The commissioners in charge of the project performed one interesting service in these early days by putting Chicago on the map; but the two terminals, Ottawa on the Illinois and Chicago on Lake Michigan-both plotted in 1830-were very largely figures of speech at that time. The day of miracles was at hand, however, for the little town of one hundred people at the foot of Lake Michigan. The purchase of the lands of the Potawatomies, the Black Hawk War in 1832, which brought steamboats to Chicago for the first time, and the decision of Illinois in 1836 to pledge her good name in favor of the Illinois and Michigan Ca.n.a.l made Chicago a city of four thousand people by the panic year of 1837. So absorbed were these Chicago folk in the building of their ca.n.a.l and in wresting from their lake firm foothold for a city (reclaiming four hundred feet of lake bed in two years) that the panic affected their town less than it did many a rival. Although the ca.n.a.l enterprise came to an ominous pause in 1842, after the expenditure of five millions, the pledge of the State stood the enterprise in good stead. Local financiers, together with New York and Boston promoters, advanced about a quarter of a million, while French and English bankers, notably Baring Brothers, contributed about three-quarters of a million. With this a.s.sistance the work was carried to a successful ending. On April 10,1848, the first boat pa.s.sed over the ninety-mile route from Chicago to Ottawa, and the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin were united by this Erie Ca.n.a.l of the West. Though its days of greatest value were soon over, no one can exaggerate the importance of this waterway in the growth and prosperity of Chicago between 1848 and 1860. By 1857 Chicago was sending north and south annually by boat over twenty million bushels of wheat and corn.
The awakening of the lands behind Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Michigan brought forth innumerable demands for roads, ca.n.a.ls, and railways to the ports of Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago. There were actually hundreds of these enterprises undertaken. The development of the land behind Lake Superior was particularly spectacular and important, not only because of its general effect on the industrial world but also because out of it came the St. Mary"s River Ship Ca.n.a.l. Nowhere in the zone of the Great Lakes has any region produced such unexpected changes in American industrial and commercial life as did the region of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota contributory to Lake Superior. If, as the story goes, Benjamin Franklin said, when he drew at Paris the international boundary line through Lake Superior, that this was his greatest service to America, he did not exaggerate. The line running north of Isle Royale and thence to the Lake of the Woods gave the United States the lion"s share of that great inland seaboard and the inestimably rich deposits of copper and iron that have revolutionized American industry.
From earliest days rumors of deposits of bright copper in the land behind Lake Superior had been reported by Indians to fur traders who in turn had pa.s.sed the story on to fur company agents and thus to the outside world. As a result of her "Toledo War"-as her boundary dispute was called-Michigan had reluctantly accepted the northern peninsula lying between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan in lieu of the strip of Ohio territory which she believed to be hers. If Michigan felt that she had lost by this compromise, her state geologist, Dougla.s.s Houghton, soon found a splendid jewel in the toad"s head of defeat, for the report of his survey of 1840 confirmed the story of the existence of large copper deposits, and the first rush to El Dorado followed. Amid the usual chaos, conflict, and failure incident to such stampedes, order and system at last triumphed and the richest copper mines of the New World were uncovered. Then came the unexpected finding of the mammoth iron-ore beds by William A. Burt, inventor of the solar compa.s.s. The circ.u.mstance of this discovery is of such national importance that a contemporary description by a member of Burt"s party which was surveying a line near Marquette, Michigan, is worth quoting:
"I shall never forget the excitement of the old gentleman when viewing the changes of the variation. He kept changing his position to take observations, all the time saying "How would they survey this country without my compa.s.s" and "What could be done here without my compa.s.s." At length the compa.s.sman called for us all to "come and see a variation which will beat them all." As we looked at the instrument, to our astonishment, the north end of the needle was traversing a few degrees to the south west. Mr. Burt called out "Boys, look around and see what you can find." We all left the line, some going to the east, some going to the west, and all of us returned with specimens of iron ore."
