187] did not know how to keep it. When he had a good claim he did not stick to it.

Sutter's popularity with the pioneers was so great that when he had lost all his property the legislature came to his aid with a pension of $3,000 a year, which sum was paid for six years; and it would perhaps have been continued till his death if he had not left the State in order to demand justice from Congress for the spoliation of his property. But he did not possess the same popularity and influence in the Eastern States as in California. He spent winters of vain solicitation at Washington, and there he died on the 18th of June, 1880, at the age of seventy-seven years. His grave is at Litiz, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he had made his home.

For California the main results of the discovery have been the sudden changes from a Spanish-speaking to an English-speaking community; from popular ignorance to high intelligence; from pasturage, first to mining, and then to tillage, as the occupation of most of the people; from a population of less than 10,000 to more than 1,200,000; and from isolation to frequent, cheap, and convenient communication with all civilized countries. The State has become one of the most noted gardens, pleasure grounds, and sanitariums of the world; and San Francisco is one of the most intellectual and brilliant, and in many respects one of the most interesting, of cities. To the United States[188] the Californian gold discovery gave a vast increase of the national wealth; great attractiveness for immigration from Europe; a strong stimulus to shipping; the development of the mineral wealth of Nevada, Idaho, and Utah; and the vast railroad system west of the Mississippi.

But Marshall's find did not limit its great influences to our continent. It aroused and stimulated industrial activity in all the leading nations. It profoundly agitated all the countries of South America. It shook Europe and Asia. It caused the first large migration of the Chinese across the Pacific. It opened Japan to the traffic of Christendom. It threw a belt of steam around the globe. It educated Hargraves, and taught him where to find and how to open up the gold deposits of Australia. It built the Panama railroad. It brought the Pacific Ocean within the domain of active commerce. Directly and indirectly it added $3,500,000,000 to the stock of the precious metals, and by giving the distribution of this vast sum to the English-speaking nations added much to their great industrial and intellectual influence.

MARSHALL'S OWN NARRATIVE.

"In May, 1847, with my rifle, blanket, and a few crackers to eat with the venison (for the deer then were awful plenty), I ascended the American River, according to Mr. Sutter's wish, as he wanted to find a good site for a saw-mill, where we could have plenty of timber, and where wagons would be able to ascend and descend the river hills. Many fellows had been out before me, but they could not find any place to suit; so when I left I told Mr. Sutter I would go along the river to its very head and find the place, if such a place existed anywhere upon the river or[189] any of its forks. I traveled along the river the whole way. Many places would suit very well for the erection of the mill, with plenty of timber everywhere, but then nothing but a mule could climb the hills; and when I would find a spot where the hills were not steep, there was no timber to be had; and so it was until I had been out several days and reached this place, which, after first sight, looked like the exact spot we were hunting.

"I passed a couple of days examining the hills, and found a place where wagons could ascend and descend with all ease. On my return to the fort I went out through the country examining the cañons and gulches, and picking out the easiest places for crossing them with loaded wagons.

"You may be sure Mr. Sutter was pleased when I reported my success. We entered into partnership; I was to build the mill, and he was to find provisions, teams, tools, and to pay a portion of the men's wages. I believe I was at that time the only millwright in the whole country. In August, everything being ready, we freighted two wagons with tools and provisions, and accompanied by six men I left the fort, and after a good deal of difficulty reached this place one beautiful afternoon and formed our camp on yon little rise of ground right above the town.

"Our first business was to put up log houses, as we intended remaining here all winter. This was done in less than no time, for my men were great with the ax. We then cut timber, and fell to work hewing it for the framework of the mill. The Indians gathered about us in great numbers. I employed about forty of them to assist us with the dam, which we put up in a kind of way in about four weeks. In digging the foundation of the mill we cut some distance into the soft granite; we opened the[190] forebay and then I left for the fort, giving orders to Mr. Weimar to have a ditch cut through the bar in the rear of the mill, and after quitting work in the evening to raise the gate and let the water run all night, as it would assist us very much in deepening and widening the tail-race.

"I returned in a few days, and found everything favorable, all the men being at work in the ditch. When the channel was opened it was my custom every evening to raise the gate and let the water wash out as much sand and gravel through the night as possible; and in the morning, while the men were getting breakfast, I would walk down, and, shutting off the water, look along the race and see what was to be done, so that I might tell Mr. Weimar, who had charge of the Indians, at what particular point to set them to work for the day. As I was the only millwright present, all of my time was employed upon the framework and machinery.

"One morning in January,—it was a clear, cold morning; I shall never forget that morning,—as I was taking my usual walk along the race after shutting off the water, my eye was caught with the glimpse of something shining in the bottom of the ditch. There was about a foot of water running then. I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold. The piece was about half the size and of the shape of a pea. Then I saw another piece in the water. After taking it out I sat down and began to think right hard. I thought it was gold, and yet it did not seem to be of the right color: all the gold coin I had seen was of a reddish tinge; this looked more like brass. I recalled to mind all the metals I had ever seen or heard of, but I could find none that resembled this. Suddenly the idea flashed across[191] my mind that it might be iron pyrites. I trembled to think of it! This question could soon be determined. Putting one of the pieces on a hard river stone, I took another and commenced hammering it. It was soft, and didn't break: it therefore must be gold, but largely mixed with some other metal, very likely silver; for pure gold, I thought, would certainly have a brighter color.

"When I returned to our cabin for breakfast I showed the two pieces to my men. They were all a good deal excited, and had they not thought that the gold only existed in small quantities they would have abandoned everything and left me to finish my job alone. However, to satisfy them, I told them that as soon as we had the mill finished we would devote a week or two to gold hunting and see what we could make out of it."

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PIONEER MINING

By E. G. Waite

Pioneer mining life—what was it? The miner must have an outfit of a pick, pan, shovel, rocker, dipper and bucket of wood, or of rawhide. A tent was good to have, but he could make shift during the dry season with a substitute of boughs, for there was no fear of rain from May to October. A blanket of rubber spread on a stratum of leaves, on which his woolen blankets were laid, sufficed for a bed. His culinary utensils were confined to a frying-pan, a small iron pot, tin cups and plates, knife, fork, and spoon. His wardrobe consisted generally of a pair of serviceable shirts, a change of trousers, strong boots and a slouch-hat. With these, and a supply of bacon, flour, salt, saleratus, beans, a few candles and occasionally fresh beef, the miner was ready for work. His luxuries were tea and raw sugar, with occasionally the addition of[193] dried peaches from Chili. His bread was made by mixing flour, water, and saleratus in the tin or iron pan which did double duty in the kitchen and in gathering gold, and baking it about two inches thick, like a shortcake. But slapjacks, the legitimate successors of the Mexican tortillas, were also a standard article of diet. Tin teapots were sometimes affected, but the small iron pot with a hollow handle did duty for both tea and beans or frijoles. The latter were of a brown variety grown in Chili, and were prepared after the Mexican style with a piece of bacon or fresh beef and plenty of chili colorado, or red pepper. They were allowed to cook a long time, often standing in the hot embers over night to be ready for breakfast in the morning. The bill-of-fare did not vary much for breakfast, dinner and supper.

