FROM the gloom of Buffalo, the smoke of Cincinnati, and the dirt of Pittsburg, I should have been glad to escape as soon as might be, even had not the death from cholera of 240 persons in a single day of my visit to the “Queen City” warned me to fly north. From a stricken town, with its gutters full of chloride of lime, and fires burning in the public streets, to green Michigan, was a grateful change; but I was full of sorrow at leaving that richest and most lovely of all States—Ohio. There is a charm in the park-like beauty of the Monongahela valley, dotted with vines and orchards, that nothing in Eastern America can rival. The absence at once of stumps in the cornfields, and of untilled or unfenced land, gives the “Buckeye State” a look of age that none of the “old Eastern States” can show. In corn, in meadow, in timber-land, Ohio stands alone. Her indian-corn exceeds in richness that of any other State; she has ample stores of iron, and coal is worked upon the surface in every Alleghany valley. Wool, wine, hops, tobacco, all are raised; her Catawba has inspired poems. Every river-side is clothed with groves of oak, of hickory, of sugar-maple, of sycamore, of poplar, and of buckeye. Yet, as I said, the change to the Michigan prairie was full of a delightful relief; it was Holland after the Rhine, London after Paris.
Where men grow tall there will maize grow tall, is a good sound rule: limestone makes both bone and straw. The Northwestern States, inhabited by giant men, are the chosen home of the most useful and beautiful of plants, the maize—in America called “corn.” For hundreds of miles the railway track, protected not even by a fence or hedge, runs through the towering plants, which hide all prospects save that of their own green pyramids. Maize feeds the people, it feeds the cattle and the hogs that they export to feed the cities of the East; from it is made yearly, as an Ohio farmer told me, “whisky enough to float the ark.” Rice is not more the support of the Chinese than maize of the English in America.
In the great corn-field of the Northwestern States, dwells a people without a history, without tradition, busy at hewing out of the forest trunks codes and social usages of its own. The Kansas men have set themselves to emancipating women; the “Wolverines,” as the people of Michigan are called, have turned their heads to education, and are teaching the teachers upon this point.
The rapidity with which intellectual activity is awakened in the West is inexplicable to the people of New England. While you are admiring the laws of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Boston men tell you that the resemblance of the code of Kansas to that of Connecticut is consequent only on the fact, that the framers of the former possessed a copy of this one New England code, while they had never set eyes upon the code of any other country in the world. While Yale and Harvard are trying in vain to keep pace with the State universities of Michigan and Kansas, you will meet in Lowell and New Haven men who apply an old Russian story to the Western colleges, and tell you that their professors of languages, when asked where they have studied, reply that they guess they learned to read and write in Springfield.
One of the difficulties of the New England colleges has been to reconcile university traditions with democracy; but in the Western States there is neither reconciliation nor tradition, though universities are plenty. Probably the most democratic school in the whole world is the State University of Michigan, situate at Ann Arbor, near Detroit. It is cheap, large, practical; twelve hundred students, paying only the ten dollars entrance fee, and five dollars a year during residence, and living where they can in the little town, attend the university to be prepared to enter with knowledge and resolution upon the affairs of their future life. A few only are educated by having their minds unfolded that they may become many-sided men; but all work with spirit, and with that earnestness which is seen in the Scotch universities at home. The war with crime, the war with sin, the war with death—Law, Theology, Medicine—these are the three foremost of man‘s employments; to these, accordingly, the university affords her chiefest care, and to one of these the student, his entrance examination passed, often gives his entire time.
These things are democratic, but it is not in them that the essential democracy of the university is to be seen. There are at Michigan no honor-lists, no classes in our sense, no orders of merit, no competition. A man takes, or does not take a certain degree. The university is governed, not by its members, not by its professors, but by a parliament of “regents” appointed by the inhabitants of the State. Such are the two great principles of the democratic university of the West.
It might be supposed that these two strange departures from the systems of older universities were irregularities, introduced to meet the temporary embarrassments incidental to educational establishments in young States. So far is this from being the case that, as I saw at Cambridge, the clearest-sighted men of the older colleges of America are trying to assimilate their teaching system to that of Michigan—at least in the one point of the absence of competition. They assert that toil performed under the excitement of a fierce struggle between man and man is unhealthy work, different in nature and in results from the loving labor of men whose hearts are really in what they do: toil, in short, not very easily distinguishable from slave labor.
In the matter of the absence of competition, Michigan is probably but returning to the system of the European universities of the Middle Ages, but the government by other than the members of the university is a still stranger scheme. It is explained when we look to the sources whence the funds of the university are drawn—namely, from the pockets of the taxpayers of the State. The men who have set up this corporation in their midst, and who tax themselves for its support, cannot be called on, they say, to renounce its government to their nominees, professors from New England, unconnected with the State, men of one idea, often quarrelsome, sometimes “irreligious.” There is much truth in these statements of the case, but it is to be hoped that the men chosen to serve as “regents” are of a higher intellectual stamp than those appointed to educational offices in the Canadian backwoods. A report was put into my hands at Ottawa, in which a superintendent of instruction writes to the Minister of Education, that he had advised the ratepayers of Victoria County not in future to elect as school trustees men who cannot read or write. As Michigan grows older, she will, perhaps, seek to conform to the practice of other universities in this matter of her government, but in the point of absence of competition she is likely to continue firm.
Even here some difficulty is found in getting competent school directors; one of them reported 31½ children attending school. Of another district its superintendent reports: “Conduct of scholars about the same as that of ‘Young America’ in general.” Some of the superintendents aim at jocosity, and show no want of talent in themselves, while their efforts are to demonstrate its deficiency among the boys. The superintendent of Grattan says, in answer to some numbered questions: “Condition good, improvement fair; for ¼ of ¼ of the year in school, and fifteen-sixteenths of the time at play. Male teachers most successful with the birch; female with Cupid‘s darts. Schoolhouses in fair whittling order. Apparatus: Shovel, none; tongs, ditto; poker, one. Conduct of scholars like that of parents—good, bad, and indifferent. No minister in town—sorry; no lawyer—good!” The superintendents of Manlius Township report that Districts 1 and 2 have buildings “fit (in winter) only for the polar bear, walrus, reindeer, Russian sable, or Siberian bat;” and they go on to say: “Our children read everything, from Mr. Noodle‘s Essays on Matrimony to Artemus Ward‘s Lecture on First Principles of American Government.” Another report from a very new county runs: “Sunday-schools afford a little reading-matter to the children. Character of matter most read—battle, murder, and sudden death.” A third states that the teachers are meanly paid, and goes on: “If the teaching is no better than the pay, it must be like the soup that the rebels gave the prisoners.” A superintendent, reporting that the success of the teachers is greater than their qualifications warrant, says: “The reason is to be found in the Yankeeish adaptability of even Wolverines.”
After all, it is hard even to pass jokes at the expense of the Northwestern people. A population who would maintain schools and universities under difficulties apparently overwhelming was the source from which to draw Union volunteers such as those who, after the war, returned to their Northern homes, I have been told, shocked and astonished at the ignorance and debasement of the Southern whites.
