The Atlantic Monthly Part 15
Henceforth the financial history of the Revolution, although it loses none of its importance, loses much of its narrative-interest. No longer a hand-to-hand conflict between coin and paper,--no longer the melancholy spectacle of wise men doing unwise things, and honorable men doing things which, in any other form, they would have been the first to brand with dishonor,--it still continues a long, a wearisome, and often a mortifying struggle: men knowing their duty and refusing to do it, knowing consequences and yet blindly shutting their eyes to them. I will give but one example.
After a careful estimate of the operations of 1782, Congress had called upon the States for eight millions. Up to January, 1783, only four hundred and twenty thousand had come into the Treasury. Four hundred thousand Treasury-notes were almost due; the funds in Europe were overdrawn to the amount of five hundred thousand by the sale of drafts.
But Morris, waiting only to cover himself by a special authorization of Congress, made fresh sales upon the hopes of the Dutch loan and the possibility of a new French loan, and still held on--as cautiously as he could, but ever boldly and skilfully--his anxious way through the rocks and shoals that menaced him on every side. He was rewarded, as such men too often are, by calumny and suspicion. But when men came to look closely at his acts, comparing his means with his wants, and the expenditure of the Treasury Board with the expenditure of the Finance Office, it was seen and acknowledged that he had saved the country thirteen millions a year in hard money.
And now, from our stand-point of the Peace,--from 1783,--let us give a parting glance at the ground over which we have pa.s.sed. We see thirteen Colonies, united by interest, divided by habits, a.s.sociation, and tradition, engaging in a doubtful contest with one of the most powerful and energetic nations which the world had ever seen; we see them begin, as men always do, with very imperfect conceptions of the time it would last, the lengths to which it would carry them, or the sacrifices it would impose; we see them boldly adopting some measures, timidly shrinking from others,--reasoning justly about some things, reasoning falsely about things equally important,--endowed at times with singular foresight, visited at times by incomprehensible blindness: boatmen on a mighty river, strong themselves and resolute and skilful, plying their oars manfully from first to last, but borne onward by a current which no human science could measure, no human strength could resist.
They knew that the resources of the country were exhaustless; and they threw themselves upon those resources in the only way by which they could reach them. Their bills of credit were the offspring of enthusiasm and faith. The enthusiasm grew chill, the faith failed. With a little more enthusiasm, the people would cheerfully have submitted to taxation; with a little more faith, the Congress would have taxed them. In the end, the people paid for the shortcomings of their enthusiasm by seventy millions of indirect taxation,--taxation through depreciation; the Congress paid for the shortcomings of their faith by the loss of confidence and respect. The war left them with a Federal debt of seventy million dollars, and State debts of nearly twenty-six millions.
Could this have been avoided? Could they have done otherwise? It is easy, when the battle is won, to tell how victory might have been bought cheaper,--when the campaign is ended, to show what might perhaps have brought it to an earlier and more glorious close. It is easy for us, with the whole field before us, to see that from the beginning, from the very first start, although the formula was _Taxation_, the principle was _Independence_; but before we venture to pa.s.s sentence, ought we not to pause and weigh well our judgment and our words,--we who, in the fiercer contest through which we are pa.s.sing, have so long failed to see, that, while the formula is _Secession_, the principle is _Slavery_?
THROUGH-TICKETS TO SAN FRANCISCO: A PROPHECY.
We write this article in September. Within a few days, and without much heralding, has occurred an event of prime importance to our country's future. This is the opening from New York to St. Louis of a continuous broad-gauge line under the t.i.tle of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway. This line is twelve hundred miles long, and pursues the following route: By the New York and Erie Road, from New York to the station of Salamanca; thence, by a separate road of the Atlantic and Great Western, to Dayton, Ohio; thence, over the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton Road, to Cincinnati; and finally, by the Ohio and Mississippi Road, to St. Louis. The first excursion-train accomplished the whole distance in forty-four hours. We understand that the regular express-trains of the line will be required to make equally good time,--ultimately, perhaps, to reduce the time to forty hours.
