,0 J* ^ s ' « ^ '^- '^ N " \ V ^^ S • <■ , °/- * .'> N ^ . # ■ -,....■. ^.. ,4^^ 1^ A*^ V -^ - » ft - . \ fy:::;^"".^ v\ •^^ / 4 / .-v ■^. ' , X ■* ^O"^ >^^^. '.'• z "^ •^^.^'i 6s ■■■' %<• o. .•0' ^y- > o. .V •x^ v^' >-".r.. ^ A^' %^ % .H^' ■^OO^ '^>^ V -\.^^ .0 0^ \^^^ f--. "'^ S"^ ■'^. v v\^' •^ ^ , X * ,0^ ^\^ MISSION NORTH AMERICAN PEOPLE, GEOGRAPHICAL, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL. ILLUSTRATED BY SIX CHARTS DELINEATING THE PHYSICAL ARCHITECTURE AND THERMAL LAWS OF ALL THE CONTINENTS. BY WILLIAM GILPIN, LATE GOVERNOR OP COLORADO. SECOND EDITION— REVISED. -J ^o/o J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. PHILADELPHIA; LONDON: TRUBNER & CO. 1874. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by WILLIAM GILPIN, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at "Washington. i \ (a ■ INTRODUCTION. This volume is tbe reproduction of its predecessor, which appeared in 1860. This short interval, although checkered by war, is illuminated by stupendous achievements in the direction whither the energies of the people were invited. The vivacity with which labor, intelligence, and moderation, in concert and alliance, march and expand in force and volume, is amazing and glorious. Nothing in sight predicts any serious check to this tidal flood, on which is borne every department and detail of Progress. The aim here is to grasp facts as they are ; to reject delusions which have grown senile. No special chapter is here assigned to the Western Cordillera (the Sierra Nevada), because its general profile, its thermal features, and its continuity ate everywhere referred to and described. Much that has been proposed and asked from the people in the former volume is now fully completed and has gone into history. Everything else is coming with assured certainty and celerity. In the former preface I have given expression fully to my faith and hopes. These I retain and repeat with fortified confidence and con- viction. ^ Denver, Juno 1 1873. THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. THE GRAIN, PASTORAL, AND GOLD REGIONS OF :^OETH AMEEIOA. WITH SOME NEW VIEWS OE ITS PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY, AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE PACIEIC RAILROAD. . BY WILLIAM GILPIN, lATE OF THE UNITED STATES ARMT. T^IE/ST I'TT OB L I SUED I IT I860. PREFACE. Everybody is acquainted with the history of the American people. Their commonwealth, commenced at first by a few republican familiea voluntarily exiled from the Old World, is now, at the end of two and a half centuries, a republican empire of established continental dimensions and policy. Restricted heretofore in its development to so much of our continent as belongs to the Atlantic, a point of progress is reached, whence our energies, overflowing towards the west, expand to embrace the regions of the Pacific Ocean and establish direct and familiar relations with Asia. This movement, long in preparation, now engages so large a force that its advance daily acquires volume and celerity. Federal legislation^ to progress pari passu with the people, is demanded upon a basis to give effect to the great central movement resulting from their energies. A liberal understanding of the mission of our people, counsels a genial expansion of the federal system to the grandest dimensions which their energies may reach. I have condensed into a small volume, the memoranda and reflections suggested by a residence of twenty years in the wilderness : and in the midst of the pioneer people who occupy the foreground of progress, and clear open the track of empire. I distinguish, as the most essential present ground of development, the interval which separates the Mississippi Basin from the Pacific Ocean. This defines itself as the '■^Mountain Systeni" of our geography. The magnitude of the obstacles which it opposes to the forces of pro- gress assembled on its two fronts, sanctions an appeal to every form of 7 g PREFACE. help discernible to the patriotic heart. This needed help is, in short, the construction of the Continental Railroad. Two auspicious elements in human civilization, by their rapid growth in power and importance, fix our attention, — the indefinite multiplication of gold coin, and international public works. These two elements, so operating as to mutually stimulate and sustain each other, promise to enthrone industrial organization as the ruling principle of nations. America leads the host of nations as they ascend to this new order of civilization. Her intermediate geographical position between Asia and Europe and their populations, invests her with the powers and duties of arbiter between them. Our continent is at once a barrier which separates the other two, yet fuses and harmonizes their intercourse in all the relations from which force is absent. Human society is, then, upon the brink of a new order of arrangement, inspired by the universal instincts of peace, and is about to assume the grandest dimensions. Fascinated by this vision, which I have seen appear and assume the solid form of a reality in less than half a generation, I discern in it a new power, the People occupied in the wilderness, engaged at once in extracting from its recesses the omnipotent element of gold coin, and disbursing it immediately for the industrial conquest of the world. William Gtilpin. Independence, April 7, 1860. TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE JIOUNTAIN FORMATION OF NORTH AMERICA THE CORDILLERAS THE PLA- TEAU THE NORTH AMERICAN ANDES. PAGE Breadth — Length — Black Hills — Cordillera of the Sierra Madre — Gold-producing Granite — Pares — Plateau of Table Lands — Not comprehene, containing her gi-eat rivers, the densest masses of her population, and detached islands of great area, dense population, and infinite production. The distance from the European to the Asian shores (from Paris t(, Pekin), travelling straight by the continuous river line of the Potomac, 68 THE GREAT BASIN OF THE MISSISSIPPI. Ohio, Missouri, Platte, and Snake Rivers, and across the two oceans, ia only 10,000 geographic miles. This straight line is the axis of that temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere of the globe, thirty-three degrees in width, which contains four-fifths of the land, nine-tenths of the people, and all the white races, commercial activity, and industry of the civilized world. When, therefore, this interval of North America shall be filled up, the affiliation of mankind will be accomplished, proximity recognized, the dis- traction of intervening oceans and equatorial heats cease, the remotest nations grouped together and fused into one universal and convenient system of immediate relationship. Such are some of the extraordinary attractions presented to mankind, as a social mass, by the position and configuration of the Mississippi Basin. There is another and superlative prospective view. This presents itself in contrasting the physical configuration of North America with the other continents. Europe, the smallest in area of the continents, culminates in its centre into the icy masses of the Alps. From the glaciers, where all the great ^rivers have their sources, they descend the declivities and radiate to the different seas. The Danube flows directly east to the Pontic Sea ; the Po, to the Adriatic ; the Rhone, to the Sea of Lyons ; the Rhine, north to the ■Grerman Sea. Walled ofi" by the Pyreuean and Carpathian Mountains, divergent and isolated, are the Tagus, the Elbe, and other single rivers, affluents of the Baltic, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Pontic Sea. Descending /ro??i common radiant points and diverging everyway from ■one another, no intercommunication exists among the rivers of Europe towards their sources ; navigation is petty and feeble. Art and commerce have never, during thirty centuries, united so many small valleys, remotely isolated by impenetrable barriers. Hence upon each river dwells a distinct people, difi"ering from all the rest in race, language, religion, interests, and habits. Though o^ten politically amalgamated by conquest, they again relapse into fragments, from innate geographical incoherence. Religious creeds and diplomacy form no more enduring bond. The history of these nations is a story of perpetual war, of mutual extermination ; an appalling dramatic catalogue of a few splendid tyran- nies crushing multitudinous millions of submissive and unchronicled serfs. Exactly similar to Europe., though grander in size and population, is Asia. THE GREAT BASIN OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 69 From the stupendous central barrier of the Himalayas run the four great rivers of China, due east, to discharge themselves under the rising sun : towards the south run the rivers of Cochin China, the Ganges, and the Indus : towards the west, the rivers of the Caspian : and north, through Siberia to the Arctic Sea, many rivers of the first magnitude. During fifty centuries, as now, the Alps and Himalaya Mountains have proved insuperable barriers to the amalgamation of the nations around their bases and dwelling in the valleys that radiate from their slopes. The continents of Africa and South America, as far as we are familiar with the details of their surfaces, are even more than these perplexed into dislocated fragments. In contrast, the interior of North America presents towards heaven an expanded, concave bowl, to receive and fuse into harmony whatsoever enters within its rim. So, each of the other continents presenting the convex surface of a bowl reversed, scatter everything from a central apex into radiant distraction. Political societies and empires have in all ages conformed themselves to emphatic geographical facts. This Democratic Republican empire of North America is, then, predestined to expand and fit itself to the conti- nent ; to control the oceans on either hand, and eventually the continents beyond them. Much is uncertain, yet through all the vicissitudes of the future, this much of eternal truth is discernible. In geography the antithesis of the old world, in society we are and will be the reverse. Our North America will rapidly accumulate a population equalling that of the rest of the world combined : a people one and indi- visible, identical in manners, language, customs, and impulses : preserv- ing the same civilization, the same religion ; imbued with the same opinions, and having the same political liberties. Of this we have two illustrations now under our eye, the one passing away, the other advancing. The aboriginal Indian race, amongst whom, from Darien to the Esquimaux, and from Florida to Vancouver's Island, exists a perfect identity in hair, complexion, features, religion, stature, and language : and, second, in the instinctive fusion into one language and into one new race of immigrant Germans, English, Norwegians, Celts, and Italians, whose individualities are obliterated in a single generation. Thus, the perpetuity and destiny of our sacred Union find their con- clusive proof and illustration in the bosom of nature. The political storms that periodically rage are but the clouds and sunshine that give variety to the atmosphere and checker our history as we march. The possession of the Basin of the Mississippi, thus held in unity by the American people, is a supreme, a crowning mercy. Viewed alone in 70 THE GREAT BASIN OF THE MISSISSIPPI. its wonderful position and capacity among the continents and the nations ; viewed, also, as the dominating part of the great calcareous plain formed of the conterminous Basins of the Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Hudson's Bay, and Athabasca, the amphitheatre of the world — ^here is supremely, indeed, the most magnificent dwelling-place marked out by God for man's abode. Behold, then, rising now and in the future, the empire which industry and self-government create. The growth of half a century, hewed out of the wilderness — its weapons, the axe and plow ; its tactics, labor and energy ; its soldiers, free and equal citizens. Behold the oracular goal to which our eagles march, and whither the phalanx of our States and people moves harmoniously on, to plant a liiuv- dred States and consummate their civic greatness. l^OmTIC RELATIONS Of mGREArPLAm "" XOimiA.MKUKAXANDKs'. >>IUl II,,. PACIFIC MAR I ii CHAPTEK VII. PASTORAL AMERICA. There has been a radical misapprehension in the popular mind as to the true character of the " Great Plains of America,^' as complete as that which pervaded Europe respecting the Atlantic Ocean during the whole historic period prior to Columbus. These Plains are not deserts, but the opposite, and are the cardinal basis of the future empire of commerce and industry now erecting itself upon the North American Continent. They are calcareous, and form the Pastoral Garden of the world. Their position and area may be easily understood. The meridian line which terminates the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa on the west, forms their eastern limit, and the Rocky Mountain crest their western limit. Between these limits they occupy a longitudinal parallel- ogram of less than 1000 miles in width, extending from the Texan to the Arctic coasts. There is no timber upon them, and single trees are scarce. They have a gentle slope from the icest to the east, and abound in rivers. They are clad thick with nutritious grasses, and swarm with animal life. The soil is not silicious or sandy, but is a fine calcareous mould. They run smoothly out to the navigable rivers, the Missouri, Mississippi, and St. Lawrence, and to the Texan coast. The mountain masses towards the Pacific form no serious barrier between them and that ocean. No portion of their whole sweep of surface is more than 1000 miles from the most facile navigation. The prospect is everywhere gently undu- lating and graceful, being bounded, as on the ocean, by the horizon. Storms are rare, except during the melting of the snows upon the crest of the Rocky Mountains. The climate is comparatively rainless ; the rivers serve, like the Nile, to irrigate rather than drain the neighboring surface, and have few afflu- ents. They all run from west to east, having beds shallow and broad, and the basins through which they flow are flat, long, and narrow. Tlie area of the " Great Plains" is equivalent to the surface of the twenty-four States between the Mississippi and the Atlantic Sea. They are one homo- 71 72 PASTORAL AMERICA. geneous formation, smooth, uniform, and continuous, without a single abrupt mountain, timbered space, desert, or lake. From their ample dimensions and position they define themselves to be the pasture-fields of the world. Upon them pastoral agriculture will become a separate grand department of continental industry. The pastoral characteristic, being novel to our people, needs a minute explanation. In traversing the continent from the Atlantic beach to the South Pass, the point of greatest altitude and remoteness from the sea, we cross successively the timbered region, the prairie region of soft soil and long annual grasses, and finally the Great Plains. The two first are irri- gated by the rains coming from the sea, and are arable. The last is rainless, of a compact soil resisting the plow, and is, there- fore, pastoral. The herbage is peculiarly adapted to the climate and the dryness of the soil and atmosphere, and is perennial. It is edible and nutritious throughout the year. This is the "gramma^'' or " buffalo grass.