Cleveland founded the town of Cleveland as early as 1796. Lower down in the great valley of the Mississippi was a curious, illogical, and now forgotten little band of settlers who had formed what was known as the "Mississippi Territory." Smaller yet, and more inexplicable, did we not know the story of the old water-trail from the Green Bay to the Mississippi, there was a dot, a smear, a tiny speck of population high up on the east bank of the Mississippi, where the Wisconsin emptied. These valley settlements far outnumbered all the population of the State of Ohio, which had lain directly in the path of the star, but the streams of which lay awkwardly on the scheme of travel. The West was beginning to be the West. The seed sown by Marquette the Good, by Hennepin the Bad, by La Salle the Bold, by Tonti the Faithful—seed despised by an ancient and corrupt monarchy—had now begun to grow.
Illustration: UNITED STATES CENSUS 1890.
ANOTHER WEST BEYOND.
Yet, beyond the farthest families of the West of that day, there was still a land so great that no one tried to measure it, or sought to include it in the plans of family or nation. It was all a matter for the future, for generations much later. Compared with the movements of the past, it must be centuries before the West—whatever that term might mean—could ever be overrun. That it could ever be exhausted was, to be sure, an utterly unthinkable thing. There were vague stories among the hardy settlers about new lands incredibly distant, mythically rich in interest. But who dreamed the import of the journey of strong-legged Zebulon Pike into the lands of the Sioux, and who believed all his story of a march from Colorado to Chihuahua, and thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused for the peaceful settlers of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty miles away, by that ancient saga, that heroically done, misspelled story of Lewis and Clark? There was still to be room enough and chance enough in the West.
II. AGAINST THE WATERS
THE UP-STREAM MAN.
In 1810 the Western frontier of the United States slanted like the roof of a house from Maine to Louisiana. The center of population was almost exactly upon the site of the city of Washington.
That mysterious land beyond the Mississippi was even then receiving more and more of that adventurous population which the statesmen of the Louisiana Purchase feared would leave the East and never would return. The fur-traders of St. Louis had found a way to reach the Rockies. The adventurous West was once more blazing a trail for the commercial and industrial West to follow. This was the second outward setting of the tide of West-bound travel. We had used up all our down-stream transportation, and we had taken over, and were beginning to use, all the trails that led into the West, all the old French trails, the old Spanish trails, the trails that led out with the sun. No more war parties now from the Great Lakes to the Ohio, from the Great Lakes to Mississippi. This was our country. We held the roads.
STEAM HELPS THE UP-STREAM JOURNEYINGS.
But now there were happening yet other strange and startling things. In 1806, at Pittsburg, some persons built the first steamboat ever seen on the Ohio River.
KASKASKIA: THE TURNING OF THE TIDE.
Thanks to the man who could go up-stream, corn was no longer worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel anywhere in America. Corn was worth fifty cents a bushel, and calico was worth fifty cents a yard, at the city of Kaskaskia, in the heart of the Mississippi valley. Kaskaskia the ancient was queen of the down-stream trade in her day.
THE COMMERCE OF THE TRANS-MISSISSIPPI WEST.
Calico was worth fifty cents a yard at Kaskaskia; it was worth three dollars a yard in Santa Fé. A beaver-skin was worth three dollars in New York; it was worth fifty cents at the head of the Missouri. There you have the problems of the men of 1810, and that, in a nutshell, is the West of 1810, 1820, 1830. The problem was then, as now, how to transport a finished product into a new country, a raw product back into an old country, and a population between the two countries. There sprang up then, in this second era of American transportation, that mighty commerce of the prairies, which, carried on under the name of trade, furnished one of the boldest commercial romances of the earth. Fostered by merchants, it was captained and carried on by heroes, and was dependent upon a daily heroism such as commerce has never seen anywhere except in the American West. The Kit Carsons now took the place of the Simon Kentons, the Bill Williamses of the Daniel Boones. The Western scout, the trapper, the hunter, wild and solitary figures, took prominent place upon the nation's canvas.
This Western commerce, the wagon-freighting, steamboating, and packing of the first half of this century, was to run in three great channels, each distinct from the other. First there was the fur trade, whose birth was in the North. Next there was the trade of mercantile ventures to the far Southwest. Lastly there was to grow up the freighting trade to the mining regions of the West. The cattle-growing, farming, or commercial West of to-day was still a thing undreamed.
CAUSES FOR GROWTH OF SELF-RELIANT WESTERN CHARACTER.
In every one of these three great lines of activity we may still note what we may call the curiously individual quality of the West. The conditions of life, of trade, of any endurance upon the soil, made heavy demands upon the physical man. There must, above all things, be strength, hardihood, courage. There were great companies in commerce, it is true, but there were no great corporations to safeguard the persons of those transported. Each man must "take care of himself," as the peculiar and significant phrase went. "Good-by; take care of yourself," was the last word for the man departing to the West. The strong legs of himself and his horse, the strong arms of himself and his fellow-laborers, these must furnish his transportation. The muscles tried and proved, the mind calm amid peril, the heart unwearied by reverses or hardships—these were the items of the capital universal and indispensable of the West. We may trace here the development of a type as surely as we can by reading the storied rocks of geology. This time of boat and horse, of pack and cordelle and travois, of strenuous personal effort, of individual initiative, left its imprint forever and indelibly upon the character of the American, and made him what he is to-day among the nations of the globe.
THE ADVENTUROUS WEST.
There was still a West when Kaskaskia was queen. Major Long's expedition up the Platte brought back the "important fact" that the "whole division of North America drained by the Missouri and the Platte, and their tributaries between the meridians of the mouth of the Platte and the Rockies, is almost entirely unfit for cultivation, and therefore uninhabitable for an agricultural people." There are many thousands of farmers to-day who cannot quite agree with Major Long's dictum, but in that day the dictum was accepted carelessly or eagerly. No one west of the Mississippi yet cared for farms. There were swifter ways to wealth than farming, and the wild men of the West of that day had only scorn and distrust for the whole theory of agriculture. "As soon as you thrust the plow into the earth," said one adventurer who had left the East for the wilder lands of the West, "it teems with worms and useless weeds. Agriculture increases population to an unnatural extent." For such men there was still a vast world without weeds, where the soil was virgin, where one might be uncrowded by the touch of home-building man. Let the farmers have Ohio and Kentucky, there was still a West.
THE WEST OF THE FUR TRADE.
There was, in the first place, then, the West of the fur trade. For generations the wild peddlers of the woods had traced the waterways of the far Northwest, sometimes absent for one, two, or more years from the place they loosely called home, sometimes never returning at all from that savagery which offered so great a fascination, often