This valuable connection has been mainly effected by the energy and talents of two men. Mr. James McHenry, a Pennsylvanian by birth, but of late years resident abroad, has raised twenty million dollars for the project in the money-markets of England, Spain, and Germany, the bonds of the Company obtaining ready sale upon the guaranty of his personal high character for uprightness and financial ability. Mr. Thomas W.
Kennard, an engineer and capitalist of large views, discretion, and experience, has managed the interests of the project here at home, securing the hearty cooperation and good-will of all the roads now made continuous, and bringing the enterprise to a successful issue with a skill possible only to first-cla.s.s commercial genius. The former of these gentlemen is Financial Director and Contractor, the latter, Engineer-in-Chief, Vice-President, and General Manager of the line. At any other period than this their success would have been widely talked of as a great national benefit. Even now let us not forget the public-spirited men whose hopeful hands, in the midst of blood and din, have been sowing seeds of commercial prosperity to glorify with their perfected harvest the day of our National triumph and reunion.
This work is the first instalment of the greatest popular enterprise in the world, the initial fulfilment of a promise which America has made to herself and all the other nations,--one which shall be completely fulfilled only when an iron highway stretches across her entire breadth, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. As a people we have grudged neither time nor money to the accomplishment of this end. We have dared the fiery desert and the frozen mountaintop, the demons of thirst, starvation, and savage warfare. Our foremost scientific men, for the sake of the great national enterprise, have taken their lives in their hands, going out to meet peril and privation with the cheerful constancy of apostles and martyrs. The record of expeditions bearing either directly or indirectly on the subject of the Pacific Railroad is one to which every American citizen must point with a pride none the less hearty for the fact that its route has not yet been absolutely decided.
The one curse mingled with a young republic's many blessings is the intrusion of political influences into the dispa.s.sionate field of national enterprise. We might have determined the line of our Pacific Road before the breaking out of the Rebellion, and by this time its first or Great-Plains section should have been in running order, but for the partisan jealousies which prevailed in high places between the advocates of the different routes. Slavery, that _enfant gate_ of our old-school and now happily obsolete statecraft, insisted on the expensive toy of a southern and unpractical line, until our representatives, hara.s.sed by the problem how to gratify her without incurring the contempt of the financial world, gave over to the drift of events the settlement of their country's chief commercial question. We are now in a position to decide coolly; no entangling alliances with a dead-weight social system bias our plain judgment of practical pros and cons; but the opportunity for decision arrives a little too late and a little too early for action. Congress, the legitimate custodian of the Pacific Railroad, may be said to have pa.s.sed the last four years in climbing to the level of the country's vital exigency. Till Congress reaches that and understands it fully, there is no surplus energy to be thrown away on the else paramount matters of a peaceful age.
But it must not be forgotten that the Pacific Railroad stands next to the maintenance of National Unity on the docket of causes for adjudication by our representative tribunal. The people have filed it away till the grand appeal is settled; but they have not forgotten it.
It is none the pleasanter thought to them because they have no time to talk about it, that the great highway of the continent has been left, _pendente lite_, in the hands of squabbling speculators, and that personal recriminations bar the progress of our commerce between sea and sea. The indifference of our public trustees to the disgraceful controversies which have embarra.s.sed work on the eastern end of the line is itself not a disgrace only because human power is limited to the care of one great matter at a time. The first Congress that meets under the olive of an honorable peace must at once take the Pacific Railroad into the Nation's hands, and prosecute it as the Nation's matter, with a liberal-mindedness learned from the conduct of a great war. Next to the salvation of the Union, the completion of the Pacific Road most fully justifies prompt action and comparative disregard of expenditure.
It is not our purpose, nor is this the place, to dictate to our legislators either the precise line of their own action or that of the road. It is still proper to say that the arrangements thus far entered into with private contractors have proved inadequate to the accomplishment and unworthy of the character of the enterprise. Whatever may be the details of the improved plan, it must embrace a sterner national surveillance over the execution of the project, and a direct national a.s.sumption of its prime responsibility.
