I ask you to look at this splendid tool, the American ax, not more an implement of labor than an instrument of civilization. If you can not use it, you are not American. If you do not understand it, you can not understand America.
This tool is so simple and so perfect that it has scarcely seen change in the course of a hundred years. It lacks decoration, as do the tools and the weapons of all strong peoples. It has no fantastic lines, no deviations from simplicity of outline, no ornamentations, no irregularities. It is simple, severe, perfect. Its beauty is the beauty of utility.
In the shaft of the ax there is a curve. This curve is there for a reason, a reason of usefulness. The simple swelling head is made thus not for motives of beauty, but for the purpose of effectiveness. The shaft, an even yard in length, polished, curved, of a formation that shall give the greatest strength to a downright blow in combination with the greatest security to the hand-grasp, has been made thus for a century of American life. This shaft is made of hickory, the sternest of American woods, the one most capable of withstanding the hardest use. It has always been made thus and of this material.
The metal head or blade of the American ax is to-day as it has always been. The makers of axes will tell you that they scarcely know of any other model. The face of the blade is of the most highly tempered steel for a third or half of its extent. The blade or bitt is about eight inches in length, the cutting edge four and seven-eighths to five inches in width. The curve of this edge could not, by the highest science, be made more perfect for the purpose of biting deepest at the least outlay of human strength. The poll or back of the ax is about four inches in width, square or roughly rounded into such form that it is capable of delivering a pounding, crushing or directing blow. The weight of the ax-head is about four pounds, that is to say from three and one-half to five pounds.
With the ax one can do many things. With it the early American blazed his way through the trackless forests. With it he felled the wood whereby was fed the home fire, or the blaze by which he kept his distant and solitary bivouac. With it he built his home, framing a fortress capable of withstanding all the weaponry of his time. With it he not only made the walls, but fabricated the floors and roof for his little castle. He built chairs, tables, beds, therewith. By its means he hewed out his homestead from the heart of the primeval forest, and fenced it round about. Without it he had been lost.
At times it served him not only as tool, but as weapon; nor did more terrible weapon ever fit the hand of man. Against its downright blow wielded by a sinewy arm the steel casques of the Crusaders had proved indeed poor fending. Even the early womankind of America had acquaintance with this weapon. There is record of a woman of early Kentucky who with an ax once despatched five Indians, who assailed the cabin where for the time she had been left alone.
It was a tremendous thing, this ax of the early American. It cleared away paths over hundreds of miles, or marked the portages between the heads of the Western waterways, which the early government declared should be held as public pathways forever. In time it became an agent of desolation and destruction, as well as an agent of upbuilding and construction. Misguided, it leveled all too soon and wastefully the magnificent forests of this country, whose superior was never seen on any portion of the earth. Stern, simple, severe, tremendous, wasteful—truly this was the typical American implement.
Witness this sweet ancient weapon of our fathers, the American rifle, maker of states, empire builder. Useful as its cousin, the ax, it is in design simple as the ax; in outline severe, practicable, purposeful in every regard. It is devoid of ornamentation. The brass that binds the foot of the stock is there to protect the wood. The metal guard below the lock is to preserve from injury the light set-triggers. The serrated edges of the lock plate may show rude file marks of a certain pattern, but they are done more in careless strength than in cunning or in delicacy. This is no belonging of a weak or savage man. It is the weapon of the Anglo-Saxon; that is to say, the Anglo-Saxon in America, who invented it because he had need for it.
This arm was born of the conditions that surrounded our forefathers in the densely covered slopes of the Appalachian Divide, in whose virgin forests there was for the most part small opportunity for extended vision, hence little necessity for a weapon of long range. The game or the enemy with which the early frontiersman was concerned was apt to be met at distances of not more than a hundred or two hundred yards, and the early rifle was perfect for such ranges.
Moreover, it was only with great difficulty that the frontiersman transported any weighty articles on his Western pilgrimage. Lead was heavy, powder was precious, the paths back to the land of such commodities long and arduous. A marvel of adaptation, the American rifle swiftly grew to a practical perfection. Never in the history of the arms of nations has there been produced a weapon whose results have been more tremendous in comparison to the visible expenditure of energy; never has there been a more economical engine, or an environment where economy was more imperative.
The ball of the American rifle was small, forty, sixty or perhaps one hundred of them weighing scarcely more than a pound. The little, curving horn, filled with the precious powder grains, carried enough to furnish many shots. The stock of the rifle itself gave housing to the little squares of linen or fine leather with which the bullet was patched in loading. With this tiny store of powder and lead, easily portable food for this providentially contrived weapon, the American frontiersman passed on silently through the forest, a master, an arbiter, ruler of savage beast or savage foeman, and in time master of the civilized antagonist that said him nay.
