By REUBEN G. THWAITES

THE first two volumes of this series—those devoted to the historic towns of New England and the Middle States—dealt with communities each group of which has had for the most part a common origin, has progressed along practically parallel lines, and possesses characteristics closely akin. The volume upon the towns of the South brought closely to view the cosmopolitan character of the population which has settled our continent to the South and Southwest of the Appalachian wall. The stories of Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and St. Augustine bring into view widely-different origins, experiences, and interests along a single stretch of coast; while Mobile and New Orleans, Knoxville, Nashville, and Louisville, Vicksburg and Little Rock, are groups representing chapters in our history which appear to have but slight connection save in the view of those who have closely studied the mainsprings of American development.

The present volume represents even a wider range of historical interest. The attentive reader will, however, discover that although these towns of the far-stretching trans-Alleghany region have sprung from curiously divergent beginnings, and are apparently incongruous in composition and in aims, there really is and has been much in common among them.

In order to understand Western history, one must first have knowledge of the details of the titanic struggle for settlement in North America, made respectively by Spain, France, and England. The early decline of Spanish power north of the Red and the Arkansas, save for the later temporary holding of Louisiana; the protracted tragedy which ended on the Plains of Abraham in the Fall of New France; the Revolution of the English colonists, and its portentous results; the Louisiana Purchase of 1803; the Mexican War, the episode of California, the story of Texas, with their consequent ousting of Spain from lands north of the Rio Grande and the Gila—all these are factors bearing the closest relation to the history of the West, and consequently of many of the historic towns whose stories have been grouped within these covers.

With these episodes of national rivalry, and consequent diplomacy and war, were intimately concerned the French fur-trade outposts of Detroit, Mackinac, Vincennes, and St. Louis, links in the forted chain which bound Canada and Louisiana, and by means of which it was sought to form a barrier against the Westward growth of the English colonies; also the Spanish stations of San Francisco, Monterey, Los Angeles, and Santa FÉ, which were at once political vantage points and mission seats, for the spread of Spanish power and civilization from Mexico, among the brown barbarians of the North. St. Louis experienced both French and Spanish rÉgimes, while Mackinac, Detroit, and Vincennes were much affected by the period of English occupancy.

As settlement grew upon the Atlantic coast, the English frontier was inevitably pushed farther and farther from tidewater. The hunter followed his game westward; so the forest trader, seeking the ever-receding camps of the aborigines, and, in due course, the raiser of cattle, horses, and swine who needed fresh pastures for his herds as tillage steadily encroached upon the wild lands of the border. At first timorously occupying the valleys and foothills of the eastern slopes, hunter, trader, and grazier, each in his turn, cautiously followed buffalo traces and Indian war-paths over the crest of the great range, and hailed with glee waters descending into the mysterious West. Not less formidable than the barriers reared by nature were those interposed by the savage, who with dismay saw his hunting grounds fast dwindling under the sway of the land-grabbing English; and by the jealous machinations of the military agents and fur traders of New France, who brooked no rivalry in their commercial exploitation of the forest.

When New France fell, the English crown strictly forbade further settlement in the back country. This order was issued upon the representations of London merchants interested, as had been the merchant adventurers of France, in preserving the forest for the Indians and the fur trade; the ministry were not unmindful also that the bold and liberty-loving frontiersmen who crossed the mountains might come to consider English political control as unessential to their being.

This policy was, however, diametrically opposed to the policy of the border. The fertile fields of the West were far from the observation of London officials, the spirit of unrest and the desire for gain laughed at royal proclamations, and the trans-Alleghany movement but gathered force. By the opening of the Revolution, Kentucky and Tennessee were practically staked out; by its close, Americans were sole white masters of the West to the east of the Mississippi, save for a brief holding by the British of Detroit, Mackinac, and other upper lake posts, as security for treaty obligations as yet unfulfilled.