It is a mistaken notion to suppose that the Pacific-Railroad question rests on the same principles as that of our minor internal improvements.
It calls for no reopening of the long-hushed controversy between Democracy and Whiggism. The best thinkers of the day are universally agreed to deprecate legislation in every case where private enterprise will do its office. No good political economist approves the emasculation of private effort by Government subsidy. The people are averse to statutory crutches and go-carts, wherever it is possible for them to walk alone. We feel distrust of the railroad which asks monopoly-privileges. The sight of a Governmental prop under any ostensibly commercial concern warns an American from its neighborhood.
He has learned that true prestige lies with the people,--that there is no vital warmth in official patronage. Even within the memory of young men a great change for the better has taken place in our commercial manliness. Out first-cla.s.s public enterprises blush to take Government help, as their directors might blush, if at the close of an interview Mr. Lincoln "tipped" them like school-boys with a holiday handful of greenbacks. There is no doubt that the ideal principle of democratic progress demands the absolute non-interference of Government in all enterprises whose benefit accrues to a part of its citizens, or which can be stimulated into life by the spontaneous operation of popular interest.
But facts are not ideal, and absolute principles in their practical application make head only by a curved line of compromise with the facts. The philosopher cannot go faster than the people. Certain courses are proper for certain stages of development. Few New-York Democrats now denounce the building of "Clinton's Ditch," and the fact that a majority approved of it as a sufficient evidence that it was a measure suited to the period; though even an old Whig at this day could not approve of a State ca.n.a.l under the auspices of Governor Seymour. Here are the two great questions which at any time must regulate the exertion of Governmental power: Is the enterprise vitally important? and, Will it be accomplished by private effort?
Because the Nation in several eminent instances saw the former question answered affirmatively and the latter negatively, it centralized a certain amount of authority for the construction of fortresses and the maintenance of a military force. These matters vitally concerned the entire people, yet the ordinary _stimuli_ to private enterprise were quite inadequate to securing their accomplishment.
The Pacific Railroad stands on precisely the same grounds. It concerns the entire population of the United States, but no ordinary business-organization of citizens will ever accomplish it alone. The mere cost of its construction might stagger the most audacious financier; but that is a minor obstacle. No doubt the city of New York and the State of California contain capital enough for the completion of the entire road,--would subscribe to it, too, upon sufficient guaranties. But who is to give those guaranties? Whose credit is broad enough to secure them? Our Atlantic capitalists have too often been defrauded by stock-companies of moderate liabilities and immediately under their own eyes, to feel quite comfortable about putting millions into the hands of private operators, who shall presently have the Rocky Mountains between them and their bondholders. In the case of almost any other railroad-enterprise this objection might be answered by the proposal to build the line with the subscriptions of people living on its route. But this line must take a route without people, and bring people to the route. Certain other roads are guarantied by the pledge of their way-freight business. This road must be completed before such a business exists; the business must be the product of the road. The ordinary principle of demand and supply is reversed in its application to this case. Supply must precede demand. Furnish the Pacific Railroad to the continent, and the continent in ten years will give it all the business it can do. Wait fifty years for the continent to take the initiative, and there will not yet be enough business to build the road.
This enterprise must be looked at in the light of a cash-advance from California and the Eastern States to the Plains, the Mountains, and the Desert, secured by a pledge of all the mineral and agricultural wealth of the party of the second part, guarantied by the prospective myriads of settlers whom the road shall bring to tracts now lying waste through the mere lack of its existence. In the course of the present article we shall endeavor to show the solidity of this security, the responsibility of these indorsers. While we counsel confidence to the capital which must build the road, we feel it imperative upon the National Government to enforce its position as that capital's trustee. That capital for the most part lies east of the Missouri and west of the Sierra Nevada.
Between these two boundaries the road must run for eighteen hundred miles through a region where capital may well be cautious of intrusting its life to any less potent authority than that of the Nation itself.
