The different West as seen by a transplanted easterner

Preface

SOME readers will find fault with this book because it neither gives statistics nor quotes authorities. It is well to say, therefore, at the outset, that it is written for those who dislike both, and who like to read straight on without having their attention distracted by footnotes or figures. The author assumes full responsibility for what he says, and if he has inadvertently missed the truth upon occasion, doubtless it matters little.

A. E. B.

Contents

Chapter V page

The West's Political Unrest .... 47

The first Western " insurgents" — Eastern and western ill-feeling — Western restlessness — Movements from below upward — Democracy in the West — Bryan and Roosevelt — Socialism — The heritage of border lawlessness.

Chapter I Some Preliminaries

MUCH ridicule has been heaped on the heads of travelers who, after a very brief sojourn in a strange place, essay to describe what they have seen and to comment on it. Obviously, knowledge gained in a few days cannot be thorough, but first impressions are of value, and they quickly die away; so that it is possible that the visitor of a day may have something to tell us that might quite escape the resident of ten years. It is not the rapid glance that constitutes superficiality; it is the mistaken idea that this glance may be made the basis of a thorough discussion. A lightning flash may reveal details of a landscape that are unnoticeable in a careful scrutiny by noonday light; but one does not go to the view by lightning for topographical or geological data.

This book assumes to give scarcely more than first impressions, except in the discussion of matters that are as patent in the East as in the West.

And it is obvious that if we are to catalogue and discuss the particulars in which the West differs from the East, our observer must be one who is familiar with the East. The foreigner, if he is an Englishman, notes first the aspects in which America, as a whole, differs from England; all states look alike to him. The typical American of the British novel, as has been amusingly noted in a recent magazine article,* combines the dialects and the mannerisms of Maine and Texas, of North Carolina and Arizona. If the foreign observer is a German, he is struck by any Anglo-Saxon peculiarity, including those that we share with our transatlantic cousins. To these a Frenchman or Italian is apt to add various Teutonic or non-Latin items. All of which is simply the elementary arithmetical truth that if you desire to find the difference between two quantities you must subtract one from the other; taking both from a third will be of no avail. And when one is a variable that rapidly approaches the other, as time passes, then the sooner the subtracting is done, the more nearly will the difference appear in its original amount. When the two objects to be compared — in this case the easterner and the westerner — are very nearly equal to start with, the approach due to contact is very swift. Differences that appall, amuse, or vex at the outset, are overlooked in a few

*The Yankee in British Fiction, by Frank M. Bicknell. The Outlook, Nov. 19, 1910.

Some Preliminaries months, and one soon forgets that they ever existed. The newcomer In Illinois or Missouri soon finds himself almost remembering that persimmons grew on the New Hampshire farm, and forgets that chestnuts ever existed outside of literature.

A Russian experimental psychologist, in a recent interesting series of investigations concerning the apprehension of numerical relations by animals, seems to have proved conclusively that dogs can count up to four. At least this is true if by " counting" we mean distinguishing that number of objects or events from other smaller numbers. The experimenter, Zeliony by name, says that the impression made on the mind by any one of a series of events is colored by all those that have gone before : hence we are able to distinguish the fourth of a series, for instance, which has three predecessors, from the third, which has only two.

In like manner, the impressions of a newcomer vary slightly with every day of his stay, even if they are the same objectively. The effect produced by looking down the same street is different on the second day from the first, and still more different on the third. This difference is not wholly due to addition of impressions; if it were so, the effect should grow stronger with time, whereas the reverse is generally true; perception becomes dulled with habit, details once noticed are blurred or smoothed over, and familiarity relegates the whole impression more or less to the subconsciousness. Recognition of detail thus grows up to a certain point and then fades. This point of maximum recognition is the one at which one should sit down to record his Impressions.

The case is different with the recognition of relationships, which requires thought. This usually improves with time. One's impressions of life in a foreign city might be more vivid and interesting in the first few weeks than at a later period; one's understanding of what it all meant might not be good within the year, and might constantly improve thereafter.

The accounts written by foreign travelers of their first glimpse of New York from the bay, of the docks, of the drive through the streets to the hotel, of the reporter's first visit, and so on, are not only interesting, but extremely valuable; but when these visitors begin to generalize on short acquaintance, as they so often regrettably do, what they have to say is not so well worth while.

When the writer of this volume has included in it more than first impressions he has tried not to go beyond the kind of generalizations that are made earliest and that are not far removed from the impressions themselves.