^ ' It covers the ground one inch in height, has the appearance of a delicate moss, and its leaf has the fineness and spiral texture of a negro's hair. During the melting of the snows in the immense mountain masses on the western frontier of the Great Plains, the rivers swell like the Nile, and yield a copious evaporation in their long sinuous courses across the Plains : storm-clouds gather on the summits, roll down the mountain flanks, and discharge themselves in vernal showers. During this tempo- rary prevalence of moist atmosj^here these delicate grasses grow, seed in the root, and are cured into hay upon the ground by the gradually return- ing drouth. It is this longitudinal belt of perennial pasture upon which the buffalo finds his winter food, dwelling upon it without regard to latitude, and here are the infinite herds of aboriginal cattle peculiar to North America — buffiilo, wild horses, elk, antelope, white and black-tailed deer, mountain sheep, the grisly bear, wolves, the hare, badger, porcupine, and smaller animals innumerable. The aggregate number of this cattle, by calculation from sound data, exceeds one hundred million. No annual fires ever sweep over the Great Plains ; these are confined to the Prairie region. The Great Plains also swarm with poultry — the turkey, the mountain cock, the prairie cock, sage chickens, the sand-hill crane, the curlew. Water-fowl of every variety, the swan, goose, brant, ducks. Marmots, the armadillo, the peccary, reptiles, the horned frog. Birds of prey, eagles, vultures, the raven, and the small birds of game and song. The streams abound in fish. Dogs and demi-wolves abound. The immense population of nomadic Indians, lately a million in num- PASTORAL AMERICA. 73 ber, have, from immemorial antiquity, subsisted exclusively upon these aboriginal herds. They are unacquainted with any kind of agriculture or the habitual use of vegetable food or fruits. From this source the Indian draws exclusively his food, his lodge, his fuel, harness, clothing, bed, his ornaments, weapons, and utensils. Here is kis sole dependence fro7n the beginning to the end of his existence. The innumerable carnivorous animals also subsist upon them. The buifalo alone have appeared to me as numerous as the American people, and to inhabit as uniformly as large a space of country. The buffalo robe at once suggests his adaptability to a winter climate. The Great Plains embrace a very ample proportion of arable soil for farms. The " bottoms^ ^ of the rivers are very broad and level, having only a few inches of elevation above the waters, which descend by a rapid and even current. They may be easily and cheaply saturated by all the various systems of artificial irrigation, azequias, artesian wells, or floo-'.- iug by machinery. Under this treatment the soils, being alluvial and calcareous, both from the sulphate and carbonate formations, return a prodigious yield, and are independent of the seasons. Every variety of grain, grass, vegetable, the grape and fruits, flax, hemp, cotton, and the flora, under a perpetual sun, and irrigated at the root, attain extraordinary vigor, flavor, and beauty. The Great Plains abound in fuel, and the materials for dwellings and fencing. Bituminous coal is everywhere interstratified with the calcareous and sandstone formation ; it is also abundant in the flanks of the moun- tains, and is everywhere conveniently accessible. The dung of the buffalo is scattered everywhere. The order of vegetable growth being reversed by the aridity of the atmosphere, what show above as the merest bushes, radiate themselves deep into the earth, and form below an immense arborescent growth. Fuel of wood is found by digging. Plaster and lime, limestone, freestone, clay, and sand, exist within the area of almost every acre. The large and economical adobe brick, hard- ened in the sun and without fire, supersedes other materials for walls and fences in this dry atmosphere, and, as in Syria and Egypt, resists decay for centuries. The dwellings thus constructed are most healthy, being impervious to heat, cold, damp, and wind. The climate of the Great Plains is favorable to health, longevity, intel- lectual and physical development, and stimulative of an exalted tone of tocitil civilization and refinement. The American people and their ancestral European people have dwelt 74 PASTORAL AMERICA. for many thousand years exclusively in countries of timber and within the region of the maritime atmosj)here: where winter annihilates all vege- tation annually for half the year : where all animal food must be sustained, fed, and fattened by tillage with the plow : where the essential necessities of existence, food, clothing, fuel, and dwellings, are secured only by con- stant and intense manual toil. To this people heretofore^ the immense empire of pastoral agriculture^ at the threshold of which we have arrived, has been as completely a blank, as was the present condition of social development on the Atlantic Ocean and the American Continent, to the ordinary thoughts of the antique Grreeks and Romans. Hence this immense world of plains and mountains ; occupying three- fifths of our continent ; so novel to them and so exactly contradictory in every feature to the existing prejudices, routine, and economy of society, is unanimously pronounced an wiinJiahitable desert. To any reversal of such a judgment, the unanimous public opinion, the rich and poor, the wise and ignorant, the fiimous and obscure, agree to oppose unanimously a dogmatic and universal deafness. To them, the delineations of travellers, elsewhere intelligent, are here tinged with lunacy ; the science of geography is befogged ; the sublime order of Crea- tion no longer holds, and the sujDreme engineering of Grod is at fault and a chaos of blunders ! The Pastoral Region is longitudinal. The bulk of it is under the Temperate Zone, out of which it runs into the Arctic Zone on the north, and into the Tropical Zone on the south. The parallel Atlantic arahle and maritime region flaiaks it on the east ; that of the Pacific on the west. The Great Plains, then, at once separate and bind together these flanks, rounding out both the variety and compactness of arrangement in the ele- mentary details of society, wJiich enables a continent to govern itself with the same ease as a single city.^ * Such an internal adjustment of society, expanding itself uniformly over the whole area of the continent, accompanies incidentally and of necessity its grand architecture. The physical anatomy, auspicious and consistent in all its details, the intense range of variety, the neighborhood and compactness of these elements so various in configu- ration, warmth, altitude, and production, all conspire to dictate fusion and order. They correct and render impossible what is hostile and opposite to them. The conventionalities which anticipate tumult will assert, establish, and perpetuate themselves. The experiences of history arm us with precedents for our guidance, and instruct our judgments. They predict for us a wholesome employment of our energies, accom- panied by a subtle and zealous discipline competent to anticipate and to restrain disorder. PASTORAL AMERICA. 75 Assuming, then, that the advancing column of progress, having reached and established itself in force all along the eastern front of the Great Plains^ from Louisiana to Minnesota : having, also, jumped over and flanked them to occupy California and Oregon : — Assuming that this column is about to debouch to the front and occupy them with the embodied impulse of o'ox fifty millions of population : here- tofore scattered upon the flanks, but now converging into phalanx upon the centre : some reflections, legitimately made, may cheer the timid, and confirm those who hesitate from old opinion and the prejudices of adverse education. It is well established that six-tenths of the food of the human family is, or ought to be, animal food, the result of pasfora? agriculture. The cattle of the world consume eight times the food per head, as compared with the human family. Meat, milk, butter, cheese, poultry, eggs, wool, leather, honey, are the productions of pastoral agriculture. Fish is the sponta- neous production of the water. Nine-tenths of the labor of arable culture is expended to produce the grain and gi'asses that sustain the present supplies to the world of the above enumerated articles of the pastoral order. If, then, a country can be found where pastoral produce is spontaneoud)/ sustained by nature, as fish in the ocean, it is manifest that arable labor, being reduced to the pro- duction of bread food only, may condense itself to a very small percent- age of its present volume, and the cultivated ground devoted to grain and grass be greatly reduced in acres. By the census of 1850, the pastoral culture of the American people resulting exclusively from the plow, exhibits the following aggregate : — Cattle of all kinds 18,378,907 Horses and mules 4,890,050 Sheep 21,722,220 Swine 30,334,213 Value $655,883,058 It is probable that the aggregate ahoriginal stock of the Great Plains still exceeds in amount the above table. It is all sjyonfaneously supported by natui'e, as is the fish of the sea. Every kind of our domestic animals flourishes upon the Great Plains equally well with the wild ones. Three tame animals may be substituted for every wild one, and vast territories re-occupied, from which the wiJd The aucieut discordances between urban and rural populations, manners, and tem- per, will find their asperities mutually modified. Society, rectified by reflection from the propitious powers of Nature, will insensibly ascend to an exalted level, illustrating the perpetual dominance and activity of peace, industry, and concord. 76 PASTORAL AMEBICA. stock has been exterminated by indiscriminate slaughter and the increase of the wolves. The American people are about, then, to inaugurate anove? and immense order of industrial production : Pastoral Agriculture. — Its fields will be the Great Plains intermediate between the oceans. Once commenced, it will develop very rapidly. We trace in their history the successive inauguration and systematic growth of several of these distinct orders : The tobacco culture, the rice culture, the cotton culture, the immense provision culture of cereals and meats, leather and wool, the gold culture, navigation external and internal, commerce external and internal, transportation by land and water, the liemp culture, ihe fisheries, manufactures. Each of these has arisen as time has ripened the necessity for each, and noiselessly taken and filled its appropriate jdace in the general economy of our industrial empire. This pastoral property transports itself on the hoof, and finds its food ready furnished by nature. In these elevated countries fresh meats become the preferable food for man, to the exclusion of bread, vegetables, and salted articles. The atmosphere of the Ch'eat Plains is perpetually brilliant with sun- shine, tonic, healthy, pungent, and inspiring to the temper. It corresponds with and surpasses the historic climate of Syria and Arabia, from whence we inherit all that is ethereal and refined in our system of civilization, our religion, our sciences, our alphabet, our numerals, our written languages, our articles of food, our learning, and our system of social manners. As the site for a great central metropolitan city of the " Basin of the Mississippi'^ to arise prospectively upon the developments now maturing, Kansas City, at the mouth of the Kansas River, has the start, the geo- graphical position, and the existing elements with which any rival will contend in vain. It is the focal point where three developments, now near ripeness, will find their I'iver port. 1. The pastoral development. 2. The gold, silver, and salt production of the Sierra San Juan. 3. The continental railroad from the Pacific. These great fields of enterprise will all be recognized and understood by the popular mind, and will be under vigorous headway within the mature life of the existing generation. There must be a great city here, such as antiquity built at the head of the Mediterranean and named Jerusalem, Tyre, Alexandria, and Constan- tinople ; such as our own people name New York, New Orleans, San Fran- cisco, St. Louis. V CHAPTEK VIIL THE SYSTEM OF THE PARCS. In proportion as curiosity, warmed by the expanding energy of pro- gress now everywhere palpitating with activity and fresh fire, extends our researches into every detail of our entire country, we are astonished and awed by the splendid magnitude of its architecture, and by the faultless grace and consistency of its anatomy. The Mountain System sparkles everywhere, and is checkered with the most startling beauties. The special recurrence of Parcs, which are innumerable, and are lavishly scattered over its area, has pre-eminent sig- nificance. These are charming valleys, accompanying the rivers. They surround their sources, or expand from their channels, between the mountain battlements, among which they flow. * Each is an amphitheatre. They maintain everywhere an undeviating rectitude of proportion, fitted in size to the volume of the rivers and mountains. Fertility and enchanting scenery mark them all. The most generous wealth of streams and vegetation are unfailing. In the latitudinal courses of the mountain structures of the other con- tinents, the favorable sunsJiine being absent, this form of valleys is either wanting, or they are unattractive. Those known to fame, are Kashmere in Asia : Constance and Grcneva, encased within the Alps of Europe. These bowls are occupied by water surfaces, and are unfitted for habita- tion. The Parcs of the North American Andes find their culmination of superlative grandeur in the System op the Four Parcs op Colo- rado. This System towers over and crowns the whole Continental structure. Mortised down, many thousand feet, into the ample expanse of the flat- tened cone, encircled by all the other North American mountains, they surround the sources and shed out all the grand arterial rivers, which radiate to all the seas. Here is the supreme dome, which surmounts the heart of North America ! 