It had been the custom of England to grant lands for military service; the American colonies had likewise liberally rewarded their defenders in the Indian wars; Revolutionary soldiers were now given free access to the broad acres of the West, the direct result of this policy being the settlements of Marietta and Cleveland.

Water courses have ever been of the highest importance in determining the lines of continental settlement. The river St. Lawrence and the great lakes offered to the people of New France a continual invitation to explore the regions whence they flowed. It was not long before the French found that the sources of south-and west-flowing waters were not far from the banks of the eastering waterways upon which they dwelt. By ascending short tributaries, and carrying their light craft along practicable paths, or portages, first used by the Indians, they could re-launch into strange and devious paths which led to all parts of the continental interior—the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Assiniboine, and their multifarious affluents and connections. Thus easily did New France spread along the St. Lawrence and the lakes, over into the Ohio and the Mississippi, and down their gliding channels to New Orleans and the sea.

In crossing the Alleghanies, the English sought the Ohio and its tributaries—the Alleghany, the Monongahela, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, the Kanawha, the Big Sandy. The Ohio was long the chief gateway to the West. Upon this royal path into the wilderness, the Ohio Company sent Christopher Gist to prospect and report; for its possession, France and England came to final blows through the action at Fort Necessity of Major Washington, than whom no man knew the Ohio better; it was an approach to Kentucky more inviting than Boone's Wilderness Road, through Cumberland Gap; Clark's flotilla came swooping down the great river to conquer Kaskaskia and Vincennes; and, the Revolution ended, Rufus Putnam and his fellow veterans from New England claimed their military land grants along this continental highway, at Marietta. Cincinnati, also, was an outpost deliberately planted upon the great pathway to the West, although otherwise differing in genesis. It was by the Great Lakes, that other principal approach to the West, that Moses Cleaveland founded the settlement of Revolutionary soldiers who were redeeming their land warrants in New Connecticut, or the Western Reserve—an incident closely connecting Ohio with colonial history.

Early in the Western experiences of the new nation, came Indian wars. These resulted in treaties where under the defeated tribesmen were either forbidden to enter defined areas of settlement, or were confined within specific reservations. This necessitated the construction of rude but effective frontier forts, which not infrequently proved the nuclei of hamlets that grew into considerable towns. Sometimes these forts were essential to the direct protection of the white settlers, who, upon occasion of alarm, flew to cover within the log palisades, which were stout enough to resist a barbaric foe unpossessed of artillery; such was Fort Washington, which in time became Cincinnati.

The forest trade was long the chief and only commercial interest in the West, and at certain points garrisoned forts were necessary to serve the traders as depÔts and as havens of refuge; this was the part played by Detroit, Mackinac, Chicago, St. Paul, Vincennes, and St. Louis. In the case of Des Moines, the fort was established for the protection of a group of reservation Indians who might otherwise have fallen victims to a superior savage foe.

Agricultural settlers rapidly took up lands. Battle against it as he would,—and the early history of the border is a piteous tale of man's inhumanity to man,—the dispossessed savage found this army of occupation impregnable. As the frontier moved to the westward of the Mississippi, it was accompanied by the Indians and the fur trade. Territories were erected by Congress out of the lands of the ousted Iroquois and Algonkins, and these political divisions were soon admitted to the Union as states; mines were exploited, forests were depleted, miscellaneous industries were created, and these new interests not only profoundly affected the old towns, but gave rise to a new order of cities.