The system of elective studies pursued at Michigan is one to which we are year by year tending in the English universities. As sciences multiply and deepen, it becomes more and more impossible that a “general course” scheme can produce men fit to take their places in the world. Cambridge has attempted to set up both systems, and, giving her students the choice, bids them pursue one branch of study with a view to honors, or take a less valued degree requiring some slight proficiency in many things. Michigan denies that the stimulus of honor examinations should be connected with the elective system. With her, men first graduate in science, or in an arts degree, which bears a close resemblance to the English “poll,” and then pursue their elected study in a course which leads to no university distinction, which is free from the struggle for place and honors. These objections to “honors” rest upon a more solid foundation than a mere democratic hatred of inequality of man and man. Repute as a writer, as a practitioner, is valued by the Ann Arbor man, and the Wolverines do not follow the Ephesians, and tell men who excel among them to go and excel elsewhere. The Michigan professors say, and Dr. Hedges bears them out, that a far higher average of real knowledge is obtained under this system of independent work than is dreamt of in colleges where competition rules. “A higher average” is all they say, and they acknowledge frankly that there is here and there a student to be found to whom competition would do good. As a rule, they tell us this is not the case. Unlimited battle between man and man for place is sufficiently the bane of the world not to be made the curse of schools: competition breeds every evil which it is the aim of education, the duty of a university to suppress: pale faces caused by excessive toil, feverish excitement that prevents true work, a hatred of the subject on which the toil is spent, jealousy of best friends, systematic depreciation of men‘s talents, rejection of all reading that will not “pay,” extreme and unhealthy cultivation of the memory, general degradation of labor—all these evils, and many more, are charged upon the competition system. Everything that our professors have to say of “cram” these American thinkers apply to competition. Strange doctrines these for young America!
Of the practical turn which we should naturally expect to discover in the university of a bran-new State I found evidence in the regulation which prescribes that the degree of Master of Arts shall not be conferred as a matter of course upon graduates of three years’ standing, but only upon such as have pursued professional or general scientific studies during that period. Even in these cases an examination before some one of the faculties is required for the Master‘s degree. I was told that for the medical degree “four years of reputable practice” is received, instead of certain courses.
In her special and selected studies, Michigan is as merely practical as Swift‘s University of Brobdingnag; but, standing far above the ordinary arts or science courses, there is a “University course” designed for those who have already taken the Bachelor‘s degree. It is harder to say what this course includes than what it does not. The twenty heads range over philology, philosophy, art, and science; there is a branch of “criticism,” one of “arts of design,” one of “fine arts.” Astronomy, ethics, and Oriental languages are all embraced in a scheme brought into working order within ten years of the time when Michigan was a wilderness, and the college-yard an Indian hunting-ground.
Michigan entered upon education work very early in her history as a State. In 1850, her legislature commissioned the Hon. Ira Mayhew to prepare a work on education for circulation throughout America. Her progress has been as rapid as her start was good; her natural history collection is already one of the most remarkable in America; her medical school is almost unequaled, and students flow to her even from New England and from California, while from New York she draws a hundred men a year. In only one point is Ann Arbor anywhere but in the van: she has hitherto followed the New England colleges in excluding women. The State University of Kansas has not shown the same exclusiveness that has characterized the conduct of the rulers of Michigan: women are admitted not only to the classes, but to the professorships at Lawrence.
This Northwestern institution at Ann Arbor was not behind even Harvard in the war: it supplied the Union army with 1000 men. The 17th Regiment of Michigan Volunteers, mainly composed of teachers and Ann Arbor students, has no cause to fear the rivalry of any other “record;” and such was the effect of the war, that in 1860 there were in Michigan 2600 male to 5350 female teachers, whereas now there are but 1300 men to 7500 women.
So proud are Michigan men of their roll of honor, that they publish it at full length in the calendar of the university. Every “class” from the foundation of the schools shows some graduates distinguished in their country‘s service during the suppression of the rebellion. The Hon. Oramel Hosford, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan, reports that, owing to the presence of crowds of returned soldiers, the schools of the State are filled almost to the limit of their capacity, while some are compelled to close their doors against the thronging crowds. Captains, colonels, generals, are among the students now humbly learning in the Ann Arbor University Schools.
The State of Michigan is peculiar in the form that she has given to her higher teaching; but in no way peculiar in the attention she bestows on education. Teaching, high and low, is a passion in the West, and each of these young States has established a university of the highest order, and placed in every township not only schools, but public libraries, supported from the rates, and managed by the people.
Not only have the appropriations for educational purposes by each State been large, but those of the Federal government have been upon the most splendid scale. What has been done in the Eastern and the Central States no man can tell, but even west of the Mississippi twenty-two million acres have already been granted for such purposes, while fifty-six million more are set aside for similar gifts.
The Americans are not forgetful of their Puritan traditions.
WHEN the companions of the explorer Cartier found that the rapids at Montreal were not the end of all navigation, as they had feared, but that above them there commenced a second and boundless reach of deep, still waters, they fancied they had found the long-looked-for route to China, and cried, “La Chine!” So the story goes, and the name has stuck to the place.
Up to 1861, the Canadians remained in the belief that they were at least the potential possessors of the only possible road for the China trade of the future, for in that year a Canadian government paper declared that the Rocky Mountains, south of British territory, were impassable for railroads. Maps showed that from St. Louis to San Francisco the distance was twice that from the head of navigation on Lake Superior to the British Pacific ports.
America has gone through a five years’ agony since that time; but now, in the first days of peace, we find that the American Pacific Railroad, growing at the average rate of two miles a day at one end, and one mile a day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in 1869 or 1870, while the British line remains a dream.
Not only have the Rocky Mountains turned out to be passable, but the engineers have found themselves compelled to decide on the conflicting claims of passes without number. Wall-like and frowning as the Rocky Mountains are when seen from the plains, the rolling gaps are many, and they are easier crossed by railway lines than the less lofty chains of Europe. From the heat of the country, the snow-line lies high; the chosen pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto. The dryness of the air of the center of a vast continent prevents the fall of heavy snows or rains in winter. At eight or nine thousand feet above the sea, in the Black Hills, or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the Pacific line will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter than their brothers on the Grand Trunk or the Camden and Amboy at the sea-level. On the other hand, fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless succession of smaller snowy chains which have to be crossed, upon the Grand Plateau or basin of the Great Salt Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1870 the line will be an accomplished fact.
In the act creating the Pacific Railroad Company, passed in 1862, the company were bound to complete their line at the rate of a hundred miles a year. They are completing it at more than three times that rate.
When the act is examined, it ceases to be strange that the road should be pushed with extraordinary energy and speed, so numerous are the baits offered to the companies to hasten its completion. Money is to be advanced them; land is to be given them for every mile they finish—on a generous scale while the line is on the plains, on three times the scale when it reaches the most rugged tracts. These grants alone are estimated at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alternate sections, a width of four hundred feet, with additional room for works and stations, is granted for the line. The California Company is tempted by similar offers to a race with the Union Pacific, and each company is struggling to lay the most miles and get the most land upon the great basin. It is the interest of the Eastern Company that the junction should be as far as possible to the west; of the Western, that it should be as far as possible to the east. The result is an average laying of three, and an occasional construction of four, miles a day. If we look to the progress at both ends, we find as much sometimes laid in a day as a bullock train could travel. So fast do the headquarters “cities” keep moving forward, that at the Californian end the superintendent wished me to believe that whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass, they threw themselves upon their backs, and held up their legs, that they might be tied and thrown into the cart for a fresh move. “They are true birds of passage,” he said.