The most expensive instrument of the early miner was the rocker, which, though simple in construction, cost in the mines from fifty to a hundred dollars. In general appearance it was not unlike a baby's cradle as used by our grandmothers and as still seen on the frontier. It consisted of a flat bottom with two sides that flared outward, and an end board at the head, while the foot was open save a riffle about an inch and a half high at the bottom to catch the gold that might pass another riffle across the bottom near the middle. At the head of the cradle was a hopper about eighteen inches square, with a perforated sheet-iron[194] bottom or wire screen. Under this was an apron, or board, sloping downward towards the head. Two substantial rockers under the whole completed the simple machine which gave to the world millions of dollars. The modus operandi may be described as follows: Two sticks of wood hewn on the upper side were imbedded at the river's brink, one four inches lower than the other, on which the rockers were to rest, thus securing a grade in the machine to facilitate the outward flow of the water and sand. Two miners usually worked together as partners. One shoveled the earth into the rocker, while the other, seated on a boulder or block of wood, dipped the water from the river, and poured it upon the earth in the hopper with one hand, all the time rocking with the other. When the earth was thoroughly washed, he rose, lifted the hopper from its place, threw out the stones and gravel, replaced it, and thus the work went on. As the ground about the rocker became exhausted to the bed-rock, recourse was had to the bucket, and the earth was carried sometimes a few rods, making laborious work for the miner. To keep the rocker going another hand would be employed to carry earth, and each would carry two buckets at a time. I was in many camps down to 1854, and in none did I ever know of a theft of gold, and I heard of but one, and that was punished by a cat-o'-nine-tails, which was afterward nailed to the center-post of a trader's tent, as a warning to evil-doers.

The gold taken from the river bars was mostly in the form of scales resembling cucumber seeds, and of varying size. It was most plentiful on the bed-rock and in a few inches of soil above it, though sometimes three or four feet of earth would pay to wash. Where the bed-rock was hard the miner cleaned it, for a shovelful of dirt might[195] contain a few dollars in small particles. Where the bed-rock was soft shale or slate on edge the miner picked away an inch or so and washed it, as frequently the scales were found to be driven quite thickly into the crevices. When the ground was very rich the rocker was cleaned of gold every hour or two. When work was over, around the supper fire the events of the day were discussed, earnings compared, reports made of grizzly bears or deer being seen or killed, of better diggings of "coarse gold" discovered. This was the hour for speculations as to the origin of the gold in the rivers, and a strong opinion was entertained by many who were not well-read that immense masses of the precious metal would some day be brought to light in the snow-capped peaks towering to the east. "Coarse gold" was a charm to the ear of the ordinary miner. His claim might be paying him an ounce a day in fine gold, but he was always interested in some reported diggings far away where the product was in lumps, and not infrequently he left a good mine to seek some richer El Dorado. The characteristic and besetting fault of the early miner was unrest. He was forever seeking better fortune. Yet it was this passion for prospecting that resulted in the discovery of gold in an incredibly short time from the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley to the[196] northern limit of the State. To "prospect" was to find a spot that looked favorable and make an examination of it. The miner would take a pan of earth, shake and gyrate it under water, raising and tipping it frequently to run the dirt and water off, then plunge it again, and so continue until a small residuum of black sand and gold remained. A speck of gold was the "color," several specks were "several colors," and the number and size determined the judgment of the miner whether he should go to work or move on. I have seen ounces taken in this way in a single pan, but in the earlier days we counted a "bit" to the pan, twelve and a half cents, a fair prospect.

The average gain of the miner in those days can never be known. Though he was extraordinarily frank and confiding in the offhand conversations about the camp-fire, yet there is reason to believe that his largest receipts were sometimes not reported. My observation was that the industrious worker rarely brought to his supper less than ten dollars, often an ounce (reckoned at sixteen dollars), and sometimes six ounces, or even more. I myself took from the earth nearly one hundred and fifty ounces in[197] seventeen successive working days. My largest clean-up was $224. One day, in less than half an hour, I took with my knife from a crevice in the rocks six and a half ounces of gold. When the river went down after it had been swollen by the first rains and had swept over the bed-rock of bars supposed to be worked out, hundreds of glittering scales were left exposed, affording pleasant picking for a day or two.

Mining is one of the most fascinating and exciting of employments. But in the earlier days, when we knew less about genuine indications, mining was, more than now, a species of gambling. The effects are yet to be seen in hundreds of men still living near their old haunts, who, in common phrase, have "lost their grip"; others live in our memories who, after repeated disappointment, sleep on the mountain sides in nameless graves. Yet these same unfortunates did their part in giving to the world thousands of millions of dollars, thus stimulating progress probably more than was ever known in any other epoch of similar length in the history of mankind.

The early miner has never been truly painted. I protest against the flippant style and eccentric rhetoric of those writers who have made him a terror, or who, seizing upon a sporadic case of extreme oddity, some drunken, brawling wretch, have given a caricature to the world as the typical miner. The so-called literature that treats of the golden era is too extravagant in this direction. In all my personal experience in mining-camps from 1849 to 1854 there was not a case of bloodshed, robbery, theft or actual violence. I doubt if a more orderly society was ever known. How could it be otherwise? The pioneers were young, ardent, uncorrupted, most of them well educated and[198] from the best families in the East. The early miner was ambitious, energetic, and enterprising. No undertaking was too great to daunt him. The pluck and resources exhibited by him in attempting mighty projects with nothing but his courage and his brawny arms to carry them out was phenomenal. His generosity was profuse and his sympathy active, knowing no distinction of race. His sentiment that justice is sacred was never dulled. His services were at command to settle differences peaceably, or with pistol in hand to right a grievous wrong to a stranger. His capacity for self-government never has been surpassed. Of a glorious epoch, he was of a glorious race.

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THE GREAT NORTHWEST IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES

By E. V. Smalley

FURTHER WEST.