But it was not enough that this Aladdin"s Land in the Northwest should revolutionize the copper and steel industry of the world, for as soon as the soil took to its bosom an enterprising race of agriculturists it bade fair to play as equally important a part in the grain industry. Copper and iron no less came out of the blue of this cold northern region than did the mighty crops of Minnesota wheat, corn, and oats. In the decade preceding the Civil War the export of wheat from Lake Superior rose from fourteen hundred bushels to three and a quarter millions of bushels, while in 1859 nearly seven million bushels of corn and oats were sent out to the world.
The commerce of Lake Superior could not await the building of a ca.n.a.l around the foaming rapids of the St. Mary"s River, its one outlet to the lower lakes. In the decade following the discovery of copper and iron more than a dozen ships, one even of as much as five hundred tons, were hauled bodily across the portage between Lake Huron and Lake Superior. The last link of navigation in the Great Lake system, however, was made possible in 1852 by a grant by Congress of 750,000 acres of Michigan land. Although only a mile in length, the work proved to be of unusual difficulty since the pathway for the ca.n.a.l had to be blasted throughout practically its whole length out of solid rock. It was completed in 1855, and the princely empire "in the moon" was in a position to make its terms with the coal fields of Pennsylvania and to usher in the iron age of transportation and construction.
It is only in the light of this awakening of the lands around the Great Lakes that one can see plainly the task which fell to the lot of the successors of the frail Walk-in-the-Water and st.u.r.dier Superior of the early twenties. For the first fifteen years the steamboat found its mission in carrying the thousands of emigrants pouring into the Northwest, a heterogeneous mult.i.tude which made the Lake Erie boats seem, to one traveler at least, filled with "men, women and children, beds, cradles, kettles, and frying pans." These craft were built after the pattern of the Walk-in-the-Water-side-wheelers with a steering wheel at the stern. No cabins or staterooms on deck were provided; and amid such freight as the thriving young towns provided were to be found the twenty or thirty cords of wood which the engines required as fuel.
The second period of steamboating began with the opening of the Ohio Ca.n.a.l and the Welland Ca.n.a.l about 1834 and extended another fifteen years to the middle of the century, when it underwent a transformation owing to the great development of Chicago, the completion of the Illinois and Michigan and St. Mary"s ca.n.a.ls, and the new railways. This second period was marked by the building of such steamers as the Michigan, the Great Western, and the Illinois. These were the first boats with an upper cabin and were looked upon with marked suspicion by those best acquainted with the severe storms upon the Great Lakes. The Michigan, of 475 tons, built by Oliver Newberry at Detroit in 1833, is said to have been the first ship of this type. These boats proved their seaworthiness and caused a revolution in the construction of lake craft. Later in this period freight transportation saw an equally radical advance with the building of the first propellers. The sloop-rigged Vandalia, built by Sylvester Doolittle at Oswego on Lake Ontario in 1842, was the first of the propeller type and was soon followed by the Hercules, the Samson, and the Detroit.
One very great handicap in lake commerce up to this time had been the lack of harbors. Detroit alone of the lake ports was distinctly favored in this respect. The harbors of Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Chicago were improved slowly, but it was not until the great Chicago convention of 1846 that the nation"s attention was focused on the needs of Western rivers and harbors, and there dawned a new era of lighthouses and buoys, breakwaters and piers, and dredged channels. Another handicap to the volume of business which the lake boats handled in the period just previous to the Civil War was the inadequacy of the feeders, the roads, riverways, and ca.n.a.ls. The Erie Ca.n.a.l was declared too small almost before the cries of its virulent opponents had died away, and the enlargement of its locks was soon undertaken. The same thing proved true of the Ohio and Illinois ca.n.a.ls. The failure of the Welland Ca.n.a.l was similarly a very serious handicap. Although its locks were enlarged in 1841, it was found by 1850 that despite the improvements it could not admit more than about one-third of the grain-carrying boats, while only one in four of the new propellers could enter its locks.