77 78 THE SYSTEM OF THE PARCS. Favored by their immense dimensions, and screened by an uninter- rupted envelope of primary mountain, edifices ; the climatic elements happily balanced ; give to their atmosphere a perpetual vernal temperature ; intense serenity and the most gorgeous splendor. They are bisected successively, through and through, by the one 7mn- dred and sixth meridian. Each one singly is of marvellous size, excellence of form, and eminent beauty. The group, as they are blended into one system, is miraculous ! This springs from its dominating continental position: from the juxtaposition: from the immediate contact: from the intense variety and supreme grace illustrating every detail and pervading the entire structure. Restricted especially to the System op the Four Parcs op Colo- rado, the San Luis Pare is readily entered at the extreme north through the Puncho Pass, penetrating the Cordillera from the Arkansas River. This pare, of elliptical form, and immense dimensions, is envel- oped between the Cordillera and Sierra Mimbres. It has its extreme northern point between these two Sierras, where they separate by a sharp angle and diverge ; the former to the southeast, and the latter to the southwest. The latitude of the Puncho Pass is 38° 30', the longitude 106°. It is one hundred and twenty-five miles southwest from Denver, and thirty- seven miles due ivest from Canon City. Emerging from the Puncho Pass, the waters- begin to gather and form the San Luis River. This flows to the south, through a valley of great beauty, which rapidly widens to the right and left. On the east flank, the Cordillera ascends abruptly and continuously, without any foot-hills, to a sharp, snowy summit. On the west, foot- hills and secondary mountains, rising one above the other, entangle the whole space of the Sierra Mimbres. The Sawatch River has its source on the inner (easterri) fl-ank of the Sierra Mimbres, about sixty miles south of its angle of divergence from the Cordillera, and, by a course nearly east, converges toward the lower San Luis River. It enters upon the pare by a similar valley. These two valleys expand into one another around this mass of foot- hills, fusing into the open pare, whose centre is here occupied by the San Luis Lake., into which the two rivers converge and discharge their waters. The San Luis Lake, extending south from the point of the foot-hills, occupies the centre of the pare for sixty miles. It forms a boicl without any outlet to its waters. It is encircled by immense saturated savannas of luxuriant grass. THE SYSTEM OF THE PARCS. 79 Its water surface expands over this savanna during the season of the melting snows upon the Sierras, and shrinks when the season of evapora- tion returns. From the flanks of the Cordillera on the east, at intervals of six or eight miles asunder, and at very equal distances, four teen streams other than the San Luis, descend and converge into the San Luis Lake, The belt of the sloping plain between the mountains and the lake, trav- ersed by so many parallel streams, bordered by meadows and groves of cottonwood-trees, has from this feature the name of " Los Alamos." It is sixty miles in length and twenty wide. On the opposite (western) side from the flank of the Sierra Mimbres, similar streams descend from the west into the lake, known as the Sa- watch, the Carnero, and the Gareta. The confluent streams thus converging into the San Luis Lake are nine- teen in number. The area thus occupied by this isolated lake and drained into it by its converging affluents, forming distinctly one-third of the Avhole surface of the pare, is classified under the general name oi '^ RinconJ' Advancing onward to the south along the loest edge of the plain, ten miles, from the Gareta, the Rio del Norte River issues from its mountain gorge. Its source is in the perpetual snows of the peaks of the San Juan, the local name given to this stupendous culmination of the Sierra Mimbres. The Del Norte flows from its extreme source due east one hundred and fifty miles, and having reached the longitudinal middle of the jyo^Tc, turns abruptly south, and, bisecting the pare for perhaps one hundred and fifty miles, passes beyond its rim in its course to the Grulf of Mexico. All the streams descending from the enveloping Sierras (other than the Alamos) converge into it their tributary waters. On the west come in successively the Pintada, the Rio del Gata, the Rio de la Gara, the Conejos, the San Antonio and Piedra. These streams, six or eight miles asunder, parallel, equidistant, fed by the snows of the Sierra Mimbres, have abundant waters, very fertile areas of land, and are all of the very highest order of beauty. Advancing again from the Rincon, at the eastern edge of the plain along the base of the Cordillera, the prodigious conical inass of the Sierra Blanca protrudes like a vast hemisphere into the plain and blocks the vision to the direct south. The road describes the arc of a semicircle around its base for thirty miles and reaches Fort Grarland. In the immediate vicinity of Fort Garland, the three large streams, the Yuta, the Sangre de Cristo, and the Trinchera, descend from the Cor- dillera, converge, unite a few miles west, and, blending themselves in the Trinchera, flow west twenty-four miles into the Rio del Norte. 80 THE SYSTEM OF THE PAR OS. The line of the snowy Cordillera, hidden behind the bulk of the Sierra Blanca, here again reveals itself pursuing its regular southeast course and direction. Fourteen miles south is reached the town of San Zniis, upon the Culehra River ; seventeen miles farther is the town of Costilla, upon Costilla River. Fifteen miles farther the town of Rito Colorado is reached : eighteen miles farther onward the xlrroyo Hondo (between these is the San Cristoval) ; from the Arroyo Hondo to Taos is fourteen miles ; twenty miles beyond Taos is the mountain chain whose circle towards the west forms the southern mountain barrier which encloses the San Luis Pare in that direction. The San Luis Pare is then an immense elliptical bowl, the bed of a primeval sea which has been drained : its bottom, smooth as a water sur- face, and concave, is 9400 square miles in area. It is watered by thirty- Jive mountain streams, which, descending from the encircling crest of snow, converge nineteen into the San Luis Lake, the rest into the Rio del Norte. An extraordinary symmetry of configniration is its prominent feature. The scenery, everywhere sublime, has the ever-changing variety of the kaleidoscope. Entirely around the edge of the plain, and closing the junction of the plain with the mountain's foot, runs a smooth glacis, exactly resembling the sea-beach which accompanies the conjunction of the land with the ocean. From this heach rise continuously, all around the horizon, the great mountains, elevating their heads above the line of perpetual snow. On the eastern side the escarpment of the Cordillera rises rapidly, and is abrupt ; on the tcestern side the crest of the Sierra Mimhres is more re- mote, having the interval filled with ridges, lessening in altitude as they descend to the plain of the pare. This continuous shelving flank of the Sierras, completing a perfect amphitheatre, has a superficial area equal to that of the level plain which ii envelopes, and gives to the whole enclosure within the encircling band of snow an area of 18,000 square miles. At an elevation of five or six thousand feet above the plain, a level line upon the mountain wall marks the cessation of arborescence, above which naked granite and snow alone are seen. To one who ascends to this elevation at any point, the whole interior of this prodigious amphitheatre, displaying an elliptical area of 11,520,000 acres, is scanned by the eye and swept in at a single glance. Aided by a glass, the smallest objects scattered over the immense elliptical area beneath are discernible through the limpid, brilliant, and translucent atmosphere. THE SYSTEM OF THE PARCS. 81 Two facts impress themselves upon the senses : the perfect symmetry of configuration in nature, and the intense variety in the form and splen- dor of the landscape. The colors of the sky and atmosphere are intensely vivid and gorgeous ; the dissolving tints of light and shade are forever interchanging ; they are as infinite as are the altering angles of the solar rays in his diurnal circuit. The average elevation of the plain above the sea-level is G400 feet. The highest peaks have an altitude of 16,000 feet above the sea. In the serrated rim of the pare, as seen from the plain, projected against the canopy, are discernible seventeen peaks, at very equal distances from one another. Each one differs from all the rest in some peculiarity of shape and position. Each one identifies itself by some striking beauty. From the snows of each one descends some considerable river, as well within the pare, as outward down the external mountain back. We recognize, therefore, in the San Luis Pare an immense elliptica} basin, enveloping the sources of the Eio Bravo del Norte. It is isolated in the heart of the continent, 1200 miles from any sea. It is mortised, as it were, in the midst of the vast mountain bulk, where, rising gradu- ally from the oceans, the highest altitude and amplitude of the continent is attained. This pare spreads its plain from .30° to 38° 30', and is bisected by the 106th meridian. Its greatest length is 210 miles; its greatest width is 100 miles ; its aggregate approximate area is 18,000 square miles. Such being the geogrcq->ln'cal position, altitude, and peculiar unique con- figuration, these features suggest the in((uiry into parallel peculiarities of ineteorology ^ geology^ jyhyi^^cal structure, agriculture, mineralogy, and the economy of labor. The American people have heretofore developed tbeir social system exclu- sively on the borders of the two oceans, and within the maritime valleys of moderate altitude, having navigation and an atmosphere influenced by the sea. To them, then, the contrast is complete in every feature, in these high and remote altitudes, beyond all influence of the ocean, and specially continental. There is an identity between the " Valley or Pare of the City of Mexico" and the San Luis Pare which ought to be here mentioned. They are similar twin basins of the great Plateau, classifying together in the physical structure of the continent. Mexico is in latitude 20°, longitude 99°, and has an altitude of 7500 feet. The width of the continent is here 575 miles from ocean to ocean, and the divergence of the Cordilleras is 275 miles, which here is the width of the Plateau. 6 82 THE SYSTEM OF THE PARCS. At tlie 39tli degree, the continent expands to a width of 3500 miles between the oceans ; the Cordilleras have diverged 1200 miles asunder, and the Plateau has widened to the same dimensions. In harmony with the great expansion of the continent are all the details of its interior structure. The " Pare of the City of Mexico'^ is but one-tenth in size and gran- deur as compared and contrasted with the San Luis Pare. It has an area, including the water surface of five lakes, of 1,278,'720 acres. Of identical anatomy, the former is a pigmy ; the latter a giant. The similitude as com- ponent parts of the mountain anatomy is in all respects absolute, as is also true of the other pares, which occupy longitudinally the centre of the State of Colorado. In METEOROLOGY the atmos2iheric condition of the San Luis pare, like its scenery, is one of constant brilliancy, both by day and night ; obey- ing steady laws, yet alternating with a playful methodical fickleness. There are no prolonged vernal or autumnal seasons. Summer and win- ter divide the year. Both are characterized by mildness of temperature. After the a?(^im?na? equinox, the snows begin to accumulate on the moun- tains. After the vernal equinox they dissolve. The formation of light clouds upon the crest of the Sierras is incessant. The meridian sun retains its vitalizing heat around the year; at mid- night prevails a corresponding tonic coolness. The clouds are wafted away by steady atmosjiheric currents coming from the west. They rarely inter- rupt the sunshine, but, refracting his rays, imbue the canopy with a shining silver light, at once intense and brilliant. The atmosphere and climate are essentially continental^ being uninterruptedly salubrious, brilliant, and tonic. The flanks of the great mountains, bathed by the embrace of these irri- gating clouds, are clad with great forests of pine, fir, spruce, hemlock, aspen, oak, cedar, piiion, and a variety of smaller fruit-trees and shrubs, which j^rotect the sources of the springs and rivulets. Among the forests, alternate mountain meadows of luxuriant and nutritious gTass. The ascending clouds, rarely condensed, furnish little irrigation at the depressed elevation of the plains, which are destitute of timber but clothed in grass. These delicate grasses, growing rapidly during the annual melting of the snows, cure into hay as the aridity of the atmosphere returns. They form perennial pastures, and supply the winter food of the aboriginal cattle, everywhere indigenous and abun- dant. An infinite variety in temper and temperature is suggested as flowing from the juxtaposition of extreme altitudes and depressions ; permanent THE SYSTEM OF THE PAIiCS. 