The claims of the Pacific Railroad have usually been urged upon the ground of its benefit to its _termini_. This ground is adequate to justify any advance of capital by the cities of New York and San Francisco. With the completion of the road, San Francisco necessarily becomes a depot for the entire China trade of the United States, and an entrepot for much of that between China and Western Europe. With the development of our j.a.panese relations, still another stream of wealth, now incalculable, must flow in through the Golden Gate. In the reverse current of Asiatic commerce, New York's position at the eastern terminus of the continental belt gives her a similar share. The gold-transport and the entire fast-freight business of New York and San Francisco, now transacted at an enormous expense by Wells and Fargo's Express, must be transferred _en ma.s.se_ to the Pacific Road; while the pa.s.senger-carriage, now devolving on Isthmus steamers and overland stages, may be pa.s.sed, practically entire, to the credit of the new line. Certainly, no traveller who has once purchased bitter experience with his ticket on Mr. Vanderbilt's line will ever again patronize that enterprising capitalist, unless he sells his ships and becomes a stockholder in the Pacific Railroad. The most enthusiastic lover of the sea must abjure his predilections, when brought to the ordeal of the steamer Champion. Crowded like rabbits in a hutch or captives in the Libby into such indecent propinquity with his kind that the third day out makes him a misanthrope,--fed on the putrid remains of the last trip's commissariat, turkeys which drop out of their skins while the cook is larding them in the galley, beef which maybe eaten as spoon-meat, and tea apparently made with bilge-water,--sleeping or vainly trying to sleep in an unventilated dungeon which should be called death instead of berth, where the reek of the aforesaid putridities awakes him to breakfast without aid of gong,--propelled by a second-hand engine, whose every wheeze threatens the terrors of dissolution,--morally certain, that, if his floating sty from any cause ceases to float, there are not boats enough to save an eighth of the pa.s.sengers,--he must admire the ocean with a true poet's enthusiasm, if he can brave the Champion a second time.
The considerations we have mentioned should be sufficiently operative with the capitalists of New York and California, and, as such, are those most prominently urged by the friends of the road. It would, however, be a great mistake to regard the through-business an all-comprehensive, in enumerating the sources of profit to be relied on by the enterprise. For a better understanding of that immense way-trade which lies between the oceans, waiting only for the whistle of the steam-genie to wake it into vigorous life, let us treat the entire line as already continuous from New York to San Francisco, and make an excursion to the Pacific on its prophetic rails. We will suppose the track a uniform broad gauge, as it ought to be,--the Pacific Road connecting at St. Louis with the Atlantic and Great Western by powerful boats, like those in use at Havre de Grace, capable of ferrying the heaviest cars between the Illinois and Missouri sh.o.r.es. We will take the liberty of constructing for ourselves the remainder of the still undecided route to the Pacific. We run our ideal broad gauge as follows:--
From St. Louis to Jefferson City; thence by the shortest line to the Kansas-River crossing; thence to Leavenworth (where St. Joseph, makes connection by a branch-track); thence to that bend of the Republican Fork which nearest approaches the Little Blue; thence along the bottoms of the Republican to the foot of the high divide out of which it is believed to rise, and which also serves for the water-shed between the Platte and Arkansas; and thence skirting the bluffs a distance of about one hundred miles to Denver. At Denver we find two branches making junctions with our line: one connects us with Central City, the great mining-town of Colorado, by a series of grades which might appall the Pennsylvania Central; the other threads the foot-hills and _mesas_ between Denver and the Fontaine-qui-Bouille Spa at Colorado City, with the possibility of its being extended in time to Canon City on the Arkansas. From Denver we strike for the nearest point on the Cache-la-Poudre, follow its bed as far as practicable, and rise from that level to the grand plateau of the Laramie Plains. Running through these Plains, we cross the Big and the Little Laramie Rivers, here shallow streams, crystal clear, and scarcely wider than the