Indianapolis and Madison are examples of town sites staked out in virgin forests by ambitious and imaginative speculators, and, before a house could be built, set aside by statute as capitals of their respective young commonwealths. It is not always that towns thus artificially planted have similarly thriven. Under normal conditions, a successful city is as much a matter of natural growth as a tree, whose germ has chanced to fall in favored soil. Many, perhaps most, Western towns of importance, that were planted before the days of the railroad, when waterways were highways, are upon the sites of early villages of aborigines, who made their stands at natural vantage points—at a river mouth, convenient for transportation, or close to considerable fishing grounds; at a waterfall, because here fish are plenty, and canoes must be carried around the obstruction, so that the villagers are masters of the highway; upon a portage path, because of ease in reaching and controlling divergent water systems; upon a bluff overlooking waterways, for facility of observation and control; upon a fertile river bottom, because of good corn lands. In due time, whites came to such a centre of population and established a trading post; here and there, as at Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Vincennes, and Kansas City (Westport), the post in due time developed into a garrisoned fort; and the surrounding community, at first dependent on the fur trade or the military, under modern conditions became a town of importance. Scores, possibly hundreds, of such examples might be cited; and even when some thrifty towns of the West appear at first sight to have no connection with such a past, antiquarians have not infrequently discovered evidences that substantially the same reasons which before the railway era had led civilized men to select the site, caused its previous occupancy by aborigines—sometimes at so early a day that the only remaining relics are the curious earthworks which the progenitors of our Western Indians, prompted by religious fervor, constructed anywhere from two and a half to ten centuries ago. Minneapolis and Spokane, both of them old Indian sites, are the direct outgrowth of the superb waterpowers which have given them pre-eminence in the industrial world.

We have seen that the Great Lakes and the great rivers were the paths to the Mississippi basin in the days of the canoe, the bateau, and the pack-horse. The early movement of population over the trans-Mississippi plains and through the passes of the Rockies was by means of wagons along well-worn buffalo traces, which Indians had followed in the pursuit of game. Where rivers intersected these overland trails, ferries were instituted, their keepers doing a thriving business in helping upon their way fur traders, explorers, miners, and settlers. Such was the origin of Kansas City and Omaha, which naturally developed, with the rush of immigration, into great centres of distribution. In every quarter of our land, from the earliest colonial days, the frontier ferryman, with his tavern and trading house, has been a town builder.

The discovery of precious metals in the hills of Colorado gave life to the mining camp of Denver, which in time became the metropolis of a wide district, to which irrigation brought a wealth more enduring than gold and silver.

Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are the open doors of the Pacific Coast, and their growth is thus easily accounted for. Prophecies are current of the possible commercial supremacy of these Pacific-coast towns, as a consequence of our new interests in the Far East. It is curious, in this connection, to remember that Spain's motive in founding her California colonies, four generations ago, was, on the temporal side, the more strongly to establish herself in the Philippines.

Strangest of all stories is that of Salt Lake City, the product of religious zeal seeking a supposedly inaccessible desert as a haven from persecution. Finally, when the laborious development of the wilderness has brought rich fruitage, this hermit city finds itself a station on one of the world's most-traveled highways.

The coming of the railway, and the consequent practical abandonment of the waterway, wrought a profound change in the fortunes of the Western towns. The railway paid small heed to watercourses, save in mountainous country; it struck out upon short-cuts over the plains and prairies, almost regardless of topography. Hundreds of staid and promising river and lake towns received a staggering blow when, for various reasons,—sometimes their own failure to encourage the enterprise,—the railway passed them by and entered rival and often less pretentious communities, which now were quickened into new vigor. A more favorable situation for a bridge across the stream was often the determining factor which caused several towns upon a river to die and the fortunate one to be transformed into a metropolis. The arbitrary erection throughout the West of new paths of commerce, of new centres of distribution, during the decade and a half before the War of Secession, was of itself a revolutionary element in urban history.

Almost as profound in its effects was the practically contemporaneous dispersion through this vast territory of millions of European immigrants, who came to open farms, to practise trades, and in city and in village to carry forward, often to inaugurate, hundreds of new commercial and industrial enterprises. The new-comers brought strange habits of thought and social customs; some of the most desirable of these they engrafted upon their American neighbors, while at the same time they themselves were being consciously or unconsciously remoulded into American citizens—who, whatever may be said, will always be essentially but transplanted Englishmen modified by environment and political education.