We shall observe that the state of Pennsylvania was the starting point of the westward movement of our frontiersmen. We shall find also that the first American small-bore, muzzle-loading rifles were made in Pennsylvania. The principle of the rifle, the twist in the bore, is thought to have originated in the German states of the Palatinate, but it was left for America to improve it and to perfect its use.
At Lancaster, Pennsylvania, there was a riflemaker, probably a German by birth, by name Decherd or Dechert, who began to outline the type of the American squirrel-rifle or hunting-arm. This man had an apprentice, one Mills, with ideas of his own. We see this apprentice and his improved rifle presently in North Carolina; and soon thereafter riflemakers spring up all over the east slope of the Alleghanies, so that as though by magic all our hunters and frontiersmen are equipped with this long rifle, shooting the tiny ball, and shooting it with an accuracy hitherto deemed impossible in the achievements of firearms.
Withal we may call this a Southern arm, since New England was later in taking up its use, clinging to the Queen Anne musket when the men of North Carolina and Virginia scorned to shoot a squirrel anywhere except in the head. The first riflemen of the Revolutionary War were Pennsylvanians, Virginians and Marylanders, all Southerners; and deadly enough was their skill with what the English officers called their “cursed widow and orphan makers.”
The barrel of the typical rifle of those days was about four feet in length, the stock slender, short and strongly curved, so that the sights came easily and directly up to the level of the eye in aiming. The sights were low and close to the barrel, some pieces being provided with two hind sights, a foot or so apart, so that the marksman might not draw either too fine or too coarse a bead with the low silver or bone crescent of the fore sight. Usually the rear sight was a simple, flat bar, finely notched, and placed a foot or fifteen inches in front of the breech of the barrel, so that the eye should focus easily and sharply at the notch of the rear sight. Such was the care with which the sights were adjusted that the rifleman sometimes put the finishing touches on the notch with so soft a cutting tool as a common pin, working away patiently, a little at a time, lest he should by too great haste go too deep into the rear sight, and so cause the piece to shoot otherwise than “true.”
The delicately arranged set-triggers made possible an instantaneous discharge without any appreciable disturbance of the aim when once obtained; and the long distance between the hind sight and fore sight, the steadiness of the piece, owing to its length and weight, the closeness of the line of sight to the line of the trajectory of a ball driven with a relatively heavy powder charge, all conspired to render extreme accuracy possible with this arm, and this accuracy became so general throughout the American frontier that to be a poor rifle shot was to be an object of contempt.
Each rifle was provided with its own bullet mold, which cast a round ball of such size that when properly “patched” it fitted the bore of the piece tightly, so tightly that in some cases a “starter” or section of false barrel was used, into which the ball was forced, sometimes being swaged in with a mallet and a short starting rod. The ramrod proper was carried in pipes attached to the long wooden stock, which extended to the muzzle of the barrel underneath the piece. One end of this rod was protected with a brass ferrule, and the other was provided with a screw, into which was twisted the “worm” used in cleaning the arm.
The pouch of the hunter always carried some flax or tow for use in cleaning the piece. The rifleman would wind a wisp of this tow about the end of the “worm,” moisten it by passing it between his lips, and then pass the tightly fitting wad of tow up and down the barrel until the latter was perfectly free from powder residue. Then the little ball, nicely patched, was forced down on the powder charge by the slender ramrod, made with great care from the toughest straight-grained hickory wood.
Powder and ball were precious in those early days, and though strong men ever love the sports of weapons, waste could not be tolerated even in sport. Sometimes at night the frontiersmen would gather for the pastime of “snuffing the candle,” and he was considered a clumsy rifleman who but fanned the flame with his bullet, or cut too deeply into the base of the candle-wick, and so extinguished the light. Again the riflemen would engage in “driving the nail” with the rifle ball, or would shoot at a tiny spot of black on a board or a blazed tree-trunk, firing a number of balls into the same mark. In nearly all such cases the balls were dug out of the tree or plank into which they had been fired, and were run over again into fresh bullets for use at another time. Thus grew the skill of the American rifleman, with whose weapon most of the feats of latter day short-range marksmanship could be duplicated.[1]
The early American depended upon his rifle in supporting and defending his family. Without it he had not dared to move across the Alleghanies. With it he dared to go anywhere, knowing that it would furnish him food and fending. When the deer and turkey became less numerous near him, he moved his home farther westward, where game was more abundant.