As late as the middle forties men did not in the least grasp the commercial situation which now confronted the Northwest nor could they foresee that the land behind the Great Lakes was about to deluge the country with an output of produce and manufactures of which the roads, ca.n.a.ls, ships, wharfs, or warehouses in existence could handle not a tenth part. They did not yet understand that-this trade was to become national. It was well on in the forties before the Galena lead mines, for instance, were given up as the terminal of the Illinois Central Railroad and the main line was directed to Chicago. The middle of the century was reached before the Lake Sh.o.r.e was considered at Cleveland or Chicago as important commercially as the neighboring portage paths which by the Ordinance of 1787 had been created "common highways forever free." The idea of joining Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago with the interior-an idea as old as the Indian trails thither-still dominated men"s minds even in the early part of the railroad epoch. Chicago desired to be connected with Cairo, the ice-free port on the Mississippi; and Cleveland was eager to be joined to Columbus and Cincinnati. The enthusiastic railway promoters of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois drew splendid plans for uniting all parts of those States by railway lines; but the strategic position of the cities on the continental alignment from New York to the Pacific by way of South Pa.s.s never came within their horizon. The ten million dollar Illinois scheme did not even contemplate a railway running eastward from Chicago. But the future of the commerce of the Great Lakes depended absolutely upon this development. There was no hope of any ca.n.a.ls being able to handle the traffic of the mighty empire which was now awake and fully conscious of its power. The solution lay in joining the cities to each other and to the Atlantic world markets by iron rails running east and west.
This railroad expansion is what makes the last decade before the Civil War such a remarkable series of years in the West. In the half decade, 1850-55, the Baltimore and Ohio and Pennsylvania railways reached the Ohio River; the links of the present Lake Sh.o.r.e system between Buffalo and Chicago by way of Cleveland and Toledo were constructed; and the Pennsylvania line was put through from Pittsburgh to Chicago. The place of the lake country on the continental alignment and the imperial situation of Chicago, and later of Omaha, came to be realized. The new view transformed men"s conceptions of every port on the Great Lakes in the chain from Buffalo to Chicago. At a dozen southern ports on Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan, commerce now touched the swiftest and most economical means of transcontinental traffic. This development culminated in the miracle we call Chicago. In 1847 not a line of rail entered the town; its population then numbered about twenty-five thousand and its property valuation approximated seven millions. Ten years later four thousand miles of railway connected with all four points of the compa.s.s a city of nearly one hundred thousand people, and property valuation had increased five hundred per cent. The growth of Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit during this period was also phenomenal.
When the crisis of 1861 came, the service performed by the Walk-in-the-Water and her successors was seen in its true light. The Great Lakes as avenues of migration had played a providential part in filling a northern empire with a proud and loyal race; from farm and factory regiment on regiment marched forth to fight for unity; from fields without number produce to sustain a nation on trial poured forth in abundance; enormous quant.i.ties of iron were at hand for the casting of cannon and cannon b.a.l.l.s; and, finally, pathways of water and steel were in readiness in the nick of time to carry these resources where they would count tremendously in the four long years of conflict.
CHAPTER XI. The Steamboat And The West
Two great fields of service lay open before those who were to achieve by steam the mastery of the inland waterways. On the one hand the cotton kingdom of the South, now demanding great stores of manufactured goods, produce, and machinery, was waiting to be linked to the valleys and industrial cities of the Middle West; and, on the other hand, along those great eastward and westward rivers, the Ohio and Missouri, lay the commerce of the prairies and the Great Plains. But before the steamboat could serve the inland commerce of the West, it had to be constructed on new lines. The craft brought from the seaboard were of too deep draft to navigate shallow streams which ran through this more level country.
The task of constructing a great inland river marine to play the dual role of serving the cotton empire and of extending American migration and commerce into the trans-Mississippi region was solved by Henry Shreve when he built the Washington at Wheeling in 1816. Shreve was the American John Hawkins. Hawkins, that st.u.r.dy old admiral of Elizabethan days, took the English ship of his time, trimmed down the high stern and p.o.o.p decks, and cut away the deep-lying prow and stern, after the fashion of our modern cup defenders, and in a day gave England the key to sea mastery in the shape of a new ship that would take sail and answer her rudder beyond anything the maritime world until then had known. Shreve, like Hawkins, flagrantly ignoring the conventional wisdom of his day and craft, built the Washington to sail on the water instead of in it, doing away altogether with a hold and supplying an upper deck in its place.
