The United States of Yesterday and of To-morrow

Front matter

THE UNITED STATES OF YESTERDAY AND OF TO-MORROW. THE UNITED STATES OF YESTERDAY AND OF TO-MORROW. BY WILLIAM BARROWS, D.D., AUTHOR OF -*^"YCv "twelve nights in the hunters' camp;" "oregon: the struggle for possession;" "the Indian's side of the Indian question;" etc Out of old Books, new Writings, and much Meditation not of yesterday, he will endeavor to select a thing or two; and from the Past, in a circuitous way, illustrate the Present and the Future. — Carlvle. Whoever would do his duty, and his whole duty, in the councils of the Government, must look upon the whole country as it is, in its whole length and breadth. He must comprehend it in its vast extent, its novel character, its sudden development, its amazing progress, confounding all calculations, and almost overwhelming the imagination. — Webster. BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1888. Copyright, 1887, By E. A. Barrows. Smbtrsitj; Shrtan: Johk Wilson and Son, Cambridge. CONTENTS. Page

Introduction

vii Chapter I. How Large is the West ? 9 II. Surprising Distances in the United States 18 III. The Six Growths op the United States . 27 IV. Growth in Settlements 42 V. Ancient Chicago 53 VI. The "Great American Desert" .... 93 VII. Large Landholdings in the United States . 138 VIII. Wild Life on the Border 169 IX. Pioneering in Education 200 X. Lynch Law 221 XI. Eastern Jealousy and Neglect of the West 2G3 XTI. The Railway System of the West . . . 314 XIII. The Empire of the Future 355 XIV. Conclusion 404 INDEX

INTRODUCTION.

. r I "HIS book has been written to answer questions. As the author in earlier days had spent several years beyond the Mississippi, and much time and travel there since in official work, during which he made ten tours over the border, and in the East had devoted much labor to public addresses and lectures on our new country, it was quite natural that a miscellaneous information should be solicited from him concerning the terri tory between the Alleghanies and the Pacific. For various reasons it has seemed best to let this information group itself into topics, and so it stands classified under headings and in chapters. If it seem that many authors have been cited or quoted, with volume and page given, the reason is obvious. They were better informed on the matters in hand than the writer, and therefore support his statements and observations with a wider authority.

INTRODUCTION.

. The author hopes that the candid reader will not allow the magnitude of some of the facts and statements to mar their credibility. Such vastness must be both expected and tolerated in speaking faithfully of a domain much larger than all Europe, whose growth in all the ele ments of a nation has been without precedent or parallel. WILLIAM BARROWS. Reading, Mass., October, 1887. THE UNITED STATES OF YESTERDAY AND OF TO-MORROW.

Chapter I. How Large Is

" THE WEST " ? NEAR the close of the last century France was making wonderful growth in imperial territory and power. Her increase was so great and convulsive as to jar every throne iu Europe. Edmund Burke anxiously turned the attention of Great Britain to her colossal rival, and spoke of ambitious France as " something which awed and commanded the imagination." How large, territorially, would the France of to day be in this country ? Suppose Texas to be a circular lake and France a circular island ; the island could be anchored centrally in the lake out of sight of land, twenty-two miles from any point on the encircling shore. The vastness of this State of Texas — equal to the capacity of Eugland five times, and of Massachusetts thirty- " THE WEST " ! 10 four — is not so very much overstated by the bold fiLrure of Mr. Webster in his 7th of March Speech : " So vast that a bird cannot fly over it in a week."

One accurate statement in arithmet ical figures is so startling as at first to provoke an honest disbelief. Nevertheless it is true that if the entire living population of the globe — fourteen hundred millions — were divided into families of five persons each, all those families could be located in Texas, each family having a house-lot of half an acre, and then leave more than seventy millions of family lots untaken.1 Such surprises are constantly recurring if one follows up an ordinary school geography with questions of comparison. In the days of the con troversy with England over Oregon, some thought it too small an item for so great a peril of the peace and blood of the two countries. The item puts on ampler and more important extent and issue to-day, when our portion of the territory then in dispute — Oregon, Washington Territory, and Idaho — is equal in extent to Great Britain and Ireland twice told, with a remnant nearly as large as Connecticut.