His progress was bitterly contested by the Indian savages all the way cross the American continent, but they perished before this engine of civilization, which served its purpose across the timbered Appalachians, down the watershed to the Mississippi, up the long and winding streams of the western lands, over the Rockies, and down the slopes of the Sierras to the farther sea. Had it never known change it had not been American. An ax is an ax, because a tree is a tree, whether in the Alleghanies or the Rockies; but the rifle met in time different conditions. The great plains furnished larger game animals, and demanded longer range in arms, so that in time the rifle shot a heavier ball.
When the feverish intensity of American life had asked yet more haste, there came the repeating rifle, firing rapidly a number of shots, an invention now used all over the earth. In time there came also the revolving pistol, rapid, destructive, American. These things had not to do with the early west-bound man, this wilderness traveler, himself perforce almost savage, shod with moccasins, wearing the fringed hide tunic that was never in the designs of Providence intended for any unmanly man, and that fits ill to-day the figure of any round-paunched city dweller. Feather or plume he did not wear in his hat, for such things pertained rather to the hired voyager than to the independent home builder. Ornamentation was foreign to his garb and to his weaponry. He had much to do. The way was hard. No matter how he must travel, this long rifle was with him. At his belt, in the little bag of buckskin, were the bullets in their stoppered pouch, the cleaning worm, the extra flint or two, the awl for mending shoon or clothing.
So were equipped the early Americans, gaunt, keen, tireless, that marched to meet the invading forces at the battle of New Orleans; and when the officers of the British army, on the day after that stricken field, found half their dead shot between the eyes, they knew they could lead their troops no more against such weaponry and such weapon bearers. The rifle had won the West, and it would hold it fast.
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In a careful test an old squirrel-rifle, for three generations in the author’s family, and now nearly one hundred years old, was fired five times, at a distance of 60 yards, and the point of the finger would cover all five of the balls, which made practically but one ragged hole. The author’s father handled the old weapon on this occasion. Again, in the author’s hands, it shot out in succession the spots or pips of a playing card, the ten of clubs, at such distance as left the spots only clearly distinguishable. This piece was altered from flint lock to pill-percussion lock, and later to the percussion cap lock. |
Here is that fairy ship of the wilderness, the birch-bark canoe, the first craft of America, antedating even the arrival of the white man. It is the ship of risk and of adventure, belonging by right to him who goes far and travels light, who is careless of his home coming. It is a boat that now carries the voyager, and now is carried by him. It is a great-hearted craft. You shall take it upon your shoulders, and carry it a mile across the land trail, without needing to set it down; but when you place it on the water it in turn will carry you and your fellow, and yet another, and your household goods of the wilderness up to five times your weight.
Freakish as a woman, as easily unsettled, yet if you be master it shall take you over combing waves, and down yeasty rapids and against steady current, until finally you shall find yourself utterly apart from the familiar haunts of man, about you only the wilderness, the unadventured. This is the ship of the wilderness, the fairy ship, the ship of heroes. To-day it is passing away. With it goes great store of romance and adventure.
The red man taught the white man how to build and how to use this boat. He taught how to cut the long strips of toughest bark from the birch-tree, prying it off with sharpened pole or driven wooden wedge. He showed how to build the frame of the boat on the ground, or in a long hole dug in the ground, where stakes hold fast the curves of the gunwales, between which are later forced the steamed splints that serve as ribs and as protection for the fragile skin, soaked soft and pliable, which is presently laid on the frame of gunwale and rib and bottom splint. This covering of bark is sewn together with the thread of the forest, fiber of swamp conifers—“wautp,” the Indians of the North call this thread.
Then over the seams is run the melted pitch and resin taken from the woods. The edges of the bark skin are made fast at the gunwales, the sharply bent bows are guarded carefully from cracks where the straining comes, and the narrow thwarts, wide as your three fingers, are lashed in, serving as brace and as all the seat you shall find when weary from kneeling. The fresh bark is clean and sweet upon the new-made ship, the smell of the resin is clean. Each line of the boat is full of spirit and grace and beauty.
The builder turns it over, and where he finds a bubble in the pitching of a seam he bends down and puts his lips to it, sucking in his breath, to find if air comes through. So he tests it, well and thoroughly, mending and patching slowly and carefully, until at last it pleases him throughout. And then he places his new-made ship on the water, where it sits high and light, spinning and turning at its tether, never still for an instant, but shifting like a wild duck under the willows, responsive to the least breath of the passing airs. It is eager to go on. It will go far, in its life of a year or two. If it gets a wound from the rocks, or from the clumsiness of the tyro that drives it upon the beach instead of anchoring it free, then it is easily mended by a strip of bark and some forest pitch. When at last it loses its youth, and cracks or soaks in water so freely that it takes too long to dry it at the noonday pipe-smoking, then it is not so difficult to build another in the forest.