To few inventors, indeed, does America owe a greater debt of thanks than to this Ohio River shipbuilder. A dozen men were on the way to produce a Clermont had Fulton failed; but Shreve had no rival in his plan to build a flat-bottomed steamboat. The remarkable success of his design is attested by the fact that in two decades the boats built on his model outweighed in tonnage all the ships of the Atlantic seaboard and Great Lakes combined. Immediately the Ohio became in effect the western extension of the great national highway and opened an easy pathway for immigration to the eastern as well as the western lands of the Mississippi Basin. The story goes that an old phlegmatic negro watched the approach of one of the first steamboats to the wharf of a Southern city. Like many others, he had doubted the practicability of this new-fangled Yankee notion. The boat, however, came and went with ease and dispatch. The old negro was converted. "By golly," he shouted, waving his cap, "the Mississippi"s got her Ma.s.sa now."
The Mississippi had indeed found her master, but only by slow degrees and after intervals of protracted rebellion did she succ.u.mb to that master. Luckily, however, there was at hand an army of unusual men-the "alligator-horses" of the flatboat era-upon whom the steamboat could call with supreme confidence that they would not fail. Theodore Roosevelt has said of the Western pioneers that they "had to be good and strong-especially, strong." If these men upon whom the success of the steamboat depended were not always good, they were beyond any doubt behemoths in strength.
The task before them, however, was a task worthy of Hercules. The great river boldly fought its conquerors, asking and giving no quarter, biding its time when opposed by the brave but crushing the fearful on sight. In one respect alone could it be depended upon-it was never the same. It is said to bring down annually four hundred million tons of mud, but its eccentricity in deciding where to wash away and where to deposit its load is still the despair of river pilots. The great river could destroy islands and build new ones overnight with the nonchalance of a child playing with clay. It could shorten itself thirty miles at a single lunge. It could move inland towns to its banks and leave river towns far inland. It transferred the town of Delta, for instance, from three miles below Vicksburg to two miles above it. Men have gone to sleep in one State and have wakened unharmed in another, because the river decided in the night to alter the boundary line. In this way the village of Hard Times, the original site of which was in Louisiana, found itself eventually in Mississippi. Were La Salle to descend the river today by the route he traversed two and a half centuries ago, he would follow dry ground most of the way, for the river now lies practically everywhere either to the right or left of its old course.
If the Mississippi could perform such miracles upon its whole course without a show of effort, what could it not do with the little winding ca.n.a.l through its center called by pilots the "channel"? The flatboatmen had laboriously acquired the art of piloting the commerce of the West through this mazy, shifting channel, but as steamboats developed in size and power the man at the wheel had to become almost a superman. He needed to be. He must know the stage of water anywhere by a glance at the river banks. He must guess correctly the amount of "fill" at the head of dangerous chutes, detect bars "working down," distinguish between bars and "sand reefs" or "wind reefs" or "bluff reefs" by night as well as by day, avoid the" breaks" in the "graveyard" behind Goose Island, navigate the Hat Island chutes, or find the "middle crossing" at Hole-in-the-Wall. He must navigate his craft in fogs, in storms, in the face of treacherous winds, on black nights, with thousands of dollars" worth of cargo and hundreds of lives at stake.
As the golfer knows each knoll and tuft of gra.s.s on his home links, so the pilot learned his river by heart. Said one of these pilots to an apprentice:
"You see this has got to be learned.... A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn"t know the shape of a sh.o.r.e perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from sh.o.r.e all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can"t see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there"s your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All sh.o.r.es seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you"d run them for straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there) and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there"s your gray mist. You take a night when there"s one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn"t any particular shape to a sh.o.r.e. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways.... You only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that"s IN YOUR HEAD and never mind the one that"s before your eyes." *
* Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," pp. 103-04.
No wonder that the two hundred miles of the Mississippi from the mouth of the Ohio to St. Louis in time contained the wrecks of two hundred steamboats.