When the iron trains are at the front, the laying will for a short time proceed at the rate of nine yards in every fifteen seconds; but three or four hundred tons of rails have to be brought up every day upon the single track, and it is in this that the time is lost.
The advance carriages of the construction train are well supplied with rifles hung from the roofs; but even when the Indians forget their amaze, and attack the “city upon wheels,” or tear up the track, they are incapable of destroying the line so fast as the machinery can lay it down. “Soon,” as a Denver paper said, during my stay in the Mountain City, “the iron horse will sniff the Alpine breeze upon the summit of the Black Hills 9000 feet above the sea;” and upon the plateau, where deer are scarce and buffalo unknown, the Indians have all but disappeared. The worst Indian country is already crossed, and the red men have sullenly followed the buffalo to the south, and occupy the country between Kansas State and Denver, contenting themselves with preventing the construction of the Santa Fé and Denver routes to California. Both for the end in view, and the energy with which it is pursued, the Pacific Railroad will stand first among the achievements of our times.
If the end to be kept in view in the construction of the first Pacific Railroad line were merely the traffic from China and Japan to Europe, or the shortest route from San Francisco to Hampton Roads, the Kansas route through St. Louis, Denver, and the Berthoud Pass would be, perhaps, the best and shortest of those within the United States; but the Saskatchewan line through British territory, with Halifax and Puget Sound for ports, would be still more advantageous. As it is, the true question seems to be, not the trade between the Pacific and Great Britain, but between Asia and America, for Pennsylvania and Ohio must be the manufacturing countries of the next fifty years.
Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough: in 1870 we shall reach San Francisco from London in less time than by the severest traveling I can reach it from Denver in 1866.
Wherever, in the States, Forth and South have met in conflict, North has won. New York has beaten Norfolk; Chicago, in spite of its inferior situation, has beaten the older St. Louis. In the same way, Omaha, or cities still farther north, will carry off the trade from Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Kansas City. Ultimately Puget Sound may beat San Francisco in the race for the Pacific trade, and the Southern cities become still less able to keep their place than they have been hitherto. Time after time, Chicago has thrown out intercepting lines, and diverted from St. Louis trade which seemed of necessity to belong to her; and the success of the Union Pacific line, and failure of the Kansas road, is a fresh proof of the superior energy of the Northern to the Southern city. This time a fresh element enters into the calculation, and declares for Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight line, is in these great distances shorter by fifty or a hundred miles than the straight lines of the maps and charts, and the Platte route becomes not only the natural, but the shortest route from sea to sea.
Chicago has a great advantage over St. Louis in her comparative freedom from the cholera, which yearly attacks the Missourian city. During my stay in St. Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were known to have reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by flight to 180,000. A quarantine was established on the river; the sale of fruit and vegetables prohibited; prisoners released on condition that they should work at burying the dead; and funeral corteges were forbidden. Chicago herself, unreached by the plague, was scattering handbills on every Western railroad line, warning immigrants against St. Louis.
The Missourians have relied overmuch upon the Mississippi River, and have forgotten that railroads are superseding steamboats every day. Chicago, on the other hand, which ten years ago was the twentieth city in America, is probably by this time the third. As a center of thought, political and religious, she stands second only to Boston, and her Wabash and Michigan Avenues are among the most beautiful of streets.
One of the chief causes of the future wealth of America is to be found in the fact that all her “inland” towns are ports. The State of Michigan lies between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but the single State has upon the great lakes a coast of 1500 miles. From Fort Benton to the sea by water is nearly 4000 miles, but the post is a much-used steamboat port, though more distant, even in the air-line, from the nearest sea upon the same side the dividing range, than is the White Sea from the Persian Gulf. Put it in which way you would, Europe could not hold this river.
A great American city is almost invariably placed at a point where an important railroad finds an outport on a lake or river. This is no adaptation to railways of the Limerick saying about rivers—namely, that Providence has everywhere so placed them as to pass through the great towns; for in America railways precede population, and when mapped out and laid, they are but tramways in the desert. There is no great wonder in this, when we remember that 158,000,000 acres of land have been up to this time granted to railroads in America.
One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few lines will be made, and trade being thus driven into certain unchanging routes, a small number of cities will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing stations or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and population. Where a system of cheap railways is adopted, there will be year by year a tendency to multiply lines of traffic, and consequently to multiply also ports and seats of trade—a tendency, however, which may be more than neutralized by any special circumstances which may cause the lines of transit to converge rather than run parallel to one another. Of the system of costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India, where we see the creation of Umritsur and the prosperity of Calcutta alike due to our single great Bengal line; of the converging system we have excellent instances in Chicago and Bombay; while we see the plan of parallel lines in action here in Kansas, and causing the comparative equality of progress manifested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, in Omaha. The coasts of India swarmed with ports till our trunk lines ruined Goa and Surat to advance Bombay, and a hundred village ports to push our factory at Calcutta, founded by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown to be the third or fourth city of the empire.
Of the dozen chaotic cities which are struggling for the honor of becoming the future capital of the West, Leavenworth, with 20,000 people, three daily papers, an opera house, and 200 drinking saloons, was, at the time of my visit in 1866, somewhat ahead of Omaha, with its 12,000, two papers, and a single “one-horse” theater, though the northern city tied Leavenworth in the point of “saloons.”
Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte, Atchison, Topeka, Lecompton, and Lawrence, each praises itself and runs down its neighbor. Leavenworth claims to be so healthy that when it lately became necessary to “inaugurate” the new grave-yard, “they had to shoot a man on purpose”—a change since the days when the Southern Border Ruffians were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of abolitionists stuck on poles. On the other hand, a Nebraska man, when asked whether the Kansas people were fairly honest, said: “Don‘t know about honest; but they do say as how the folk around take in their stone fences every night.” Lawrence, the State capital, which is on the dried-up Kansas River, sneeringly says of all the new towns on the Missouri that the boats that ply between them are so dangerous that the fare is collected in installments every five minutes throughout the trip. Next after the jealousy between two Australian colonies, there is nothing equal to the hatreds between cities competing for the same trade. Omaha has now the best chance of becoming the capital of the far West, but Leavenworth will no doubt continue to be the chief town of Kansas.
The progress of the smaller cities is amazing. Pistol-shots by day and night are frequent, but trade and development are little interfered with by such incidents as these; and as the village cities are peopled up, the pioneers, shunning their fellows, keep pushing westward, seeking new “locations.” “You‘re the second man I‘ve seen this fall! Darn me, if ‘taint ’bout time to varmose out westerly—y,” is the standing joke of the “frontier-bars” against each other.
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At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepworth Dixon, just out from England, and with him I visited the Kansas towns, and then pushed through Waumego to Manhattan, the terminus (for the day) of the Kansas Pacific line. Here we were thrust into what space remained between forty leathern mail-bags and the canvas roof of the mule-drawn ambulance, which was to be at once our prison for six nights, and our fort upon wheels against the Indians.
