Our story closes with the national domain completed within limits grander than even the sagacious Jefferson had hoped for. Though "peace hath her victories," peaceful development, such as has followed the settlement of grave political questions, affords fewer materials for history than the stirring records of war, or the annals of political strife.
The West shared with the East in the drain made upon its resources by the Secession War. Its recovery from the effects of that war has, however, been so marked that to-day all traces of it are nearly effaced from its outward and inward life. National unity is no longer a thing of territorial expansion, as with the statesmen of Jefferson's and Benton's time, but now means a perfect union of the whole people in the cause of progress, and for the welfare of mankind. In that peaceful conflict the once hostile sections are now engaged with a praiseworthy emulation.
The child who was born when Lewis and Clarke set out for the Pacific, may now be the living witness to what we have called the marvel of the nineteenth century. It is true, much of the rapid progress of the Great West is due to the development of its extraordinary mineral wealth, by which masses of population have been suddenly moved upon particular points, so forcing settlement beyond its legitimate growth.
There have been, however, other potent agencies at work to the same end. Foremost among these, always keeping in mind the constantly improving facilities for moving emigrants into the West, come the great improvements made in mechanical arts. And first of all we should class the reaping-machine, invented by Cyrus H. McCormick, which is thought to have advanced the line of civilization westward many miles each year. Without this invention, what was an uninhabited and unproductive region forty years ago would hardly have been converted into the granary of the continent, with its millions of people, its marvellous productiveness, and its growing weight in the nation. In the East small farms are the rule; in the West, the exception. The difference, at least, seems to be largely owing to the grass-mower, and grain-reaping machines that were unknown to agriculturists of a former generation, though allowance must be made for the better conditions of soil, which more generally adapt it for cultivation. Great bodies of fertile lands, such as exist in the States of Kansas and Nebraska, are unknown in the East.
Then the building of the Pacific railways has contributed greatly to the rise of the West. Munificently endowed by Government with moneys and lands, the sale of the latter to settlers became an instant and potent means to the building-up of the unoccupied country. In its pre-emption and homestead laws the Government has also offered unusual privileges to all who wished to settle on the vacant public domain; thus putting within the reach of men of small means, the most valuable and productive farming lands in the world. In this respect no government has done so much for its middle-class population as ours. And no population has more quickly returned to the giver the benefits it has received.
One other active means to the making of the Great West should not be overlooked. Passing by the explorers, whose names are familiar, we come to a class of men whose work was no less important in its way. Trained journalists like Horace Greeley, Samuel Bowles, Albert D. Richardson, Henry Villard, Thomas W. Knox, and William Phillips, did much to make the West known to the East in all its aspects, whether political, social, or economical, so depicting its inside and outside life to a multitude of readers, many of whom became actual emigrants in consequence.
These combined agencies, all working together in harmony, have produced extraordinary results. For instance, at the time we bought it all Louisiana, counting from New Orleans to the Missouri, had only about forty-five thousand people. In 1880, under not quite eighty years of American rule, it had over eleven millions, or more than twice as many as all the States had when Louisiana was ceded to us. The whole population of French and Spanish Louisiana did not equal that of Minneapolis, St. Paul, or Kansas City at the present time, neither of which had a single settler at the date of cession.
Spain thought to control the continent with a few soldiers and missionaries. Her civilization, barbaric in its origin, is mediæval rather than modern. In America it could rise no higher than its source. Mexico and Cuba, two of its earliest conquests, show what it has been able to do in the New World in three hundred and fifty years of rule.
France frittered away her opportunities in schemes too vast for the time or the means appointed for their accomplishment. It is the story of force without forecast. Her explorers overran the country, but left few substantial footmarks behind them. One reads French names everywhere, but sees no cities founded. The policy of France, like that of Spain, looked more to getting a revenue from America than colonizing it. Hence every avenue of individual effort was made to lead back to the royal exchequer.
Now let the man who is not yet fifty years old take down the geography he studied when a schoolboy, and put his finger in the middle of the State of Iowa. He will have touched the border of that Great American Desert whose story we have been telling him.