83 snows, running rivers, and tlie concentric courses of the mountains and rivers. Nature is benignant and graceful throughout her whole plan, and is propitious in the working of all her laws and in every element. The longituduial Sierras receive and absorb the glory of the morning and of the evening sun upon their flanks, the noontide beams upon their summits ; they cast no chilling shadow. Within the bowl of the pare, the heat of the shining sun accumulates ; when the sun has set, this heated atmosphere ascends ; simulttineously the colder atmosphere descends from the engirdling rim of snow. These atmospheres permeate broadcast the one the other, through and through ; each one tempers the other by this play of natural transition. The snows of the altitudes are constantly attacked and their excessive accumulation defeated : no glaciers form to enclose the rocks and vegeta- tion, as in a perpetual tomb. The heat of the concave plain is in a like manner temjDered to a genial standard ; irrigation and the streams are con- stantly maintained ; vegetation constantly and as uniformly nurtured to maturity. Storms of rain and wind are neither frequent nor lasting. The air is uniformly dry, having a racy freshness and an exhilarating taste. A soothing serenity is the prevailing impression upon those who live perpet- ually exposed to the seasons. Mud is never anywhere or at any time seen. Moderation and concord appear to result from the presence and con- tact of elements so various. The critical conclusions to which a rigid study of nature brings the scrutinizing mind are the reverse of first impressions. The multitudinous variety of nature adjusts itself with a delicate harmony which brings into healthy action the industrial energies. There is no use for the practice of professional pharmacy. Chronic health and longevity characterize animal life. The envelope of cloud- compelling peaks : the seclusion from the oceans : the rarity of the air inhaled, and the absence of humidity : disinfect the earth, the water, and the atmosphere of exhalations and miasmas. Health, sound and uninter- rupted, stimulates and sustains a high state of mental and physical energy. All of these are burnished, as it were, by the perpetual brilliancy and salubrity of the atmosphere and landscape ; whose unfailing beauty and tonic taste stimulate and invite the physical and mental energies to per- petual activity. As to its GEOLOGY and minerals, the San Luis Pare is in the highest degree interesting and remarkable. It is found to contain, intermingled and in order, a complete epitome of all the elements of which geological science and research take note. Its intramural locality between the pri- 84 THE SYSTEM OF THE PAECS. meval crests of the Cordillera, on the east, and the Sien*a Mimbres (here called the " San Jiiaii"'), on the tcesf, multiplies this variety indef- initely. Those lyrimary Sierras, separated by the pare, face one another in full sight, as they rear their flanks from the opposite edges of the concuA^e plain. The successive periods and stupendous forces which have expended themselves to produce what is in sight, and then subsided to an eternal rest, each particularly manifests itself. The conib of the Sierra presents the prodigious plates of primeval porphyry driven up, as the subsoil of a furrow, from the lowest ten-estrial crust and protruding their vertical edges toward the sky. The summit, yielding to the corroding forces, pi'esents a wedge toward the canopy ; is arranged in peaks resembling the teeth of a saw, is above all arborescence, and is either clad in perpetual snow, or is bald rock. Against this is lapped perpendicularly the second stratum, less by many thousand feet in altitude, its top forming a hinn or bench. This hcncli being the rended edge of the erupted stratum, softer than the first and receiving the debris from above, has a deep, fertile soil, a luxuriant alpine vegetation, forests of lir and aspen, and is the higlicst xc^xow of arborescence and vegetable growth. This is the region of rocks, where the metals, especialli/ gold and silver, abound in crevices charged and infused with the richest ores. It is from hence that the gold of the gulches is disintegrated and descends. Here are springs of water and the sources of rivers. The timber is excellent and the pastures of various grasses luxuriant and inexhaustible. Swept by ascending currents of vapor, irrig-ation is constant. This elevated bench is a permanent characteristic of the mountain flank, continuous as the continent itself ; a colossal staircase, whose stops are themselves of moiintain magnitude. It is here, at these surfices of contact of the erupted plates of the lowest terrestrial crust, that the thread of the "^(/oA? Ac/^"' is revealed and found. From this thread, as from a core outward, the precious metals taper in quantity and become diluted in the immensity of the rocks, as a hill of rock salt disappears to the eye, dissolved in the immensity of the ocean. The top of this continuous bench is luidulating, broad, and occasionally crossed by transverse ridges and the chasms of water-courses descending from above. The front flank of this bench forms the stupendous escarp- ment of the mountains, everywhere lofty and precipitous. It is cut through by innumerable streams, up whose gorges access to the upper regions is attained, and the internal contents, the intestines, as it were, of the rocks are revealed to siiiht ;ind seai'ch. rilE SYSTEM OF THE PARCS. 85 Forming the petlinieut of this stupemlou.s iiiural escurpnient is the second hinn or bench (being tlie lowest^ in tlie general nionntain descent. Here the upproiiching elevation of the plain: the increase in size oi' the streams : the accumulating debris from above, and the increased atmos- pheric abrasion : all unite to obliterate the angularity of the rocks, and impair the striking distinctness of formation. Forests of pine and deciduous trees prevail. The flora and vegetation is abundant and various. The atmospheric irrigation becomes uncertain, and the rocks are covered with soil or the I'ragments of their own super- ficial destruction. Immediately following is the broad space occupied by the fusion of the mountain base and the plain gently ascending to meet it. Here is a })rofile infinitely indented and broken ; alternately the slop- ing ridges protrude their ribs into the plain, and the plain advances its valleys between them, to receive the streams. This is the region of the placers, where is checked in its descent and lodged beneath the alluvial soil the free gold washed down by torrents from the overhanging sumnuts. This sketcii of the /ior/ua^ structure and configuration of the Cordillera is illustrated by a checkered list of details in its minute (ilemcnts. The priraeval I'ocks, heated to incandescence, rest in their vertical positions un- altered from their original form ; they have been roasted but not liquefied. Original strata of limestone and gypsum, uplifted on high but not de- stroyed, rest upon the summits as a torn hat. Gypsum, limestone, slates, clays, shale, earths, and salts are thus found near the highest summits. The decay of the secondary rocks gives extraordinary fertility to the mountain flanks, and to the alluvial bottoms below. Hence the luxuriance of the arborescence, the pastures, and the flora. The altitude of the summits gathers and retains the snows, whose gla- (•iers give birth to innumerable rivers. These gash the precipitous flanks with chasms, up which roads ascend. 'I'he composition of the rocks is here revealed ; the mysteries of their interior contents are unravelled, and the secretions of nature subjected to the human eye and hand. Thus, then, erects itself the inimevdl Cordillera, constructed of hori- zontal plates, vertically thrown up by stupendous volcanic forces, j)artially altered and roasted by incandescent heat, but neither destroyed nor recast in form. The secondary rocks are tossed and scattered high in the upper regions, but are not calcined )>y flame. The metallic ores are as various as the variety of the rocks, cnriclied by heat and exposed by upheaval and corrosion. No lava, no pumice, no obsidian, nothing of melted matter from the Plutonic region is seen. This furrowing of the terrestrial crust has alone occupied and exhausted the stupendous volcanic throes of the subterranean world of fire. 86 THE SYSTEM OF TEE PAECS. The Sierra Mimbres, forming the western envelope of the Pare, is not dissimilar to the Cordillera in its oiigin, composition, and configura- tion. Rising from the level of the great Plateau, it is of inferior bulk and rank. It forms the backbone from whose contrasted flanks descend the waters of the Rio del Norte, on the east^ and the Rio Colorado, on the icest. Craters of extinct volcanoes are numerous ; streams of lava, once liquid, abound ; pedrigals of semi-crystalline basalt submerge and cover the val- ley into which they have flowed, and over which they have hardened. This Sierra, then, has a general direction from north to south, corre- sponding with the 109th meridian. It has all the characteristics in ?jwjua- ture of the Cordillera, but is checkered and interrupted by the escape of subterranean fires, having areas overflowed and buried beneath the erupted current. Where the nascent springs of the Rio del Norte have their birth, the Sierra IMimbres culminates to stupendous peaks of perennial snow, locally named Sierra San Juan. The concave plain of the San Luis Pare, begirt by this elliptical zone of the Sierras, thus capped with a ragged fringe of snow projected upward against the canopy, is the receptacle of their converging waters. It is a bowl of vast amplitude. It has for countless ages received and kept the sedi- mentary settlings of so prodigious a circuit of the Sierras. It is builded up with every variety of form, structure, and geological elements elsewhere found to enter into the architecture of nature. Hither descend the currents of water, of the atmosphere, of lava. The rocks rent from the naked pinnacles, tortured by the intense vicissitudes which assail them ; the fragments rolled by the perpetual pressure of gravity upon the descending slopes ; the sands and soils from the founda- tions of rocks and clays of every gradation of hardness ; the humus of expired forests and annual vegetation ; elements carbonized by transient fires ; organic decay ; all these elements descend, intermingle, and accu- mulate. This concave plain is, then, a bowl filled with sedimentary drift, covered with soil, and varnished over, as it were, with vegetation. The northern department of Rincon, closely embraced by the Sierras, and occupied by the San Luis Lake, is a vast savanna deposited from the filtration of the waters, highly impregnated with the mountain debris. Beneath this soil is a continuous pavement of peat, which maintains the saturation of the super-soil, and is admirable for fuel. The middle region of the plain, longitudinally, displays a crater of the most perfect form. The interior pit has a diameter of twenty miles, from the centre of which is seen the circumferent wall forming an exact circle, THE SYSTEM OF THE PARCS. 87 and ill lieiglit five hundred feet. This wull is a barranca, composed of lava, pumice, calcined lime, metamorphosed sandstone, vitrified rocks, and obsidian. This circumferent barranca is perforated through by the entrance and departure of the Rio del Norte, the Culebra, and the Costilla Rivers, which traverse the northern, western, and southern edges of the interior. By this and other forces of corrosion this barranca is on three sides cut into isolated hills, called cerritos, of every fantastic form and of extraor- dinary beauty of shape and tints. The bottom of the crater has been filled up with the soils resulting from the decay of this variety of matei-ial, introduced by the currents of the water and of the atmosphere. It is bevelled by these forces to a pei'fect level ; is of the fattest fertility, and drained through the porous formation- which underlies it. From this crater to its southern rim, a distance of sixty-five miles, the Pare expands over a prodigious pedrigal, formed from it in the jjeriod of volcanic activity. This pedrigal retains its level, and is perforated by the Rio del Norte, whose longitudinal course is confined in a i:)rofound chasm or caiion of perpendicular walls of lava, increasing to the depth of 1200 feet, where it debouches from the jaws of this gigantic flood of lava, near the village of La Joya, in New Mexico. Such are the extraordinary forms and stupendous dimensions with which nature here salutes the eye and astonishes the imagination. The ex- pansion of the lava is all to the south, following the descent toward the sea. Toward the north, repelled by the ascent, are waves demonstrating the defeated efibrt to climb the mountain base. Such is an imperfect sketch of this wonderful amplutheatre of the Sier- ras. Its jihysical structure, infinitely complex, exhibiting all the elements of nature piled in contact, yet set together in order and arranged in har- mony ; its cloud-compelling Sierras, of stern primeval matter and pro- portions ; its concave basin of fat fertility ; its atmosphere of dazzling brilliancy, tonic temperature, and gorgeous tints ; its arable and pastoral excellence, grand forests, and multitude of streams ; its infinite variety of mines and minerals, embracing the whole catalogue of metals, rocks, clays, salts, and fuel ; its capacity to produce grain, flax, wool, hides, vegetables, fruits, meat, poultry, and dairy food ; the compact economy of arrange- ment which blends and interfuses all these varieties ; these combine to pro- voke, stimulate, and reward the taste for physical and mental labor. Entrance and exit over the rim of the pare is everywhere made easy by convenient passes. Roads re-enter upon it from all points of the com- pass and every portion of the surrounding continent. These are not ob- structed at any season. 