The canoe is as the ax and the rifle, an agent economical, capable of great results in return for small expenditure of energy. It is American. There was much to do, far to go. It was thus because America existed as it did.
No craft has been found easier of propulsion to one knowing the art of the paddle. The voyager makes his paddle about as long as his rifle, up to his chin in length. He paddles with the blade always on one side of the canoe. As the blade is withdrawn from the backward stroke, it is turned slightly in the water, so that the course of the bow is still held straight. If he would approach a landing sidewise with his boat, he makes his paddle describe short half curves, back and forth, and the little boat follows the paddle obediently. The advance of the canoe is light, silent, spirit-like. It is full of mystery, this boat. Yet it is kind to those who know it, as is the wilderness and as are all its creatures.
This is the boat of the northern traveler, the voyager of the upper ways. In the South, where the birch does not grow in proper dimensions, the bark of the elm has on occasion served to make a small craft. In different parts of the North, too, the birch canoe takes different shapes. In the northeast the Abenakis made it long and with little rake, with low bow and stern and with bottom swelling outward safely under the tumble-home,—this stable model serving for the strong streams of the forested regions of the North. Far to the west, where roll the great inland lakes, the Ojibways made their boats higher at bow and stern, wider of beam, shorter, rounder of bottom, all the better fitted for short and choppy waves.
Then, under the white fur traders’ tutelage, there were made great ships of birch-bark, the canot du Nord of the Hudson Bay trade, such as came down with rich burdens of furs when the brigades started down-stream to the markets; or yet the greater canot du maitre once used on the Great Lakes, a craft that needed a dozen to a dozen and a half paddles for its propulsion. Again, at the heads of the far off Northwestern streams there were canoes so small as to carry but a single person, propelled by a pair of sticks, one in each hand of the occupant, the points of these hand-sticks pushing against the bottom of the stream. But ever this ship of the wilderness was so contrived that its crew could drive it by water or carry it by land.
Thus were the portages mastered, thus did the man with small gear to hinder him get out from home, westward into the wilderness. Down stream or up stream, this boat went far. Paddle or sail or shodden pole served for the wanderer before the trails were made, and before the boats of the white settlers followed where the savage red men and scarcely less savage white adventurers had found the way.
There were other boats for the early traveler, and these were employed by those that had crossed the Alleghanies on foot and would fare farther westward. The dugout, made of the sycamore or sassafras log, ten to twenty feet in length, narrow, unstable, thick-skinned and a bit clumsy, was good enough for one pushing on down-stream, or prowling about in sluggish, silent bayous. This was the boat of the South in the early days. Soon the great flat-boat succeeded it for those that traveled with family goods or in large parties. The wooden boats came later, the flat-boat after the dugout, the keel-boat but following the far trail of the birch-bark to the upper ways, or perchance passing, slipping down-stream, the frail hide coracle of the hunter that had ventured unaccompanied far into unknown lands.
Above all things in these early days must compactness and lightness be studied. This American traveler was poor in the goods of this world; his possessions made small bulk. This ax made him bivouac or castle, or helped him make raft or canoe. This rifle gave him food and clothing. He walked westward to the westward flowing streams, and there this light craft, dancing, beckoning, alluring, invited him yet on and on, proffering him carriage for his scanty store, offering obedience to him who was the master of the wilderness, of its alluring secrets and its immeasurable resources.
Observe here a creature, a dumb brute, that has saved some centuries of time. Indeed, without this American horse, the American civilization perhaps could never have been. Without the ax, the rifle, the boat and the horse there could have been no West.
To-day we would in some measure dispense with the horse, but in the early times no part of man’s possessions was more indispensable. This animal was not then quite as we find him to-day in the older settled portions of the country. In some of our wilder regions we can still see him somewhat as he once was, rough, wiry, hardy, capable of great endeavor, easily supported upon the country over which he passed.
Naturally the early west-bound traveler could not take with him food for his horse, and the latter must be quite independent of grain. Corn, exceedingly difficult to raise, was for the master alone. The horse must live on grass food, and find it where he stopped at night. During the day he must carry the traveler and his weapons, another horse perhaps serving as transportation for food or household goods; or, if there was a family with the traveler, perhaps one horse sufficed for the mother and a child or two. The weak might ride, the strong could trudge alongside. Many women have so traveled out into the West—women as sweet as any of to-day.