The old order of developing new regions in the West was reversed when the railroad era began. Formerly the country was settled first, and the towns grew up to supply the needs of the rural population. Afterwards the towns were created by speculators far in advance of the farming settlement; and by the conveniences they afforded for selling crops, and buying implements, lumber and household supplies, they attracted farmers to their vicinity. Each new frontier town is an advertisement of the surrounding country, upon the settlement of which it must depend for its existence. The towns-folk are untiring in their praises of the soil and climate, and if you believe them the next grade of human felicity to living in their raw little village is to live upon a farm in the neighborhood. Whatever happens in the way of disagreeable weather, they assure you it is good for the crops. If it snows in May or hails in June, they come up smiling, and remark blandly that it is just what the crops need. The creation of a new town on a line of railroad pushing its track out into the vacant, treeless spaces of the far West, is an interesting process to observe. A speculator, or a company of speculators, look over the ground carefully fifty or a hundred miles in advance of the temporary terminus of the railroad,[200] and hit upon a site which they think has special advantages, and is far enough away from the last town. They make a treaty with the railroad company for a section of land, agreeing, perhaps, to share the prospective profits on the sale of lots. Then they "scrip" the adjoining sections of Government land, or take it up with desert land claims. A large amount of land scrip is afloat on the market issued in pursuance of Indian treaties, Agricultural College grants, old Military Bounty Land acts and other peculiar features of our complicated Public Land System. The speculator with his pocket stocked with scrip is able to pick out any choice sections not occupied by homestead or preëmption claimants. Having thus obtained a sufficient body of land to operate with, the founding of the new town is trumpeted in the newspapers, and in all the frontier region for hundreds of miles there is a stir of excitement about the coming city. Billings, on the Yellowstone, is a good example of a town made by this process. In the beginning it had no existence save in the brains of its inventors. The bare prairie was staked out in streets, avenues and parks, on a scale for a city of twenty thousand inhabitants. A map was engraved, and within a few weeks after the place got its name, the "Billings boom" began to be talked of as far east as St. Paul. Billings lots were advertised in every town from St. Paul to Miles City, and whole blocks were sold in Chicago and New York. The purchasers, as a rule, knew no more about the valley of the Yellowstone than about that of the Congo, and few of them could have put their finger on a spot upon a map within a hundred miles of Billings. They heard there was a boom, and were eager to take their chances for profit or loss. It was enough for[201] them to hear the place spoken of as the future metropolis of the Yellowstone Valley. Within sixty days from the time when Billings got a local habitation and a name, lots to the value of $220,000 were sold within its limits, and before thirty days more had elapsed the purchasers had advanced the imaginary value of their holdings from one hundred to three hundred per cent.

Charles Dickens once said that the typical American would hesitate about entering heaven, unless assured that he could go further West. The men who lead the advance of the army of civilization on the frontier skirmish line do not come from the rear. They are always the scouts and pickets. The people of the six-weeks-old town do not come from the East. As a rule they are from the one-year-old and two-year-old towns a little further back. Most of the men I met in the Yellowstone country were from Eastern Dakota, or the Black Hills region, or from Western Minnesota. When asked why they left homes so recently made in a new country, their reply was invariably that they wanted to get further West.

BILLINGS AND COULSON.

We came upon Billings one sunny day in May [about 1882], dropped upon it, I might say; for after a ten miles' drive across a high and windy plateau, the immense dazzling range of the Big Snowy Mountains looming up in front, the ground fell away abruptly and the town lay at our feet in a broad, green valley. The yellow-pine houses, untouched by paint, glistened in the sunlight like gold. The valley, hemmed in by precipitous cliffs on the north, and by black, bare hills beyond the muddy river on the south, stretched away to the west to distant mountain slopes.[202] Under the shadow of a huge sandstone butte lay the little hamlet of Coulson, now quite out of spirits because of the new town a mile further on. Old Coulson, it was called, though its age was only three years. It had made some money buying buffalo robes of the Crow Indians across the river, and selling shirting, groceries, and whisky to a few herdsmen whose cattle graze in the Musselshell Ranges. Now it must abandon its score of "shacks" and shanties or move them up to Billings. The new town, when I visited it, consisted of perhaps fifty cheap structures scattered over a square mile of bottom-land. Many people were living in little A tents or in their canvas-covered wagons, waiting for lumber to arrive with which to build houses. Sixty dollars a thousand was the price of a poor quality of green stuff brought from a mill twenty miles up the Yellowstone. All articles of food, except beef, were frightfully dear. Potatoes were eight cents a pound, flour six dollars a sack. I doubt if one in ten of the inhabitants could tell why he had come. The migrating impulse is the only way to account for the movement of merchants, mechanics, farmers, speculators, gamblers, liquor-sellers, preachers and doctors to a point nearly one hundred and fifty miles from anything that can be called a town—a point, too, in a region inhabited only by Crow Indians and a few scattered herdsmen. At the signal that a town was to be created, all these people, of diverse possessions and ambitions, moved forward and occupied the site as though they were soldiers marching at the word of command. What a wonderful self-organizing thing is society! How did the German baker from St. Paul, the milliner from Minneapolis, the Chinese laundryman from the Pacific slope, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the butcher,[203] the beer-seller, the grocer and all the other constituent parts of a complete community happen to feel the desire, at the same time, to go with their trades and wares to a remote spot in an unknown land?

Large herds of cattle graze in the valleys of the Yellowstone and its tributaries, and in the hill country as far north as the Upper Missouri, wherever there are small streams or water holes. Now that the buffalo is fast disappearing, the region would afford pasturage to at least ten times as many cattle as it supports at present. The stockmen who occupy it are generally careful, however, not to let this fact be known, as they naturally would like to keep the whole section for the future increase of their own herds. Cattle-raising in Montana is an exceedingly profitable business. One hears a great deal said in the Territory of the wealth of the "cattle-kings," and how they began their careers a few years ago with only a few[204] hundred dollars. The local estimate of the annual return from money invested in a herd of cattle is from thirty to fifty per cent. The life of a stockman is not, however, an idle and comfortable one, as often pictured in the newspaper accounts of the business. Unless he is rich enough to hire herdsmen he must look after his herd constantly. He lives, as a rule, in a wretched dirt-roof "shack," and passes most of the time in the saddle, seeing that his animals do not stray too far off the range. In the fierce winter storms he must be out driving the herd into ravines and deep valleys, where they will be protected from the wind. No shelter is built for stock in Montana. The dried bunch-grass furnishes abundant winter grazing, and the animals get through the severe weather with a loss rarely exceeding four per cent. In the spring each owner "rounds up" his herd, and brands the calves. Every ranchman has his own brand, which he registers in the office of the county clerk, and advertises in the nearest local paper, printed, it may be, one or two hundred miles from his range. The annual drive of bullocks across the plains southward to the Union Pacific Railroad, or eastward to the temporary terminus of the Northern Pacific, takes place in the summer months.