88 THE SYSTEM OF THE PARCS. On the north is the Puncho Pass, leading to the Upper xirkansas River, and into the South Pare. On the east^ the Moscha and Sangre de Cristo Passes debouch immediately upon the Great Plains. On the soutlt, is the channel of the Rio del Norte. On the tcest^ easy roads diverge to the rivers Chamas, San Juan, and toward Arizona. In the northwest the Cocha-to-pee opens to the Great Salt Lake and the Pacific. Convenient thoroughfares and excellent roads converge from all points, and diverge with the same facility. The system of the four pares, extending to the north, indefinitely ampli- fies and repeats all that characterizes the San Luis Pare. Smaller in size and less illustrated by variety, each one of the three by itself lingers be- hind the San Luis, but is an equal ornament in the same family. Their graceful forms, their happy harmony of contact and position, make their aggregated attractions the fascinating charm and glory of the American continent. The abundance and variety of hot springs, of every modulation of tem- perature, is very great. These are also equalled by waters of medicinal virtues. It has been the paradise of the ahoriginal stock, elsewhere so abundant and various. Fish, water-fowl, and birds of game and song and brilliant plumage frequent the streams and groves. Animal life is infi- nite in quantity and abundantly various. The Atmospheric currents, which sweep away every exhalation and all traces of malaria and miasma, have an undeviating rotation. These currents are necessarily vertical in direction and equable in force, alter- nating smoothly as land and sea currents of the tropical islands of the ocean. The silence and serenity of the atmosphere are not ruffled ; the changing temperature alone indicates the motion of nature. All around the eZfop^tcaZ circumference of the plain, following, as it were, its shore, and bending with the indented base of the mountains, is an un- interrupted road of unparalleled excellence. This circuit is five hundred miles in length, and is graced with a land-scape of uninterrupted grandeur, variety, and beauty. On the one hand the mountains, on the other hand the concave plain diversified with groves of alamos and volcanic cerritos. At short inter- vals of five or ten miles asunder, are crossed the swift running currents and fertile meadows of the converging mountain streams. ITot springs mingle their w^arm water with all these streams, which swarm with delicate fish and water-fowl. The works of the beaver and otter are everywhere encountered, and water-power for machinery is of singularly universal distribution. Agri- cidture classifies itself mto pastoral and arable; the former subsisting on THE SYSTEM OF THE PA ECS. f9 the perennial grasses ; the hitter upon irrigation everywhere attained uy the streams and artificial azcijuias. This concave configuration and symmetry of structure is remarkably propitious to economy of labor and production, favored by the juxtaposi- tion and variety of material, by the short and easy transport, and by the benignant atmosphere. The supreme excellence of position, structure, and productions thus grouped within the system of the Parcs op Colorado, occupying the heart of the continental home of the American people, is conclusively dis- cernible. Here is the focus of the mountains, of the great rivers, and of the metals of the continent. The great rivers have Jicre their extreme sources, w^hich interlock and form innumerable and convenient })a8ses from sea to sea. From these they descend smoothly to both oceans by continuous gradations. The i)arcs occupy the fortieth degree, and offer the facilities for a lodgment in force, at the highest altitude. Here the sujireme divide of the continent exists, half-way between the trough of the Mississijipi and the Pacific shore. Being immediately approachable over the Great Plains, their mines of precious metals are the nearest in the world to the social masses of the American people and to their great commercial cities. Their accessibility is perfect. All the elements of a perfect economy, food, health, geographical posi- tion, innumerable mines of the richest ores and every variety, erect, assist, and fortify one another. Within and around this pare, so grand in dimen- sions and harmonious in structure and locality, is preparing itself the mining laboratory of the world. The rare economy in architecture, climate, inter-oceanic convenience, prolific food, miscellaneous niateiials and metals, constitute and locate here the paragon indeed of all geographical positions. The San Luis Pare has ticenty-four thoiDiand population. These people are of the Mexican- American race. Since the conquest of Cortez, a.d. 1520, the Mexican people have acquired and adopted the language, and in modified forms, the political and social systems of their European rulers. A taste for seclusion has ahvays characterized the ahorighial masses, height- ened by the geographical configuration of their peculiar territory. Upon the Plateau, elevated 7000 feet above the oceans, and encased within an uninterrupted barrier of snow, reside 9,000,000 of homogeneous people. An instinctive terror of the ocean, of the torrid heats and mala- rious atmosphere of the narrow coast on either sea, perpetually haunts the natives of the Plateau. To them navigation is unknown, and maritime life is abhorrent. The 90 THE SYSTEM OF THE PAR OS. industrial energies of the people, always active and elastic, and always recoiling from tlie sea, have expanded to the north, following the longi- tudinal direction of the great rivers. This column of "progress advances from south to north ; it ascends the Rio Bravo del Norte ; it has reached and permanently occupies the southern half of the San Luis Pare. At the same moment the column of the American people, advancing in force across the middle belt of the continent, from east to tcest, is solidly lodged upon the eastern flank of the Cordillera, and is everywhere enter- ing the pares through its passes. These two American populations, all of the Christian faith, here meet front to front, harmojiize, intermarry, and reinvigorate the blended mass with the peculiar domestic accomplishments of each other. The Nexican contributes his primitive skill, inherited for centuries M'ithout change, in the manipulations of pastoral and mi'm^y industry, and in the tillage of the soil by artificial irrigation. The American adds to these machinery and the intelligence of expansive progi-ess. The grafted stock has the sap of both. As the coming continental railways hasten to bind together our people isolated on the seas, A longitudinal railway of 2000 miles will unite with these in their middle course, bisecting the Territory, States, and cities of 10,000,000 of affiliated people. This will fuse aud harmonize the iso- lated populations of our continent into one people, in all the relations of commerce, affinity, and concord. NO in II 'Icliiu-.ilnio llu- ISOTIIKKMAL ZODIAC niE ISO rilKIHL lA . LV/.V oi IXTKXSir^ mill its rxpiiiisuins lip niiil ilown lilt- ed IM.ATKAr ^ I CHAPTER IX. THERMAL AMERICA. To the American who nssemhles tvithiii his mental glance every detail of our entire country, from a position correctly selected and rightly under- stood, a vision of unparalleled splendor is unveiled. There is revealed to him a nascent supremacy over all things that are passed, an ascendency to which futurity can evolve no hopeful rival. It is here that the pre-eminently divine gifts, vouchsafed to the Ameri- can People by God through Nature, speak out and enforce from every heart a pious prayer of thanksgiving. Here are united, in special magnitude, a variety of new powers and fresh forces. All of these combine to dictate, and are auspicious to, the struc- ture of a political society^ of vast dimensions, upon the highest level attainable by energetic intelligence, — order and mental culture. Eminent among these gifts is Thermal Science. If a navigator, in the mid-ocean and beneath the equator, shall ascend vertically into the atmosphere, as in a balloon, he will experience a fall of one degree of annual mea)i heat, as evidenced by the thermometer, at the altitude of 259 feet. At or about an altitude of 20,000 feet, he will find the temperature of pei'petual zero, where animal life and vegetation cease. If he shall then Aveigh anchor and sail along a meridian line to the north pole, it will be necessary to traverse a full degree of latitude, 69^ miles, to experience along the sea-surface the same reduction of heat as has been encountered at 259 feet of t'erticaZ altitude. We Avill learn from these facts the special combinations of climatic ■ changes peculiar to and peculiarly favorable to North America. One who travels by a meridian line along the concave of the great cal- careous plain, from Cuba to the Arctic Sea, crosses in regular succession the sugar belt, the cotton belt, the belt of Indian corn, hemp, tobacco, cattle, and swine, the wheat belt, oats, rye, roots, the grasses, and barley. At length, the perpetual Arctic frosts stop all vegetation, all culture, and consequently all habitation. Such are the palpable changes ascribable to 91 92 THERMAL AMERICA. latitude, ■upon the continental area of small altitude above tlie sea, and within the maritime climates. If the same traveller, facing to the left at the 40th degree of latitude, adhering to this line, climbs the gradual ascent of the Great Plains, sur- mounts the Snowy Northern Andes, and reaches the Pacific Ocean, he encounters a similar succession of belts of vegetation and animal life, greatly compressed in arrangement, and ascribable to increasing vertical altitude. Thermal Science, assisted by its handmaid meteorology, explains for us the atmospheres which successively envelop the globe of the earth outside, handles them, and fixes them without obscurity. The globe is closely enveloped by a shell of water, as the pulp of an orange by its rind, through which the continents and islands elevate and protrude themselves. This is the aqueous atmosphere. Visible to the eye, dense and viscid, the kange of its elasticity is measured by the sur- face undulations, by the disturbances caused by winds and cyclones, and by the rise and fall of the tides against its shores. Enveloping this, and external to it, is the aerial atmosphere. This is invisible to the eye, and highly elastic. Into it ascend the vapors ex- haled from the surface of the sea and the laud. These vapors, variously condensed, float through this atmosphere in the form of clouds, and thus reveal themselves to vision. At an altitude of 4000 feet this aerial atmosphere terminates, being as the second rind of an orange enveloping and external to the first. It ceases here as absolutely as does the aqueous atmosphere under our feet. External to the aerial, and similarly enveloping it, is the ethereal atmosphere. This has the position and similitude of a third rind to an orange. Here the region of space is approached, where animal life, vege- tation, and clouds cease to exist. Physical geography defines those portions of the earth's surface within the aericd atmosphere, to possess a maritime climate ; those portions within the ethereal atmosphere to possess a continental climate. It is in the neighborhood of the 102d meridian, the eastern boundary of Colorado, where the altitude of 4000 feet is attained and the region of the continental climate is approached and entered. It is clear, then, that the whole prodigious system of the North American Andes is within the ethereal atmosphere, and in the region of the continental climate. Upon the region of the piedmont which extends eastward from the abrupt base of the Cordilleras, are discernible counterpart phenomena as occur upon the shores of the oceans and illustrated by their tides. The highly elastic aerial atmosphere is sometimes, by external pressure, THEIIMAL AMERICA. 93 flooded up to the very base of the Cordillera. This causes the concave surface of the ethereal atmosphere, also highly elastic, to ascend. Alter- nately, the aerial atmosphere ebbs back to its normal level. Thus is experienced, within this margin, embracing the conjunction of these two atmospheres, an alternate play, as in depressed lands which are overflowed and then left dry by the tides of the sea. We have seen that the North American Andes are longitudinal in their direction, receiving favorably the heating power of the sun on all their flanks and every summit. The outflanking Cordilleras exalt their su- preme heads above the line of perpetual frost. They winnow from the air all the vapors of the 7«ariVt»ic world, and totally exclude their entrance within, on to the Plateau. Carbonic acid, hydrogen, nitrogen, are left below. Pungent, tonic, health- and life-bestowing oxygen remains to possess unadulterated and supreme dominion. These favorable modifications of the thermal laws, acting locall//, but over a stupendous area, give and combine warmth, dryness, a diminution of atmospheric pressure, a sun never clouded, serenity, and profuse arbo- rescencc and vegetation. These influences are expanded up and down the protected Plateau : they overleap the narrow limits which elsewhere restrict ihn isothermal zodiac: they push the favorable conditions of the isothermal AXIS, to the north and to the south, i\p and down the Plateau, in both directions, to its ex- tren)e limits. A sublime architecture acts through the vision. It exalts the heart and refines the taste of man. Nature is graceful, winning, and uninter- ruptedly friendly in every feature. Now the vertical thermal belts, side by side with the horizontal belts, compressed as a rainbow, are joined, and the two thermal scales blend their areas. They expand from one another, augmenting manifold the auspicious thermal varieties. The stupendous mountain mass is elevated above the maritime and into the ethereal atmosphere. The battlements and summits present con- secutively every front to the morning, to the meridian, and to the de- scending sun. The fire of the sun perpetually pours down his heat through the pungent air and unclouded canopy. This warmth condenses and exerts a favorable power round the year. The area of most auspicious isothermal warmth is here expanded to the most immense dimensions and comprehensive variety. The surface is most favorably undulating. It is burnished with dissolving colors of the richest hues, and checkered with bewitching scenery. The latitude is most favorable. The longitude is equally so. From this centre all the grand rivers radiate and descend uninterruptedly to all / 94 THERMAL AMERICA. the circumfluent oceans, everywhere concealed from sight beyond the encircling horizon. All inhahitahle altitudes