The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson

The open and abounding West is no more. From California, from all the interior regions of the great dry plains rises the same cry, that the government should take measures to give the people more land; that by means of irrigation it should restore, in some measure at least, the opportunities which allured the men who in the old days followed in the pilgrimage “out West.” This changed and restricted region has problems entirely different from those of the West that was.

Once we wished a population to embrace the opportunities that abounded in the West. Now we wish to increase the opportunities for a population clamoring for a better chance than is offered anywhere in America. It is demanded that the government shall bring about reclamation of the arid lands, and their actual settlement in small tracts. “The political party that shall boldly advocate a great national irrigation appropriation will receive the support of millions of people, now homeless and discontented, who desire homes and an opportunity to make a living by honest labor.” This is the statement of a master in transportation, who has assisted in the importation of hundreds of thousands of these homeless and discontented people into an America too suddenly gone small. He would scarcely care to see our railroads under government control, but he can suggest a method by which the government could be immensely helpful to the Western people, and perhaps to the Western railroads!

In yet another prominent railroad office, the conversation lately turned upon the future of the carrying trade in the West, when another of these captains of transportation swept his hand in a large circle on a map that hung on the wall. Within his circle was included a good portion of Montana and Wyoming, with other parts of the great Western interior. “All this region must go under irrigation,” said he. “It is worthless to-day for farming purposes, but there exists no richer soil when once you get water on it. There is no county or state government, there is not even the richest railroad corporation, that can afford to put this vast acreage under the ditch. It is a problem for the national government of the United States; and, mark my words, that government will one day be obliged to solve that problem. Of course, the interest of our railroad in the matter is purely a business one. We want this country settled up, not by a few scattered grazers, but by many producing farmers. We want this country filled full of small land holders, not that we may carry their products to the East on our railway, but so that we may carry them west to the Pacific, and thence across the ocean to the Asiatic market. There must be a new West, and for that West the market must be found in Asia.”

The common carriers, therefore, tell us that our West is now beyond the Pacific; that the East has come into the West; that the Old World has come into the New; that the Latin methods of farming must supplant the Anglo-Saxon ways. Perhaps; but this will take some time. As against the likelihood of any early and sweeping national action in the matter, there remains chiefly the vis inertiæ of mental habit in the American farmer, who hitherto has not been acquainted with the doctrine of irrigation and reclamation. Vast tracts of California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas—large regions in what was once considered the irreclaimable desert of America, go to show that the Western-American can learn irrigation and can successfully carry on farming of that nature; but none the less, for the average American farmer, who has been accustomed to the wide-handed methods of his forefathers, this proposition will carry no immediate appeal.

The proof of this latter statement lies in that very emigration into Canada to which attention has been called, and which constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena ever known in the history of the American West. These dwellers under the Stars and Stripes, these citizens of the land of the free, of the land supposed to offer the greatest extent of human opportunity to-day, are flocking across her borders with the purpose of establishing homes in an alien land, and under a flag from which in a century gone by they made deliberate and forcible desertion!

They want the cheap lands, the wide acres, the great horizon of a West, even if they must find that West in land other than that which bore them! They do not want irrigated land that is worth one hundred dollars an acre, even though there be an unchanging and pleasant climate as an attraction thereto. They prefer a cold, bleak environment, a rude, hard life, with poorer markets, a looser touch with civilization, but with a bolder, a wider and freer individual horizon. There has been nothing in our history more pathetic than this. There has been nothing more cheerlessly disheartening in our history than the thought that we are exchanging thousands of men of this bold and rugged type, men who are willing and able to go out into the savage wilderness and lay it under tribute, for an equal number of thousands of shiftless and unambitious incoming population, who are willing to live on the droppings of the American table.

As to the extent of this American emigration northward into Canada, the figures are great enough to cause consternation in the mind of more than one railroad man, and to set on foot all possible measures of checking the outgoing stream. Within the year 1902 more than fifty thousand American citizens, some say seventy-five, even a hundred thousand, are thought to have taken up homes on the soil of Canada. These American emigrants took with them twenty million dollars out of the banks of Iowa alone. Great syndicates, in part made up of American capitalists and in conjunction with American and Canadian masters of transportation, have undertaken the settlement of large tracts of these cheap Canadian lands.

The settlers of the remoter West, the men from Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and so forth, largely move into Manitoba or other western British provinces. Farther to the east, in what is known as New Ontario under the new railroad industrial policy, an equally determined effort is making to influence American citizens to settle on lands subject to the rigorous climate north of Lake Superior. If only the settler shall come here he may have land at any price he likes, on terms of payment that shall suit himself. In all the large Canadian cities, whether under government countenance or not, there are emigration bureaus. In the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis there are yet other emigration offices, proclaiming as flamboyantly as they ever did for the lands of the United States, the attractions of a home in the far Northwest, across the borders of the United States.

