Читать книгу The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson - Emerson Hough - Страница 9

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There was a generation of this down-stream transportation, and it built up the first splendid, aggressive population of the West—a population that continued to edge farther outward and farther down-stream. The settlement at Nashville, the settlements of Kentucky, were at touch with the Ohio River, the broad highway that led easily down to the yet broader highway of the Mississippi, that great, mysterious stream so intimately connected with American history and American progress. It was easy to get to New Orleans, but hard to get back over the Alleghanies. Therefore, out of the mere fact that water runs downhill, arose one of the earliest and most dangerous political problems this country ever knew.

The riflemen of Sevier and Robertson saved Tennessee and Kentucky to the Union only that they might well-nigh be lost again to Spain. The Indian fighters of the West knew little how the scales trembled in the balance for the weak young government of the United States of America, lately come into place as an independent power. The authorities at Washington dared not be too firm with France or Spain, or even, with England. Diplomacy juggled across seas, while the riflemen of the West fought for the opening of that Great River which meant everything for them.

The league of Spain and the Cherokees kept up covert warfare against these early Westerners. The stark, staunch men of Robertson and Sevier hunted down the red fighters and killed them one by one over all the Western hunting-grounds and corn-grounds; and then they rebelled against Washington, and were for setting up a world of their own. They sent in a petition, a veritable prayer from the wilderness, the first words of complaint ever wrung from those hardy men.

“We endured almost unconquerable difficulties in settling this Western country,” they said, “in full confidence that we should be enabled to send our products to the market through the rivers that water the country; but we have the mortification not only to be excluded from that channel of commerce by a foreign nation, but the Indians are rendered more hostile through the influence of that nation.”

To add to the intricacy of this situation, now came one General James Wilkinson, late of a quasi-connection with the Continental army, who early discovered the profit of the trade to the mouth of the Mississippi. Discovering, likewise, the discontent of the West, which was almost wholly dependent upon that river for its transportation, he conceived the pretty idea of handing over this land to Spain, believing that in the confusion consequent upon such change his own personal fortunes must necessarily be largely bettered. The archives show the double dealings of Wilkinson with Spain, Great Britain, and the United States. He played fast and loose with friend and foe, until at length he found his own level and met in part his just deserts.

Meantime the stout little government at Washington, knowing well enough all the dangers that threatened it, continued to work out the problems crowding upon it. Some breathless, trembling years passed by—years full of wars and treaties in Europe as well as in America. Then came the end of all doubts and tremblings. The lying intrigues at the mouth of America’s great roadway ceased by virtue of that purchase of territory which gave to America forever this mighty Mississippi, solemn, majestic, and mysterious stream, perpetual highway, and henceforth to be included wholly within the borders of the West.

The acquisition of this territory was due not so much to American statesmanship or foresight as to either the freakishness or wisdom of Napoleon Bonaparte, then much disturbed by the native revolts in the West Indies, and harassed by the impending war with England. Whether England or France would land troops at New Orleans was long a question. The year that saw the Mississippi made wholly American was one mighty in the history of America and of the world.

The date of the Louisiana Purchase is significant not more in virtue of the vast domain added to the West than because of the fact that with this territory came the means of building it up and holding it together. It was now that for the first time the solidarity of this New World was forever assured. We gained a million uninhabited miles—a million miles of country that will one day support its thousands to the mile. But still more important, we gained the right and the ability to travel into it and across it and through it. France had failed to build roads into that country, and thereafter neither France nor any other foreign power might ever do so.

We who have the advantage of the retrospect understand the Mississippi and its tributaries far better than did the statesmen of a hundred years ago. Indeed, it was then the belief of many of the ablest minds that we ought not to accept this Louisiana Purchase even as a gift. Josiah Adams, in discussing the bill for the admission of Louisiana as a state, said: “I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion that if this bill passes, the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved; that the states which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to prepare definitely for a separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must.”