Housatonic at Pittsfield. Just after leaving the Plains, we cross Medicine Bow,--a mere brook,--and a few hours later the North Fork of the Platte, which eccentrically turns up in this most unexpected quarter, running nearly due north from a source which cannot be very far off. The rope-ferry by which the writer last crossed this picturesque and rapid stream we have replaced by a strong iron bridge. Leaving the west end of that bridge, we look out of the rear car and send our final message to the Atlantic by the last stream which we shall find going thither. A stupendous, but not impracticable, system of grades next carries us over the axial water-shed of the continent, by the way of Bridger's Pa.s.s. One hundred and fifty miles of tortuous descent brings us to Green River,--the stream which farther down becomes the mysterious Colorado, and seeks the Pacific by the Gulf of California. After crossing the Green by another iron bridge subst.i.tuted for rope-ferriage, our first important station will be Fort Bridger. Leaving there, we almost immediately enter the galleries of the Wahsatch Range, which form a continuous pa.s.s across Bear River and into the tremendous _canons_ conducting down to Salt-Lake City. From Salt Lake we pursue the shortest practicable route through the Desert to the Ruby-Valley Pa.s.s of the Humboldt Mountains; we cross that range to enter another desert, descend to the Sink of Carson, and reascend to Carson City, thence going nearly due north till we strike the line of the Truckee Pa.s.s, (where a branch connects us with the princ.i.p.al Washoe mines,) and thence to Sacramento by the long-projected California section of the Pacific Railroad. Another proposed, but still ideal, road completes our connection with the Western Ocean by way of Stockton, San Jose, and San Francisco.
We do not pretend to a.s.sert that the route indicated is in all respects the most economical and practicable; a good deal more surveying must be done before that can be said of any entire route, though we think it may fairly be claimed for our ideal section between St. Louis and Denver. We have chosen this route because along its course are more completely represented the natural features to which in any case the Pacific Railroad must look for all its primary obstacles and part of its subsequent profits.
To complete the conception as its reality must in time be completed, let us unite our Trans-Missouri portion with the Atlantic and Great Western Railway, under the all-inclusive t.i.tle of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. It will not be very far out of the way to regard thirty-eight hundred miles as the entire length of the line. On the Atlantic and Great Western section express-trains will run at a speed of twenty-seven miles an hour, including stops; but to provide against every detention, let us slow our through-express to twenty-five miles. At this rate we shall traverse the continent in six days and eight hours. In other words, the San-Francisco gentleman who left the Jersey depot by the five o'clock Atlantic and Pacific express-train on Monday morning may reasonably expect (allowing for difference of longitude) to be in the bosom of his family just in time to accompany them to morning service on the following Sunday.
We will suppose our packing accomplished the day before we set out.
During the evening we send our watches to get the exact Washington time.
The schedule of the entire road is based upon that time; and a thousand inconveniences, once endured by the traveller between New York and St.
Louis, are thereby avoided. It is not necessary to alter one's watch with every new conductor. We no longer grow dizzy with a horrible uncertainty on the subject of what-'s-o'clock,--ignorant whether we are running on New-York time, Dayton time, Cincinnati time, or St. Louis time,--whether, indeed, all time be not a pure subjective notion, and any o'clock at all a mere popular delusion. For the introduction of a uniform standard we have originally to thank the Atlantic and Great Western Railway.
In comfort and elegance the second-cla.s.s cars of the Atlantic and Pacific Road correspond to the omnivorous cars in use on our railroads generally. But we are a family-party, have nearly a week of travel before us, and prefer to sacrifice our money rather than our comfort. It costs a third, perhaps one-half more, to take first-cla.s.s tickets; but these secure us a compartment entirely to ourselves,--fitted up with all the luxury of a lady's boudoir. We have comfortable arm-chairs to sit in all day, the latest improvement in folding-beds to sleep in at night.