We have here, then, one more simple, economical and effective factor in the resources of the early American. Beauty, finish, elegance, were not imperative. Strength, stamina, hardihood, these things must be possessed. The horse must be durable; and so he was. The early settlers on the Atlantic coast brought from over the seas horses of good blood. Virginia was noted as a breeding ground before the yet more famous Blue Grass Region of Kentucky began to produce horses of great quality. The use of the horse in the New World went on as it did in the Old. The French in the North, the English at the mid-continent, the Spanish in the South, all brought over horses; and even to-day the types of the three sections are distinct.
The horse with which we are concerned was the hardy animal, able to find food in the forest glades or laurel thickets of the Appalachians; that served as pack-horse in the hunt near home, as baggage horse in the journey away from home. In those days the horse was rather a luxury than a necessity. All earlier or Eastern America was at short range. The rifle was short in range; the man himself was a footman, and did not travel very far in actual leagues.
For a generation he could walk, or at least travel by boat. But when he came to the edge of the open country of the plains, when he saw above him the vast bow of the great River of the West, across whose arc he needed to travel direct, then there stood waiting for him, as though by providential appointment, this humble creature, this coward, this hero of an animal, now afraid of its own shadow, now willing to face steel and powder-smoke, patient, dauntless, capable of great exertion and great accomplishment. So in the land of great distances the traveler became a mounted man; the horse became part of him, no longer a luxury, but a necessity.
The Spanish contributed most largely to the American holding of that vast indefinite West of ours that they once claimed, when they allowed to straggle northward across the plains, into the hand of Indian or white man, this same lean and wiry horse, carrying to the deserts of America the courage of his far-off Moorish blood, his African adaptability to long journeys on short fare.[2] The man that followed the Ohio and Missouri to the edge of the plains, the trapper, the hunter, the adventurer of the fur trade, had been wholly helpless without the horse. For a time the trading posts might cling to the streams, but there was a call to a vast empire between the streams, where one could not walk, where no boat could go, nor any wheeled vehicle whatever. Here, then, came the horse, the thing needed.
The white adventurer may have brought his horse with him by certain slow generations of advance, or he may have met him as he moved West; at times he captured and tamed him for himself, again he bought him of the Indian, or took him without purchase. Certainly in the great open reaches of the farther West the horse became man’s most valuable property, the unit of all recognized current values. The most serious, the most unforgivable crime was that of horse stealing. To kill a man in war, man to man, was a matter of man and man, and to be regarded at times with philosophy; but to take away without quarrel and by stealth what was most essential to man’s life or welfare was held equivalent to murder unprovoked and of a despicable nature. To be “set afoot” was one of the horrors long preserved in memory by the idiom of Western speech.
The food of this horse, then, was generally what he might gain by forage. In furnishings, his bridle was sometimes a hide lariat, his saddle the buckskin pad of the Indians. Stirrups the half-wild white man sometimes discarded, after the fashion of the Indian, who rode by the clinging of his legs turned back, or by purchase of his toes thrust in between the foreleg and the body of his mount. A fleet horse, one much valued in the chase or in war, might be his master’s pet, tied close to his house of skin at night, or picketed near-by at the lonesome bivouac. He might have braided in his forelock the eagle feather that his white master himself would have disdained to wear as ornament. Of grooming the horse knew nothing, neither did he ever know a day of shelter.
His stable was the heart of a willow thicket if the storm blew fierce. In winter-time his hay was the bark of the cottonwood, under whose gnarled arms the hunter had pitched his winter tepee or built his rough war-house of crooked logs. When all the wide plain was a sheet of white, covered again by the driven blinding snows of the prairie storm, then this hardy animal must paw down through the snow and find his own food, the dried grass curled close to the ground. Where the ox would perish the horse could survive. He was simple, practicable, durable, even under the hardest conditions. The horse of the American West ought to have place on the American coat of arms.
The horse might be a riding animal, or at times a beast of burden. In the earliest days he was packed simply, sometimes with hide pockets or panniers after the Indian fashion, with a lash rope perhaps holding the load together roughly. Later on in the story of the West there came a day when it was necessary to utilize all energies more exactly, and then the loading of the horse became an interesting and intricate science. The carry-all or pannier was no longer essential, and the packs were made up of all manner of things transported. The pack saddle, a pair of X’s connected with side bars, the “saw buck” pack-saddle of the West, which was an idea perhaps taken from the Indians, was the immediate aid of the packer. The horse and the lash rope in combination were born of necessity, the necessity of long trails across the mountains and the plains.