Of the many nationalities of the European continent which have planted stakes in North America, the Germans and the Scandinavians, closely allied to our Anglo-Saxon stock, have been the most numerous and have exercised the greatest influence. Many considerable towns, like Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis, and Omaha, have become strongly German, with not a few of the characteristics of old Germany, such as are evinced in a general fostering of music and rational outdoor recreation. The Scandinavian element vies good-naturedly with the German, as at Madison and Chicago; while Minneapolis may be considered as the centre of Scandinavian influence, fostering sturdy democracy and tenacious enterprise.

In the large towns which have their roots planted in New France, the French element is no longer of considerable importance. The French borderer was a vivacious, fun-loving, easy-going fellow, and upon the road to modern opulence and power has long since been passed; to-day, as an urban dweller, he is not seriously reckoned with by the politician, and this is a safe guide to the relative standing of a race in any American city. The towns which we have more recently inherited from Spain still possess, in their older quarters, strong characteristics to link them with the past. Here and there, as with the French, individual Spaniards or mixed-bloods rise into prominence in our modern life—but only through the channel of Americanization, which means effacement of the old rÉgime. Spanish traits have left permanent traces on the Southwest and the Pacific, as some French traits are a part of the lasting heritage of the Old Northwest; but Spaniards and Frenchmen as such are rapidly fading from our historic towns.

A half-century ago, few of the twenty-one Western towns whose stories are herein collected had taken upon themselves the characteristics which to-day chiefly distinguish them. We have seen that the advent of the railway was for many the starting-point upon the road to prosperity; the arrival of European immigrants, with traditions of toil and thrift, proved the turning stage for others, and strengthened all. The War of Secession shook the Republic to its foundations; but from it the North rose with fresh vigor, and rapidly developed in growth and ambition, with the ensuing commercial and industrial conditions which we encounter to-day. Nowhere has this development been quite so noticeable as in the towns of the West.

Pioneer men and women are necessarily too closely engaged in taming the wilderness to have either thought or leisure for any but the most elementary education. But now that the West is no longer the frontier, and mines, forests, fisheries, manufactures, and scientific agriculture have brought wealth and comparative leisure, there is among her people no lack of aspiration for culture. In no section of the United States are study clubs relatively more numerous, in town and country; university extension courses and the lyceum prosper everywhere; the common-school systems, capped by the fast-growing State universities with their thousands of students, are exhibiting a healthy growth along the most approved lines under the guidance of teachers of national reputation; excellent private academies and colleges are numerous in every commonwealth. Several of the towns mentioned in this volume have won wide reputation as educational centres—notably Cleveland, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

From these Western towns there issues no note of decadence. Theirs is the glowing ambition of youth. Each of our several authors is quite confident, and properly so, that his town is the handsomest, brightest, and most prosperous of all; or, if it is not, that it is soon to be. Its commerce ever widens, its industries expand in capacity and number, its railways connect it each year with some new sphere of trade; and, what is better, it is making strides, in breezy Western fashion, in the cultivation of the higher things of life, in its churches, its schools, its libraries and museums, its charities, its parks, its popular conveniences, its insistence upon moral and material municipal cleanliness. It is pleasant and profitable to trace the careers of communities such as this; to note, for instance, by what means the Indian village became a trading post, then a fort, next a hamlet, and at last comes to be pulsating with the ambitions and struggling with the multifarious problems of a great modern city. Herein is a record of urban development crowded into the span of a single human life, that in the Old World it took centuries to accomplish.

It is often flippantly asserted that America has no history; and even well-informed Americans, who have come to appreciate their national history at large, are apt to fancy that, in any event, the West has had a prosaic career, being simply an overflow or outgrowth from the East. But a perusal of these pages will surely convince the thoughtful reader that Western history is not so easily disposed of. It will be found a chronicle abounding in complexities, aglow with life and color, freighted with significance to the continent at large. The chief towns of this historic West have come down to us from many sorts of beginnings, have traveled by differing and devious paths, often encountering curious adventures by the way, until, quickened by modern resources and demands, they have each in its kind come creditably to serve mankind in some useful way.