Our mirror, water-tank, basin, and all our toilet-arrangements are independent of the rest of the train. We have a table in the centre of our compartment for cards or luncheon. If we are wise, we have also brought along three or four Champagne-baskets stocked with private commissariat-stores, which make us quite independent of that black-art known as Western cookery. These contain sardines (half-boxes are the most practically useful size for a small party); chow-chow; _pates-de-foie-gras_; a selection of various potted meats; a few hundred _Zwiebacks_ from our Berlin baker, and as many sticks of Italian bread from our Milanese; a dozen pounds of hard-tack, and a half-dozen of soda-crackers; an a.s.sortment of canned fruits, including, as absolute essentials, peaches and the Shaker apple-b.u.t.ter; a pot of anchovy-paste; a dozen half-pint boxes of concentrated coffee, and as many of condensed milk, both, as the writer has abundantly tested, prepared with unrivalled excellence by an establishment in Boston; a tin box containing ten pounds of lump-sugar; a kettle and gas-stove, to be attached by a flexible tube to one of the burners lighting the compartment; a dozen bottles of lemon-syrup; and whatever stores, in the way of wines, liquors, and cigars, may strike the fancy of the party.
This may seem an ambitious outfit, but for the first year of the Pacific Railroad it will be an absolutely necessary one. As civilization spreads westward along the grand iron conductor of the continent, our national gastronomy will develop itself in company with all the other arts; but for the present it is safe to a.s.sume that outside of our private stores we shall not find a good cup of coffee after we leave St. Louis, or decent bread of any kind between Denver and Sacramento.
We seat ourselves in our comfortable arm-chairs, without the mortification of removing single gentlemen and the trouble of reversing seats to accommodate our party. The ladies are not compelled to sit in isolation, by the side of pa.s.sengers who use the car-floor as a spittoon. We may chat together upon family-matters without awakening the vivid interest of any mother-in-Israel mounting guard in front of us over a bandbox. The gentlemen may smoke, if the ladies like it, and, so long as they keep the windows open, n.o.body shall say them nay. We all enjoy a sense of security and independence, which is like occupying a well-provisioned Gibraltar on wheels. If we have a sick friend with us, he need never leave his mattress till he reaches San Francisco.
Should his situation become critical _en route_, the best medical attendance is at hand,--every through-train being obliged by statute to carry a first-cla.s.s physician and surgeon, with a well-stocked apothecary-compartment. But our present party are all of them in fine health and spirits; so we may dismiss the doctor's shop from our consideration.
The whistle blows just as the ladies have hung their bonnets in the rack, and the gentlemen exchanged their boots for slippers. We wave adieu to the Atlantic coast and the friends who have come to see us off. A few minutes more, and we pa.s.s through the Bergen Tunnel. The remainder of the day is spent amid that wild mountain and forest scenery which the Erie Railroad has made familiar to the whole travelling-population of our Eastern States. At Salamanca we strike the Atlantic and Great Western's separate line. On the way thence to Dayton we shall pa.s.s a number of long trains, made up of platform-cars heavily laden with barrels carrying East the riches of the Pennsylvania oil-region. These have connected with our main road by a couple of branches built especially for the accommodation of the petroleum-trade.
From Dayton to Cincinnati we shall traverse one of the finest farming-regions of the world, meeting trains laden with beeves, swine, packed pork, lard, grain, corn, potatoes, and every variety of produce that bears transportation. By this time, also, Ohio vine-culture has attained a development which justifies an occasional train entirely devoted to pipes of still Catawba and baskets of the sparkling brands.
From Cincinnati to St. Louis by way of Vincennes, we run through the southern portions of Indiana and Illinois, threading varied and picturesque scenery all the way, unless we have seen the Egyptian prairies so many times before that they pall on us before we reach the Mississippi bluff opposite St. Louis. Till we strike the prairie, our course is among bold, well-timbered hills, which now and then we are obliged to tunnel, and by the side of charming pastoral streams whose green bottom-land is shaded by n.o.ble plane-trees and cotton-woods.
Certain pa.s.sages in the scenery between Cincinnati and Vincennes are beautiful as a dream of fairy-land. Every few miles we continue to meet freight-trains laden with all the well-known products of the Western field and dairy. Twice, before we reach St. Louis, a splendid cortege of pa.s.senger-carriages shall whiz by us on the southern track,--and each time we shall have seen the daily through-express from San Francisco.