The river trade reached its zenith between 1840 and 1860, in the two decades previous to the Civil War, that period before the railroads began to parallel the great rivers. It was a time which saw the rise of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Arkansas, and which witnessed the spread of the cotton kingdom into the Southwest. The story of King Cotton"s conquest of the Mississippi South is best told in statistics. In 1811, the year of the first voyage which the New Orleans made down the Ohio River, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi exported five million pounds of cotton. In 1834 these same States exported almost two hundred million pounds of cotton. To take care of this crop and to supply the cotton country, which was becoming wealthy, with the necessaries and luxuries of life, more and more steamboats were needed. The great shipyards situated, because of the proximity of suitable timber, at St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville became busy hives, not since paralleled except by such centers of shipbuilding as Hog Island in 1917-18, during the time of the Great War. The steamboat tonnage of the Mississippi Valley (exclusive of New Orleans) in the hustling forties exceeded that of the Atlantic ports (exclusive of New York City) by 15,000 tons. The steamboat tonnage of New Orleans alone in 1843 was more than double that of New York City.
Those who, if the old story is true, ran in fear to the hills when the little New Orleans went puffing down the Ohio, in 1811, would have been doubly amazed at the splendid development in the art of boat building, could they have seen the stately Sultana or Southern Belle of the fifties sweep swiftly by. After a period of gaudy ornamentation (1830-40) steamboat architecture settled down, as has that of Pullman cars today, to sane and practical lines, and the boats gained in length and strength, though they contained less weight of timber. The value of one of the greater boats of this era would be about fifty thousand dollars. When Captain Bixby made his celebrated night crossing at Hat Island a quarter of a million dollars in ship and cargo would have been the price of an error in judgment, according to Mark Twain, * a good authority.
*Op. cit., p. 101 The Yorktown, built in 1844 for the Ohio-Mississippi trade, was typical of that epoch of inland commerce. Her length was 182 feet, breadth of beam 31 feet, and the diameter of wheels 28 feet. Though her hold was 8 feet in depth, yet she drew but 4 feet of water light and barely over 8 feet when loaded with 500 tons of freight. She had 4 boilers, 30 feet long and 42 inches in diameter, double engines, and two 24-inch cylinders. The stateroom cabin had come in with Captain Isaiah Sellers"s Prairie in 1836, the first boat with such luxuries ever seen in St. Louis, according to Sellers. The Yorktown had 40 private cabins. It is interesting to compare the Yorktown with The Queen of the West, the giant British steamer built for the Falmouth-Calcutta trade in 1839. The Queen of the West had a length of 310 feet, a beam of 31 feet, a draft of 15 feet, and 16 private cabins. The building of this great vessel led a writer in the New York American to say: "It would really seem that we as a nation had no interest in this new application of steam power, or no energy to appropriate it to our own use." The statement-written in a day when the Mississippi steamboat tonnage exceeded that of the entire British Empire-is one of the best examples of provincial ignorance concerning the West.
On these steamboats there was a multiplicity of arrangements and equipments for preventing and for fighting fire. One of the innovations on the new boats in this particular was the subst.i.tution of wire for the combustible rope formerly used to control the tiller, so that even in time of fire the pilot could "hold her nozzle agin" the bank." Much of the great loss of life in steamboat fires had been due to the tiller-ropes being burned and the boats becoming unmanageable.
The arrival of the railroad at the head of the Ohio River in the early fifties brought the East into an immediate touch with the Mississippi Valley unknown before. But however bold railway engineers were in the face of the ragged ranges of the Alleghanies, they could not then outguess the tricks of the Ohio, the Mississippi, or the Missouri, and railway promoters could not afford to take chances on having their stations and tracks unexpectedly isolated, if not actually carried away, by swirling, yellow floods. The Mississippi, too, had been known at times to achieve a width of seventy miles, and tributaries have overflowed their banks to a proportionate extent. It was several decades ere the Ohio was paralleled by a railway, and the Mississippi for long distances even today has not yet heard the shrill cry of the locomotive. So the steamboat entered its heyday and encountered little compet.i.tion. Until the Civil War the rivers of the West remained the great arteries of trade, carrying grain and merchandise of every description southward and bringing back cotton, rice, and sugar.