The recorder of somewhat superficial impressions

Superficial Impressions runs the risk, of course, of mistaking a local peculiarity for one that is common to a wider region; this he can avoid only by observing and comparing peculiarities in divers points of that region.

I once knew a good lady from South Carolina who occasionally visited relatives in Waltham, Mass. She was a keen observer and discoursed freely on what she regarded as New England peculiarities. Some were such in truth, but most would have puzzled the majority of New Englanders to recognize, being customs or idioms peculiar to Massachusetts, or to Waltham, or even, perhaps, to the family in which she visited. So our British cousin who has spent some time in New York returns to report the customs and peculiarities of that city as those of the United States in general.

In order to avoid such a mistake, or at least to render its commission unlikely, it is not necessary that the traveler should visit every town, hamlet, and farm in the region of which he is to write. A somewhat wide sampling is all that is necessary. If we open a dozen cans, chosen at random from a pile of several thousand, and find tomatoes in all, we are justified in concluding — not perhaps that there are absolutely no peaches or pears in the lot, but at any rate that the tomato is abundant in the pile. So if one finds here and there throughout a region the same custom, the same trick of speech, he coneludes that It is characteristic of the region. Our friend from Waltham, Mass., would not have confused the peculiarities of that town with those of New England had she made observations also In Burlington, Vt, Concord, N. H., and Waterbury, Conn.

The time has now come for us to ask "What Is the West? Where, precisely, are Its boundaries?" A Chicago paper recently printed a clever cartoon giving a bird's-eye view of the United States, and showing a strip on the Atlantic coast surrounded by a high wall and labeled "The East," while the rest of the country bore the legend " Only the West." As a graphic delineation of eastern opinion this Is hardly an exaggeration, and the reason Is not far to seek. Our country began with a strip along the Atlantic, and the western edge of this strip was of course "The West." Central New York and Pennsylvania, and western Virginia, were all once on this western edge. The strip has widened until It reaches from ocean to ocean, and it has necessarily done so entirely by westward extension of this edge, the eastern being fixed at the Atlantic coast. Hence every part of the country west of the original boundary has been successively "The West," and this shifting has been so rapid that a new strip has acquired the name before the older ones have had time to lose It. Hence It happens that

Where Is the West?

a New Englander still occasionally talks of "going west" to Buffalo, N. Y., and a Jerseyite will talk of his "western relatives" in Wilkesbarre, Pa.

It must not be forgotten, however, that the expanding strip of American dominion did not pass over absolute wilderness. It overflowed and submerged, more or less completely, the French settlements in the Mississippi Valley, and the Spanish colonies in Texas and California. All these had already their own customs and their own points of view. To the St. Louisan, the Mississippi has always divided the East from the West, while to the San Franciscan the East has been as allinclusive as the West has been to the Atlantic Coast dweller — hence the story of the two girls, one of whom had been East, to Denver, while the other had gone West, to Pittsburg.

In selecting any one region of the country to describe by the name of "The West," one is thus confronted by an embarrassment of riches. The most reasonable criterion would appear to consist in asking the question "What region most frequently accepts the name as applied to itself?" Now we find that no matter how central New York and Pennsylvania are regarded by Atlantic dwellers, they never themselves acknowledge that they are "western," looking upon the term. Indeed, as involving a certain degree of opprobrium. Similarly, a Callfornian or an Oregonian seldom admits that he lives "in the West." His abode is in "the Pacific States," or "on the Coast" — a superb phrase whose magnificent disrespect to the Atlantic can not be too much admired.

So far as I can find out, the only westerner selfconfessed and unashamed, is he who dwells in what easterners call the "Middle West" — the great belt of states fringing the Mississippi on either side, especially about the country's middle latitudes. Here the denizens ask naturally, " How do you like it here in the West?" and speak of "us westerners." They talk, to be sure, of "going west" when they entrain for Denver or Pueblo, but this is purely in a kinematic sense, and means merely that the train is to move toward the setting sun. Few would refer to Colorado, in a static sense, as "The West."

Some dwellers in this region, it is true, object to the words "west" and "western," as applied to them and their states. I was taken to task not long ago by a Chicagoan of eastern origin for so using them. "The Central States," he maintained, should be the true term. Now this phrase, aside from the fact that nobody uses it, is not even descriptive. The " Central States" are those in the neighborhood of Colorado; certainly Indiana and Iowa do not belong to them.

The Middle West

Then an inevitable confusion with the so-called "Middle States" would result. As a matter of fact, names of this sort are traditional and habitual, and rarely descriptive; but the exchange of a familiar name that was once descriptive and has become non-descriptive only through changed conditions, for an unfamiliar one that never was and never will be descriptive, does not commend Itself.