Canada lost one-fifth of her population to the United States. She is regaining much of it to-day, because she still has a West, and we have none. There is systematic, deliberate and highly differentiated effort going on toward the influencing of this American emigration. To offset it we have nothing to offer except the incoming stream of city dwellers from Europe, and the possible policy of national irrigation, subject always to the dubious methods of American politics. Gaze now once more, if you like, on the picture of the old West and of the new!

England fears, and in some portions of Canada that fear is shared, that these Americans will not become good Canadian subjects; that, in short, Canada will become Americanized. Only the years will tell. These great popular movements are matters of individual self-interest. The day of the individual is indeed passing, yet it is not to pass without a fight to the last gasp upon the part of that individual himself. It would lie ill to suggest that the American government has not always properly treated its people, in spite of that vast modern meshwork of monopolies and combinations which has brought about practically an industrial slavery, and has gone so far toward bidding our once free American to hope for freedom no more. Yet the answer as to the patriotism of the American people lies silent before us in the records of the ticket offices of these railways that run from America into Canada.

In a view of the past American transportation methods, and of that natural Monroe doctrine whose basis lies in the abundant natural richness of the environment of the American temperate zone, it is no unbiased prophecy to suggest that this question will eventually be settled, not by the government of the United States, not by the government of England, not by the government of Canada, but by the people themselves. If the transportation of the future shall make Canada and the United States alike, then assuredly the people will attend to the rest, and care not what may be the politics or the government of either the one land or the other. The eventual settlement of the West may mean a country in which there shall be small distinction between Canada and the United States, small distinction between the latter and the more desirable parts of the republic of Mexico on the south. If these questions shall be settled in Washington or Ottawa, it is safe prophecy to believe that it will be in the railroad offices and not the governmental offices of those respective cities. It takes more than politics to suppress the instinct that seeks individual well being. It takes more than politics to prevent water from running down-hill.

The reply to such prophecy or foreboding, or guessing, as one may choose to call it, which has been provided by the government of England, is not apt to take any form different from the ancient policy of England, which after all is military. England is old and is, or presently will be, decadent. Her bigotry is that of age, her unprogressive slowness of change is senile. She has been the great colonizer; and in so far as the development of transportation facilities has brought her colonies closer home to her, it has given England hope—her only hope—that of existing in the future of her robust children. Yet we find the concern of England to-day to be that of securing military touch with all the corners of the world, rather than that of establishing a flexible and durable system of transportation methods that shall make for the individual well-being of all her widely scattered subjects.

England, concerned with this American invasion of settlers, is to-day planning a great trans-Canadian road, whose western head shall lie somewhere within striking distance of Asia. “This,” says one commentator, “is England’s answer to Russia and the trans-Siberian railway.” To a humble observer it might seem far safer were England concerned, not so much in answering Russia, as in answering the United States.

The best answer to Russia would be multitudes of farms in Western Canada, which one day we may call Western America. She can make that answer only by learning the methods of the United States. Till in some measure she shall have done so, she can not be safe as against the inroads of the American citizens. She can not restore the level of the waters by the building of railroads with military reasons under them. There may be a time in the history of the North American mid-continent when Canada and the United States will agree that it is better to get along comfortably together than it is to aid a far-off and somewhat mythical government to fight its battles somewhere at the end of military roads.

Our little Western secessionists, our little frontier republics cleaved to the government at Washington as soon as the pathways thereto made such loyalty a possible thing. It is nearer from Quebec and Ottawa to Washington, than it is to London. Patriotism is much a matter of transportation. The faster the ocean steamships, the better the telegraphic communication, the nearer Canada is to England; yet at the same time relatively she grows still nearer to the United States.^[66]

Germane to these questions are those that rise as to the opening of additional avenues of industry at the other end of those pathways that stretch out across the Pacific Ocean. In the mad race for the gates of the imperial city of China, America had no real friends at her side. That was the time when the covetous powers of Europe, owners of lands overpopulated and industries overcrowded, conceived that they had at length opportunity to urge quarrel on a weaker land, with the result of a war in which the weaker power would inevitably be obliged to pay the penalty of unsuccessful resort to arms. England and Germany wished to do what England had been doing in South Africa and elsewhere for some time. They wanted a quarrel and a war, therefore a dismemberment and a division. Water transportation is cheap. The coal and iron of China lie close to water transportation. It had excellently well served the designs of England and Germany to parcel out this land, so full of raw material fit for manufacturing purposes. It had excellently well suited the powers to wipe the barbarians off the map, as has been done in so many South Asiatic and South African transactions of a similar nature. The secret of the Christian indignation at the barbarity of the heathen Chinese is none too much a secret in the frank vision of commercial desire.