If Colorado were crowded into the map of Europe it would crowd out almost as much as Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, Greece, and Wales. If we were able to take 1 We have followed Donaldson as to the area of Texas = 274,356 square miles. " THE WEST " 3 11 immigraiton of acres, and nationally, we could locate in Dakota, acre for acre, Great Britain, Ire land, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Supposea parallelogram be made to corner on Milwaukee, with a line due west to the Pacific, and by the ocean shore north to our northwestern corner, and thence on our boundary line due east, and to Lake Superior and down to the point of starting, — that enclosure, being about three him dred and fifty-seven miles by seventeen hundred and fifty-six, would cut up into one hundred and twenty-nine Connecticuts.

Yet another illustration from that region will serve to impress on us the magnitude of our interior and Western areas. In 1864 Abraham Lincoln signed the bill granting the Northern Pacific Railroad. As a trunk road it might be assumed to open up a belt of wild laud four hun dred miles wide and eighteen hundred long. This amount of unsettled country the charter proposed to take from its prehistoric occupants — Indians and buffaloes — and give it to agriculture, manufactures, commerce, schoolhouses and churches, voters and jurors. That belt would contain Eng land, Scotland, and Ireland ; Spain and Portugal ; Belgium and the Netherlands ; Norway, Den mark, Sweden, and eight Palestines. And yet the most eastern depot of that road is fifteen hundred miles west of New England tide-water. A man visits those eleven States of the Old World, aud is " THE WEST " ? 12 gone a year on the long tour, and after his return he perhaps lectures or publishes a book on his travels.

The next generation may travel as far in the cars on that belt and see as many marvels of growth as he would hoary wonders abroad, and not leave home. It may enhance the force of this illustration of area to add that the amount of land granted to this road by the Government in its original char ter was equal to all New England and an extra Massachusetts. Probably few Americans, even scholarly ones, and certainly very few of those whose benevolence works in the extension of education and Chris tianity for the world, realize how much the Amer ican Union was enlarged by the Mexican War and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that closed it in 1848, and the Gadsden Purchase. That treaty for mally included and conceded Texas, previously an nexed, and the total addition to the territory of the United States was equal to one hundred and four States as large as Massachusetts ; it was one hundred and fifty times larger than the Holy Land of Israel, the Palestine of marvellous record.

Patriotism, philanthropy, and Christianity have been singularly tardy in going in where onr sword went out ; and the most of this land has won but little interest, though under our own flag, com pared with the interest given by us to lands under the Crescent, and to the territory and home " THE WEST " ! 13 missionary fields of the English Crown. It is one of the peculiarities of benevolence in the United States, that so much of the foreign field of the American church is the home field of the British Crown and of the Established Church of England. I shall never recover from the overwhelming impressions of the vastness of our great valley lying between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains, as they came on me when I first went down the eastern slope of it. It was in the au tumn of 1840, when our steamer swung into the Ohio at Guyandotte, and we were seven days of fair running to St. Louis.

Current and steam for a week to go down one side of this valley ! Since then I have seen more of it, and only to deepen the thought of its immensity. Its northern rim is perpetually fringed by arctic lichens and mosses and firs around their ice-beds, and its southern is perpetually fragrant with the rose and magnolia and orange-blossom. If you are familiar mainly with the valley of the Thames or Tweed or Merrimac or Hudson, struggle a moment with your fancy to measure this great valley of a continent. As aid and stepping stones, recall your reading of Roman history when that Empire had its greatest extent. Consider how beyond the horizon in all directions Roman legions swarmed, capturing the great cities of the world and then returning to the Eternal City " THE WEST " t 14 leading processions of kings and nobles as cap tives and suitors.