The "Middle West," then, is the "West" of this modest treatise — the West, whither its writer has been transplanted and to which, in common with its older inhabitants, he "points with pride." It is a land of whose differences there is something to say; were it not so, these pages would have no reason for being. But those differences, as they really are, are not as the eye of the westerner sees them, nor yet as that of the easterner beholds them. Perhaps the eye of the present writer has not discriminated them aright; it may take nothing less than the fabled Eye of Faith to view them as they are. At any rate, they are here set down as they obtrude themselves upon one person's consciousness. Like Luther, here he stands — on the banks of the Mississippi — he "can not do otherwise."

Chapter II Flying Impressions

WHEN Sylvia Pankhurst, the English suffragette, was in St. Louis, she addressed the members of the City Club, just after luncheon. As she entered the crowded dining room of the club, accompanied by two other ladies, those present naturally rose to their feet and so remained until the women were seated. What kind of treatment Miss Pankhurst had expected, I do not know, but she is said to have been deeply affected by this courteous reception — something, she said, that she had never experienced at home. It is to be hoped that she did not wrongly interpret it as a universal expression of sympathy with her ideas.

In the course of her speech, when she was telling how the London bobbies had driven her suffragette sisters from their posts, she remarked, "but they came back." This bit of appropriate but quite unintentional slang was met with an instant roar of laughter and applause. The expression on the speaker's face was worth going miles to see. She saw she had made some kind of a hit, but she did not see why or how; and she was half Inclined to

Bluffs and Prairies II

suspect that the demonstration was Intended to be unfriendly. Whether her American friends enlightened her or whether she is still wondering what it was all about, I do not know.

These trivial incidents illustrate very well what the newcomer, especially the foreign newcomer, has to meet in the West — little differences from the treatment to which he is accustomed or from the environment with which he is familiar — differences so small that he is doubtful whether they exist or not, or is even unaware of their existence until the involuntary smiles of those about him lead him to investigate.

The first differences noticed by a newcomer to a given region are those apparent to the senses, especially to the sight; those of topography, vegetation, and climate. In the vast region that we have chosen to denominate "the West," there are no mountains and very few hills; whole states are nearly level except for the cuttings made by the rivers. Where these rivers are of any size the flat country is divided Into two levels: "bottom lands," the broad alluvial plains constituting the river's flood-area, over which it meanders almost at will, and the prairies at the level of the top of the bluffs. The transition from one level to the other, especially where the bluffs are soft and earthy and easily furrowed into ravines, is often beautiful and gives the impression of a hilly region. This may be near the river itself or it may be fifteen miles distant.

The easterner's idea of the Middle West as a flat country is apt to receive a jolt when he visits, for instance, Alton, 111., a Mississippi River town that is as precipitous as Providence, R. I. The relation of river-bluffs to both prairie and bottom lands is often misapprehended, even by those who frequently pass over all three in railway journeys.

Another misapprehension is that prairies are always flat. Bottom lands are necessarily so; the plains west of the Missouri are apparently so, although really they rise steadily in level to the foot of the Rockies where they are "mile-high." But prairies may be, and often are, lovely rolling country, intersected by beautiful ravines. What makes them striking to an easterner's eye is the absence of rock. Such rolling country, brilliant green with young wheat, as far as the eye can reach, reminds one of a lawn, especially at a little distance, and an easterner can scarcely help having the impression that it has been cleared of stones and graded, at huge expense, whereas the configuration is perfectly natural.

But even a flat region Is far from uninteresting. It gives one the impression of largeness and airiness that seems inseparable from the West. "You ought to see the country where we live," said a west-

Bottom Lands 13 ern farmer's daughter, " Why, it 's perfectly beautiful; it's just as flat as the top of a table." This girl would probably always regard hilly country as alien; interesting, perhaps, but not homelike. To thousands of our fellow citizens the rocky hills of New England are simply an infertile wilderness — difficult, monotonous, and disagreeable.

A man loves the kind of country where he was born and bred: that is right; only he must not assume that those born and bred elsewhere should and do love his kind of country instead of their own. Both have their beauties, as even the discriminating stranger must acknowledge. The "American bottoms" — the flood plain of the Mississippi on the Illinois side in the neighborhood of St. Louis, form an absolutely flat region of hundreds of square miles. There are few more impressive sights than this great plain, as viewed from the giant Indian mound near the banks of the Cahokia Creek, green with the new wheat, and dotted here and there with the smaller, but still great, tumuli of a vanished race. The indifference of the residents of the neighborhood to this region of wonders is astonishing. Fortunately it is as hard to destroy a tumulus as It Is to erect one, and the material — the common soft earth of the region — excites no one's cupidity; otherwise the mounds would have been leveled to the ground long ago.