BITTER ROOT VALLEY.

South of Missoula within rifle-shot, is the entrance to the great Hell Gate Cañon; westward across the angle formed by the two rivers rises the huge, dark wall of the Bitter Root Mountains, higher here, and more picturesque, than the main range of the Rockies, which are half concealed by the grassy swells of the foot-hills on the east. Lo-Lo Peak, the loftiest and most individual mountain of[205] the Bitter Root chain, is covered with snow all summer; its altitude must be about ten thousand feet. Northwest of the town the valley is broad enough for cultivation for a distance of twenty miles, when it closes in at the cañon of the Missoula River. A range for which there is not even a local name rims the valley on the north. One summit, called Skotah Peak, is a perfect pyramid in form. This cloud-compassed landmark we shall not lose sight of in three days' travel.

Up the Bitter Root Valley there are farms scattered for sixty miles. The valley is warmer than any other in Western Montana, and the small fruits and some hardy varieties of apples are grown. Herds of horses and cattle feed on the slopes of the mountains. Grain and potatoes are grown by irrigation, and the valley is a source of food-supply for military posts and mining-camps. Hogs are fattened upon peas and wheat, and the flavor of a Bitter Root ham is something altogether unique and appetizing. In June the bitter-root plant, from which the valley gets its name, covers all the uncultivated ground with its delicate rose-colored stars. The blossom, about as large as a wild rose, lies close upon the earth. The long, pipestem-like root is greatly relished by the Indians for food. When dried it looks like macaroni, and it is by no means unpalatable when cooked with a little salt or butter, or eaten raw. The squaws dig it with long sticks, and dry it for winter food. Another root, also a staple in the aboriginal larder, is the camas, which loves moist prairies, where it flaunts its blue flowers in the early summer. In June, when the camas is ready to gather, even the most civilized Indian on the Flathead reservation feels the nomadic impulse too strong to resist. He packs his lodge upon ponies, and starts with[206] his family for some camas prairie, where he is sure to meet a numerous company bent on having a good time.

A MONTANA TOWN.

The picturesque features of life in a Western Montana town like Missoula are best seen as evening approaches. Crowds of roughly clad men gather around the doors of the drinking-saloons. A group of Indians, who have been squatting on the sidewalk for two hours playing some mysterious game of cards of their own invention, breaks up. One of the squaws throws the cards into the street, which is already decorated from end to end with similar relics of other games. Another swings a baby upon her back, ties a shawl around it and herself, secures the child with a strap buckled across her chest, and strides off, her moccasined feet toeing inward in the traditional Indian fashion. She wears a gown made of a scarlet calico bed-quilt, with leggings of some blue stuff; but she has somehow managed to get a civilized dress for the child. They all go off to their camp on the hill near by. Some blue-coated soldiers from the neighboring military post, remembering the roll-call at sunset, swing themselves upon their horses and go galloping off, a little the worse for the bad whisky they have been drinking in the saloons. A miner in blue woolen shirt and brown canvas trousers, with a hat of astonishing dimensions and a beard of a year's growth, trots up the street on a mule, and, with droll oaths and shuffling talk, offers the animal for sale to the crowd of loungers on the hotel piazza. No one wants to buy, and, after provoking a deal of laughter, the miner gives his ultimatum: "I'll hitch the critter to one of them piazzer posts, and if he don't pull it down you may[207] have him." This generous offer is declined by the landlord; and the miner rides off, declaring that he has not a solitary four-bit piece to pay for his supper, and is bound to sell the mule to somebody.

Toward nightfall the whole male population seems to be in the street, save the busy Chinamen in the laundries, who keep on sprinkling clothes by blowing water out of their mouths. Early or late, you will find these industrious little yellow men at work. One shuffles back and forth from the hydrant, carrying water for the morning wash in old coal-oil cans hung to a stick balanced across his shoulders. More Indians now—a "buck" and two squaws, leading ponies heavily laden with tent, clothes and buffalo robes. A rope tied around a pony's lower jaw is the ordinary halter and bridle of the Indians. These people want to buy some article at the saddler's shop. They do not go in, but stare through the windows for five minutes. The saddler, knowing the Indian way of dealing, pays no attention to them. After a while they all sit down on the ground in front of the shop. Perhaps a quarter of an hour passes before the saddler asks what they want. If he had noticed them at first, they would have gone away without buying.

THE STAGE-COACH.

Now the great event of the day is at hand. The cracking of a whip and a rattle of wheels are heard up the street: the stage is coming. Thirty-six hours ago it left the terminus of the railroad one hundred and fifty miles away. It is the connecting link between the little isolated mountain community and the outside world. No handsome Concord coach appears, but only a clumsy "jerky"[208] covered with dust. The "jerky" is a sort of cross between a coach proper and a common wagon. As an instrument of torture this hideous vehicle has no equal in modern times. The passengers emerge from its cavernous interior looking more dead than alive. A hundred able-bodied men, not one of them with a respectable coat or a tolerable hat, save two flashy gamblers, look on at the unloading of the luggage. The stage goes off to a stable, and the crowd disperses, to rally again, largely reinforced, at the word that there is to be a horse-race.

Now the drinking saloons—each one of which runs a faro bank and a table for "stud poker"—are lighted up, and the gaming and guzzling begin. Every third building on the principal business street is a saloon. The gambling goes on until daylight without any effort at concealment. In all the Montana towns keeping gaming-tables is treated as a perfectly legitimate business. Indeed, it is licensed by the Territorial laws. Some of the saloons[209] have music, but this is a rather superfluous attraction. In one a woman sings popular ballads in a cracked voice, to the accompaniment of a banjo. Women of a certain sort mingle with the men and try their luck at the tables. Good order usually prevails, less probably from respect for law than from a prudent recognition of the fact that every man carries a pistol in his hip-pocket, and a quarrel means shooting. The games played are faro and "stud poker," the latter being the favorite. It is a game in which "bluff" goes farther than luck or skill. Few whisky saloons in Montana are without a rude pine table covered with an old blanket, which, with a pack of cards, is all the outfit required for this diversion.

The main street of the frontier town, given up at night to drinking and gambling, by no means typifies the whole life of the place. The current of business and society, on the surface of which surges a deal of mud and driftwood, is steady and decent. There are churches and schools and a wholesome family life.

A ROCKY MOUNTAIN VALLEY.