DASHING through a grove of cottonwood-trees draped in bignonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a charming scene: a range of huts and forts crowning a long, low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed ravine, while the clear stream of the Republican fork wreathed itself about the woods and bluffs. The block-house, over which floated the Stars and Stripes, was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which continents are to measure all their miles; the “capital of the universe,” or “center of the world.” Not that it has always been so. Geographers will be glad to learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the center of its crust also moves: within the last ten years it has removed westward into Kansas from Missouri—from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest for centership is no new thing. Herodotus held that Greece was the very middle of the world, and that the unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the yet more unfortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of their poor lives in order that the sun might shine on Greece at noon; London plumes herself on being the “center of the terrestrial globe;” Boston is the “hub of the hull universe,” though the latter claim is less physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley the Western men seem to have found the physical center of the United States, but they claim for the Great Plains as well the intellectual as the political leadership of the whole continent. These hitherto untrodden tracts, they tell you, form the heart of the empire, from which the life-blood must be driven to the extremities. Geographical and political centers must ultimately coincide.
Connected with this belief is another Western theory—that the powers of the future must be “continental.” Germany, or else Russia, is to absorb all Asia and Europe, except Britain. North America is already cared for, as the gradual extinction of the Mexican and absorption of the Canadians they consider certain. As for South America, the Californians are planning an occupation of Western Brazil, on the ground that the continental power of South America must start from the head-waters of the great rivers, and spread seaward down the streams. Even in the Brazilian climate they believe that the Anglo-Saxon is destined to become the dominant race.
The success of this omphalism, this government from the center, will be brought about, in the Western belief, by the necessity under which the nations on the head-waters of all streams will find themselves of having the outlets in their hands. Even if it be true that railways are beating rivers, still the railways must also lead seaward to the ports, and the need for their control is still felt by the producers in the center countries of the continent. The Upper States must everywhere command the Lower, and salt-water despotism find its end.
The Americans of the Valley States, who fought all the more heartily in the Federal cause from the fact that they were battling for the freedom of the Mississippi against the men who held its mouth, look forward to the time when they will have to assert, peaceably but with firmness, their right to the freedom of their railways through the Northern Atlantic States. Whatever their respect for New England, it cannot be expected that they are forever to permit Illinois and Ohio to be neutralized in the Senate by Rhode Island and Vermont. If it goes hard with New England, it will go still harder with New York; and the Western men look forward to the day when Washington will be removed, Congress and all, to Columbus or Fort Riley.
The singular wideness of Western thought, always verging on extravagance, is traceable to the width of Western land. The immensity of the continent produces a kind of intoxication; there is moral dram-drinking in the contemplation of the map. No Fourth of July oration can come up to the plain facts contained in the Land Commissioners’ report. The public domain of the United States still consists of one thousand five hundred millions of acres; there are two hundred thousand square miles of coal lands in the country, ten times as much as in all the remaining world. In the Western territories not yet States, there is land sufficient to bear, at the English population rate, five hundred and fifty millions of human beings.
It is strange to see how the Western country dwarfs the Eastern States. Buffalo is called a “Western City;” yet from New York to Buffalo is only three hundred and fifty miles, and Buffalo is but seven hundred miles to the west of the most eastern point in all the United States. On the other hand, from Buffalo we can go two thousand five hundred miles westward without quitting the United States. “The West” is eight times as wide as the Atlantic States, and will soon be eight times as strong.
The conformation of North America is widely different to that of any other continent on the globe. In Europe, the glaciers of the Alps occupy the center point, and shed the waters toward each of the surrounding seas: confluence is almost unknown. So it is in Asia: there the Indus flowing into the Arabian Gulf, the Oxus into the Sea of Aral, the Ganges into the Bay of Bengal, the Yangtse Kiang into the Pacific, and the Yenesei into the Arctic Ocean, all take their rise in the central table-land. In South America, the mountains form a wall upon the west, whence the rivers flow eastward in parallel lines. In North America alone are there mountains on each coast, and a trough between, into which the rivers flow together, giving in a single valley 23,000 miles of navigable stream to be plowed by steamships. The map proclaims the essential unity of North America. Political geography might be a more interesting study than it has yet been made.
In reaching Leavenworth, I had crossed two of the five divisions of America: the other three lie before me on my way to San Francisco. The eastern slopes of the Alleghanies, or Atlantic coast; their western slopes; the Great Plains; the Grand Plateau, and the Pacific coast—these are the five divisions. Fort Riley, the center of the United States, is upon the border of the third division, the Great Plains. The Atlantic coast is poor and stony, but the slight altitude of the Alleghany chain has prevented its being a hinderance to the passage of population to the West: the second of the divisions is now the richest and most powerful of the five: but the wave of immigration is crossing the Mississippi and Missouri into the Great Plains, and here at Fort Riley we are upon the limit of civilization.
This spot is not only the center of the United States and of the continent, but, if Denver had contrived to carry the Pacific Railroad by the Berthoud Pass, would have been the center station upon what Governor Gilpin, of Colorado, calls the “Asiatic and European railway line.” As it is, Columbus in Nebraska has somewhat a better chance of becoming the Washington of the future than has this block-house.
Quitting Fort Riley, we found ourselves at once upon the plains. No more sycamore and white-oak and honey-locust; no more of the rich deep green of the cottonwood groves; but yellow earth, yellow flowers, yellow grass, and here and there groves of giant sunflowers with yellow blooms, but no more trees.
As the sun set, we came on a body of cavalry marching slowly from the plains toward the fort. Before them, at some little distance, walked a sad-faced man on foot, in sober riding-dress, with a repeating carbine slung across his back. It was Sherman returning from his expedition to Santa Fé.
Monday, 3d September.
My dear ——,
Here we are, scalps and all.
On Tuesday last, at sundown, we left Fort Riley, and supped at Junction City, the extreme point that “civilization” has reached upon the plains. Civilization means whisky: post-offices don‘t count.
It was here that it first dawned upon us that we were being charged 500 dollars to guard the United States Californian mail, with the compensation of the chance of being ourselves able to rob it with impunity. It is at all events the case that we, well armed as the mail officers at Leavenworth insisted on our being, sat inside with forty-two cwt. of mail, in open bags, and over a great portion of the route had only the driver with us, without whose knowledge we could have read all and stolen most of the letters, and with whose knowledge, but against whose will, we could have carried off the whole, leaving him gagged, bound, and at the mercy of the Indians. As it was, a mail-bag fell out one day, without the knowledge of either Dixon or the driver, who were outside, and I had to shout pretty freely before they would pull up.
On Wednesday we had our last “squar’ meal” in the shape of a breakfast, at Fort Ellsworth, and soon were out upon the almost unknown plains. In the morning we caught up and passed long wagon trains, each wagon drawn by eight oxen, and guarded by two drivers and one horseman, all armed with breech-loading rifles and revolvers, or with the new “repeaters,” before which breech-loaders and revolvers must alike go down. All day we kept a sharp look-out for a party of seven American officers, who, in defiance of the scout‘s advice, had gone out from the fort to hunt buffalo upon the track. About sundown we came into the little station of Lost Creek. The ranchmen told us that they had, during the day, been driven in from their work by a party of Cheyennes, and that they had some doubts as to the wisdom of the officers in going out to hunt.
Just as we were leaving the station, one of the officers’ horses dashed in riderless, and was caught; and about two miles from the station we passed another on its back, ripped up either by a knife or buffalo horn. The saddle was gone, but there were no other marks of a fight. We believe that these officers were routed by buffalo, not Cheyennes, but still we should be glad to hear of them.