This softness of the earth, and its lack of stones, is also responsible for another feature that is noted at once by the eastern eye — the muddiness of the rivers. Clear water flows over rock from which all soil has long since been washed away; water running through an alluvial plain, shifting its course and washing away its soft, earthy banks, must needs be muddy, "What's that?" said a slum child on her first view of the Mississippi's brown, rolling flood, during a charitable "fresh-airing." "What do you think it is?" was the answering query from one of the fair patronesses. " I don't know for sure," rejoined the child, hesitatingly; "but it looks like coffee." It surely does; but it has beauty of its own for the eyes that are not disappointed because it is not something else.

Some people ought to find fault with the sky because it is not green like the trees. I have heard of a California woman who said she would object to the pearly gates of heaven if they were not made of the abalone shell of her native Pacific. And I have listened to loud complaints uttered because the Mississippi a thousand miles above its mouth is not as wide as the Hudson at New York!

The great eastern rivers, so far as they are great, are not real rivers at all, but drowned valleys — estuaries, arms of the sea, with salt or brackish water, slight current and tidal flow. The great western

Rivers in the West 15

rivers are as far from the ocean, and as independent of it, as the brooks; they are in fact huge brooks and resemble in no respect the navigable reaches of the Hudson, the Connecticut, or the Delaware.

These differences have a wide influence on conditions of life. Those relating to the navigabihty of the rivers will be touched upon elsewhere, but those that affect the appearance of the streams as they flow past cities belong here. The easterner thinks of a navigable river as fringed with wharves as it passes a city — projections at right-angles to its banks. But in swift-flowing streams — brooks on a huge scale — varying in level perhaps forty feet from high to low water, such wharves are impracticable. On rivers like the Mississippi the sloping bank is simply paved to form a "levee" and the water comes up as far as it will, the boats with it. Steamboats have long gangways slung from their bows, which can be let down either at levees or on any convenient spot along the banks where paved spaces do not exist, or wharf-boats are moored at the edge of the water and are hauled up and let out as it advances and recedes.

A recent novel in which the hero starts on his career from St. Louis gives a stirring picture of the water-front there as the eastern author imagined it; the long wharves and the great steamers between them, hauling out into the stream as they start, just as they do in the North River at New York, or the Delaware at Philadelphia. If the author had ever seen one of the big western rivers, or had even read of the conditions that obtain along their banks, he would not have penned so absurd a passage.

Next to topographical features the easterner is struck by differences of vegetation, and here we must exclude those due purely to differences of latitude. The dweller in the Northwest who visits the Southwest is struck, of course, by variations due to his southward travel — with these we have nothing to do. The most striking differences to the traveler along one parallel of latitude are probably those due to changed agricultural conditions, chiefly the huge size of the fields and the enormous areas devoted to one crop.

In Illinois one may travel for hours without seeing anything but corn and that in apparently limitless areas. As one goes farther west, the wheat intrudes, takes the middle of the stage and then yields partly to alfalfa or other crops, but there is the same extent, the same impressive monotony, all of which is foreign to the East. In the case of natural vegetation there is hardly the same degree of noticeable difference, except to the botanist. Trees of the poplar family, such as the sycamore and Cottonwood, are more numerous; others, the maple

Western Weather 17

and the elm for instance, grow fewer. Strange wild fruits such as the persimmon are abundant; springflowering shrubs such as the red-bud give an unfamiliar look to the woods in that season, yet taken by and large, vegetative nature does not obtrude her differences on the easterner, except perhaps in the parts of the bottom-lands given over to floods and abandoned for cultivation. Here there is a jungle of willows, wild vines, and the like, that gives a peculiarly savage and unfamiliar look.

Variation of climate, like that of vegetation, which depends on it so closely, is of course less noticed when traveling east and west than from north to south or the reverse. The chief things that make that of the Middle West different from that of the East are the absence of mountains, the inland situation, and the fact that, as our weather moves from west to east, the West gets its storms and its hot and cold waves earlier.

