Читать книгу The Overland Trail - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 7

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There stand in America three great obelisks.

One is in Washington, the Federal Capital. It is the Washington Monument. It marks the beginning of a great nation in its expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It commemorates also one of the noblest leaders, who ever guided that nation in its Destiny.

The second is in Kansas City. It commemorates the soldiers, who perished in the World War; but it also marks the beginning of a great racial path in that expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That racial path is the Overland Trail. Here set out in the last trek of humanity westward, not an army of soldiers in rank formation, but an army of Pioneers, who conquered a wilderness and transformed a desert into a garden; and they accomplished in a little more than half a century, what the Old World did not achieve in sixty centuries. They conquered by sheer dogged dauntless courage an empire half the area of Europe. Five thousand people—men, women, children—perished from hunger, from hardship, from Indian raids, in a single year on the Oregon Trail. If you want to realize the epic heroism of such pioneer heroism, compare that mortality loss to the army death list of a single little war in Europe over some principality not the size of a single county in the states bordering the Overland Trail! Then you grasp what the great racial highway means in American history. You realize why to the West, it is sacred as the very altar stairs of a saint’s monument in Asia or Europe. It, too, is dyed in sacrificial martyr blood. It, too, is worn by the pilgrims’ feet in traces which time can never efface.

The third obelisk stands at the final outlet of Columbia River to the Pacific. It is known as the Astor Monolith. It marks the end of the Oregon Pioneer Trail. It commemorates far more. It symbolizes the final destination of man’s trek round the world from East to West for six thousand years.

One may grasp the significance of these things best, perhaps, by telescoping back from the present to the past and seeing how all evolved from simple beginnings.

Whether you travel by rail or by motor, pause midway above the long viaduct across the yeasty muddy floods of the river flats at Kansas City. Here shunt in a never-stop shuttle the trains of a dozen big rail systems. Ask yourself some questions.

Did the three Kansas Cities and their one suburb jump from a center of a few hundred thousands to a population of seven hundred thousand through man’s dauntless spirit or their own geographic position as the center of a Western Empire much vaster than all Central Europe or for that matter than all New England with New York and Pennsylvania included?

It is a mighty interesting question and its answer is an epic of human progress in a century unparalleled in the records of the race.

When I was there but a few years before the World War, and again just after the War, Kansas City was elated by a population of less than three hundred thousand. Here today are almost three-quarters of a million; and here tomorrow may be—what? I hesitate to answer—a Berlin, a Paris, a Chicago.

Less than seventy-five years ago, a man and his family with prophetic fore-vision might have sat down on a village lot sold at twenty-five dollars or given to anyone who would build and improve the property, and by sheer persistence in sitting on a little nest-egg without letting it go addled before it hatched, waken up to a fortune that would have left Rip Van Winkle rubbing his sleepy eyes, or King Midas feeling cheap. There are lots in Kansas City today as valuable as the best in New York, or richer far than any principality of the Old World. But the man would have needed more than prophetic fore-vision. He must needs have faith in his vision, faith based on facts.

Don’t regard Kansas City, Missouri, as the one Kansas City. Kansas City includes also Kansas City, Kansas, and Westport and suburbs beyond each, and Independence farther out, where many workers live and motor to and from home each day.

If you have eyes that see and comprehend what they see, the architecture tells the whole story of the city as it always does.

There are the most recent bank and public buildings and schools of the Grecian column and Chaldean lions with the wings of the spirit from the shoulders of power, with the acanthus leaves above the columns and not a line on the façade more or less than adds to beauty. Then there are the Gothic types, twenty stories with the towers and minarets cutting the clouds, resembling the highest structures of New York and Chicago. Older still are the good substantial red brick defying time in their squatty stolid ugliness—holding their own like good old burghers resisting change as a device of the devil and mighty useful in the wholesale and warehouse sections, where train smoke and the fogs of the rivers would blacken up my lady’s fine attire of frills now sported in the beautiful structures of the higher levels.

Take a look down from the causeway bridge, itself no mean viaduct of one and a quarter miles, where but a few years ago a bridge of one or two thousand feet was a marvel. Below the causeway, besides the ordinary freight car for general merchandise, lumber, coal, you see again the whole story of Kansas City’s growth. Oil from Oklahoma and Kansas. Cattle, sheep, hogs from the packing plants. Wheat from the great wheat plains north, south, west. Though oil will be piped for a century yet to the great oil distributing point of Kansas City which is the hub of a vast wheel, oil is a will-o’-the-wisp, which no science can foretell or forecast. It is a gusher today and an exhausted pool tomorrow. But the farm—the general farm of dairy, wheat, potato, fruit—there is the hub of Kansas City prosperity; and by the same token, that was what created Kansas as a rich state.