succeed one another. They are gracefully blended and conibined, as are the streaks of the rainbow. They imme- diately touch and rest upon one another. All altitudes are equally open for individual election. This sj)lendid structure and these prolific gifts are prophetic of a so- ciety .inspired by mental energies of the highest standard and reinforced with impregnable power. Here is discernible a trenchant contrast and deficiency in architectural economy. The European basins of the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Pontic and Propontic have their calcareous bottoms buried, as in a tomb, beneath a sterile salt expanse. The intervening and rugged moun- tain lands only are left dry and inhabitable. This latitudinal expanse of sea, prolonged from Gibraltar to the Caucasus, incorrigibly isolated Europe from tropical Africa. This latter and neighboring continent has remained thus cut off, unused and undeveloped. The people of the nortliern shore circumnavigate the globe to bring their groceries from the Oriental and Western Indies. The thermal latos have here operated since the birth of time with un- relenting hostility, and superadded their blasting power to the unfriendly anatomy of the land and water. In America, the prolonged Plateau surrounds .and envelops the Mex- ican and Caribbean Seas. It carries the isothermal warmth and railways into the very nest of tropical productions. Thus the widest extremes are propitiously combined in a single neighborhood and united in one domestic home. A special feature of this vast expanse within the continental climate is 'pastoral agriculture. Here the dryness and the unfailing sunshine curl the grasses into hay upon the ground where they grow. Preserved thus from decay, they furnish lointer food, dispensing with the labor of harvest. For arable culture, which has the highest grade of excellence and the widest range in quality, variety, and quantity, a corresponding economy is discernible in the universal necessity and use of artificial irrigation. The waters, coming from the snows, descend from above. Labor is not har- assed by mud or by the hostile interruptions incidental to a fickle canopy. The sloping surfaces of land and water are neighborly and friendly to each other: this relation is continuous from the highest altitude to the seas. All civilized populations have been intensely sensitive to climatic power, and instinctively oblique from excessive heat, cold, and damp. The latitudinal backbone which bisects the Asiatic-European continent THERMAL AMERICA. 95 from east to iced receives the heating power of the &un, and all of it, upon its southern slope alone. The northern slope, assigned to perpetual shade, receives as perpetu- ally, without mitigation, the hyperborean rigor. The animating sun-heat, which is concentrated and condensed without the concave amphitheatre of North America, is here scattered and dissipated by a hostile convex roof. The omnipotent power of the benignant thermal forces is here universally negative, chilling, and hostile. The mental forces and speculations of the antique loorld have been ex- clusively restricted to the contemplation o^ ingniy states. The anarchy of force has uniformly accompanied a convex geography of incoherent frag- ments. A sour, saturated soil ; a dismal atmosphere exclusively maritime ; a febrile thermal condition ; monotony : all these have incubated over society universally and with unrelieved perpetuity. Society, dwarfed by the absence of any generous inspirations, has been sluggish and vegetated without elasticity. Political and .social science have found it impossible to have birth. To the American, experiences sought for and derived from the antique icorld are deceptive, sombre, and discouraging. War, monarchy, and sub- missive multitudes only are seen. Civil liherty has never permanently established itself. Societies have gTown to be polished and enervated without emerging from semi-savage barbarism. There is discernible in the temper of the generation of our statesmen who are now passed away, and who have seen our country saddened by civil strife, an idolatrous adulation of Europe; a proclivity to view with trepida- tion and to dwarf the aspiring genius and elastic energies of the pioneer people. To bridle the continental mission of the North American people and curb it to the sway and dimensions of the Atlantic shore., to restrict it to this geographical selvage^ has not ceased to be a cherished policy with them. The grand North American Andes, and the noio to vs domestic Pacific Ocean, have received only fiiint appreciation and acknowledgment ; post- poned in development from insufficient and stingy legislation or by un- fricjidhj silence. Thermal Science, coming to be rightly understood and to be ac- cepted, offers itself to correct the general judgment and to rectify and re- inforce the conquering forces of sound progress. The grand pioneer army., having solidly established its lodgments around the whole encii-cling rim of oxir national territory, gathers its columns faces inwards, assumes a concentric movement, departs from the seas and from river-lines to con- verge on the centre. These columns unite by their flanks. They per- 96 THERMAL AMERICA. petually increase in numbei'3, pressure, and activity. The instinct of gravitation, enlightened by THERMAL SCIENCE, gains velocity, steadi- ness, and victory without tumult. The traces of geographical anarch^/ abate rapidly. They are about finally to be extinguished forever, by the ripening movement which will soon re-annex to us the area of the IMcxican Republic, on the one flank ; the whole area of the Canadas, on the other flank. All that is necessary for this achievement, long in preparation, ap- proaches its aceomplishniont. To fold to txs these domestic wings', too long stretched out and segregated from us, will fill out to the ocean bounds, and occupy through all its solid dimensions, as well the stupendous architecture of our country as the perfectly graceful anatomy of its compact expanse. It is the discovery of inexhaustible precious metals within a propitious thermal zone that gives perpetual success to the GtOLD Fever. This defines itself as " the indefinite supply of sonnd money for the people, by their own individual and voluntary labor." This is the discovery of the profound want and necessity of human society. It is the final and exhausting solution of the heretofore enigmatical question, " What is the function and what is the power of finance in hiiman organized socie- ties ?" The FINANCIAL PROBLEM, essential to the healthy growth of every other problem in the scheme of civilization, is revealed, identified, and solved. The land, area of the Territory of Colorado is 75, C 00,000 of acres. To reduce this area to use and private possession requires $100,000,000 to be paid by the people to the Federal government. This immense sum is wrung from the meritorious and self-sacrificing labor of the pioneers — it is all carried forth and disbursed elsewhere. This is a cjahel tax ; uncon- stitutional, accumulative over all other taxes, crippling, and atrocious. If this sum may be retained among those who pay it, the gain will be to them $200,000,000. It may be retained to reinforce and enhance the creative power of the pioneer army. If the State of Colorado, and other similar Territories, be sanctioned and self-government established, this may with ease be achieved. Let the system of laud surveys and the price be untoxiched, hut the payments enter the State treasury. The disbursements shall be restricted to the constriiotion of a complete net-work of railways ; to universal and per- petual education ; and to fit the lands for the production of food, by canals of irrigation and drainage. Within the State^ integrity will be sternly enforced. These generous liuhlic benefits will be paid for and constructed by the people themselves. THERMAL AMERICA. 97 — They will be perpetually owned by, and used and guarded for and under the will and supervision of, the people. Thus universal railways come into existence. The lands are universally cultivated. TransjDortation and travel fuse nations and populations. Civilization and civic order and civic discipline, for all, becomes possi- ble and erects itself. It maintains universal authority and power. Lahor equitably rules itself and the political and financial rohher is permanently dethroned. This public policy will combine idle populations and idle lands, to mutually employ each other and to fire up the stagnant torpidity of both. It may be transplanted into Siberia and into all the continents and islands of the seas. Military organization^ essentially monarchical and which but partially embraces or employs a whole population, will go out of existence. Industrial organization, which employs all labor, uniformly and continually, will displace and supersede it. Behold, then, in the novel and auspicious thermal splendor of North America, united with its PHYSICAL CONFIGURATION and POSITION, the birth of neio and overwhelming powers and fresh forces ! The existence of these, or their combination, has heretofore been im- possible or unthought of in human experience. These fresh powers and forces suddenly unveil themselves, ferment and modify all societies and reverse their fronts. They dictate a cosmopolitan comity and assume an overwhelming sway. By the Land System, the idle lands throughout the world are meas- ured oflF in the small. They are made attainable for starving multitudes and oppressed laborers. An avarice for the possession and conversion of them to use in this form is Mndled throughout all populations. The Gold Fever is the indefinite production of sound money by the individxial and voluntary labor of the people. This is free money ; the multiplication of money caj^itals in the small, independent and individual in form, abundant in quantity, and prospectively indefinite. Grovernment credit, rightly understood, reduced to discipline and am- plified universally, becomes available to combine and utilize these popular elements. The California Gold Fever had its invention and birth in 1848. I<. has in a decade of years transplanted itself to Australasia and to Pike's Peak. It has permeated mankind as an electric fluid, to animate, to regenerate, to exalt humanity. It permanently fortifies progress with impregnable power and activity. Its inspiring democratic genius has, within a quarter of a century, 7 98 THERMAL AMERICA. covered the continents witt railways and witli telegraphs. It economizes navigation by its reduction to steam ferries upon the oceans and tele- graphic cables upon its profound bed. Immortal railways extend themselves, to become a universal system, over all the land of the globe ! The dwarfing power, the waste, the piratical temper, the monopoly of sea navigation is at an end. Its despotism and arrogance over the rural populations is absorbed and reversed. We have seen the energies of the American people, bringing into line and into use these new powers^ span their continent with the Pacific Railicay, as with the rapidity of lightning from a mountain cloud. Availing themselves of the favorable thermal warmth upon the Plateau, and upon the immediate sea-coasts, bathed by the Asiatic Gulf Stream (the Suro-Siwo), they will continue to expand their work to Behring's Straits, where all the continents are united. This will prolong itself along the similarly propitious thermal selvage of the Oriental Russian coasts, into China. To prolong this unbroken line of Cosmopolitan Railways along the latitudinal Plateau of Asia, to Moscow, to Berlin, to Paris, to Madrid, and to London, will not have long delay. The less significant and isolated continents of the Southern Hemi- sphere — South America, Africa, and Australasia — will be reached by feeders through Panama, Suez, and the chain of Oriental peninsulas and islands. The whole area and all the populations of the globe will be thus united and fused by land travel and by railways. Behold what a short quarter of a century in time has sufficed to originate and accomplish, in an age awakened and armed with the subtle democratic power of free and abundant gold ! What celerity of motion ! What vivacity of progress ! What victo- rious, what triumphant, what sublime energies ! What works of magni- tude ! How benignant to mankind ! How prophetic of the future ! How charitable to universal humanity ! CHAPTER X. POWER. Power is strength. " The practice of virtue and energy always in exercise'^ is oracular REPUBLICAN POWER. Original forces, strong, varied, and numerous, characterize the American continent and people. These forces, combined by an exact discipline, free from mutiny, and handled with ever-vigilant valor, rectitude, and wisdom, invest them with a supreme conquering ^o^(;er. On page 44 has been said : "2b command the gold and silver produc- tion of the xcorld, and to combine this with an intelligent policy, is to rnle the world. The present ability of the American people to do this will become manifest so soon as the geography of the North American Con- tinent shall become correctly understood by them, and its economical de- velopment be made a systematic policy. " A few standard facts in physical geography and geology being cur- rently grafted in to guide the popular mind, the ease with which the people of America will rise to the pinnacle of power and empire, and the necessity incumhent upon them to do so, become both simple and luminous of com- prehension." The American people have established for themselves (hy right and not by concession) universal mcde suflFrage, universal education, universal religion, universal labor, universal gold. They have also one universal language. '^ These stupendous forces of civilization hourly expand. They gain elasticity, co-operation, perpetuity. Peace and progress accompany them. The pioneer army of the people advances with miraculous celerity, order, and self-discipline. Incredible conquests are achieved. In number, two millions strong, self-governed, self-fed, self-armed, self-commanded, it plants empire in the wilderness by a system of colonization at once perfect and inscrutable. It moves with the steadiness, weight, and forward pressure of an ocean. One thousand each day, three hundred thousand annually, of the selected and able-bodied laborers of the external continents, land upon our coasts. These displace our own people, who perpetually move up to recruit and reinforce the pioneers. 