Absence of a great body of water near by, with its capacity for absorbing and storing heat, makes the climate on the same parallel colder in winter and hotter in summer. On a hot August day there is no chance that the wind by switching to the east will bring the cool sea air over the parched country; the familiar newspaper headline, " No Relief in Sight," has a more sinister meaning. At the same time the remoteness of great bodies of water lessens the humidity — that great terror of the eastern summer and winter weather ahke. Fifty below zero in Minnesota may be merely stimulating, where twenty above in New York may seem unbearably cold. So also in the latter city the "scare" headlines in the papers begin to bloom at eighty-five degrees, where ninety-five degrees in dryer St. Louis scarcely brings them out.

The absence of mountains means greater regularity in atmospheric disturbances — a tendency to follow the laws of meteorology without interruption. Here we may have a great cyclonic movement, around a center of low-pressure, a thousand miles in diameter, entirely over flat country. One of the things that happens according to regulation in such a vast cyclonic disturbance is the development of thunderstorms, tempests, and whirlwinds, in its southeast quadrant; and all these are more frequent in the West than in more broken country. Tornadoes do occur in New England and the Middle States, but no one thinks of taking out tornado insurance there, or of building "cyclone-cellars" for refuge, as is done regularly in many parts of the West. The sign "Tornado Insurance" on a business building is one of the things that gives the eastern visitor a mental jolt and reminds him that he has entered a region that is different meteorologically as well as topographically. What has been

The West the Weather's Source 19

said of the absence of bodies of water does not apply of course to the Great Lake region, where the effect of the lakes on the climate is similar, on a smaller scale, to that of the ocean; but this effect is purely local.

The nearness of the West to the source of the weather is an influence that acts in the same direction as its uniformity of surface. We do not know exactly how or why the great atmospheric whirls that we call cyclones and anti-cyclones begin, but we know that they start in the Far West and travel thence eastward across the continent. Our weather prediction is largely the art of watching them, tracking them, and estimating when they will reach a given spot. When the disgusted citizen swears at the weather bureau it is apt to be because the erratic whirl with its attendant "weather" fooled the forecaster by slowing up, or turning aside, or perhaps by melting away altogether. The nearer one is to the starting point the less chance all these accidents have to happen; hence the weather is somewhat more uniform in the West than in the East. Also the storms are more severe; the hot and cold waves are felt in their full force.

Most of the differences mentioned in what precedes do not depend on the hand of man; what is said of the crops constitutes the only exception. There are other differences, however, noticeable to the casual traveler as he glances from the car window, that are artificial rather than natural. Farmhouses seem smaller and more infrequent. This is partly due to the vastness of the setting, which makes a normal house with its usual outbuildings seem insignificant; partly to the fact that the use of machinery in farm-operation has rendered a large resident staff unnecessary. It is only at harvest that an army of men must be employed, and these are hired temporarily, often from outside the boundaries of the state. The country is familiar with the annual newspaper item to the effect that somany thousand men will be required to harvest the wheat or corn crops in Kansas or Nebraska. These are all " emergency help."

As the train passes through cities and towns the traveler notices that their immediate environs are not so well kept as in eastern cities. The outskirts of most American cities are discreditable: Boston is a shining exception. Possibly this condition is inseparable from continuous and rapid growth; and as this is taking place more rapidly in the West than in the East, it might be expected that conditions there would be even more unsatisfactory. Even the more remote suburbs, accessible by rail or long-distance trolley beyond the rim of immediate outskirts, are not in general so noteworthy as in the East. Chicago has some of great beauty on the

Railway Peculiarities 21

lake shore, but In general such suburban towns as those about Philadelphia or in the New Jersey and "Sound" environs of New York, are lacking. The suburb habit is not so fully developed. San Francisco is much more like New York in this respect than any town in the West as we are using the term. In general the type of residence district that the easterner associates with a more or less distant suburb is to be found within the city limits in western cities. In many of them, too, the private "Place," a short-parked street constituting a rus in urhe, is much in vogue and highly developed.

Some of the most striking differences apparent to the traveler he will notice best from the rear observation platform of his train. In the first place he will find that he is running on a single track, although he may be on one of the fast " flyers " with de luxe equipment. But the place of the second track will often be taken by a single-track interurban trolley road, whose rails parallel for miles those on which he is running. The roadbed is as good as that of the steam road on which he travels, sometimes even better. The cars are large and fine, and race successfully with the flyer, sometimes getting ahead of It.

The development of these interurban electric roads has no parallel in the East. Their patrons use them for comparatively long trips and they even run sleepers whose conveniences are in some respects greater than those of the standard Pullmans. The interurban electric terminal in Indianapolis is a noteworthy building and one even more striking is to be erected in St. Louis, where the Illinois Traction Co., one of the largest of the interurban electric roads, has built an expensive bridge over the Mississippi for its exclusive use.