Apart from political plans to mend the farmers’ plight—and it is very real—put in a few lines the real farm problem of the fourteen states encircling Kansas City. Say the farmers—Give us a home market for all we sell and all we buy so we won’t be eaten alive by middlemen profits, and we’ll undertake to make ourselves prosperous. Say the manufacturers implored to come in and create such a home market—Give us a larger farming population to buy all we manufacture and to supply us with raw material, and we’ll come in. There is the eternal see-saw and Kansas City plans to meet both demands. Can she do it? She has in the past.

When the founder of the Santa Fé railroad—Halliday—came west and jumped off the back of nowhere, he found a place called Topeka—Indian word for “where potatoes will grow.” Where potatoes will grow, almost any staple farm product will grow; so he planted his meager fortune in the future capital of the State and incidentally, let it be added, quadrupled it and got him busy interesting friends in a rail line to center traffic in Kansas. The Civil War ditched his plans but did not stop them. When the first spadeful of earth was turned for the railroad and a little later a poor lame duck of a train came wabbling over twelve miles of rattling track bed and Halliday spread his arms and predicted his line would yet reach Chicago to the northeast and the Gulf of Mexico to the south and San Francisco to the west, a cowboy who had imbibed too freely of “tangle-foot” threw himself on the ground, kicked up his heels in the air and yelled “the blank old fool.” The old-in-head but young-in-years fool lived to see that cowboy become the mayor of Topeka.

Kansas City’s name tells its history much as its public buildings do. Before the squat brick structures were the warehouses of the fur traders on the flats and the French-Canadian little dormer-window cottages on the upper levels, of which only three remain today. The Indians who used to come padding in their moccasins up from the river flats where canoes lay beached called themselves Kon-zas. The French-Canadian voyageur had a trick of slurring his ins and awns and ons and called these Indians Kahns. Then when the Americans came, the Indians were known as the Kansas, and the Kaw River as the Kansas.

Or better still than the causeway as a look-out on the Kansas world, motor over to the Soldiers’ Memorial Column above the bluffs. You can ascend inside by an elevator. From its dome where flashes the most beautiful dark rose-red light each night, you see an empire fading on the horizon in the distance on all sides—literally an ocean of what was but yesterday sage brush and buffalo grass; but what is even more interesting than the marvelous growth of the city in its brief past is what may be its future.

Look down to the river flats. The Kansas River comes in here like a baby snake following its mother, the great looped python of the Missouri. From what looks like an island of sand in the broad mid-current but isn’t an island at all—rather an isthmus of sand accumulated in centuries by the two rivers, rise birds—the most beautiful birds in the world—sky-blue, blue wings of immense expanse, with the beautiful streamer lines of a gigantic aerial fish cleaving the air in whirls and spins, or poise like great hawks, with a roar of propellers that sets the atmosphere vibrating.

From “The Life of Frémont.” From collection Dr. G. C. Hebard, Wyoming Univ.

FRÉMONT ADDRESSING THE INDIANS AT FORT LARAMIE

From Dr. G. C. Hebard’s Collection

FORT LARAMIE

This is one of the great half-way stations across the continent for air flight. Will the air transportation do for Kansas City in the future what the steel rail has done in half a century? Quien sabe: as the Mexicans say. Remembering that “tangle-foot” cowboy’s derision and the crowd’s “boos” at the founder of the Santa Fé railroad, who can play prophet? Later, motor down to the Aviation Field. Now I know a little—very little—about aviation. I visited every great aeroplane factory during the War and once took a flight across one of the most dangerous sections of the Rockies. The improvements in aviation have left me gasping. War aeroplanes were built to kill or be killed—light of wing, too light for safety, light of cockpit, much too light for anything but war, but powerful of engine for speed. Now, the aeroplanes are built more powerful of engine, stronger in cockpit and body, with the wings of enormous spread in which may be carried extra gasoline to be tapped as needed. The take-offs are not the impossible bumpy-humpy land spots, which jarred going up and jolted the car to bits coming down, but long runways of concrete, smooth-surfaced as a billiard table; and experiments are in process whether these cannot be made softer to avoid jars in quick landing by the use of tars and asphalts and heavy fabrics as a binder. It is very much like the improvement of the railroad bed in a century, when granite ties and road beds jolted rail cars to wrecks and the nerves of passengers so that Boston papers pronounced all rails a positive menace to sanity. There are fourteen air lines now centering in Kansas City.