Thus the horse trebled the independence of the Western man, made it possible for him to travel as far as he liked across unknown lands, made him soldier, settler, trader, merchant; enabled him indeed to build a West that had grown into giant stature even before the day of steam.
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“Wherever pictographs of the horse appear the representations must have been done subsequent to the advent of Coronado, or the conquistadors of Florida. There are no horse portraits in Arizona and vicinity, nor up the Pacific coast, but they are frequent in Texas and in the trans-Mississippi region. The domestic horse (not Eohippus, the diminutive quaternary animal which was indigenous) was introduced into Florida from Santo Domingo by the Spaniards early in the 15th century, as well as into South America, where it spread in fifteen years as far south as Patagonia.”—Chas. Hallock, the “American Antiquarian,” January, 1902. |
On a busy street of a certain Western city there appeared, not long ago, a figure whose peculiarities attracted the curious attention of the throng through which he passed. It was a man, tall, thin, bronzed, wide-hatted, long-haired, clad in the garb of a day gone by. How he came to the city, whence he came, or why, it boots little to ask. There he was, one of the old-time “long-haired men” of the West. His face, furrowed with the winds of the high plains and of the mountains, and bearing still the lines of boldness and confidence, had in these new surroundings taken on a shade of timorous anxiety. His eye was disturbed. At his temples the hair was gray, and the long locks that dropped to his shoulders were thin and pitiful. A man of another day, of a bygone country, he babbled of scoutings, of warfare with savages, of the chase of the buffalo. None knew what he spoke. He babbled, grieved, and vanished.
Into the same city there wandered, from a somewhat more recent West, another man grown swiftly old. Ten years earlier this figure might have been seen over all the farming-lands of the West, most numerous near the boom towns and the land-offices. He was here transplanted, set down in the greatest boom town of them all, but, alas! too old and too alien to take root.
He wore the same long-tailed coat, the same white hat that marked him years ago—tall-crowned, not wide-rimmed; the hat that swept across the Missouri River in the early eighties. His beard was now grown gray, his eye watery, his expression subdued, and no longer buoyantly and irresistibly hopeful. His pencil, as ready as ever to explain the price of lots or land, had lost its erstwhile convincing logic. From his soul had departed that strange, irrational, adorable belief, birthright of the American that was, by which he was once sure that the opportunities of the land that bore him were perennial and inexhaustible. This man sought now no greatness and no glory. He wanted only the chance to make a living. And, think you, he came of a time when a man might be a carpenter at dawn, merchant at noon, lawyer by night, and yet be respected every hour of the day, if he deserved it as a man.
It was exceeding sweet to be a savage. It is pleasant to dwell upon the independent character of Western life, and to go back to the glories of that land and day when a man who had a rifle and a saddle-blanket was sure of a living, and need ask neither advice nor permission of any living soul. Those days, vivid, adventurous, heroic, will have no counterpart on the earth again. Those early Americans, who raged and roared across the West, how unspeakably swift was the play in which they had their part! There, surely, was a drama done under the strictest law of the unities, under the sun of a single day.
No fiction can ever surpass in vividness the vast, heroic drama of the West. The clang of steel, the shoutings of the captains, the stimulus of wild adventure—of these things, certainly, there has been no lack. There has been close about us for two hundred years the sweeping action of a story keyed higher than any fiction, more unbelievably bold, more incredibly keen in spirit. And now we come upon the tame and tranquil sequel of that vivid play of human action. “Anticlimax!” cries all that humanity that cares to think, that dares to regret, that once dared to hope. “Tell us of the West that was,” demands that humanity, and with the best of warrant; “play for us again the glorious drama of the past, and let us see again the America that once was ours.”
Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest may attach to a quest that goes farther than a mere summons for the spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West? What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run wider than the West, and, indeed, wider than America.
In the pursuit of this line of thought we need ask only a few broad premises. These premises may leave us not so much of self-vaunting as we might wish, and may tend to diminish our esteem of the importance of individual as well as national accomplishment; for, after all and before all, we are but flecks on the surface of the broad, moving ribbon of fate. We are all,—Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World or the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,—but the result of the mandate that bade mankind to increase and multiply, that bade mankind to take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken over temporarily that portion of the earth and its fullness allotted or made possible to us by that Providence to which all things belong. We have each of us done this along the lines of the least possible resistance, for this is the law of organic life.
The story of the taking over of the earth into possession has been but a story of travel. Aryan, Cymri, Goth, Vandal, Westerner—they are all one. The question of occupying the unoccupied world has been only a question of transportation, of invasion, and of occupation along the lines of least resistance. Hence we have at hand, in a study of transportation of the West at different epochs, a clue that will take us very near to the heart of things.
