In the dim dawn of history the Aryans, forsaking the birthplace of the race upon the Caspian shore, poured through the passes of the Caucasus and peopled Europe. By caravel and merchantman adventuring Europeans crossed the western ocean and established a fringe of settlements along this continent’s eastern rim. The American pioneers, taking up the historic march, slowly but inexorably pressed westward, from the Hudson to the Ohio, from the Ohio to the Mississippi, from the Mississippi across the plains, across the Rockies, until athwart the line of their advance they found another ocean. They could go no farther, for beyond that ocean lay the overpopulated countries of the yellow race. The white man had completed his age-long migration toward the beckoning West; his march was finished; in the golden lands which look upon the Pacific he had come to the End of the Trail.
In the great march which substituted the wheat-field for the desert, the orchard for the forest, the work was done by the hardiest breed of adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation—the Pioneers. And the pioneer has always lived on the frontier. Most people believe that there is no longer any quarter of this continent that can properly be called the frontier and that the pioneer is as extinct as the buffalo. To prove that they are wrong I have written this book. Though the gambler and the gun-fighter have vanished before the storm of public disapproval; though the bison no longer roams the ranges; though the express rider has given way to the express-train; in the hinterland of that vast region which sweeps westward and northward from the Pecos to the Skeena, and which includes New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, frontier conditions still endure and the frontiersman is still to be found. In the unexplored and unexploited portions of this, “the Last West,” white-topped prairie schooners—full sisters of those which crossed the plains in ’49—creak into the wilderness in the wake of the home seeker; the settler chops his little farmstead from the virgin forest and rears his cabin of logs from the trees which grew upon the site; mile-long pack-trains wend their way into the northern wild; six-horse Concord coaches tear along the roads amid rolling clouds of dust, their scarlet bodies swaying drunkenly upon their leathern springs; out in the back country, where the roads run out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher still rides the ranges in his picturesque panoply of high-crowned Stetson and Angora chaps and vivid shirt. But this is the last call. It is the last chance to see a nation in the primeval stage of its existence. In a few more years, a very few, there will be no place on this continent, or on any continent, that can truthfully be called the frontier, and with it will disappear, never to return, those stern and hardy figures—the pioneer, the prospector, the packer, the puncher—who won for us the West.
The real West—and by the term I do not mean that sun-kissed, flower-carpeted coast zone, with its orange groves and apple orchards, its palatial mansions and luxurious hotels, its fashionable resorts and teeming, all-of-a-sudden cities, which stretches from San Diego to Vancouver and which to the Eastern visitor represents “the West”—cannot be seen from the terraces of tourist hostelries or the observation platforms of transcontinental trains. Because I wished to visit those portions of the West which cannot be viewed from a car-window and because I wished to acquaint myself with the characteristics and problems and ideals of the people who dwell in them, I travelled from Mexico to the borders of Alaska by motor-car—the only time, I believe, that a car has made that journey on its own wheels and under its own power. Because that journey was so crowded with incident and obstacle and adventure, and because the incidents and obstacles and adventures thus encountered so graphically illustrate the conditions which prevail in “the Last West,” is my excuse for having to a certain extent made a personal narrative of the following chapters.
Without entering into a tedious recital of distances and road conditions, I have outlined certain routes which the motorist who contemplates turning the bonnet of his car westward might follow with profit and pleasure. With no desire to usurp the guide-book’s place, I have deemed it as important to describe that enchanted littoral which has become the nation’s winter playground as to depict that back country which the tourist seldom sees. Though I hold no brief for boards of trade and kindred organisations, I have incorporated the more significant facts and figures as to land values, soils, crops, climates, and resources which every prospective home-seeker wishes to know. But, more than anything else, I have tried to convey something of the spell of that big, open, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, glad-to-see-you land and of the spirit of energy, industry, and determination which animates the kindly, hospitable, big-hearted, broad-minded, open-handed men who dwell there. They are the modern Argonauts, the present-day Pioneers. To them, across the miles, I lift my glass.
E. Alexander Powell.