FIRST STONE ERECTED IN NEBRASKA TO MARK THE OVERLAND TRAIL AND FAMOUS U. S. ARMY HEROES

Courtesy Union Pacific Historical Museum

UNION PACIFIC EXCURSION TRAIN, 1866, AT 100TH MERIDIAN. LOCATED AT POINT 14.7 FEET EAST OF EAST FACE OF PRESENT DEPOT AT COZAD. NEBR.

Then coming up from the flats, pause midway on another viaduct and look down. Here are not switching yards but the dwellings of Mexican laborers—houses in adobé bricks with little yards and the usual assortment of children and puppy dogs and chickens. If you have ever visited a truly Mexican suburb for day labor of the unskilled sort, you know the smells are almost as variegated as the mosaic of colors but by no means so lovely. They assail you in a hot blast of anything but perfume. Look down on these Mexican workers’ dwellings—yards clean as a good kitchen floor, children in clean bright multicolored calicoes; no pulque drunks; no poverty. Kansas City does not entrust the Americanizing of her foreign unskilled labor to study-chair theory. She sends down either as public school teacher, or social settlement worker, or deaconess, or nun—according to the dwellers’ religion—someone to train these foreigners into American citizens; and of foreigners as foreigners, Kansas City today numbers less than eight per cent. The rest of her population has in a generation been so completely absorbed in American types, it cannot be distinguished from the home born and home bred type.

That is great work and it is more than talk.

Coming back one evening past a playground for children, I saw sitting banked against the green slope several thousand youngsters below a public school that looked like a university. It was as composite a group of what has made America as I have ever seen. The lank lean-horse type predominated; but what impressed most was that there was not a pasty faced weakling among them. These were fine little citizens and their children and their children’s children augur well for future Americans.

I wish I had space to tell of other things Kansas City is doing and what they mean in future growth.

Is it possible that only one city in what was called Indian Territory at the time of the Louisiana Purchase at fifteen million dollars has now an assessed property valuation of almost seven hundred millions? Was it gained by man’s dauntless spirit or was it the geographic position? People talk as though these two factors in human progress were distinct. The more you contemplate the opening and development of the West, the more you will be forced to the conclusion that with all our wild jumps hither and thither from the prods of necessity, with all our blind fumbling blunders following perhaps an illusion through fog and sunshine, with all our selfish brute instincts and all our fealty to an ideal that may resemble a rainbow and shifts from the glorious tints of heavenly light to the darkest shades of hopeless storm, something higher than self is shaping our zigzag course to a Divine Purpose. Shakespeare said this long ago. So has every prophet from Moses to John.

But keep on circling the city with both eyes open and your memory alert.

Where you come up from the viaduct across the river flats on a rocky ledge above the road stands a sentinel of the century—one of the finest bronze monuments in America of an Indian on horseback. It used to stand where now points the Soldiers’ Monument to the sky, but was appropriately moved here, above the very road where padded the fur traders in moccasins, the first Oregon Pioneers—missionaries and settlers—the gold-crazed hosts stampeding to California, later the Santa Fé traders in mule and horse-drawn covered wagon, and still later, after the Civil War, settlers of every nationality in swarms like locusts to take up homesteads preceding or following the lines of the transcontinental rails beginning to belt the land in loops of steel. Perhaps I should say in hoops of steel, for it was the rail bound East and West in unity.