The track is marked in many parts of the plains by stakes, such as those from which the Llano Estacado takes its name; but this evening we turned off into devious lines by way of precaution against ambuscades, coming round through the sandy beds of streams to the ranches for the change of mules. The ranchmen were always ready for us; for, while we were still a mile away, our driver would put his hand to his mouth, and give a “How! how! how! how—w!” the Cheyenne warhoop.
In the weird glare that follows sunset we came upon a pile of rocks, admirably fitted for an ambush. As we neared them, the driver said: “It‘s ’bout an even chance thet we‘s sculp ther’!” We could not avoid them, as there was a gully that could only be crossed at this one point. We dashed down into the “creek” and up again, past the rocks: there were no Indians, but the driver was most uneasy till we reached Big Creek.
Here they could give us nothing whatever to eat, the Indians having, on Tuesday, robbed them of everything they had, and ordered them to leave within fifteen days on pain of death.
For 250 miles westward from Big Creek we found that every station had been warned (and most plundered) by bands of Cheyennes, on behalf of the forces of the confederation encamped near the creek itself. The warning was in all cases that of fire and death at the end of fifteen days, of which nine days have expired. We found the horse-keepers of the company everywhere leaving their stations, and were, in consequence, very nearly starved, having been unsuccessful in our shots from the “coach,” except, indeed, at the snakes.
On Thursday we passed Big Timber, the only spot on the plains where there are trees; and there the Indians had counted the trunks and solemnly warned the men against cutting more: “Fifty-two tree. You no cut more tree—no more cut. Grass! You cut grass; grass make big fire. You good boy—you clear out. Fifteen day, we come: you no gone—ugh!” The “ugh” accompanied by an expressive pantomime.
On Thursday evening we got a meal of buffalo and prairie dog, the former too strong for my failing stomach, the latter wholesome nourishment, and fit for kings—as like our rabbit in flavor as he is in shape. This was at the horse-station of “The Monuments,” a natural temple of awesome grandeur, rising from the plains like a giant Stonehenge.
On Friday we “breakfasted” at Pond Creek station, two miles from Fort Wallis. Here the people had applied for a guard, and had been answered: “Come into the fort; we can‘t spare a man.” So much for the value of the present forts; and yet even these—Wallis and Ellsworth—are 200 miles apart.
We were joined at breakfast by Bill Comstock, interpreter to the fort,—a long-haired, wild-eyed half-breed,—who gave us, in an hour‘s talk, the full history of the Indian politics that have led to the present war.
The Indians, to the number of 20,000, have been in council with the Washington Commissioners all this summer at Fort Laramie; and, after being clothed, fed, and armed, lately concluded a treaty, allowing the running on the mail-roads. They now assert that this treaty was intended to apply to the Platte road (from Omaha and Atchison through Fort Kearney), and to the Arkansas road, but not to the Smoky Hill road, which lies between the others, and runs through the buffalo country; but their real opposition is to the railroad. The Cheyennes (pronounced Shíans) have got the Camanches, Appaches, and Arrapahoes from the south, and the Sioux and Kiowas from the north, to join them in a confederation, under the leadership of Spotted Dog, the chief of the Little Dog section of the Cheyennes, and son of White Antelope,—killed at Sand Creek battle by the Kansas and Colorado Volunteers,—who has sworn to avenge his father.
Soon after leaving Pond Creek, we sighted at a distance three mounted “braves,” leading some horses; and when we reached the next station, we found that they had been there openly proclaiming that their mounts had been stolen from a team.
All this day we sat with our revolvers laid upon the mail-bags in front of us, and our driver also had his armory conspicuously displayed, while we swept the plains with many an anxious glance. We were on lofty rolling downs, and to the south the eye often ranged over much of the 130 miles which lay between us and Texas. To the north the view was more bounded; still, our chief danger lay near the boulders, which here and there covered the plains.
All Thursday and Friday we never lost sight of the buffalo, in herds of about 300, and the “antelope”—the prong-horn, a kind of gazelle—in flocks of six or seven. Prairie dogs were abundant, and wolves and black-tail deer in view at every turn.
The most singular of all the sights of the plains is the constant presence every few yards of the skeletons of buffalo and of horse, of mule and of ox; the former left by the hunters, who take but the skin, and the latter the losses of the mails and the wagon-trains through sunstroke and thirst. We killed a horse on the second day of our journey.
When we came upon oxen that had not long been dead, we found that the intense dryness of the air had made mummies of them: there was no stench, no putrefaction.
During the day I made some practice at antelope with the driver‘s Ballard; but an antelope at 500 yards is not an easy target. The driver shot repeatedly at buffalo at twenty yards, but this only to keep them away from the horses; the revolver balls did not seem to go through their hair and skin, as they merely shambled on in their usual happy sort of way, after receiving a discharge or two.
The prairie dogs sat barking in thousands on the tops of their mounds, but we were too grateful to them for their gayety to dream of pistol-shots. They are no “dogs” at all, but rabbits that bark, with all the coney‘s tricks and turns, and the same odd way of rubbing their face with their paws while they con you from top to toe.
With wolves, buffalo, antelope, deer, skunks, dogs, plover, curlew, dottrel, herons, vultures, ravens, snakes, and locusts, we never seemed to be without a million companions in our loneliness.
From Cheyenne Wells, where we changed mules in the afternoon, we brought on the ranchman‘s wife, painfully making room for her at our own expense. Her husband had been warned by the Cheyennes that the place would be destroyed: he meant to stay, but was in fear for her. The Cheyennes had made her cook for them, and our supper had gone down Cheyenne throats.
Soon after leaving the station, we encountered one of the great “dirt-storms” of the plains. About 5 P.M. I saw a little white cloud growing into a column, which in half an hour turned black as night, and possessed itself of half the skies. We then saw what seemed to be a waterspout; and, though no rain reached us, I think it was one. When the storm burst on us we took it for rain, and halting, drew down our canvas and held it against the hurricane. We soon found that our eyes and mouths were full of dust; and when I put out my hand I felt that it was dirt, not rain, that was falling. In a few minutes it was pitch dark, and after the fall had continued for some time, there began a series of flashes of blinding lightning, in the very center and midst of which we seemed to be. Notwithstanding this, there was no sound of thunder. The “norther” lasted some three or four hours, and when it ceased, it left us total darkness, and a wind which froze our marrow as we again started on our way. When Fremont explored this route, he reported that the high ridge between the Platte and Arkansas was notorious among the Indians for its tremendous dirt-storms. Sheet lightning without thunder accompanies dust-storms in all great continents; it is as common in the Punjab as in Australia, in South as in North America.
On Saturday morning, at Lake station, we got beyond the Indians, and into a land of plenty, or at all events a land of something, for we got milk from the station cow, and preserved fruits that had come round through Denver from Ohio and Kentucky. Not even on Saturday, however, could we get dinner, and as I missed the only antelope that came within reach, our supper was not much heavier than our breakfast.