Yet this valley has capacity for the entire Roman Empire in the days of its broadest expanse, and half another ! The sword of a Cæsar could never point so far over ter ritory it claimed and awed as the peaceful hand of an American President is extended to receive the votes and congratulations of the Republic. Gibbon gives the greatest area of the Roman Empire at 1,600,000 square miles, and our valley is 2,450,000. Europe is cut up into twenty areas, with as many governments. They range from imperial Russia to the principality of Monaco, embracing six square miles, — about one fourth of the extent of a Yankee township. The twenty realms of Europe, the entire continent, could be located within the United States, and then there would remain uncovered all New England, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

This statement will not surprise any one who considers that the United States is nine teen times larger than France, twenty times larger than Spain, and seveuty-eight times larger than England. Our Pacific margin is worthy of measuring and considering by one who would speak correctly of the West. Its exact length, according to the United States Coast Survey, from the corner post on Mexico to British Columbia, is seventeen " THE WEST " i 15 hundred and forty-three miles, measuring and reckoning in, as is usual in such work, coast indentations. The shore line of the Territory of Alaska, measured from headland to headland, without regard to coast indentations and exclusive of all islands off the coast and beyond Ooni mak Pass, is forty-three hundred and sixty-five statute miles. This includes the northern or Arc tic coast line beyond Behring Strait and up past Point Barrow to Demarcation Point.

Here is a United States coast line of sixty-one hundred and eight statute miles ; and its extent will be more justly estimated in comparison with the total At lantic coast line of Europe, which is only eighty four hundred and eighty miles. This coast fact contrasts strikingly, and for the United States pleasantly, with the very English assumption and prediction of Sir George Simpson in his narrative of "A Journey Round the World in 1841-42." The Oregon Question was then warming toward its conclusion, and Sir George, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, doubled his cruise on the northwest coasts in his interests in fur and English dominion. Evidently feeling and fearing the rivalry of the United States on that coast, and having said that our acquisition of Louisiana " nursed into life the marauder's plea of contiguity," he proceeds to add : " The United States will never possess more than a nominal jurisdiction, nor long possess even that, on the " THE WEST " ? west side of the Rocky Mountains ; and supposing the country to be divided to-morrow to the entire satisfaction of the most unscrupulous patriot in the Union, I challenge Congress to bring my pre diction and its power to the test by imposing the Atlantic tariff on the posts of the Pacific. . . .

England and Russia, whether as friends or foes, cannot fail to control the destiny of the human race, for good or for evil, to an extent which com paratively confines every other nation within the scanty limits of its own proper locality." This cannot now be so interesting reading to the English and to Hudson's Bay men, when Russia has sold out wholly in the northwest of America to the United States, and England holds there only about three hundred miles of sea-coast, while the United States owns sixty-one hundred and eight. Some are unconscious of the vast area of our country, and so are in an amusing fault some times and provincial when putting the "West" nigh at hand, and great cities and sections in it near together. In his " Famous Americans " Parton thus speaks of Webster : " He liked large things, — mountains, elms, great oaks, mighty bulls and oxen, wide fields, the ocean, the Union, and all things of magnitude.

He liked great Rome far better than re fined Greece, and revelled in the immense things of literature, such as ' Paradise Lost ' and the Book of Job, Burke, Dr. Johnson, and the Sixth Book of " THE WEST " 7 17 the Æneid." Herein lies a broad hint that geog raphy as well as law gave Webster stimulus in his marvellous and varied defence of the American Union. He rose to the height of his great argu ment under continental as well as constitutional inspirations. In making up great Americans much use must be made of American geography. In our vastness of realm there is much danger that the East and the West and the North and the South will produce provincial men. ■j.