We read to-day of forgotten Phenicia and of ancient Britain. They were unlike, because they were far apart. The ancient captains who directed the ships that brought them approximately together were great men in their day, fateful men. The captains of transportation that made all America one land are still within our reach, great men, fateful men; and they hold a romantic interest under their grim tale of material things. You and I live where they said we must live. It was they who marked out the very spot where the fire was to rise upon your hearth-stone. You have married a certain Phenician because they said that this must be your fate. Your children were born because some captain said they should be. You are here not of your own volition. The day of volitions, let us remember, is gone.
The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax, of linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of trolley-cars and self-binders, of purple and fine linen, it must be observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work, and back of all these causes were the original law and the original mandate. The force of this primeval impulse was behind all those early actors, and Roundhead Cavalier, praying man and fighting man, who had this continent for a stage. It was behind the men that followed inland from the sea the first prophets of adventure. It is behind us to-day. The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.
When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was the Alleghanies, how then did the west-bound adventurers travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation? The answer would seem easy. They traveled as did the Cimri, the Goths—in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters.
Bishop Berkeley, prophetic soul, wrote his line: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” The public has always edited it to read the “star” of empire that “takes it way” to the West. If one will read this poem in connection with a government census map, he can not fail to see how excellent is the amendment. Excellent census map, that holds between its covers the greatest poem, the greatest drama ever written! Excellent census map, that marks the center of population of America with a literal star, and, at the curtain of each act, the lapse of each ten years, advances this star with the progress of the drama, westward, westward, ever westward! Excellent scenario, its scheme done in red and yellow and brown, patched each ten years, ragged, blurred, until, after a hundred years, the scheme is finished, and the color is solid all across the page, showing that the end has come, and that the land has yielded to the law!
The first step of this star of empire, that concluded in 1800, barely removed it from its initial point on the Chesapeake. The direction was toward the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The government at Washington, young as it was, knew that the Ohio River, reached from the North by a dozen trails from the Great Lakes, and running out into that West which even then was coveted by three nations, was of itself a priceless possession. The restless tide of humanity spread from that point according to principles as old as the world. Having a world before them from which to choose their homes, the men of that time sought out those homes along the easiest lines.
The first thrust of the out-bound population was not along the parallels of latitude westward, as is supposed to be the rule, but to the south and southeast, into the valleys of the Appalachians, where the hills would raise corn, and the streams would carry it. The early emigrants learned that a raft would eat nothing, that a boat runs well down-stream. Men still clung to the seaboard region, though even then they exemplified the great law of population that designates the river valleys to be the earliest and most permanent centers of population. The first trails of the Appalachians were the waterways.
Dear old New England, the land sought out as the home of religious freedom, and really perhaps the most intolerant land the earth ever knew, sometimes flatters herself that she is the mother of the West. Not so. New England holds mortgages only on the future of the West, not on its past. The first outshoots of the seaboard civilization to run forth into the West did not trace back to the stern and rock-bound shore where the tolerants were punishing those who did not agree with them.
New York, then, was perhaps the parent of the West? By no means, however blandly pleasant that belief might be to many for whom New York must be ever the first cause and center of the American civilization, not the reflection-point of that civilization. The rabid Westerner may enjoy the thought that neither New England nor New York was the actual ancestor. Perhaps he may say that the West had no parent, but was born Minerva-like. In this he would be wrong. The real mother of the West was the South. It was she who bore this child, and it has been much at her expense that it has grown so large and matured so swiftly. If you sing “arms and the man” for the West, you must sing Southerner and not Puritan, knight-errant and not psalmodist. The path of empire had its head on the Chesapeake. There was the American Ararat.
“The great American journeyings were far under way before New England appeared to realize that there was a greater America toward the West. The musket bearers of the New England states, the fighting men of the South, and the riflemen of what might already have been called the West, had finished the Revolutionary War long before New England had turned her eyes westward. The pilgrimage over the Appalachians was made, the new provinces of Kentucky and Tennessee were fighting for a commerce and a commercial highway of their own, while yet the most that New England, huddled along her stern and rock-bound shore, could do was to talk of shutting off these Westerners from their highway of the Mississippi, and compelling them to trade back with the tidewater provinces of what was not yet an America.