The St. Louis through-pa.s.sengers will be ready, on our arrival, in cars of their own. We shall switch them on behind us with little over half-an-hour's detention, and strike for Leavenworth, taking Jefferson City by the way. The country we now traverse is rolling, well watered, and well timbered along the streams. Our road has so stimulated production in the mines of Missouri that we frequently pa.s.s on the switch a freight-train taking out bar and pig iron to San Francisco, or on the other track a train laden with copper ore going to the East for reduction. We have hitherto said nothing of the innumerable trains which pa.s.s us or switch out of our way, carrying through-freight between New York and San Francisco. We are still surrounded by excellent farming-land, a fine grain, fruit, and general-produce country. Not till we leave Leavenworth can we be said fairly to have entered the central wilds of the continent. We are now west of the Missouri River, and for a distance of two hundred miles farther shall traverse a country possessing certain individual characteristics which ent.i.tle it to a name of its own among the divisions of our physical geography. This is the proper place for an indication of those divisions, generalized to the broadest terms.
In pa.s.sing from sea to sea, the American traveller crosses ten well-defined regions:--
1. The Atlantic slope of the Alleghany Range.
2. The eastern incline of the Mississippi basin.
3. The high divides of the short Missouri tributaries.
4. The Great Plains proper.
5. The Rocky-Mountain system of ridges and intramontane plateaus.
6. The Great Desert, broken by frequent uplifts, and divided by the Humboldt Range.
7. The Sierra-Nevada mountain-system.
8. The basin of the Sacramento River.
9. The mountain-system of the Coast Range.
10. The narrow Pacific slope.
By attending to these distinctions with map in hand we shall gain some adequate idea of the surface of our continent. The first and second of the regions we have left behind us, and at Leavenworth are well out upon the third. It would not be just to call it prairie,--and it is equally distinct from the true Plains. As a grain and gra.s.s land, Illinois nowhere rivals it; but its surface is remarkably different from that of the prairies east of the Mississippi. It may be described as an alternation of lofty bluffs and sinuous ravines,--the former known as "divides," the latter as "draws." The top of these divides preserves one general level,--leading naturally to the hypothesis that all the draws are valleys of erosion in a tract of alluvial deposit originally uniform with the plateaus of the divides. Some of the larger draws still serve as the channels of unfailing streams; most of them carry more or less water during the rainy season; few of them are dry all the year round.
The river-bottoms which traverse this region are thickly fringed with cotton-wood and elm timber; but it is a rare thing to encounter trees on the top of a divide. The fertility of the soil is boundless. Every species of gra.s.s flourishes or may flourish here, with a luxuriance unrivalled on the continent. Of the tract embraced between the Little Blue and the Republican Fork of the Kaw this is especially true. The climate is so mild and uniform that cattle may be kept at pasture the whole year round. Haymaking and the building of barns are works of supererogation. The wild gra.s.s cures spontaneously on the ground. To provide shelter against exceptional cases of climatic rigor,--an unusual "cold snap," or a fall of snow which lies more than a day or two,--the _ranchero_ constructs for his cattle a simple corral, or, at most, a rude shed. The utmost complication which can occur in his business is a stampede; and few of our Eastern farmers' boys would hesitate to exchange their scythes, hay-cutters, corn-sh.e.l.lers, and mash-tubs for the saddle of his spirited Indian pony and his three days' hunt after estrays. Over this entire region the cereals thrive splendidly. The wild plum is so abundant and delicious as to suggest the most favorable adaptation to the other stone-fruits. Every vegetable that has been tried in the loam of the river-bottoms succeeds perfectly. There is just reason to think that vine-culture might reach a development along the southern slope of the Republican Bluffs not surpa.s.sed in the most favorable positions east of California. We believe it no exaggeration to say that this region needs only culture (and that of the easiest kind) to become the garden of the continent. Its mineral wealth has received scanty examination; yet we know that it contains numerous beds of tertiary coal, and easily worked iron-deposits, in the form both of hydrated oxide and black scale.
On our way through this region we strike the Republican bottom near Lat.