This from Massachusetts, later to be the home of abolition and of centralization! It may sit ill with the sons of Massachusetts to reflect that their own state was the first one deliberately to propose secession. Still more advanced was the attitude of James White, who painted the following dismal picture of that West which was to be:

“Louisiana must and will be settled if we hold it, and with the very population that would otherwise occupy part of our present territory. Thus our citizens will be removed to the immense distance of two or three thousand miles from the capital of the Union, where they will scarcely ever feel the rays of the general government; their affections will become alienated; they will gradually begin to view us as strangers; they will form other commercial connections, and our interests will become distinct. These, with other causes that human wisdom may not now foresee, will in time effect a separation, and I fear our bounds will be fixed nearer to our houses than the waters of the Mississippi. We have already territory enough, and when I contemplate the evils that may arise to these States from this intended incorporation of Louisiana into the Union, I would rather see it given to France, to Spain, or to any other nation of the earth, upon the mere condition that no citizen of the United States should ever settle within its limits, than to see the territory sold for a hundred million of dollars and we retain the sovereignty. . . . And I do say that, under existing circumstances, even supposing that this extent of territory was a valuable acquisition, fifteen million dollars was a most enormous sum to give.”

How feeble is our grasp upon the future may be seen from the last utterance. The sum of fifteen million dollars seemed “enormous.” To-day, less than a century from that time, one American citizen has in his lifetime made from the raw resources of this land a fortune held to be two hundred and sixty-six million dollars.

One Western city, located in that despised territory, during the year just past showed sales of grain alone amounting to one hundred and twenty-three million three hundred thousand dollars; of live stock alone, two hundred and sixty-eight million dollars; of wholesale trade, seven hundred and eighty-six million two hundred and five thousand dollars; of manufactures—where manufactures were once held impossible—the total of seven hundred and forty-one million and ninety-seven thousand dollars.

It was once four weeks from Maine to Washington; it is now four days from Oregon. The total wealth of all the cities, all the lands, all the individuals of that once despised West, runs into figures that surpass all belief and all comprehension. And this has grown up within less than a hundred years. The people have outrun all the wisdom of their leaders. What would Daniel Webster, famous New Englander, doubter and discreditor of the West, say, were he to know the West to-day?

Yet the men of that day were not so much to blame, for they were in the infancy of transportation, and as no army is better than its commissary trains, so is no nation better than its transportation. We were still in the crude, primitive, down-stream days. Steam had not yet come upon the great interior waterways. The west-bound mountain roads across the Alleghanies were still only narrow tracks worn by the feet of pack-horses that carried mostly salt and bullets. The turnpikes fit for wagon traffic were Eastern affairs only. The National Road, from Wheeling to the westward, was restricted in its staging possibilities.

Between the hardy Western population and its earlier home there rose the high barrier of the Appalachians, to ascend whose streams meant a long, grievous and dangerous journey, a Journey commercially impracticable. The first traffic of the old mountain road was in salt and bullets, and it was a traffic that all went one way. The difficulties of even this crude commerce led to the establishment, as the very first manufacture ever begun in the West, of works for the production of salt. Bullitt’s Lick, on Salt Creek, was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, manufacturing community west of the Alleghanies, and part of the downstream trade of the day was in carrying kettles from Louisville down the Ohio and up Salt Creek to the lick. This route was in hostile Indian country, and every voyage held its own terrors.

We may note, then, the beginning of the commercial West in the local necessities of that West. For the first west-bound generation the problem of transportation had been largely a personal one. The first adventurers, with little baggage but the rifle and the ax, able to live on parched corn and jerked venison, with women almost as hardy as men, neither possessed nor cared for the surplus things of life. They subsisted on what nature gave them, seeking but little to add to the productiveness of nature in any way.

But now we must, presently, conceive of our Western man as already shorn of a trifle of his fringes. His dress was not now so near a parallel to that of the savage whom he had overcome. There was falling into his mien somewhat more of staidness and sobriety. This man had so used the ax that he had a farm, and on this farm he raised more than he himself could use—first step in the great future of the West as storehouse for the world. This extra produce could certainly not be taken back over the Alleghanies, nor could it be traded on the spot for aught else than merely similar commodities.

Here, then, was a turning-point in Western history. There is no need to assign to it an exact date. We have the pleasant fashion of learning history through dates of battles and assassinations. We might do better in some cases did we learn the time of certain great and significant happenings.

It was an important time when this first Western farmer, somewhat shorn of fringe, sought to find market for his crude produce, and found that the pack-horse would not serve him so well as the broad-horned flat-boat that supplanted his canoe. The flat-boat ran altogether down-stream. Hence it led altogether away from home and from the East. The Western man was relying upon himself, cutting loose from traditions, asking help of no man; sacrificing, perhaps, a little of sentiment, but doing so out of necessity, and only because of the one great fact that the waters would not run back uphill, would not carry him back to the East that was once his home.