The rivalries of the great lines of packets established in these days of the steamboat, however, equaled anything ever known in railway compet.i.tion, and, in the matter of fast time, became more spectacular than anything of its kind in any line of transportation in our country. With flags flying, boilers heated white with abundance of pine and resin, and bold and skillful pilots at the steering wheels, no sport of kings ever aroused the enthusiasm of hundreds of thousands to such a pitch as did many of the old-time races northward from New Orleans.
The J. M. White and her performances stand out conspicuously in the annals of the river. Her builder, familiarly known to a generation of rivermen as Billy King, deserves to rank with Henry Shreve. Commissioned in 1844 to build the J. M. White for J. M. Converse of St. Louis, with funds supplied by Robert Chouteau of that city, King proceeded to put into effect the knowledge which he had derived from a close study of the swells made by steamboats when under way. When the boat was being built in the famous shipyards at Elizabeth, on the Monongahela, the wheel beams were set twenty feet farther back than was customary. Converse was struck with this unheard-of radicalism in design, and balked; King was a man given to few words; he was resolved to throw convention to the winds and trust his judgment; he refused to build the boat on other lines. Converse felt compelled to let Chouteau pa.s.s on the question; in time the laconic answer came: "Let King put the beams where he pleases."
Thus the craft which Converse thought a monstrosity became known far and wide for both its design and its speed. In 1844 the J. M. White made the record of three days, twenty-three hours, and nine minutes between New Orleans and St. Louis. * Of course the secret of Billy King"s success soon became known. He had placed his paddle wheels where they would bite into the swell produced by every boat just under its engines. He had transformed what had been a handicap into a positive a.s.set. It is said that he attempted to shield his prize against compet.i.tion by destroying the model of the J. M. White, as well as to have refused large offers to build a boat that would beat her. But it is said also that an exhibition model of the boat was a cherished possession of E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War, and that it hung in his office during Lincoln"s administration.
* This performance is ill.u.s.trated by the following comparative table showing the best records of later years between New Orleans and St. Louis, a distance estimated in 1844 as 1300 miles but in 1870 as 1218 miles, owing to the action of the river in shortening its course.
YEAR BOAT TIME 1844 J. M. White 3 d. 23 h. 9 m.
1849 Missouri 4 d. 19 h. - 1889 Dexter 4 d. 9 h. - 1870 Natchez 8 d. 21 h. 58 m.
1870 R. E. Lee 3 d. 18 h. 14 m.
The steamboat now extended its service to the West and North. The ancient fur trade with the Indians of the upper Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Arkansas, had its headquarters at St. Louis, whence the notable band of men engaged in that trade were reaching out to the Rockies. The roll includes Ashley, Campbell, Sublette, Manuel Lisa, Perkins, Hempstead, William Clark, Labadie, the Chouteaus, and Menard-men of different races and colors and alike only in their energy, bravery, and initiative. Through them the village of St. Louis had grown to a population of four thousand in 1819, when Major Long"s expedition pa.s.sed up the Missouri in the first steamboat to ascend that river. This boat, the Western Engineer, was built at Pittsburgh and was modeled cunningly for its work. It was one of the first stern wheelers built in the West; and the saving in width meant much on streams having such narrow channels as the Missouri and the Platte, especially when barges were to be towed. Then, too, its machinery, which was covered over or boarded up, was shrouded in mystery. A fantastic figure representing a serpent"s open mouth contained the exhaust pipe. If the New Orleans alarmed the population of the Ohio Valley, the sensation caused among the red children of the Missouri at the sight of this gigantic snake belching fire and smoke must have thoroughly satisfied the whim of its designer.
The admission of Missouri to statehood and the independence of Mexico mark the beginning of real commercial relations between St. Louis and Santa Fe. In 1822 Captain William Becknell organized the first wagon train which left the Missouri (at Franklin, near Independence) for the long dangerous journey to the Arkansas and on to Santa Fe. In the following year two expeditions set forth, carrying out cottons and other drygoods to exchange for horses, mules, furs, and silver.