What is the Indian, sitting so intent, thinking about? Fur traders—yes—he understood them. He had known fur traders from the time Lewis and Clark passed west early in the century. They wanted his peltries. He wanted their firearms. With these firearms, he could hold his own against Indian raiders from the south. He could raid the south tribes, himself, for more Spanish horses. He could defy the Crows and the Sioux and the Blackfeet on the north. He could pen the Snake Indians in the mountains and compel them to buy supplies from him as middleman between East and West. Who was this Indian? He might have been any one of a dozen tribes gradually moved by white man pressure from the East to the plains—a Shawnee, a Kaw, a Delaware, a Pawnee, an Osage, a Cherokee, a Sac, a Fox. A pathetic figure, too, he is. He knew what the coming of the white man meant. Kill or be killed, hold your ground or lose it—his code from times unrecorded—was to be applied to himself. Live by the sword and you die by the sword—an inexorable law. Should he resist these new comers? He could see where the traders left their canoes beached, or their flatboats moored to trees, or the puff puff “mill that walked on water,” the first steamboat snubbed up as close ashore as the sand flats would permit. In the billowing grass of the flats, horses pastured in thousands near water and carried up the fur traders’ packets for the traverse across the plains. No, he would not resist these traders, though he scalped and robbed them as he could. These fur traders had already gone west far as the Rockies. They had crossed the Rockies—they had a post just west of the Rockies, known as Henry’s Fort, on an upper branch of Snake River. To be sure, it was only a collection of tumbledown log huts; but it marked the fur traders’ advance across the Rockies.

But these missionaries and settlers. He could recall, perhaps, those Flatheads from the Far North going down to General Clark in St. Louis and asking for white men to teach them the Trail to Heaven from the Sacred Book. But these settlers on horseback, in covered wagons, on foot, with mountain men as guides, and women and children, with rifles on shoulders, rifles in cases and bullets in belt or pouch, who encamped in circles surrounded by their wagons, with cows for milk and oxen of broad spreading hoofs to ford the quicksand beds and not so likely to mix up in a buffalo stampede as horses—what did they mean? He knew only too well what they meant. To the rear of the Soldiers’ Monument, you will see another statue, finer than the Indian on horseback. It is the settler’s young wife on horseback with her husband on one side trudging doggedly, blindly into the unknown, the mountain man guide on the other side, alert for foe as a coyote for rabbit. Well, the Indian could rob and raid them, too. Their oxen and cows would give him winter beef. Sometimes they came in bands of a hundred, sometimes in bands of thousands, with cattle in thousands; but why did these mountain men out for furs guide these settlers, who would destroy hunting grounds? The mountain men wore red shirts or red handkerchiefs around their long hair. He knew why. Many had married Indian wives, partly to assure them of protection from the tribe, partly to have women to make and mend buckskin suits, tents, moccasins, to cure buffalo into pemmican, to gather berries and fruits to be dried and pounded to flour. While the red shirt or head gear was a good target for enemies, it was equally good protection for friendly raiders from mistaking a man for game on the dusky plains. Curious these mountain men befriended settlers. There was Boone, whose grandson lived out at Westport on the ridge above the river. There was a Joe Meek, who learned the white man’s letters by chalking them on a paddle and then learned to read from the Sacred Book and later—though the Indian didn’t know anything about that—from Shakespeare and Scott. Then there was Jim Bridger whose family lived at Westport. These men were all hunters and had married Indian wives. Why did they guide the settlers? The Indian was no fool. He knew what it meant. It meant the end of the hunting era. Particularly, he knew when the Civil War came on and these white men began fighting among themselves. That was the Indian’s last chance. From that time on, every plains tribe pot-shotted, raided, massacred where and what he could. He didn’t do it en masse. Indeed, their wise older chiefs opposed the younger rash warriors; but the chiefs could not control young bucks out on the war path; and the very contest they provoked hastened the end inevitable. But keep clear in your mind, the fault was not all with the Indian. White-man rum lashed up the worst in the Indian. No one compelled him to drink it; but tribes highly stimulated by an ozone atmosphere and diet too purely of concentrated meats had a passion for liquor from the first taste. White-men thugs pot-shotted Indians for the fun of seeing them spin. To them the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Of this you will get some terrible examples presently when you reach Omaha—and of the terrible nemesis that punished such acts. From Lewis and Clark’s day, the Washington Government had frowned on the use of liquor in Indian trade; but who was to enforce law in a no-man’s land? The profits were too great for the individual consciences of independent traders. Only four dollars value of liquor could be diluted with water, then “doped” with drugs of a maddening sort to sell for sixteen dollars; and the keg traded at five dollars a pelt worth twenty.

And right here from the look-out of the lone Indian, you get the very birth and growth of Kansas City. The river flats of the fur traders. Independence, where presently clustered and grew the blacksmith shops to shoe horses and oxen and repair wagons. Then the traders’ shops to supply goers and comers. Then some enterprising citizens took another jump to Westport to get the trade away from Independence. Thence, the city grew and spread from buckskin tents a century ago on river flats to seven hundred thousand people today.