“Canny and cautious, New York and New England were ready to fear this new country in which they refused to believe; were ready to cripple it, although they declined to credit its future. The pioneers of the South fought their way into the West. New England bought her way, and that after all the serious problems of pioneering had been solved. The ‘Ohio Land Company’ of Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tucker and their none too honest associate, the New Bedford preacher, Manasseh Cutler, were engaged in the first great land steal ever known in the West. They did not fight the Indians for their holdings, but went to Congress, and with practical methods secured five million acres of land at a price of about eight or nine cents an acre; the first offer to Congress being a million dollars for a million and a half acres of what is now the state of Ohio, the payment to be in soldiers’ scrip, worth twelve cents on the dollar.
“The Ohio company took its settlers out to its new land as a railway does its colonists to-day. Reaching the Ohio River, they descended it in a bullet-proof barge, called ‘with strange irony’ the ‘Mayflower.’ They entered the mouth of the Muskingum and anchored under the guns of a United States fort.”[4]
This is how New England got into the West. There is no hero story there. The men of the South, men of North Carolina and Virginia, most of whom had come from Pennsylvania and dropped down along the east slope of the Appalachians, as it were sparring these mountain ranges for an opening until at length they had found the ways of the game trails and Indian trails from headwater to headwater, and so had reached the west-bound streams—these actual adventurers had built Harrodsburg and Boonesborough seventeen years before the Ohio company entered the Muskingum. Already there was a West; even a West far beyond Boonesborough and its adjacent corn grounds.
This actual record of the upper states in the exploration of the West is to-day not generally remembered nor understood. Sometimes an ardent New Englander will explain that the Puritans would have earlier pressed out westward had it not been for the barrier of the Iroquois on their western borders. They read their history but ill who do not know that the Iroquois trafficked always with the English as against the French; whereas Kentucky, the land opened by the Southern pioneers, was occupied by a more dangerous red population, made up of many tribes, having no policy but that of war, and no friends outside of each separate motley hunting party, sure to be at knife’s point with either white or red strangers. The most difficult and most dangerous frontier was that of the South; yet it was the South that won through.
There are two explanations of this incontrovertible historical fact. One lies perhaps in the general truth that early pioneers nearly always cling to the river valleys, perhaps not more for purposes of transportation by water than in obedience to a certain instinct that seems to hold the pathways of the streams as foreordained guidance. The man that is lost in the wilderness hails with delight the appearance of a stream. It will lead him somewhere; it will guide him back again. Near it will be game, near it, too, rich soil. The man that enters the wilderness deliberately does so along the waterways.
All the great initial explorations have been made in this way. The men of Kentucky and Tennessee having reached the headwaters of the Kentucky, the Tennessee, the Holston or kindred riverways, moved out into their promised land along paths, as it were, foreordained. The rivers of the North did not run out into the West, but pointed ever toward the sea. This is one explanation of the somewhat inglorious part of New England in the discovery of the West. It does not explain her narrowness of view in regard to that West after it had been discovered by others; neither does this geographical explanation, in the opinion of many, cover the main phenomena of her timid attitude in regard to Western exploration.
The true reason, in the belief of these students, is to be found in the character of the New England population, as compared to the bolder breed of men who overran the western sections of Pennsylvania and for two generations were in continuous touch with the wilderness and its savagery. This subject is taken up interestingly by Horace Kephart, a scholar of much acquaintance with early American history, in the course of an able paper. It is very much worth while for any one who wishes an actual picture of the march across the Appalachians to read his conclusions.
“In a vague way we think of all the East as old,” says this writer, “and all the West as new. We picture civilization as advancing westward from the Atlantic in a long, straight front, like a wave or a line of battle. But in point of fact it was not so. There was a permanent settlement of Europeans a thousand miles to the west of us before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Cahokia and Kaskaskia were thriving villages before Baltimore was founded; and our own city of St. Louis was building in the same year that New Jersey became a British possession. At a time when Daniel Boone was hunting beaver on the Osage and the Missouri, Fenimore Cooper was drawing the types for future ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ from his neighbors in a ‘wilderness’ only a hundred and fifty miles from New York City.
“American settlement advanced toward the Mississippi in the shape of a wedge, of which the entering edge was first Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, then the Shenandoah valley, then Louisville, and finally St. Louis. When the second census of the United States was taken, in 1800, nearly all the white inhabitants of our country lived in a triangle formed by a diagonal southwestward from Portland, Maine, to the mouth of the Tennessee River, here meeting another diagonal running northwestward from Savannah, with the Atlantic for a base. Central and western New York, northern Pennsylvania, and all the territory north of the Ohio River, save in its immediate vicinity, were almost uninhabited by whites, and so were Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Yet the state of Kentucky had half as many people as Massachusetts, and Tennessee had already been admitted into the Union.