Despite the handicaps of Indian opposition and Mexican tariffs, the Santa Fe trade became an important factor in the growth of St. Louis and the Missouri River steamboat lines. In 1825 the pathway was "surveyed" from Franklin to San Fernando, then in Mexico. This Santa Fe trade grew from fifteen thousand pounds of freight in 1822 to nearly half a million pounds twenty years later.
By 1826 steamboat traffic up the Missouri began to a.s.sume regularity. The navigation was dangerous and difficult because the Missouri never kept even an approximately constant head of water. In times of drought it became very shallow, and in times of flood it tore its wayward course open in any direction it chose. "Of all variable things in creation," wrote a Western editor, "the most uncertain are the action of a jury, the state of a woman"s mind, and the condition of the Missouri River." A further handicap, and one which was unknown on the Ohio and rare on the Mississippi, was the lack of forests to supply the necessary fuel. The Missouri, it is true, had its cottonwoods, but in a green state they were poor fuel, and along vast stretches they were not obtainable in any quant.i.ty.
The steamboat linked St. Louis with that vital stretch of the river lying between the mouth of the Kansas and the mouth of the Nebraska. From this region the great Western trail ran on to California and Oregon. In the early thirties Bonneville, Walker, Kelley, and Wyeth successively essayed this Overland Trail by way of the Platte through the South Pa.s.s of the Rockies to the Humboldt, Snake, and Columbia rivers. From Independence on the Missouri this famous pathway led to Fort Laramie, a distance of 672 miles; another 800-mile climb brought the traveler through South Pa.s.s; and so, by way of Fort Bridger, Salt Lake, and Sutter"s Fort, to San Francisco. The route, well known by hundreds of Oregon pioneers in the early forties, became a thoroughfare in the eager days of the Forty-Niners. *
* For map see "The Pa.s.sing of the Frontier," by Emerson Hough (in "The Chronicles of America").
The earliest overland stage line to Great Salt Lake was established by Hockaday and Liggett. After the founding of the famous Overland Stage Company by Russell, Majors, and Waddell in 1858, stages were soon ascending the Platte from the steamboat terminals on the Missouri and making the twelve hundred miles from St. Joseph to Salt Lake City in ten days. Stations were established from ten to fifteen miles apart, and the line was soon extended on to Sacramento. The nineteen hundred miles from St. Joseph to Sacramento were made in fifteen days although the government contract with the company for handling United States mail allowed nineteen days. A host of employees was engaged in this exciting but not very remunerative enterprise-station-agents and helpers, drivers, conductors who had charge of pa.s.sengers, in addition to mail and express and road agents who acted as division superintendents. In 1862 the Overland Route was taken over by the renowned Ben Holliday, who operated it until the railway was constructed seven years later. Freight was hauled by the same company in wagons known as the "J. Murphy wagons," which were made in St. Louis. These wagons went out from Leavenworth loaded with six thousand pounds of freight each. A train usually consisted of twenty-five wagons and was known, in the vernacular of the plains, as a "bull-outfit"; the drivers were "bull-whackers"; and the wagon master was the "bull-wagon boss."
The old story, however, was repeated again here on the boundless plains of the West. The Western trails streaming out from the terminus of steamboat traffic between Kansas City and Omaha had scarcely time to become well known before the railway conquerors of the Atlantic and Great Lakes regions were planning the conquest of the greater plains and the Rockies beyond. The opening of the Chinese ports in 1844 turned men"s minds as never before to the Pacific coast. The acquisition of Oregon within a few years and of California at the close of the Mexican War opened the way for a newspaper and congressional discussion as to whether the first railway to parallel the Santa Fe or the Overland Trail should run from Memphis, St. Louis, or Chicago. The building of the Union Pacific from Omaha westward a.s.sured the future of that city, and it was soon joined to Chicago and the East by several lines which were building toward Clinton, Rock Island, and Burlington.