Rolling through the Arrapahoe country, where it is proposed to make a reserve for the Cheyennes, at eight o‘clock on Saturday morning we caught sight of the glittering snows of Pike‘s Peak, a hundred and fifty miles away, and all the day we were galloping toward it, through a country swarming with rattlesnakes and vultures. Late in the evening, when we were drawing near to the first of the Coloradan farms, we came on a white wolf unconcernedly taking his evening prowl about the stock-yards. He sneaked along without taking any notice of us, and continued his thief-like walk with a bravery that seemed only to show that he had never seen man before; this might well be the case, if he came from the south, near the upper forks of the Arkansas.
All this, and the frequency of buffalo, I was unprepared for. I imagined that though the plains were uninhabited, the game had all been killed. On the contrary, the “Smoky district” was never known so thronged with buffalo as it is this year. The herds resort to it because there they are close to the water of the Platte River, and yet out of the reach of the traffic of the Platte road. The tracks they make in traveling to and fro across the plains are visible for years after they have ceased to use them. I have seen them as broad and as straight as the finest of Roman roads.
On Sunday, at two in the morning, we dashed into Denver; and as we reeled and staggered from our late prison, the ambulance, into the “cockroach corral” which does duty for the bar-room of the “Planters’ House,” we managed to find strength and words to agree that we would fix no time for meeting the next day. We expected to sleep for thirty hours; as it was, we met at breakfast at seven A.M., less than five hours from the time we parted. It is to-day that we feel exhausted; the exhilaration of the mountain air, and the excitement of frequent visits, carried us through yesterday. Dixon is suffering from strange blains and boils, caused by the unwholesome food.
We have been called upon here by Governor Gilpin and Governor Cummings, the opposition governors. The former is the elected governor of the State of Colorado which is to be, and would have been but for the fact that the President put his big toe (Western for veto) upon the bill; the latter, the Washington-sent governor of the Territory. Gilpin is a typical pioneer man, and the descendant of a line of such. He comes of one of the original Quaker stocks of Maryland, and he and his ancestors have ever been engaged in founding States. He himself, after taking an active share in the foundation of Kansas, commanded a regiment of cavalry in the Mexican war. After this, he was at the head of the pioneer army which explored the parcs of the Cordilleras and the Territory of Nevada. He it was who hit upon the glorious idea of placing Colorado half upon each side of the Sierra Madre. There never, in the history of the world, was a grander idea than this. Any ordinary pioneer or politician would have given Colorado the “natural” frontier, and have tried for the glory of the foundation of two States instead of one. The consequence would have been, lasting disunion between the Pacific and Atlantic States, and a possible future break-up of the country. As it is, this commonwealth, little as it at present is, links sea to sea, and Liverpool to Hong Kong.
The city swarms with Indians of the bands commanded by the chiefs Nevara and Collorego. They are at war with the six confederate tribes, and with the Pawnees—with all the plain Indians, in short. Now, as the Pawnees are also at war with the six tribes, there is a pretty triangular fight. They came in to buy arms, and fearful scoundrels they look. Short, flat-nosed, long-haired, painted in red and blue, and dressed in a gaudy costume, half Spanish, half Indian, which makes their filthiness appear more filthy by contrast, and themselves carrying only their Ballard and Smith-and-Wesson, but forcing the squaws to carry all their other goods, and papooses in addition, they present a spectacle of unmixed ruffianism which I never expect to see surpassed. Dixon and I, both of us, left London with “Lo! the poor Indian,” in all his dignity and hook-nosedness, elevated on a pedestal of nobility in our hearts. Our views were shaken in the East, but nothing revolutionized them so rapidly as our three days’ risk of scalping in the plains. John Howard and Mrs. Beecher Stowe themselves would go in for the Western “disarm at any price, and exterminate if necessary” policy if they lived long in Denver. One of the braves of Nevara‘s command brought in the scalp of a Cheyenne chief taken by him last month, and to-day it hangs outside the door of a pawnbroker‘s shop, for sale, fingered by every passer-by.
Many of the band were engaged in putting on their paint, which was bright vermilion, with a little indigo round the eye. This, with the sort of pigtail which they wear, gives them the look of the gnomes in the introduction to a London pantomime. One of them—Nevara himself, I was told—wore a sombrero with three scarlet plumes, taken probably from a Mexican, a crimson jacket, a dark-blue shawl, worn round the loins and over the arm in Spanish dancer fashion, and embroidered moccasins. His squaw was a vermilion-faced bundle of rags, not more than four feet high, staggering under buffalo hides, bow and arrows, and papoose. They move everywhere on horseback, and in the evening withdraw in military order, with advance and rear guard, to a camp at some distance from the town.
I inclose some prairie flowers, gathered in my walks round the city. Their names are not suited to their beauty; the large white one is “the morning blower,” the most lovely of all, save one, of the flowers of the plains. It grows with many branches to a height of some eighteen inches, and bears from thirty to fifty blooms. The blossoms are open up to a little after sunrise, when they close, seldom to open even after sunset. It is, therefore, peculiarly the early riser‘s flower; and if it be true that Nature doesn‘t make things in vain, it follows that Nature intended men—or, at all events, some men—to get up early, which is a point that I believe was doubtful hitherto.
For the one prairie flower which I think more beautiful than the blower I cannot find a name. It rises to about six inches above ground, and spreads in a circle of a foot across. Its leaf is thin and spare; its flower-bloom a white cup, about two inches in diameter; and its buds pink and pendulent.
All our garden annuals are to be found in masses acres in size upon the plains. Penstemon, coreopsis, persecaria, yucca, dwarf sumach, marigold, and sunflower, all are flowering here at once, till the country is ablaze with gold and red. The coreopsis of our gardens they call the “rosin-weed,” and say that it forms excellent food for sheep.
The view of the “Cordillera della Sierra Madre,” the Rocky Mountain main chain, from the outskirts of Denver is sublime; that from the roof at Milan does not approach it. Twelve miles from the city the mountains rise abruptly from the plains. Piled range above range with step-like regularity, they are topped by a long white line, sharply relieved against the indigo of the sky. Two hundred and fifty miles of the mother Sierra are in sight from our veranda; to the south, Pike‘s Peak and Spanish Peak; Long‘s Peak to the north; Mount Lincoln towering above all. The views are limited only by the curvature of the earth, such is the marvelous purity of the Coloradan air, the effect at once of the distance from the sea and of the bed of limestone which underlies the plains.
The site of Denver is heaven-blessed in climate as well as loveliness. The sky is brilliantly blue, and cloudless from dawn till noon. In the mid-day heats, cloud-making in the Sierra begins, and by sunset the snowy chain is multiplied a hundred times in curves of white and purple cumuli, while thunder rolls heavily along the range. “This is a great country, sir,” said a Coloradan to me to-day. “We make clouds for the whole universe.” At dark there is dust or thunder-storm at the mountain foot, and then the cold and brilliant night. Summer and winter it is the same.
“THESE Red Indians are not red,” was our first cry when we saw the Utes in the streets of Denver. They had come into the town to be painted as English ladies go to London to shop; and we saw them engaged within a short time after their arrival in daubing their cheeks with vermilion and blue, and referring to glasses which the squaws admiringly held. Still, when we met them with peaceful paintless cheeks, we had seen that their color was brown, copper, dirt, anything you please except red.