The part of America in this game was well played. It is too late now to cry out for an America for Americans. We have squandered our substance, wasted our heritage, played the spendthrift royally as we might. Now it is too late. We may shut our gates on the East, but we must some time take our part in the great game of going abroad in the West. We have not yet felt that time to be near at hand; but it was splendid statesmanship on the part of America that kept China intact for yet a while, and got the armies off her soil.

The blandishments of England and Germany ought not to appeal to America. There is no nation that loves us unselfishly, or that would aid us unselfishly were we in need of help;^[67] but if it shall one day come to the last bitter game among the nations, there will be none then so well equipped as we. We shall not need to call for aid. An English journal deems it “crude vulgarity” for the United States to think of wresting the maritime supremacy from Great Britain. It may be such, though we are not sure. It was perhaps crude vulgarity when we took America from Great Britain, when we took for ourselves a country so full of natural wealth, a country so perfect for the upbuilding of an aggressive and self-reliant national character. It might be crude vulgarity if we took this whole American continent as our own. Let us hope that this same character may still abide with us when we find need for the farther crude vulgarity of going abroad into the world. That we are meantime going abroad is without question true; not at the direction of our “leaders,” not by reason of our politics, but by reason of our transportation.

The South, always the leader into the West, exclaims politically against the look toward Asia. It is but politics. The Tennessee troops fought well in the Philippines. Not all the world can stop us from thus going abroad. Whether we shall come home again at a later date remains yet to be seen. Whether we shall then have left a home worth the name remains yet to be proved.

Such are some of the localities and situations into which our trails have nationally led us; such some of the problems into which our vaunted Age of Transportation is carrying us. There are new equations, new questions, new problems constantly confronting us with an ever growing urgency. It is not in any wise certain that a dispassionate study of this nature can leave us with a national vanity wholly untouched. It is not altogether sure that the conclusions framed upon our chosen premises, inevitable as they are, can leave the student wholly convinced of either our universal success or our universal happiness.

Yet we shall do best to dismiss forebodings, and to cling, as still we may, to the faith and hope that was part of the American birthright. Indeed, we find it difficult to study even our grim columns of figures, our unimaginative records of events, without still retaining the curious and awesome feeling that heretofore the settlement of the American West, the birth and growth of the American man, has been a matter of fate, of destiny. There seemed to be a mighty west-bound tide of humanity of which we were but spectators, if indeed we were not part of the tide’s burden of hurried flotsam, carried forward without plan or aim or purpose.

We go on apparently still without plan, apparently still borne forward in a throng resistless as of yore. Perhaps in the forefront of our ranks we carry trump of Jericho for other lands; if not in the bugle note of our armies, at least in the humming of our commerce. Let us hope that we do not invite a trumpet call at our own walls.

A million dead men are forgotten. Our wars are as nothing. But a million live men, taken up bodily from one environment, and set down bodily in another environment in any antipodal quarter of the world—that means history; that spells questions in forethought; that bids rise an American statesmanship big and honest, not selfish, not corrupt, and not afraid! These questions are such as must be approached wholly without reference to party or to politics.

It has been hitherto in America not so much a question of politics as of roads; but now the roads are builded that shall lead us to our City of Desire or to our Castle of Despair. Steam will establish our doctrines and our tariffs. But steam has no soul. To it, our flap-hatted frontiersman, our new-American, our product of a noble and unparalleled evolution, is but the same as the wrinkled-booted foreigner that puts down his black box in the middle of a Dakota prairie or in the heart of a crowded Eastern city. Steam has no care for the real glory of our flag. It cares naught for character. It does not love humanity. In it dwells no ancient love for the history of an America which at least might once have been dear to the heart of all humanity. Steam is an equalizer. It breaks down the lines between nations. It makes America like unto Europe, causing us to change to meet the changes of the Old World. If we be not careful we shall see going forward that equalizing of humanity that is brutalizing. And then in the good time of the ages we shall see cataclysm, revolution, change.

Whatever the product of that change after the revolutions that are yet to be, no man of all the future will ever again behold a land like that American West which is now no more. That was indeed a land rich in the bounty of nature, rich in opportunity for humanity. It was a land where a man could indeed be a man; where indeed he might live honestly and cleanly and nobly, unshrinking from his fate, unfearing for his own survival, helpful to his neighbor, independent as to himself.

Now we have seen our old rider going far, our flap-hatted man, the fearless one. He has strange company to-day, at home and abroad. In all reverence, let us hope that God may prosper him! In all reverence, let us hope that there may never arise from the great and understanding soul of any leader of this country that sad and bitter cry, “Give me back my Americans!”