But the construction of a few main lines of railway across the continent could only partially satisfy the commercial needs of the West. True, the overland trade was at once transferred to the railroad, but the enormous equipment of stage and express companies previously employed in westward overland trade was now devoted to joining the railway lines with the vast regions to the north and the south. The rivers of the West could not alone take care of this commerce and for many years these great transportation companies went with their stages and their wagons into the growing Dakota and Montana trade and opened up direct lines of communication to the nearest railway. On the south the cattle industry of Texas came northward into touch with the railways of Kansas. Eventually lateral and trunk lines covered the West with their network of lines and thus obliterated all rivalry and compet.i.tion by providing unmatched facilities for quick transportation.
In the last days previous to the opening of the first transcontinental railway line a unique method of rapid transportation for mail and light parcels was established when the famous "Pony Express" line was put into operation between St. Joseph and San Francisco in 1860. By relays of hors.e.m.e.n, who carried pouches not exceeding twenty pounds in weight, the time was cut to nine days. The innovation was the new wonder of the world for the time being and led to an outburst on the part of the enthusiastic editor of the St. Joseph Free Democrat that deserves reading because it breathes so fully the Western spirit of exultant conquest:
"Take down your map and trace the footprints of our quadrupedantic animal: From St. Joseph, on the Missouri, to San Francisco, on the Golden Horn two thousand miles-more than half the distance across our boundless continent; through Kansas, through Nebraska, by Fort Kearney, along the Platte, by Fort Laramie, past the b.u.t.tes, over the Mountains, through the narrow pa.s.ses and along the steep defiles, Utah, Fort Bridger, Salt Lake City, he witches Brigham with his swift pony-ship through the valleys, along the gra.s.sy slopes, into the snow, into the sand, faster than Thor"s Thialfi, away they go, rider and horse-did you see them? They are in California, leaping over its golden sands, treading its busy streets. The courser has unrolled to us the great American panorama, allowed us to glance at the home of one million people, and has put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes. Verily the riding is like the riding of Jehu, the son of Nimshi for he rideth furiously. Take out your watch. We are eight days from New York, eighteen from London. The race is to the swift." *
* Quoted in Inman"s "The Great Salt Lake Trail," p. 171.
The lifetime of many and many a man has covered a period longer than that interval of eighty-six years between 1783, when George Washington had his vision of "the vast inland navigation of these United States," and the year 1869, when the two divisions of the Union Pacific were joined by a golden spike at Promontory Point in Utah. In point of time, those eighty-six years are as nothing; in point of accomplishment, they stand unparalleled. When Washington"s horse splashed across the Youghiogheny in October, 1784, the boundary lines of the United States were guarded with all the jealousy and provincial selfishness of European kingdoms. But overnight, so to sneak these limitations became no more than mere geometrical expressions. "Pennamite," "Erie," and "Toledo" wars between the States, suggesting a world of bitterness and recrimination, are remembered today, if at all, only by the cartoonist and the playwright. The ancient false pride in mock values, so cherished in Europe, has quite departed from the provincial areas of the United States, and Americans can fly in a day, unwittingly, through many States. Problems that would have cost Europe blood are settled without turmoil in the solemn cloisters of that American "international tribunal," the Supreme Court, and they appear only as items of pa.s.sing interest in our newspapers.
In unifying the nation the influence of the Supreme Court has been priceless, for it has given to Americans, in place of the colonial or provincial mind, a continental mind. But great is the debt of Americans to the men who laid the foundations of interstate commerce. No antidote served so well to counteract the poison of clannish rivalry as did their enthusiasm and their constructive energy. These men, dreamers and promoters, were building better than they knew. They thought to overcome mountains, obliterate swamps, conquer stormy lakes, master great rivers and endless plains; but, as their labors are judged today, the greater service which these men rendered appears in its true light. They stifled provincialism; they battered down Chinese Walls of prejudice and separatism; they reduced the aimless rivalry of bickering provinces to a businesslike common denominator; and, perhaps more than any cla.s.s of men, they made possible the wide-spreading and yet united Republic that is honored and loved today.