The Jocko Valley is one of the prettiest of the minor valleys of the Rocky Mountain system. It was all a green, flowery meadow when I traversed it in the month of June. Its width is about ten miles and its length perhaps thirty. Low, wooded mountain ranges surround it. That on the east is broken by the main branch of the stream, and through the rift can be seen the main chain of the Rockies—a mighty mass of crags and cliffs and snow-fields thrust up among the clouds. For thirty miles after the Jocko joins the Clark's Fork of the Columbia, called by most people in this region the Pend d'Oreille River, the main river is bordered[210] by narrow green bottoms and broad stretches of grassy uplands rising to the steeper inclines of fir-clad mountains. Herds of horses are occasionally seen, and now and then the log hut of some thrifty Indian or half-breed, or the canvas lodge of a family that prefers the discomforts and freedom of savage life to the comforts and restraints of a local habitation. The first night out from the agency was spent at the hut of one of the queer characters that hang about Indian reservations,—a shiftless white man, who pays for the privilege of ferrying travelers across the river by taking the Indians over free. He lives in a dirty one-room hut. In response to a suggestion about supper, he declared that he would not cook for the Apostle Paul himself, but added that we were welcome to use his stove, and could take anything eatable to be found on the premises. His bill next morning was seven dollars—one dollar, he explained, for victuals for the party, and six for ferriage. A wagon-box offered a more inviting place for a bed that night than the floor of the ferryman's cabin.

A day's travel brought us out of the Flathead Reservation, and at the same time to the end of the wagon road and of the open country. The road did not, like one of those western highways described by Longfellow, end in a squirrel track and run up a tree, but it stopped short at a saw-mill on the river's edge, where a hundred men were at work cutting logs and sawing bridge timber for the railroad advancing up the gorge eighty miles below.

There are many camas prairies, big and little, in Montana and Idaho, and they all resemble each other in being fertile green basins among the mountains, in whose moist soil the camas plant flourishes. This was, perhaps, fifteen miles broad by twenty-five long—all magnificent grazing[211] land. We passed an Indian village of a dozen lodges, the doors of the tents shaded by arbors of green boughs, under which sat the squaws in their red, green and white blankets. On the plain fed herds of horses, and among them Indian riders galloped about seeking the animals they wanted to lariat for the next day's hunting expedition.

FOREST TRACKS.

Nor is the forest altogether lonely. Occasionally a pack-train is met, or a party of pedestrians, tramping with blankets, provisions and frying-pans from the settlements or railroad camps west of the mountains to those in the mountain valleys, and sleeping al fresco wherever night overtakes them. Rough fellows these, but good-humored, and in no way dangerous. Indeed, there is no danger in any of the country I traversed on my northwestern pilgrimage, to a traveler who minds his own business and keeps out of drinking dens. Almost everybody I met had a big pistol strapped to him; but I carried no weapon of any kind, and never once felt the need of one.

In Montana every traveler carries his bed, whether he depends upon hoofs or wheels for locomotion, or on his own legs. Even the tramp who foots it over the prairies and through the mountains, pretending to look for work, but really on a summer pleasure tour, subsisting upon the country, has a pair of dirty blankets or an old quilt slung by a rope across his shoulders. The sleeping equipment of a traveler who can afford to pay some attention to comfort, consists of a buffalo robe and two pairs of blankets. With these, and perhaps a rubber poncho, he is prepared to stop wherever night overtakes him, fortunate if he has a roof over his head, and a pine floor to spread his buffalo[212] upon, but ready to camp out under the stars. Along the stage roads one is rarely more than twenty miles from a house of some kind, but no one expects beds. The ranchman does not ask his guests if they would like to go to bed; he says: "Well, gents, are you ready to spread your blankets?"

A FAR WESTERN TOWN.

My journey next took me to Walla-Walla, largest and handsomest of all the East Washington towns. Doubtless the name of Walla-Walla brings no suggestion to the minds of most readers in the far-away East, save of a rude frontier settlement. Yet the place luxuriates in verdure and bloom, and many of its shady streets, bordered by pretty houses, with their lawns, orchards and gardens, would be admired in a New England village, while the business streets would do no discredit to an Ohio town of half a century's growth. In the homes of well-to-do citizens one finds the magazines and new books and newspapers from New York, Boston and Philadelphia, and discovers that they manage to keep abreast of the ideas of the time quite as well as intelligent people on the Atlantic slope. The town has five thousand inhabitants, but in its importance as a center of trade and social influences it represents an Eastern town of many times its size. There is barely a trace of the frontier in the manners of the people, and none at all in their comfortable way of living; yet they are thousands of miles from New York by the only route of steam travel. A fairer or more fertile country than that which stretches south and east of Walla-Walla to the base of the Blue Mountains one might travel more than five thousand miles to find. In June it is all one immense[213] rolling field of wheat and barley dotted at long intervals—for the farms are large—with neat houses, each in its orchard of apple and peach trees. The mountains rise in gentle slopes to snow-flecked summits. Over the wide plain move tall, tawny cloud-like columns of dust, in size and shape like water-spouts at sea. From the foot-hills scores of these singular formations may be seen on any warm day, though the air seems still.

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THE GREAT SOUTHWEST

By Ray Stannard Baker

No part of the United States is less generally known than the Southwest, and none is better worth knowing. Of no other part of the United States is so large a proportion of the unpleasant and unattractive features known so well, and so small a proportion of the beauties, wonders and utilities known so little. To the Eastern and Northern mind the Southwest raises a dim picture of hot desert, bare mountain, and monotonous plain sparsely grown up to cactus, sage, greasewood, or bunch-grass, and sown with the white bones of animals which have perished from hunger and thirst; a land of wild Indians, of lazy Mexicans, of rough cow-boys, of roving, half-wild cattle, of desperate mining ventures, of frequent train-robberies. This impression is based in part on the stray paragraphs from this unknown land that occasionally creep into the metropolitan newspapers, but it is chiefly founded upon the hasty observations and reports of dusty transcontinental travelers, car-weary for three or four days, the edge of their interest quite blunted with longing for the green wonders and soft sunshine of California.

What is generally known as the Southwest may be said to comprise all of Arizona and New Mexico, the greater portion of Texas, perhaps best described as arid Texas, southern California east of the Coast Range, and the western half of Oklahoma, including the "Strip." Eastern[215] Texas, with its plentiful rainfall, its forests, and its fine plantations of cotton and corn, is quite a different country from western Texas, and must be classed with the South. In extent of territory the Southwest is an empire more than twice as large as Germany, and greater in area than the thirteen original States of the American Union. Its population is sparse and occupied almost exclusively in cattle-and sheep-raising, mining, and irrigation-farming, with a limited amount of lumbering. All its vast territory contains only a little more than half as many inhabitants as the city of Chicago. Its largest city, on the extreme eastern edge of the arid land, is San Antonio, Texas. All of its other cities are much smaller. It is traversed east and west by two, in Texas three, great railroads, running generally parallel, having many branches, and connected by several cross-cuts running north and south.