The Hurons, with whom I had stayed at Indian Lorette, were French in training if not in blood; the Pottawatomies of St. Mary‘s Mission, the Delawares of Leavenworth, are tame Indians: it is true that they can hardly be called red; but still I had expected to have found these wild prairie and mountain Indians of the color from which they take their name. Save for paint, I found them of a color wholly different from that which we call red.
Low in stature, yellow-skinned, small-eyed, and Tartar-faced, the Indians of the plains are a distinct people from the tall, hook-nosed warriors of the Eastern States. It is impossible to set eyes on their women without being reminded of the dwarf skeletons found in the mounds of Missouri and Iowa; but, men or women, the Utes bear no resemblance to the bright-eyed, graceful people with whom Penn traded and Standish fought. They are not less inferior in mind than in body. It was no Shoshoné, no Ute, no Cheyenne, who called the rainbow the “heaven of flowers,” the moon “the night queen,” or the stars “God‘s eyes.” The plain tribes are as deficient, too, in heroes as in poetry: they have never even produced a general, and White Antelope is their nearest approach to a Tecumseh. Their mode of life, the natural features of the country in which they dwell, have nothing in them to suggest a reason for their debased condition. The reason must lie in the blood, the race.
All who have seen both the Indians and the Polynesians at home must have been struck with innumerable resemblances. The Maori and Red Indian wakes for the dead are identical; the Californian Indians wear the Maori mat; the “medicine” of the Mandan is but the “tapu” of Polynesia; the New Zealand dance-song, the Maori tribal scepter, were found alike by Strachey in Virginia and Drake in California; the canoes of the West Indies are the same as those of Polynesia. Hundreds of arguments, best touched from the farther side of the Pacific, concur to prove the Indians a Polynesian race. The canoes that brought to Easter Island the people who built their mounds and rock temples there, may as easily have been carried on by the Chilian breeze and current to the South American shore. The wave from Malaya would have spent itself upon the northern plains. The Utes would seem to be Kamtchatkans, or men of the Amoor, who, fighting their way round by Behring Straits, and then down south, drove a wedge between the Polynesians of Appalachia and California. No theory but this will account for the sharp contrast between the civilization of ancient Peru and Mexico, and the degradation in which the Utes have lived from the earliest recorded times. Mounds, rock temples, worship, all are alike unknown to the Indians of the plains; to the Polynesian Indians, these were things that had come down to them from all time.
Curious as is the question of the descent of the American tribes, it has no bearing on the future of the country—unless, indeed, in the eyes of those who assert that Delawares and Utes, Hurons and Pawnees, are all one race, with features modified by soil and climate. If this were so, the handsome, rollicking, frank-faced Coloradan “boys” would have to look forward to the time when their sons’ sons should be as like the Utes as many New Englanders of to-day are like the Indians they expelled—that, as the New Englanders are tall, taciturn, and hatchet-faced, the Coloradans of the next age should be flat-faced warriors, five feet high. Confidence in the future of America must be founded on a belief in the indestructible vitality of race.
Kamtchatkans or Polynesians, Malays or sons of the prairies on which they dwell, the Red Indians have no future. In twenty years there will scarcely be one of pure blood alive within the United States.
In La Plata, the Indians from the inland forests gradually mingle with the whiter inhabitants of the coast, and become indistinguishable from the remainder of the population. In Canada and Tahiti, the French intermingle with the native race: the Hurons are French in everything but name. In Kansas, in Colorado, in New Mexico, miscegenation will never be brought about. The pride of race, strong in the English everywhere, in America and Australia is an absolute bar to intermarriage, and even to lasting connections with the aborigines. What has happened in Tasmania and Victoria is happening in New Zealand and on the plains. When you ask a Western man his views on the Indian question, he says: “Well, sir, we can destroy them by the laws of war, or thin ’em out by whisky; but the thinning process is plaguy slow.”
There are a good many Southerners out upon the plains. One of them, describing to me how in Florida they had hunted down the Seminoles with bloodhounds, added, “And sarved the pesky sarpints right, sah!” Southwestern volunteers, campaigning against the Indians, have been known to hang up in their tents the scalps of the slain, as we English used to nail up the skins of the Danes.
There is in these matters less hypocrisy among the Americans than with ourselves. In 1840, the British government assumed the sovereignty of New Zealand in a proclamation which set forth with great precision that it did so for the sole purpose of protecting the aborigines in the possession of their lands. The Maories numbered 200,000 then; they number 20,000 now.
Among the Western men there is no difference of opinion on the Indian question. Rifle and revolver are their only policy. The New Englanders, who are all for Christianity and kindliness in their dealings with the red men, are not similarly united in one cry. Those who are ignorant of the nature of the Indian, call out for agricultural employment for the braves; those who know nothing of the Indian‘s life demand that “reserves” be set aside for him, forgetting that no “reserve” can be large enough to hold the buffalo, and that without the buffalo the red men must plow or starve.
Indian civilization through the means of agriculture is all but a total failure. The Shawnees are thriving near Kansas City, the Pottawatomies living at St. Mary‘s mission, the Delawares existing at Leavenworth; but in all these cases there is a large infusion of white blood. The Canadian Hurons are completely civilized; but then they are completely French. If you succeed with an Indian to all appearance, he will suddenly return to his untamed state. An Indian girl, one of the most orderly of the pupils at a ladies’ school, has been known, on feeling herself aggrieved, to withdraw to her room, let down her back hair, paint her face, and howl. The same tendency showed itself in the case of the Delaware chief who built himself a white man‘s house, and lived in it thirty years, but then suddenly set up his old wigwam in the dining-room, in disgust. Another bad case is that of the Pawnee who visited Buchanan, and behaved so well that when a young Englishman, who came out soon after, told the President that he was going West, he gave him a letter to the chief, then with his tribe in Northern Kansas. The Pawnee read the note, offered a pipe, gravely protested eternal friendship, slept upon it, and next morning scalped his visitor with his own hand.
The English everywhere attempt to introduce civilization, or to modify that which exists, in a rough-and-ready manner which invariably ends in failure or in the destruction of the native race. A hundred years of absolute rule, mostly peaceable, have not, under every advantage, seen the success of our repeated attempts to establish trial by jury in Bengal. For twenty years the Maories have mixed with the New Zealand colonists on nearly equal terms, have almost universally professed themselves Christians, have attended English schools, and learnt to speak the English language, and to read and write their own; in spite of all this, a few weeks of fanatic outburst were enough to reduce almost the whole race to a condition of degraded savagery. The Indians of America have, within the few last years, been caught and caged, given acres where they once had leagues, and told to plow where once they hunted. A pastoral race, with no conception of property in land, they have been manufactured into freeholders and tenant farmers; Western Ishmaelites, sprung of a race which has wandered since its legendary life begins, they have been subjected to homestead laws and title registrations. If our experiments in New Zealand, in India, on the African coast have failed, cautious and costly as they were, there can be no great wonder in the unsuccess that has attended the hurried American experiments. It is not for us, who have the past of Tasmania and the present of Queensland to account for, to do more than record the fact that the Americans are not more successful with the red men of Kansas than we with the black men of Australia.