Chapter II. Surprising Distances In The United States

HOW far is it to Chicago?" Our young English friend made the inquiry when that city was suggested as convenient headquarters while he might be running up and down the country on a tour of observation. When the answer was given, " Something over a thousand miles," he was amazed ; for he was fresh from England, whose longest meridian diameter is only three hundred and sixty-five statute miles, from Berwick to St. Alban's Head, and whose narrowest measure is sixty-two, from the head of the Solway to Wandsbeck on the German Ocean. Perhaps it is expecting too much that one should know tolerably the travelled lengths and breadths in his own United States ; and indeed it would be expecting a great deal. Yet if one has completed a course of common-school or higher study, and can give a fair analysis of any one of Dickens's novels, or outline the status of the unfinished stories in the magazines, or give the prices on stocks or at the best hotels in Europe, one has a right to expect that he can locate leading cities in the Union within a thousand miles of their true position.

When I once spoke to an intelligent friend of having been recently in Omaha, he inquired, with all the simplicity of one of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, "Well, did you see the Mor mons ? " He was surprised that I had not " run out" to Salt Lake City, "just back of Omaha," to interview those peculiar Saints. My answer surprised him more, — that having seen that whole conglomerate when they constituted Nauvoo, this side the Mississippi, I did not care to go a thousand miles out of my way to visit Salt Lake City. "A thousand miles ! Why, I thought it was just back of Omaha!" "It is just back, as they say out West, where there is room to say such things." His question was as if one had proposed some morning, in Boston, to run down to Fort Sumter and see the ruins, or to run up from London to Stockholm, or down to Rome, in a cheap and temporary curiosity; for the distances in these cases are the same.

Parties start from Bangor overland for San Francisco, and the most of them are surprised to learn that when at St. Louis they will be only about one third of their journey. Yet then they have travelled as far as from*Washington to Tehuan tepec, air line, or from London, by water, to St. Petersburg. The completed trip is half a thousand more miles than from Loudon to Monrovia, Africa. Such parties may well be grateful that they were not called to the excursion in old emigrant times. The trip to Oregon in those days is suggestive of distances and discomforts too, — from the seaboard to St. Louis (about fifteen hundred miles), and thence, with the comforts of a Missouri steamer, four hundred and fifty more to Westport. Here come the overhauling and packing and starting of the families and wagons and herds for Fort Hall, thirteen hundred and twenty-three miles farther, through wild lands and wilder Indian tribes.

This Fort Hall was on the Lewis Fork of the Columbia, about one hundred miles north of Salt Lake, a trading-post of the Hudson's Bay Company, and for a long time their Gibraltar against the entrance of the American traders and immigrants into Oregon. From this post, of so much historic interest in frontier affairs, to Van couver, another English trading-post and fort, was eight hundred and fifty miles, and then down the Columbia to the sea ninety, — a total of more than four thousand miles. Thus hardy and noble men and women went over the continent and founded Oregon. The impression is common, and not altogether unnatural, that on the northwest coast American cities and business centres lie quite closely to gether. Yet from Vancouver, where the Columbia is a mile wide, though at that point ninety miles from its mouth, it is six hundred miles up to Fort Colville ; and from San Francisco to Sitka, the capital of our last purchase, it is twelve hundred and ninety-six miles, — as far as from New York to Havana.

It was in the autumn of 1870, — the Kansas Pacific had been opened through to Denver the summer before, — and I was passing New Fort Hays on Big Creek. The willows marked the watercourse as their line disappeared in the infinite prairie, and the conductor advised me to take a good look at those willows, if I were pleased with woodland views, for it would be a long time before I should see more trees. We ran west to Denver, three hundred and fifty miles, without passing tree or shrub as large as a currant-bush or fair-sized switch for a needy boy. To a New Englander, where the farms appear to a Western man as snug gardens walled in, this seemed a large pasture. The clumsy buffalo-herds tumbled off right and left like the waves of a chopped sea, and timid graceful antelopes, in little bands, would run parallel to the cars, and neck and neck, for three or four miles, in their triplet leaps, and as airy and easy as thistle-down on the wind.