99 100 POWER. The pioneer army is not deficient in any arm, or in any kind of equip- ment. The construction of railways accompanies and keeps up even witli its front. Each year witnesses the foundation of a new State ; eacli month beholds the location of a new city site. The work of organization and of building is commenced and proceeds undisturbed. Neither blunders, nor cessation of motion, nor tumult, arc ever seen. Society, in all its elements, corrects, transplants, and expands itself. It is neither broken asunder, nor detached. Its purity is reinvigorated and sustained ; its lands and atmosphere are fresh. Household ties and social and political bonds are enlarged, but remain undisturbed. All movements result in an intensely accumulating volume and con- solidated strength. The temper and discipline of action and of modera- tion are unruffled and unrclaxed. To the American who visits the British Isles for curiosity and obser- vation, an astonishing spectacle is revealed. He encounters, in severe disproportion, glittering wealth contrasted by appalling poverty and squalor. These small islands, begirt and isolated \)j the seas, contain tiuenty-tliree millions of people, confined like bees within a hive, and similarly in motion. Like bees, they depart from home, swarm over the world and bring back its Iwncy. To reach India and return, they four times cross the equatorial heats, twice double the Antarctic capes, and circumnavigate the globe. At this extreme distance, they hold under military and industrial j^'^onage tivo hundred millions of laboring people. To this is due their dictatorial control over the Oriental nations, over the Oriental labor and commerce, and over the resulting transportation upon all the oceans. Within the British Isles, the machine force, chiefly steam, is equal to the labor of six hundred millions of men, working ten hours each day, round the year! Neither meat, cereals, nor forage are consumed, but only fuel! Within the hoiyie area, this stupendous machine force is systematized and brought into co-opei'ation hj a net-work of railways; It is prolonged over all the oceans, and penetrates to every extremity of the land, by a marine of steam and sailing ships. It is thus explained why and how British POWER consumes the wealth, the liberties, and the labor of India ; why it has lately menaced the absorption of still more populous China. How activity is multiplied by machine force i^iaybethus illustrated: In 1832, the aggregate passengers PO WEE. 101 moved in the city of New York was 170,500. In 1872, the aggregate has been sixty-one millions. In Philadelphia, tliirty-seven millions ! But in the British Isles is an area of land restricted to pigmy dimen- sions ; insufficient bread ; no production of groceries ; no raw material of cotton ; no ores, except tin and iron ; exhausted fuel ; a population parar lyzcd by want ; unable to labor ; no room ; no elasticity ; no democratic vigor possible. Railways are incapable of extension beyond her shores. Sterile seas isolate her from all her colonies, and from what employs the labor of, and feeds, her home population. This prosperity and this power is artificial. It rests on a variety of foundations alarmingly fickle and perpetually shifting. It is maintained by exhausting waste of its own forces, especially human labor. Splendid as is the British Empire, America hastens to ascend over and to absorb it. It is the object of these pages to bring into relief and to gain recogni- tion for the facts and forces of our domestic America in geography, in society, and in politics. To inflame the popular taste for their apprecia- tion ; their unanimous use ; their exaltation. To make clear the magni- tude, the beauty, the grace, the fitness for perpetual unity and concord, of the sublime architecture, and of the perfect anatomy of our Continental Home! It is not invidious to glance the eye over the pigmy, states that checker Asia and Europe. Each one is stagnant, devoid of inherent elasticity, and denied any margin of expansion. Expatriation, or the slaughter of war, alone fans hope. To attain the level of polished barbarism in society, military despotism in politics, and then decay ; exhaust the vicious rotation of their revolu- tions, their hopes, and their fortunes. The possibilities of progress are negative, stingy, and illusory. For tis, wanton wars of slaughter, arson, and rapine have ceased. In- dnstrial energy assumes supreme sway, and — prescribing organization and discipline — acquires the ascendency to forestall and to dethrone the anarchy and atrocious waste of wanton war. Who can behold, without intense chagrin, the obscene tragedies of two decades, enacted around Sebastopol, around Richmond, and around Paris ? Cities destroyed ; states and their populations incarnadined in their own blood ; the gates of Janus thrown wide open ; those of mercy shut upon the world ! In contrast are arrayed the benignant works of the pioneer army of the people. An empire of fresh and free States created and expanded from the Mississippi to the Pacific sea ; cities built ; works of unparalleled gran- 102 PO WER. dour and utility erected and completed ; the Oriental population summoned and vuhmtarilj/ accepting fraternal affiliation ; a resounding and elastic commerce spread broadcast over the Pacific sea, heretofore silent. Man- kind is enriched Avith gold, and is everywhere reinforced with wealth, credit, hope, and resolution. Such are the charitable and resplendent conquests won by the aggre- gated forces and energies of a continental people, all individually free, inde- })endent, and self-governed. Such are the incalculable fortunes which now gestate upon the arena of the American continent, secure in health- ful unity, magnitude, and perpetuity ! l\)\VEil and universal Progress come united and together into the possession and guardianship of the American people. They ai'e rectified, co-operate and concjuer. Humanity throughout the world, cheered by example and its reflection, unfolds the wings of progress without trepidation. It bounds onward fearless, intrepid, and successful. It pushes out of sight every restricting horizon. It revels and exults over an unlimited arena, to which wise cliarity, benevolence, and courage refuse to assign a term ! Machine forces emanate from /ire intellect. They multiply and reflect back to it aggres>^irc arms and strength. They infuse themselves and per- meate everywhere, as an all-pervading niagnrfic essence. They unify and fuse mankind. They multiply the activity of all de- sirable relations, infinitely in volume and in strength. They exalt civili- zation. They generate elasticity, ambition, fire. They give lustre to the reinvigorated laror and industry of the world, with unlimited triumphs and conquests. The odious scission of men into aristocrats and ^^Icbcians disappears. Dependence becomes distasteful ; it ceases to be vohmtarily practiced or submitted to. Democratic socict}/ establishes itself upon the level of iiuivorsal patrician equality and patrician rights. These are unanimously accepted and maintained in practice. Famines, and the terror of famines, have ceased. Epidemic diseases are controlled, and their malignity extirpated. Charitable inventions multiply, because nittlfitudinons capitals of money in the small nrc enabled to purchase and enjoy them. Machine forces infinite in number, application, and capacity appear. The reaper, the sewing-machine, locomotion by steam, on land and water, cotton goods, give luxury, taste, and merited indulgence to the ilemocratic mnltitude. Gas, fuel, and machinery economize warmth, light, and water ; they spread unstinted enjoyment of them everywhere. Multiplied millions are provoked to travel. POWEIi. 103 What alacrity, wliat elasticity, what vigor ! What stupendous new and fresh forces have been unveiled ! What inspired, what victorious, what conquering energies ! How generously is activity in each subtle atom of society reinforced ! What celerity of motion ! What vivacity of progress ! How charita- ble and auspicious are these gifts and discoveries to all humanity ! Strifes that have deformed society disappear. Rural intelligence and moderation resist successfully urhan rapacity. Aspei'ities are modified and conventionalities are, by mutual consent, arranged and accepted. With what ease do order and discipline assert themselves ! Power then assumes new features, enhanced dimensions, and increased sway. It is minute, active, and prompt to protect right and to restrain the vicious. The American people invest themselves with the creation and administration of Power. They use it without fear 'and without limit, and themselves control and moderate its exercise. They refuse tyrants, and with the same sternness refuse slaves. They found and perfect the policy of Peace, because Peace is more valuable and more enduring than the policy of War. The people and the activities of the continental and of the maritime climates, blended together, mutually reflect through and favorably stimu- late and modify one another. Let us recall again the sublime amphitheatre occupied by the Amer- ican people, impregnably set in the midst of all the pojiulations of the world, and environed all around by them. The compact insular form and concave structure of the continent ; the climatology, tenfold auspicious ; the graceful unity of the entire area, and its varied but uniform usefulness and fertility ; the intense economy in quality, in magnitude, and in proximity of contact : these are all the reverse of what is elsewhere found. It is possible, from this position, mentally, to look out over the globe of the earth, as a bright school-boy handles his cricket-ball ! Here is a capacity to produce and to supply the raw material, in every subtle variety, to employ the labor of all mankind, food to feed the world. The omnipotent and diversified power op democratic freedom, erected, codified, and perpetuated by itself, is here first seen in human experience. Metaphysical politics and its rhapsodies are rejected by the American people. They carefully hive the results o^ physical science and of inductive reason. Fortified by discovered facts of experiment and example, these are unanimously cherished, relied on, and adhered to by them. Upon this basis, they successfully progress in the construction of empire. 104 PO WEB. The retrospect over Europe is, for ^is, deceptive and treacherous. Insight into the interior system of continental China gradually reveals itself to us, and is understood. In Europe, military organization and force have always successfully held sway, and will continue to dominate and destroy. In China, civic organization, and a discipline of the national intellect by universal education, yield the grandest political results. Fifty centuries of accumulating gi'owth, and four hundred and fifty millions of homoge- neous population, — one-third of the human race, — attest the benign power of universal education, and the systematic utilization of ascertained merit. The basis of the Chinese is a fickle and vague literature, monotonous and sterile. Physical science has not been discovered by them, nor reached in practice. Intermediate between these ancient and imperfect societies, American society is fresh, pliant, and ductile. It commences its career upon a foun- dation of truths, discovered and accepted from nature. The hope of per- petuity is strong. Abundant precedents admonish what to accept and adopt — what to reject. Equilibrium among details, which is the essence of order among the forces of the xmiverse of nature, makes itself by degrees known to us, and is adopted in the self-adjustment of the department of human organization. Examples of what has been accomplished by liberty, under the spas- modic and imperfect opportunities (crippled by hostile geography and pigmy power) in the republics of antiquity, in China, and in modern England, predict the crowning mercy of. success to the American people. The pressure and drift sometimes vouchsafed to humanity by Almighty power, is with us and is favorable to us. Centralization, rightly understood and cleared of all sinister inter- pretation, will secure and protect society from mutiny and waste. Power, benignant power, inherent in, possessed, and administered by the people, will by cautious progression discover and 2iA]\\s,t\he equilibrium of forces. The empire of our continental geo^sci^\\.j ; the empire of our /?