The Minute Man on the Frontier. William George Puddefoot
NEW GROUND.
PREFACE.
In a very able review of Maspero's "Dawn of Civilization," the writer says "that for hundreds of years it was believed that history had two eyes; but now we know she has at least three, and that archæology is the third."
This may account for the saying that "history is a lie agreed to;" for it needs to be argus-eyed to give us any adequate idea of the truth; and while the writer of the following sketches does not aspire to the rank of a historian, he has been induced to print them for two or three reasons. First, because urged to by friends; and secondly, because of the unique condition of American frontier life that is so rapidly passing away forever.
One may read Macaulay, Froude, Knight, and, in fact, a half-dozen histories of England, and then sit down to the gossipy sketches of Sidney culled from Pepys's, Evelyn's, and other diaries, and get a truer view of English life than in all the great histories combined. It would be impossible to give even the slightest sketch of a country so large as ours for a single decade in many volumes; although, in one sense, we are more homogeneous than many suppose.
There was a greater difference in two counties in England before the advent of the railways than between two of our Northern States to-day. To-day a man may travel from Boston to San Francisco, and he will find the same headlines in his morning papers, and for three thousand miles will find the scenery desecrated by the wretched quack medicine advertisements that produce "that tired feeling" which they profess to cure.
If he goes into one county in the mother country, he will find the people singeing the bristles of their swine, and counting by the score, in another by the stone, etc., and customs kept up that had grown settled before travel became general. But with us it is different. We had no time to become crystallized before the iron horse, the great cosmopolitan of the age, rapidly levelled all distinctions; and it is only by getting away from the railway, and into settlements that still retain all the primitiveness of an earlier day, that we find the conditions of which much of this book treats.
THE MINUTE-MAN
ON
THE FRONTIER.
I.
THE FRONTIER IN RELATION TO THE WORLD.
The opening up of a new frontier is world-wide in its operations. Minnesota entered the Union as a State in 1858. The putting to practical use the Falls of St. Anthony was felt all over Europe. Thousands of little country mills, nestling amid the trees, and adding to the beauty of the English pastoral scenery, to-day stand idle, the great wheels covered with green moss; and Tennyson's "Miller" becomes a reminiscence. Iowa became a State in 1846, and now leads the world in the production of corn; and although it is a thousand miles from the seaboard, yet through its immense production, and with the cheapening of transportation, we find over seventy thousand Italians emmigrating to this country, as, in spite of low wages, they cannot compete on the plains of Lombardy. (See Wells's "Economic Changes.")—We find that the man at the front can ship from Chicago to Liverpool the product of five acres of grain for less money than the cost of manuring one acre of land in England. (Ibid.)
Every time a new frontier in America is opened, it means both prosperity and disaster. So large are the opportunities, so rich the results, that at first all calculations are upset. Natural gas in the Middle States changes the price of coal in Europe. The finding of a tin-mine is felt in Cornwall and Wales the next day. The opening of the iron-mines in Michigan makes Cornish towns spring up in the upper peninsula, while the finding of ore in desolate places has caused communities to spring up with all the conditions of a cosmopolitan civilization, and we have to-day men living twenty-five miles from trees or grass. But such is the energy of the frontier type, that grass-plats have been carried and planted on the solid rocks, as in Duluth, where hundreds of thousands of dollars are expended in the grading of streets, and the opening of the sewers, all having to be blasted to do the work.
North Dakota was a wilderness of 150,000 square miles, and had not produced a single bushel of wheat for sale, in 1881. In 1886 it produced nearly 35,000,000 bushels; in 1887, 62,553,000. (See Wells's "Recent Economic Changes.") The opening up of these immense territories starts railways from California to Siberia; for, with the Great West competing, Russia is stirred to greater effort. India, with her great commerce with Great Britain, needs a shorter route; and the Suez canal is made. Australia must compete with the Western plains; and great steamers, filled with refrigerators, are constructed for carrying fresh beef. The South American republics respond in return.
The hardy pioneer, ever on the move, explores well nigh impracticable routes in search of precious metals. The inventive mechanic must respond with an engine that can climb anywhere; and in almost inaccessible mountain eyries the eagle is disturbed by the shriek of the locomotive, and the bighorn must take refuge with the bison in the National Park. The news of new mines flies around the world, fortunes are made and lost in a day, and the destinies of nations determined. A great crop starts railways, steamships. Miners, smelting-works, iron and steel, respond. Letters fly across the Atlantic, and returning steamers are filled with eager men and women, who answer the letters in person. Down from the far north, Sweden and Norway have responded with over a million of their children. Great Britain has sent nearly six millions. Germany follows with 4,417,950; Italy, 392,000; France, 315,130; Austria, 304,976; Denmark, 114, 858; Hungary, 141,601; Switzerland, 167,203; Russia and Poland, 326,994; Netherlands, 99,516; and so on: in all, a total for Europe in fifty years of over 13,000,000, the great majority of whom have been started from their homes by the opening up of new frontiers.
It has been stated on good authority, that sixty per cent of the Germans that come are between the ages of fifteen and forty, while all Germany has only thirty per cent of that age.
On the authority of Dr. Farr, quoted by R. Mayo Smith in his "Emigration and Immigration," he calculates the money value of the immigrants from the British Isles from 1837 to 1876 reached the enormous sum of 1,400,000 pounds sterling, or 7,000,000,000 of dollars, an average of 175,000,000 dollars a year; while the amount sent back from British North