So the homes and the graves in the West grew, and there arose a civilization distinct and different from that which kept hold upon the sea and upon the Old World. The Westerner had forgotten the oysters and shad, the duck and terrapin of the seaboard. He still lived on venison and corn, the best portable food ever known for hard marching and hard work. The more dainty Easterners, the timid ones, the stay-at-homes, said that this new man of the Western territory was a creature “half horse and half alligator.” It were perhaps more just to accord to him a certain manhood, either then or now. He prevailed, he conquered, he survived, and therefore he was right. There grew the aristocracy of ability.

The government at Washington saw this growing up of a separate kingdom, and sought to shorten the arc of this common but far-reaching sky; it sought to mitigate the swiftness of these streams, to soften the steepness of these eternal hills. Witness Washington’s forgotten canal from the headwaters of the James River—a canal whose beginning or end would puzzle the average American of to-day to define without special study. Witness many other canal and turnpike schemes, feeble efforts at the solution of the one imperishable problem of a land vast in its geography.

Prior to the Louisiana Purchase no man could think of a civilization west of the Mississippi; but there were certain weak attempts made by the government to bind to itself that part of the new lands that lay in the eastern half of the Mississippi valley. The “Ordinance of the Northwest,” done by the hand of Thomas Jefferson himself, makes interesting reading to-day. This ordinance sought to establish a number of states in the great valley “as soon as the lands should have been purchased from the Indians.”

It was proposed that each state should comprehend, from north to south, “two degrees of latitude, beginning to count from the completion of thirty-one degrees north of the equator, but any state northwardly of the forty-seventh degree shall make part of that state next below; and eastwardly and westwardly they shall be bounded, those on the Mississippi by that river on one side, and the meridian of the lowest point on the rapids of the Ohio on the other; those adjoining on the east by the same meridian on their western side, and on their eastern by the meridian of the western cape of the mouth of the Great Kanawha; and the territory eastward of this last meridian between the Ohio, Lake Erie, and Pennsylvania shall be one state.”

The Ordinance even went so far as to propose names for these future states, and quaint enough were some of the names suggested for those that are now Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. “Sylvania,” “Cherronesus,” “Asenesipia,” “Metropotamia,” “Pelesipia”—these are names of Western states that never were born, and in this there is proof enough of the fact that, though the government at Washington had its eye on the West, it had established no control over the West, and under the existing nature of things had no right ever to expect such control. As a matter of fact, the government never did catch this truant province until the latter, in its own good time, saw fit to come back home. This was after the West had solved its own problems of commercial intercourse.

It may now prove of interest to take a glance at the crude geography of this Western land at that time when it first began to produce a surplus, and the time when it had permanently set its face away from the land east of the Alleghanies. The census map (see Map No. 1) will prove of the best service, and its little blotches of color will tell much in brief regarding the West of 1800.

For forty years before this time the fur trade had had its depot at the city of St. Louis. For a hundred years there had been a settlement on the Great Lakes. For nearly a hundred years the town of New Orleans had been established. Here and there, between these foci of adventurers, there were odd, seemingly unaccountable little dots and specks of population scattered over all the map, product of that first uncertain hundred years. Ohio, directly west of the original Pennsylvania hotbed, was left blank for a long time, and indeed received her first population from the southward, and not from the East, though the New Englander, Moses 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 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 latitudinal path of the star. 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 Tonty the Faithful, seed cultivated by Boone and Kenton, by Sevier and Robertson and scores and hundreds of stalwart early Westerners—seed despised by an ancient and corrupt monarchy—had now begun to grow.

Yet, beyond the farthest settlements 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 Santa Fé to Chihuahua, and thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused for the peaceful settler of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty miles away, by that ancient saga, that heroically done, Homerically misspelled story of Lewis and Clark? There was still to be room enough and chance enough in the West for any and all men.

The progress of civilization, accelerated with the passing of each century, was none the less slow at this epoch. There was an ictus here in the pilgrimage of humanity. It was as though the Fates wished that for a brief time the world might see the spectacle of a land of help and hope, of personal initiative and personal ambition. The slow-moving star of the West trembled and quivered with a new and unknown light, caught from these noble lakes and rivers, reflected from these mountains and these skies.

The stars of a new heaven looked down on another king, a king in linsey-woolsey. France kicked him forth a peasant, and, born again, he scorned the petty limitations of her seigniories, and stood on her rejected empire, the emperor of himself. England rotted him in her mines and ditches, but before the reversed flags of England were borne home from her war which did not subjugate, this same man, under another sky, was offering hospitality, and not obeisance, to her belted earls.

[5]	The Century Magazine; Continued.