Acres of prairie dogs would stand like kangaroos to make observations on us, dodge down through the openings in the tops of their beehive mounds, and instantly show head and neck again for a new look. As twilight approached over the grassy and rolling expanse, gangs of coyotes would settle back on their haunches beyond rifle range, and with stretched neck and wolfish manner howl at us. At Salina, where we spent the night, the stock men gave us some most impressive ideas of distances in that immense interior. Salina, with Brookville a dozen miles away, was then the nearest and great shipping-point for live-stock from that unfenced and infinite Southwest. The estimate for Salina that season was seventy thousand head. The owners, purchasers, and cow boys made that a lively night at the lonely station.

We arrived in the evening, and the morning revealed the little shanty cluster of railroad buildings as a St. Helena in an unlimited expanse of grass. In all directions were masses of cattle, like islands outlying far to sea. Making questions, and notes too, of numbers and weights and girths and prices, I began to ask about the distances that some of the herds had been driven. Pointing to different ones with my questions, the answers came back easily and care lessly, as if a few hundred miles in the saddle for the cow-boy were a slight matter : " Four hundred miles ; " " Six hundred and more ; " " From Beck's rancho on the Pecos, about six hundred ; " " Well, Fort Ringgold way, on the Rio Grande, nigh on to nine hundred." Amazed at these replies, I said : " Why, how far do you drive cattle here ?

" " Stranger, that herd this away yonder has come a right smart thousand. Six months on the trail, and the Redskins touched them at a levy a head for crossing the Indian Territory." This was the nearest route, in 1870, for those ranchmen on the dim borders of American life and civilization as they started their Texan or New Mexican steers for the New York market. It was as if Webster's fat oxen were driven on the highway from Franklin or Marshfield to Chicago, and thence taken seven hundred and fifty miles by cars, that they might furnish the sirloin of the merry king who gave the name to it. From those more southern and southwestern grazing-grounds the ranchmen started their herds for the North on the tender grass of January, and kept pace with the travelling spring, and so came upon the cattle-trains at Salina in early summer.

But now, with the locomotive at San Antonio, Santa Fe", Tuqon, and Fort Yuma, the steers are ticketed through, and find a much easier and speedier way to the slaughter. So soon following in the trail of buffalo and antelope have come compass and chain and warrantee deeds, and farms and city plots ; acres of prairie dogs have been ploughed in for so much wheat to the acre ; and planted groves break the monotonous and treeless expanse, and throw grateful shade over frolicking children, and anvils so musical of thrift, and over family altars so prophetic and insuring of " what soever things are true, whatsoever things are hon est, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, and what soever things are of good report." The time is not far gone by when similar prairies, smaller and more broken by timber, held their primitive sway between Chicago and Cairo.

When in the saddle in early days on those plains, and often without a trail, and only a compass for a guide, another horseman like myself could be seen for hours before our converging lines brought us within hail, like two ships speaking each other in mid-ocean. Pleasant memories linger still around our deer-camp on the edge, or rather in the suburbs, of Girard City. Probably it is larger now ; but then it consisted of a huge pile of crumbling brick, a roofless log-cabin, and rows of stakes running off very regularly into the prairie. The deer jumped them easily as they struck out across five denominational church-lots, the court house grounds, and the college square. The city was peopled with the fancies of Eastern speculators and owners of blocks and corner lots, with now and then a living man as a spectator of prospects.

In planning an easy and interesting tour into the West seven years ago, he of the Eastern seaboard would naturally and very properly wish to see three of the most interesting cities in the upper interior, — St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul. Yet how many would arrange for more than a thousand miles of travel in completing the triangle of the three ? In the order named the distances by rail would be 280, 420, and 368 miles, — now very much less. Our railroad from Chicago to San Francisco is about twenty-three hundred and fifty miles, and the daily trains startiug out from each terminus with full coaches indicate that the road is an American necessity. The distance traversed by it will be better understood by a European and by those Americans who travel mainly in foreign lands, and so the United States will be more intel ligently measured if we take this road to Europe for a measuring illustration.