It is a land of amazing contrasts. It is both the oldest and the newest part of the United States—oldest in history and newest in Anglo-Saxon enterprise. Long before the Cavaliers set foot in Virginia or the first Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, even before St. Augustine in Florida was founded, the Spaniards had explored a considerable proportion of New Mexico and Arizona, and the settlements made soon afterward at Santa Fé and near Tucson were among the earliest on the American continent. Indeed, for many years the region was better known to white men than New England. Yet to-day there is no part of the United States so little explored, many places, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, being wholly unsurveyed. Probably the least-known spot in the country is the mysterious wilderness, nearly as large as Switzerland, which lies in the northwestern corner of Arizona beyond the Colorado[216] River. It is bounded on the south and east by the stupendous and almost impassable chasm of the Grand Cañon, and on its other sides by difficult mountains and little-explored deserts. Here, in this long-known land, if anywhere on the continent, can be found the primeval wilderness of nature.

Though the Great Southwest is now the most sparsely inhabited region of its size in the United States, it was once the most populous and wealthy, probably more populous than it is to-day, with all its present American enterprise. Hundreds of years before the Spaniards first appeared in the New World, the valleys of Arizona and New Mexico contained a numerous population, supporting considerable cities, and irrigating extensive tracts of land with wonderful engineering skill. Frank H. Cushing, the anthropologist, who in 1882-83 wrote of the ruins of the Southwest, estimated that the irrigated valleys of Arizona were once the dwelling-place of two hundred and fifty thousand people, about twice the population of the entire Territory then. The remains of these ancient civilizations—the pueblo-dwellers, the cliff-and cave-dwellers—are found scattered everywhere throughout Arizona and New Mexico, and in such numbers that archæologists have only begun to explore them.

No part of the United States, indeed, has had a more thrilling and eventful history. While denominated a desert "not worth good blood,"—in the words of the historian,—it has been a center of contention for centuries, overwhelmed by one tide of conquest after another. From the time that the Spaniards first invaded the country, hunting for gold, down to the capture of Geronimo by American soldiers in the eighties, it has been the scene of many bloody[217] Indian wars. It was the source of contention between the United States and Mexico in the war of 1846-48. Once a possession of Spain, and later of Mexico, the story of the struggle for independence by the Texans and for annexation by the Californians is full of fascinating interest. Its soil has developed some of the boldest and most picturesque characters in American history—Boone, Crockett, Kit Carson, Sam Houston, and many a pioneer cattleman and settler, to say nothing of the Crooks and the Lawtons of the Indian wars. The main trail of the El Dorado hunters of '49 on their way to California let through it, garnishing its history with many a story of bloodshed and hardship. No American fiction is more vital and characteristic than that which deals with the early lawless days of the miner, the buffalo-hunter, and the cow-boy; none is more richly colored, picturesque, or rudely powerful.

In its material aspects it is equally full of contrasts. Here are the greatest deserts and waste places in America, and side by side with them, often with no more than a few[218] strands of barbed wire to mark the division-line, are the richest farming-lands in America, lands more fertile, even, than the famed corn-fields of Illinois or the fruit-orchards of Michigan. The Southwest has been denominated, with reason, the treeless land, and yet it contains to-day the largest unbroken stretches of forest in the country, there being nothing to equal the timber-lands of the Colorado plateau in northern and central Arizona. No part of the United States possesses such an extent of grass-plain, Texas being the greatest of the plain States, and yet none has grander mountains. Only three States have higher peaks than the noble Sierra Blanca of New Mexico, fourteen thousand two hundred and sixty-nine feet in altitude, and there are few more magnificent elevations than San Francisco Mountain in Arizona.

Though the region, to the hurried railroad traveler, seems barren and desolate almost beyond comparison, it is yet richer in variety, if not in luxury, of vegetation than any other part of the country. Professor Merriam found many arctic types in the flora of the upper regions of the San Francisco Mountain. Within a radius of a few hundred miles grow the pines and firs found in northern Canada, and the figs and dates of the African semi-tropics; Southern oranges and olives grow side by side with Northern wheat; the cactus and the fir are often found within sight of each other. Nowhere are there so many strange and marvelous forms of life as here—of flowers, multitudinous cacti and the palms; of animals, the Gila monster, the horned toad, the hydrophobia skunk, and many other unique species. Besides the monotonous desert, with its apparent lack of interest to the traveler, the region contains the greatest natural wonder on the continent—the[219] Grand Cañon of the Colorado River. It also possesses unnumbered other natural phenomena and some of the grandest mountain and forest scenery. With all its lack of rain, it is watered by two of the great rivers of the continent—the Colorado and the Rio Grande.

In its human life it is equally prolific in diversities. In few other places in the world is there such a commingling of dissimilar human elements. I doubt if even the cities of the Orient can present such contrasts of wholly unrelated races of people, as well as so great a variety of the white race. Here, in one small town, one may find representatives of several different tribes of the aboriginal Indians, in every state of civilization and savagery, picturesquely attired in bright-colored costumes, bearing their peculiar baskets and pottery. Here, also, is the next higher stratum, the Mexicans, in great numbers, and in all mixtures of blood from the nearly pure Indian peon upward. Here are African Negroes in considerable numbers, emigrants from the Southern States, and every town has its Chinese and usually its Japanese contingent, the overflow from California. Above all these, and in greatly superior numbers, rises the white man, usually American by birth, and yet generously intermixed with many of European nationalities. In most of the older towns, such as San Antonio in Texas and Tucson in Arizona, whole neighborhoods appear more foreign than American, presenting strange contrasts between modern store-buildings, banks, and churches, and ancient weather-worn adobe houses where the Mexicans live almost as primitively as did their forefathers a century ago.

The peopling of the country makes one of the most interesting and significant stories in the history of the nation.[220] For many years it was the unknown land, the land of possibilities and wonders, as well as of danger and death. Therefore it attracted the hardy pioneer, and here, for lack of any other frontier on the continent, the pioneer, though with the germ of westward ho! still lingering in his blood, has been compelled at last to settle down. I shall not soon forget the sorrowful desert-dweller whom I met in what seemed the ends of the earth in Arizona. His nearest neighbor was fifteen miles away, his post-office twenty-five miles, and yet he was bemoaning the fact that the country was becoming crowded. "If there were any more frontier," he said, "I'd go to it."