The Bosjesman is not a more unpromising subject for civilization than the red man; the Ute is not even gifted with the birthright of most savages, the mimetic power. The black man, in his dress, his farming, his religion, his family life, is always trying to imitate the white. In the Indian there is none of this: his ancestors roamed over the plains—he will roam; his ancestors hunted—why should not he hunt? The American savage, like his Asiatic cousins, is conservative; the African changeable, and strong in imitative faculties of the mind. Just as the Indian is less versatile than the negro, so, if it were possible gradually to change his mode of life, slowly to bring him to the agricultural state, he would probably become a skillful and laborious cultivator, and worthy inhabitant of the Western soil; as it is, he is exterminated before he has time to learn. “Sculp ’em fust, and then talk to ’em,” the Coloradans say.
Peace commissioners are yearly sent from Washington to treat with hostile tribes upon the plains. The Indians invariably continue to fight and rob till winter is at hand; but when the snows appear, they send in runners to announce that they are prepared to make submission. The commissioners appoint a place, and the tribe, their relatives, allies, and friends, come down thousands strong, and enter upon debates which are purposely prolonged till spring. All this time the Indians are kept in food and drink; whisky even is illegally provided them, with the cognizance of the authorities, under the name of “hatchets.” Blankets, and, it is said, powder and revolvers, are supplied to them as necessary to their existence on the plains; but when the first of the spring flowers begin to peep up through the snow-drifts on the prairies, they take their leave, and in a few weeks are out again upon the war-path, plundering and scalping all the whites.
Judging from English experience in the north, and Spanish in Mexico and South America, it would seem as though the white man and the red cannot exist on the same soil. Step by step the English have driven back the braves, till New Englanders now remember that there were Indians once in Massachusetts, as we remember that once there were bears in Hampshire. King Philip‘s defeat by the Connecticut volunteers seems to form part of the early legendary history of our race; yet there is still standing, and in good repair, in Dorchester, a suburb of Boston, a frame-house which in its time has been successfully defended against Red Indians. On the other hand, step by step, since the days of Cortez, the Indians and half-bloods have driven out the Spaniards from Mexico and South America. White men, Spaniards, received Maximilian at Vera Cruz, but he was shot by full-blooded Indians at Queretaro.
If any attempt is to be made to save the Indians that remain, it must be worked out in the Eastern States. Hitherto the whites have but pushed back the Indians westward: if they would rescue the remnant from starvation, they must bring them East, away from Western men and Western hunting-grounds, and let them intermingle with the whites, living, farming, along with them, intermarrying, if possible. The hunting Indian is too costly a being for our age; but we are bound to remember that ours is the blame of having failed to teach him to be something better.
After all, if the Indian is mentally, morally, and physically inferior to the white man, it is in every way for the advantage of the world that the next generation that inhabits Colorado should consist of whites instead of reds. That this result should not be brought about by cruelty or fraud upon the now existing Indians is all that we need require. The gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind.
The Indian question is not likely to be one much longer: before I reached England again, I learnt that the Coloradan capital had offered “twenty dollars a piece for Indian scalps with the ears on.”
WHEN you have once set eyes upon the never-ending sweep of the Great Plains, you no longer wonder that America rejects Malthusianism. As Strachey says of Virginia, “Here is ground enough to satisfy the most covetous and wide affection.” The freedom of these grand countries was worth the tremendous conflict in which it was, in reality, the foremost question; their future is of enormous moment to America.
Travelers soon learn, when making estimates of a country‘s value, to despise no feature of the landscape; that of the plains is full of life, full of charm—lonely, indeed, but never wearisome. Now great rolling uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains; there is all the grandeur of monotony, and yet continual change. Sometimes the grand distances are broken by blue buttes or rugged bluffs. Over all there is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze; the air is bracing even when most hot; the sky is cloudless, and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, and the boundless prairie swell, convey an idea of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the plains.
Maps do not remove the impression produced by views. The Arkansas River, which is born and dies within the limit of the plains, is two thousand miles in length, and is navigable for eight hundred miles. The Platte and Yellowstone are each of them as long. Into the plains and plateau you could put all India twice. The impression is not merely one of size. There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe; no patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveler wishing here to end his days.
To those who love the sea, there is a double charm. Not only is the roll of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the crispness of the wind, the absence of trees, the multitude of tiny blooms upon the sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the ocean, the effect of which is we are always expecting to hail it from off the top of the next hillock.
The resemblance to the Tartar plains has been remarked by Coloradan writers; it may be traced much farther than they have carried it. Not only are the earth, air, and water much alike, but in Colorado, as in Bokhara, there are oil wells and mud volcanoes. The color of the landscape is, in summer, green and flowers; in fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers ever.
The eastern and western portions of the plains are not alike. In Kansas the grass is tall and rank; the ravines are filled with cottonwood, hickory, and black walnut; here and there are square miles of sunflowers, from seven to nine feet high. As we came west, we found that the sunflowers dwindled, and at Denver they are only from three to nine inches in height, the oddest little plants in nature, but thorough sunflowers for all their smallness. We found the buffalo in the eastern plains in the long bunch-grass, but in the winter they work to the west in search of the sweet and juicy “blue grass,” which they rub out from under the snow in the Coloradan plains. This grass is crisp as hair, and so short that, as the story goes, you must lather before you can mow it. The “blue grass” has high vitality: if a wagon train is camped for a single night among the sunflowers or tall weeds, this crisp turf at once springs up, and holds the ground forever.
The most astounding feature of these plains is their capacity to receive millions, and, swallowing them up, to wait open-mouthed for more. Vast and silent, fertile yet waste, fieldlike yet untilled, they have room for the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, for all the teeming multitudes that have poured and can pour from the plains of Asia and of Central Europe. Twice as large as Hindostan, more temperate, more habitable, nature has been placed here hedgeless, gateless, free to all—a green field for the support of half the human race, unclaimed, untouched, awaiting smiling, hands and plow.
There are two curses upon this land. Here, as in India, the rivers depend on the melting of distant snows for their supplies, and in the hot weather are represented by beds of parched white sand. So hot and dry is a great portion of the land, that crops require irrigation. Water for drinking purposes is scarce; artesian bores succeed, but they are somewhat costly for the Coloradan purse, and the supply from common wells is brackish. This, perhaps, may in part account for the Western mode of “prospecting” after water, under which it is agreed that if none be found at ten feet, a trial shall be made at a fresh spot. The thriftless ranchman had sooner find bad water at nine feet than good at eleven.
Irrigation by means of dams and reservoirs, such as those we are building in Victoria, is but a question of cost and time. The never-failing breezes of the plains may be utilized for water-raising, and with water all is possible. Even in the mountain plateau, overspread as it is with soda, it has been found, as it has been by French farmers in Algeria, that, under irrigation, the more alkali the better corn crop.
When fires are held in check by special enactments, such as those which have been passed in Victoria and South Australia, and the waters of the winter streams retained for summer use by tanks and dams; when artesian wells are frequent and irrigation general, belts of timber will become possible upon the plains. Once planted, these will in their turn mitigate the extremes of climate, and keep alike in check the forces of evaporation, sun, and wind. Cultivation itself brings rain, and steam will soon be available for pumping water out of wells, for there is a great natural store of brown coal and of oil-bearing shale near Denver, so that all would be well were it not for the locusts—the scourge of the plains—the second curse. The coming of the chirping hordes is a real calamity in these far-western countries. Their departure, whenever it occurs, is officially announced by the governor of the State.