Suppose, therefore, that we place the Chicago terminus on London as a turn-table, and sweep the road round, as the hand on the dial of a clock, and thus see where the San Francisco terminus would rest. For con venience, an air line is assumed between its two real termini and between the illustrating ones that are about to be named. Giving it a northerly direction from London, its San Francisco terminus will rest in the extreme north of Iceland. Moving off to the right, it will extend almost to the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, and just reach St. Petersburg, opening communication between those two grand capitals in air line, as the crow flies. One third of the Black Sea will be shadowed by the moving index which, passing on, cuts its circle midway through the deserts of Barca and Sahara and enters the Atlantic among the Canary Islands.

Thence, in its home curve, taking in the Azores and two thirds of the Atlantic between London and Newfoundland, it will close its circle in northern Iceland. On this topic of distances within the dominion of the United States we introduce but one more illustration to aid the fancy in finding facts. If one will take an air line from Quoddy Head, in Lubec, the most eastern point of Maine, to the mouth of the Straits of San Juan de Fuca, where they empty into the Pacific on the southern coast of Vancouver, he will find that he is on the true air line to the most western of the Aleutian Islands. The line thus indicated measures the distance between the extreme eastern and western points of United States territory. Not speaking exactly as if casting the transit of Venus, the half-way point in this line is about two hundred miles to the west of the mouth of these straits on the Pacific coast.

So far, therefore, beyond Vancouver one must go "out West" before he will be half way over the American limits. After leaving Maine on this air line he will trespass on the Queen's dominion till he arrive at Rainy Lake, above Lake Superior, beyond which till he enter Pacific waters he will be on American soil.

Chapter III. The Six Growths Of The United States

" T NEED not remark to you that the flank and rear of JL the United States are possessed by other powers, and formidable ones too. ... If the Spaniards on their right and Great Britain on their left, instead of throwing stumbling-blocks in their way, as they now do, should hold out lures for their trade and alliance ! When they gain strength, which will be sooner than most people conceive. . . . The Western States hang upon a pivot ; the touch of a feather would turn them any way." Thus wrote Washington to Governor Harrison of Virginia in 1784, after he had made a tour of the border over the Alleghanies. Of course, increase of territory by the United States was indispensable, inevitable, and irresisti ble. " To have more land " ran in English blood, and through the colonial veins into the body politic of the infant Republic.

The English fathers had crowded back the Spanish, in their arrogant claims, from Virginia to Florida, and the Dutch from New York, and the French from the continent. In 1754, and at the early age of twenty-two, Colonel Washington planted the first British banner on the Western waters, and in the still struggling days of the Republic the region beyond the Ohio of the Upper Mississippi was organized into the " County of Illinois, State of Virginia." So early the new-boru Republic took possession where the mother country had driven out the French for quite another purpose a few years before. This inherited Saxon hunger for land showed itself signally when the colonies and their allies and the mother country met to adjust boundary lines after the Revolution. Spain would exclude the Republic from the Lower Mississippi, and she drew from Franklin the sharp remark: "Spain has taken four years to consider whether she would treat with us or not.

Give her forty, and let us in the mean time mind our own business." In his excellent " History of the Mississippi Val ley," Monette says that " during the greater part of the negotiations preceding the treaty Mr. Oswald, the British commissioner, persisted in his demands that the Ohio River should form the northwestern boundary of the United States ; and it was only after every effort had failed to move Mr. Adams and Mr. Jay that he consented to adopt the present boundary through the middle of the Great Lakes." 1 As conditions of peace that 1 History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi. By John W. Monette, M.D. In two vol umes. Vol. ii. pp. 212, 213. could not be departed from, Franklin named the Great Lakes and the Mississippi as boundaries, and in reply to the diplomatic Vergennes, who was urging the demands of Spain, Jay said : " We shall be content with no boundaries short of the Missis sippi."