It is hardy blood, that of the pioneer, good stock on which to found the development of a country. For years the West has been the lodestone for those adventurous spirits who love the outdoor and exciting life of the mining prospector, the cow-boy, the hunter—a healthy, rugged lot, virtually all pure Americans. The Rough Riders sprang from this element. But probably the most distinct single human invasion of the Southwest was made by the irreconcilables of the Confederate Army after the Civil War. They could not endure the Federal domination of the reconstruction period, or else they had lost all their property, and with it their hope of rising again in their old neighborhood, and so they set westward, remaining, as immigrants usually do, in the same latitude as that from which they came. Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona all have a strong substratum of the Old South, still possessing many of the bitternesses left by the great conflict, and yet rising with the opportunities of the new land, and adding to its development peculiar pride, dignity and often culture. Owing to its wildernesses and its contiguity to Mexico, the Southwest[221] was also for many years the refuge of outlaws from all parts of the country—an element which, though small, was so perniciously active that it earned an undue prominence in fiction and contemporary literature, giving the country a complexion of evil which it did not deserve. This element still effervesces in a train-robbery, but its effect on the Southwest has been inconsequential.

All these earlier sources of population, however, were small compared with the great inundation of the last few years, following the extension of the railroads, the crowding of other parts of the country, and the hard times of 1893, which, causing discontent among many Easterners and Northerners, tempted them to try new fields of enterprise. There are virtually no native-born Anglo-Saxons of voting age in New Mexico and Arizona—at least, they are so few as to be a wonder and a pride. In Texas there are many, for the changes in that part of the Southwest are a step older and possibly not quite so rapid, although Texas, too, is overrun with people from every part of the country. It is safe to ask any middle-aged man what part of the East he is from. Of this later influx of population there are representatives from every part of the United States, with a specially large number from Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Missouri—the Middle West. In many cases these settlers had first immigrated to the States just beyond the Mississippi, and had there taken up farms; but uncertain rain and crop-failures drove them onward to the irrigated valleys of the region, and there they are to-day.

Up to this point the population consisted of the strongest and most enterprising American manhood, for the weaklings do not undertake the chances and hardships of pioneering.[222] With this drift of population, however, there has appeared a large number of invalids, mostly with pulmonary complaints, from every part of America. Many of them have been promptly cured, and have engaged in business or taken up farms in the valleys or ranches on the plains. A considerable proportion of them are people of education, culture, refinement and often of wealth. Much of the money of the region, as in Southern California, has been, brought in and invested by health-seekers. This class has added much to the social and religious development, and it includes some of the leading spirits in politics. As yet there has been very little immigration of Italians, Russians, or the lower class of Irish, most of whom are by preference city-dwellers.

It will be seen, therefore, that the Southwest is peopled with the very best Americans, segregated by the eternal law of evolutionary selection, with almost no substratum of the low-caste European foreigner to lower the level of civilization. With such a start, and such a commingling of Americans from all parts of the Union, the man from Boston rubbing elbows with the Atlanta man, and Kansas working side by side with Mississippi, it would seem that, the region may one day produce the standard American type. It has already manifested its capacity for type-production in the cow-boy, now being rapidly merged in the new Southwesterner, a type as distinct and as uniquely American as the New England Yankee or the Virginia colonel.

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THE DESERT

By Ray Stannard Baker

To science there is no poison; to botany no weed; to chemistry no dirt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

After all, there is no desert. Within the memory of comparatively young men a third of the territory of the United States beyond the Mississippi bore the name of the "Great American Desert." It was a region vast beyond accurate human conception, in extent as great as half of Europe, midribbed with the stupendous, shaggy bulk of the Rocky Mountains, from which it descended in both directions in illimitable rolling plains and rugged mesas, rising here to the height of snow-crowned mountains, and falling there to the ancient salty beds of lost seas, lower than the level of the ocean. It was rutted by chasms and washes, the channels of rivers that thundered with a passion of water for a single month in the year, and were ash-dry for the other eleven. Some stretched eastward toward the Mississippi, some southward toward the Gulf, and some westward toward the Pacific. It was an empire of wild grandeur, of majestic heights and appalling depths, of silent waste places, of barbaric beauty of coloring, of volcanoes and the titanic work of volcanoes, of fierce wild beasts and wilder men; but it was a desert. Here, for months at a time, no rain came to moisten the parched[224] earth, and there were few clouds to obscure the heat of a blazing sun. The earth became dust and ashes, all but uninhabited and impassable, here grown up to cactus and greasewood and sage, here to gray grass, here to nothing—a place where animals dropped in their tracks from heat and thirst, and shriveled there, undecaying, until their ragged hides crumpled like parchment over their gaunt skeletons. Many a pioneer bound for the El Dorado of California felt the tooth of the desert, and left his bones to whiten on the trail as a dreadful evidence of the rigor of these waste places. This was the Great American Desert, the irreclaimable waste of fifty years ago, the dread-spot of the continent. To-day you may seek it in vain.

When reduced to its essence, the work of every great explorer and pioneer in the West has consisted in showing that the desert was no desert. It was a cramped and mendicant imagination and a weak faith in humanity that first called it a desert, and it has required the life of many a bold man to dispel that error. The pioneer cow-man came in and saw the dry bunch-grass of the plains. "This is no desert," he said; "this is pasture-land," and straightway thirty million cattle were feeding on the ranges. A colony of Mormons, driven to the wilderness by persecution, saw, with the faith of a Moses, green fields blooming where the cactus grew, and in a few years a great city had risen in the midst of a fertile valley, and a new commonwealth had been born. A Powell came and disclosed the possibilities of the desert when watered from rivers that had long run to waste, and a hundred valleys began to bloom, and millions of acres of barren desert to grow the richest crops on the continent. Miners came, found gold and silver and copper in the hills, and built a thousand camps; the railroads[225] divided the great desert with a maze of steel trails until it was a veritable patchwork of civilization; and timid tourists came and camped, and went away better and braver. To-day several million Americans are living in the desert, not temporarily, while they rob it of riches, but for all time, and they love their homes as passionately as any dwellers in the green hills of New England.

A traveler in the West must go far indeed before he find a place where he can say, "This is a worthless and irreclaimable waste, the true desert." There is no faith left in him who speaks of waste places. I stand in the gray sand; nothing but sand in every direction as far as the eye can reach—sand, a few sentinel yuccas, a sprawling mesquit-bush, with a gopher darting underneath, and a cholla cactus, gray with dust. Here, I say, is the waste place of all the ages; no man ever has set foot here before, and it is likely that no man ever will again. But what is that sound—click, click, click—that comes from the distance? It is no kin to the noises of the desert. Climb the ridge there, the one that trembles with heat; take it slowly, for the sun is blinding hot, and the dry air cracks one's lips. Have a care of that tall sahuaro; it has been growing there undisturbed for two centuries, and it is not less prickly for its age. And in all its years it never has seen a vision such as it now beholds; for here are men come to the desert, painfully dragging water with them in carts and barrels. They have put up machinery in this silent place, having faith that there is oil a thousand feet below in the rock; and so they come in the heat and dust to prove their faith. You hear the click, click of their machinery; it is the triumphant song of an indomitable, conquering humanity.