Why did not the Oregon Trail jump into the unknown from St. Louis, from which Lewis and Clark had set out? Because Kansas City by the river’s windings was five hundred miles from the outlet of the Missouri. By cutting off the loops of the river, the Overlanders from the East could save some two to three hundred miles in their traverse across the plains. One was the circumference of the half circle. The other was the diameter.

Here in a steady stream every spring—usually in the months of April and May—from 1843 to 1853, converged lines of emigrant wagons in thousands. They came in neighborhood groups from various states and territories. One group might be from Missouri—one hundred, two hundred, to the group. Another band might be Illinois or Iowa families; yet another old South and Middle South frontiersmen; and in the Whitman Missionary era, from 1839 to 1849, families from as far east as New York State and New England. Motives were as various as the groups; but the lure was the same as from the beginning—the lure of the Western Sea. Missionary zeal, hard times back East, youth’s love of adventure, the chance of fortune in gold mine or land might be the bayonet prod of necessity; but the Oregon stampede had become what the New York Tribune called “an insanity.”^[1]

[1]

To acknowledge all the authorities from whom data for the story of the Overland Trail have been drawn would be to cumber pages with a modern and ancient bibliography. Mrs. Paine, Stella Drumm, Doane Robinson, Grace Hebard, T. C. Elliot, Judge Carey, Mr. Himes, Professor Meaney, Ezra Meeker, Dr. Driggs, Alter,—the names of moderns are almost countless. I give these because they lived on the spot and knew descendants of the old heroes and the few of the old heroes who today survive, though nearing the century mark. I remember among my own personal friends two or three of these dear old people. One passed away, while I was writing this book. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life in the West, where many of the old fur traders had retired, and passed my school days with their children and grandchildren. The traditions of their descendants were already fading and it was comical to hear how many of the old generation differed as violently as to dates and spelling and this and that as modern study-chair critics. I have seen old fellows almost coming to blows over whom and what to blame; and I have tried in this narrative to take no sides but to set down as far as possible facts. On certain types of facts, the definite can never be set down and for obvious reasons, to anyone who has gone on long camping trips, whether by horseback or canoe. Down to at least the 1860’s, the daily brigades of fur traders, colonists, surveyors, dotted their notes on anything from dry parchment to tissue paper criss-crossed with a goose quill pen or carpenter pencil. Their notes could not be made daily as any traveler knows, and I myself, have found. They got in at night always dog tired, often drenched to the skin, frequently in haste to get up camps against an impending storm. Often notes had to be made a week after the places named were passed, or the day of the event happening to stamp their memory. This accounts for many of the differences as to places and dates. Take a man away from calendars for six months—yes, a month—and if absorbed by adventures of a life and death struggle, he will lose track of dates, even days of the week. If he didn’t you would have good ground for regarding his entire record as “doctored” afterward. Also what one man along the trail saw, another man in the same group missed. One man might be on the south shore of a river, the other on the north. Both were struggling through sage brush, over fallen trees,—perhaps running for dear life from a charging buffalo bull, or cocking a rifle at an ugly bear contesting the path. Would these two men remember the same episode? They would not. I say no more of that type of difference.More puzzling and confusing are the almost countless different names and sites given to the same forts. The reason is apparent, almost transparent on the spot. Sometimes, the first fort was so close to flood waters it had to be shifted back up the hill. Again, on the crest of the bank it was too easy and exposed a target for Indian raiders, or too vulnerable to violent storms; and the next fort would take the name of the army commander supervising the new structure, only to be razed for another later. In the majority of the cases, but not all, the name that emerged has been the old one, though the modern city may be from five to twenty miles from the first site. Laramie, Fort Hall, Boisé, Walla Walla are all examples of this; but monuments now mark most of the old sites but not all. That has been impossible. Farmhouses, barns, dam sites, water backed up by dam sites covered the old sites. I think of one great modern city, which in its history has had five different fort names. Again, I shall say no more of these differences. They are all along the Trail and do not detract in the least from the tremendous significance of this epic highway. Where I do not give the differences, it is only because they confuse the mind and needlessly cumber the memory, when what really matters is the intensely interesting document of heroism on the Trail.

METROPOLITAN KANSAS CITY