Go over the next ridge, or perhaps the one beyond that,[226] and you will see a still stranger sight—a great, black, angular dredge, a one-armed iron giant scooping up the sand tons at a time, in his huge palm, weighing it in the air, and then, with outcrooking elbow, majestically dropping it upon the desert. There is a little black engine behind burning mesquit-wood, and a silent, grimy man chewing tobacco and grumbling at the heat. They entered the desert forty miles away at the bank of a great river, and they have burrowed their way through the sand, with the water following in a broad brown band.

"Yes, sir," says the man, in a matter-of-fact voice; "this canal will irrigate half a million acres of land in this desert. In ten years there will be a hundred thousand people settled here. You see that mesquit-tree over there? Well, that's where we're going to locate the city. The railroad will come in along that ridge and cross over near those chollas." ... So you may go from ridge to ridge through all the great desert, and may find miners delving in the dry earth for gold; see herders setting up windmills;[227] see farmers boring holes for artesian wells; see miners of wood digging in the sand for the fat roots of the mesquit; see irrigation engineers making canal-levels, and railroad contractors spinning their threads of steel where no man dreamed of living. And you will feel as you never have felt before, and your heart will throb with the pride of it—this splendid human energy and patience and determination. Here men separate themselves from their homes, from the society of women; they suffer thirst and hardship; they die here in the desert, but they bring in civilization. And the crying wonder of it all is that these are ordinary men, good and evil, weak and strong, who have no idea that they are heroic; who would laugh at the suggestion that they are more than earning a living, making a little money for themselves, and hoping to make more in the future. Yes, the time has come when humanity will not tolerate deserts.

Yet, judging by the limited vision of the individual man, there are still desert places in the West. A man is so small and weak, and his physical wants, his need of water and food and a resting-place, are so incessant and commanding, that he can see only a little way around him and creep only a few miles in a day. If he know not the desert, he may be lost within half a dozen miles of a ranch or within a hundred yards of a spring, and die there of thirst.

To him, in such cases, it is all as much of a desert and quite as dangerous as if there were not a human habitation within a thousand miles. But to the man who is reasonably schooled in the wisdom of trails and the signs of water, the desert has been robbed of nearly all its terrors. With proper care and preparation he may go anywhere without[228] fear, although frequently not without acute discomfort and even suffering.

The desert still maintains its fastnesses in the West. There are some spots better entitled to the name than others, but each year these fastnesses are shrinking before the advance of human enterprise, as the water might rise over the land, leaving the high and difficult places to the last. So these islands are scattered through several States and Territories, mostly in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah and Oregon, in the great valley lying between the main ridge of the Rocky Mountains, on the east, and the Cascades, Sierra Nevada, and the Coast Range on the west. Chief among them are the Mohave Desert, in southeastern California, a territory as large as Switzerland; the Colorado and Gila deserts of southwestern Arizona and Southern California; the marvelous Painted Desert of northeastern Arizona; and the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah. Opening northward from the Mohave Desert lies Death Valley, perhaps the most desolate and forbidding spot in America, though comparatively small in extent. Yet there are few places even in these desert strongholds that are wholly without life of one sort or another, and a large proportion of them could be reclaimed, if water were available. Even as it is, not one can bar human activity; railroads have been built directly across three of the worst of them; mines are being opened, and oil-wells driven; land is being reclaimed by irrigation; and even in the fastnesses of Death Valley there are many mining-camps and an extensive borax industry. In all the West, look as you will, you will find no desert more pitifully forlorn, more deserted, more irreclaimable, and more worthless than the man-made deserts of northern Wisconsin and Michigan,[229] where fire has followed the heedless lumberman and spread a black and littered waste thousands of square miles in extent, where once grew a splendid green forest of pine. One is beautiful with the perfected grandeur into which nature molds even the most unpromising material; the other is hideous, grotesque, pitiful, a reminder of the reckless wastefulness of man.

The natural desert, indeed, abounds in a strange and beguiling beauty of its own that lays hold upon a man's spirit, perhaps rudely at first, yet with a growing fascination that, once deeply felt, forever calls and calls the wanderer home again. In the spell that it weaves over a man, it is like the sea: the love of the sailor for his life is not more faithful than that of those bronzed, silent riders of the desert for the long hot stretches of their open land.

Water is the key to the desert. All the life of the desert rests upon its power of resistance to thirst. One marvels at the consummate ingenuity with which nature has improved her scant opportunities, turning every capability to the conservation of such little water as there is. Everything in the desert has its own story of economy, patience, and stubborn persistency in the face of adversity. Therefore the individuality of desert life is strong; it is different from all other life. Its necessities have wrought peculiar forms both of plants and of animals, and in time the desert also leaves its indelible marks upon the men who dwell in its wastes.

Everywhere there are evidences of the terrible struggle for water—a struggle in which men who come to the desert must instantly engage: every wagon that crosses the desert carries its barrel of water; every man who sets out takes with him a canteen; every ranch has its windmill and its[230] water-barrel. Water is the only thing that is not free. Stop at a desert well, and a sign offers water at ten cents or five cents a head for your horses.

Color, indeed, is one of the great joys of the desert, and one who has learned to love these silent places finds unending pleasure in the changing lights and shades, many of them marvelously delicate and beautiful.

Who can convey the feeling of the mysterious night on the desert, suddenly and sweetly cool after the burning heat of the day, the sky a deep, clear blue above—nowhere so blue as in this dry, pure air—the stars almost crowding down to earth in their nearness and brilliancy, a deep and profound silence round about, broken occasionally by the far-off echoing scream of some prowling coyote or the hoot of an owl? The horses loom big and dark where they feed in the near distance; here and there on the top of a dry yucca-stalk an owl or a hawk sits outlined in black against the sky; otherwise there is nothing anywhere to break the long, smooth line of the horizon.

It is good to feel that, in spite of human enterprise, there is plenty of desert left for many years to come, a place where men can go and have it out with themselves, where they can breathe clean air and get down close to the great, quiet, simple life of the earth. "Few in these hot, dim, frictiony times," says John Muir, "are quite sane or free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much good and making so much money—or so little—they are no longer good themselves." But here in the desert there yet remain places of wildness and solitude and quiet; there is room here to turn without rubbing elbows, places where one may yet find refreshment.

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