-ee people ; the empires of our political, of our social, and of our religious sentiment ; the empire of our industries ; for all of these will be found mutual con- cord , self-sustained : unlimited expansion : perpetual buoyancy, and perpet- ual life ! Thus wUl be corrected and closed the sanguinary gestations of the chaotic world behind us, from which we are born, and of which we are the healthy and gigantic ofispring. CHAPTER XL THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. In the current of ages, mysteries become sciences. Vague speculation, long fermenting, and perplexed by obscure doubts, produces facts. These crystallize into precious truth. From the blind conjectures of Astrol- ogy has dawned the science of Astronomy ; from Alchemy has come Chemistry. The American people now reach and cross the threshold, where they emerge from the twilight of the futile world of thought behind. They enter into the full and perpetual light and promise o^ political and social science. A glance of the eye, thrown across the North American continent^ accompanying the course of the sun from ocean to ocean, reveals an extraordinary landscape. It displays immense forces, characterized by order, activity, and progress. The structure of nature — the marching of a vast population — the crea- tions of the people, individually and combined — are seen in infinite varieties of form and gigantic dimensions. Farms, cities. States, public works, define themselves, flash into form, accumulate, combine, and harmonize. The pioneer army perpetually advances, reconnoitres, strikes to the front. Empire plants itself upon the trails. Agitation, creative energy, industry, throb throughout and animate this crowding deluge. Conclusive occupa- tion, solidity, permanence, and a stern discipline, attend every movement and illustrate every camp. The American realizes that " Progress is God." He clearly recognizes and accepts the continental mission of his country and his people. His faith is impregnably fortified by this vision of power, unity, and forward motion. As essential to all clearness of illustration, fimiliarity with the geog- raphy and pihysical structwe of the American continent seems to me indispensable. Assuming the division of the Northern and Southern Continents to be at Panama, from the same point depart the northern and southern systems of the Andes. These two systems of mountains assume special forms of 105 106 THE NORTH AMEBIGAN MISSION. structure, each one corresponding with the anatomy of its own continent. They form the backbone of the skeletons upon which the continents are severally constructed. The Southern Andes, rising out of the ocean at Cape Horn, traverse without interruption from south to north the whole length of the conti- nent. They form a continuous escarpment not remote from the shore of the Pacific Ocean, and curving with its indentations. Approaching the equator, an expansion to the east forms the Peruvian Plateau, and is prolonged into the triangle of Brazil. The prolongations in this direction extend to the Atlantic, and separate asunder the radiant basins of the La Plata, Amazon, Orinoco, and Magdalena Rivers. The shape of the continent, enveloped all round by the sea, and that of the mountain system, are reciprocally fitted to each other. The Northern Andes, departing from Panama and contracted by the seas, traverse Central America to Tehuantepec. From hence, an immense expansion in width of the Northern Continent is accompanied by a cor- responding increase in the magnitude and altitude of the mountain system. An immense Plateau, flanked by the Cordilleras, expands from sea to sea. On the east the Cordillera of the Rocky Mountains rises flush from the shores of the Mexican Gulf. On the west the Cordillera Nevada rises from the shores of the ocean and the California Gulf. The Sierra Nevada, the Western Cordillera, like the Southern Andes, erects itself continuously from the Pacific Ocean, whose indented shore it accompanies to Behring Strait. The Eastern Cordillera obliques from the Mexican Gulf, where the latter is curved to the east by the immense increasing amplitude of the Northern Continent. This Cordillera is flanked henceforward along its base by the Mississippi basin, whose indented shore and plain it con- tinuously overlooks. In the neighborhood of the' 40tb degree of latitude, the maximum width of the Northern Continent is reached. This continent differs from the Southern in the intense magnitude of its anatomy. Its whole area, alike with each of its composing details, is thus magnified. The radiant basins of the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson's Bay and Athabasca, depart from it. The Northern Andes here attain a breadth of 1200 miles, and assume their most stupendous dimensions. They include many snowy sierras and a multitude of peaks. From this latitude of greatest expansion, the mountain system contracts towards the north : the Cordilleras converge at Behring's Strait as at Tehuantepec : they are again condensed into one. The system of the THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. 107 Northern Andes thus occupies and elevates itself above one-third of the area of North America. Defined by itself, it is a prolonged diamond-shaped parallelogram, faced on all points by the Cordilleras, longitudinal in position, GOOO miles in length, and 1200 in width. It has a direction from south-southeast to north-northwest. Similitude in anatomical structure therefore perfectly identifies the two continents. This similitude of profile holds equally between the two mountain systems. The Southern Andes exhibit in their course through Patagonia and Chili two summit ridges parallel and in close proximity. These diverge with the increasing width of the continent, and enclose the Pe- ruvian Plateau and its extensions into Bolivia and the elevated plains of New Grranada. The same peculiarity is seen in narrow Central America and the extension to the north. If, then, the imperfectly developed anatomy of a youth of five years be arranged side by side with that of his maturity at the age of thirty- five years, the relative resemblances and contrasts of South and North America in their whole anatomy will be familiarly illustrated. This simplicity of structure pervading the whole system, being held in the mind, it is manifest that the Cordillera of the Rocky Mountains is the stupendous dorsal foundation upon whose prodigious mass and solidity all the radiant limbs rest. From this, including the Alleghanies, they all radiate or depend as outliers. Into this they all ultimately group and condense themselves. This stupendous longitudinal Cordillera segregates the physical globe into two hemispheres. These two hemispheres present the basin of the Atlantic towards the rising sun, that of the Pacific towards the setting sun. Here is the supreme meridian altitude up to which the whole globe slopes ! To this crowning ridge human society, emerging from the two ocean basins, is at present climbing ; the two halves front face to face ; they march to meet — to unite and harmoni2;e over this summit ! We have seen that the American continent expands to its most com- plete dimensions and amplitude where it is traversed by the fortieth degree of north latitude. A symmetrical harmony, perfect in every detail, here characterizes all the departments of nature — an ample depth of seaboard on either ocean — the supreme expanse of the Mississippi Basin — its great confluent rivers — the grand width of the mountain Plateau, which here protrudes its extreme salient corners to the east and to the west — to this focal region it rises in altitude, mass, and dimensions, from every point of the continental horizon. It here displays over its area, and in the outflanking Cordilleras, a hundred snow-crowned peaks. 108 THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION Here arise in cloud-compelling majesty the continental pillars, Long's Peak and Pike's Peak, 150 miles apart ; through, the intermediate space traverses ihe fortieth degree of north latitude. From their summits depart the waters to seek the Asiatic and European seas. Hither the continental slopes mounting upwards from all the oceans converge and culminate : from hence all the descending waters radiate. Here, in the midst of the grand works of nature — multitudinous in variety, sublime in vastness, in order, and in beauty — are assembled all the natural gifts which human society needs, or may demand for the most complete development. Here the supreme Cordillera envelops in its folds a group of gigantic valleys known as the " System of the Pares of Colo- rado ^ Of all the gems displayed here and there in the physical varieties which checker the earth's surface, this group is the most gigantic in dimensions ; the most transcendently excellent in locality ; the most wonderful, curious, and attractive. The Parcs bestride the line of way-travel op mankind at a point op paramount control. Here meet and mingle mountains, plains, valleys, rivers, in confluent aflSuence, in immensity of proportions, order, and graceful forms. The pungent and tonic atmosphere preserves the highest standard of modera- tion and excellence round the year. The oceans are not far ofi", and are easily accessible over uniformly descending slopes. Pastoral agriculture, mining, arable agriculture, manufactures, com- merce — each of these has tho essential elements of a conquering power ; — they are here all blended, ea^-h self-supporting, and each stimulating all the rest. The aflluence of nature and the prolific generosity of her pro- portions are miraculous. The Parcs occupy, longitudinally, the centre of Colorado^ passing through and through, from south to north. The whole area of Colorado, 107,000 square miles (70,000,000 acres), is so folded around them as to constitute their frame and envelope, incapable of being segregated from them. These Parcs, thus mounting from south to north, one upon the other, are 'of very nearly equal area. They are the San Luis, the South, the Middle, and the North Parcs. The elliptical area of the San Luis Pare is 18,000 square miles (11,520,000 acres). Their similarity one to another, as members of one family, is perfect. The internal details of structure, form, and scenery are infinitely variegated. Each one, examined by itself, seems to surpass the rest in eminent convenience and beauty. The climatic geniality of THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. 109 temperature and salubrity have not a single blemish. They perpetually prompt and stimulate mental energy and physical activity. I am struggling to nai-rate faithfully the homespun facts of nature : to exaggerate is far from my intention. The splendid magnitude of the architecture — the faultless proportions everywhere discernible — the grace- ful grouping of propitious and benignant elements — the far-searching vision and resplendent panorama — all these unite to reveal to the judg- ment that omnipotent nature here culiliinates her work, and has planted tlie life-giving heart of the terrestrial scheme. To illustrate this wonderful configuration, as with a model of di- minutive size, the Alps of Europe present an example. A spectator, from the supreme summit of the Helvetian Peaks, beholds radiating from his feet the diverging channels of the Po, the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Danube. As they depart, the small lake basins or pares of Geneva and Constance gather the drippings of the glaciers ; and the river basins open out to share between them the widening expanse of the continent. The waters of the Mediterranean Sea are visible towards Genoa — those of the Adriatic towards Venice. Biscay, and the German and Pontic Seas, are more remote. Within a horizon whose diameter is 300 miles, are, at present, congregated 45,000,000 of population, who occupy the river basins and the rugged ground. Since the wars of Julius Ctesar, the progress of the people within this area has been sluggish and painful ; civilization yet continues crepuscular, and its languid fire is maintained with difficulty. A hostile climatology, forever incubating upon nature and man, saddens labor, chills its elas- ticity, and stagnates hope. The evil passions of force and despair rule ; the energies of labor and virtue are crushed out by a perpetually cor- roding pressure. The incessant vapors fi'om the neighboring seas, brought in by every wind, bathe perpetually the mountain altitudes : these are thus encased to their very roots with unfathomable depths of ice, which never melts. The soil of Europe, saturated by chilling fogs, and veiled by them and by forests from the sun, is cold and sour — the atmosphere febrile and inimical to life. Seamed with mountain bones from toest to east — pinched in and trenched upon around its margin by the salt wastes of Biscay and the German Ocean — by the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the Pontic Seas — Europe is a promontory pendent from the solid dimensions of Asia, having only one-sixth of its area. Its convex surface and ragged shores — its humid atmosphere — its large 110 THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. area, expanding from an edge of the temperate into the frigid zone of warmth : — ^these dwarf as well the industry as the mind of man. Asia and Europe present a continuous snow-crested wall, east and west, from China to Gibraltar, rising abruptly and not far removed from the southern seas. From this convex crest, to the north, descends as con- tinuously a hyperborean slope, withdrawn from the sun, and resting only within the oblique and chilling shadow of his rays. In contrast, the longitudinal direction and double structure of the North American Andes opens them to the directly searching and om- nipotent power of the meridian sun : their outward flanks receive the tempering glories of his morning and his evening beams. These old continents are, in their abstract form of structure, convex as the camel's hack. The Cordilleras of North America and their outliers, from north to south in direction and ranging round near the oceans, give to the con- tinent a vast and splendid concave structure. This incessantly receives and absorbs the direct solar rays. North America is a sublime amphitheatre, of gorgeous fertility and transcendent proportions. The vast surface of concentric basins is uni- formly calcareous — it is scarcely less in expanse of area, or more undu- lating, than the oceans. This comprehensive area, mellow and salubrious, is fattened everywhere, and refreshed by the soils abraded from the moun • tains. It may receive by immigration, and sustain without surfeit, the existing populations of the globe. Cumulative with this is the auspicious structure of the longitudinal Sierras. Where Colorado embraces and arches over the extreme salient corner of the Cordillera, is found the stupendous culmination in bulk and altitude of the mountains, of the valleys, of the running waters, and of the climatology of the whole continent. To this supreme apex the whole continent ascends, by easy gradations, from the trough of the Mississippi on the one hand, from the shores of the Pacific on the other hand. Here is the summit altitude of a stupen- dous cone of elevation, whose diameter has a foundation of 2000 miles. Into the summit area of this truncated cone of elevation are mortised to a profound depth the valleys which make up the " Si/stem of the Pares." These collect and send forth the fresh waters, like the arterial blood gath- ered and distributed from the human heart. From hence depart ten rivers : the North Platte, to the north ; the South Platte, to the northeast ; the Kansas, to the east ; the Arkansas and Canadian, to the southeast; the Rio Bravo del Norte, due south into the Mexican Grulf ; the San Juan, Eagle, and Grrand Colorado Rivers, to THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. HI the southtvest, into the Gulf of California ; the Green River, to the northwest The North Platte descends, without deflection, to the direct north for 500 miles to receive the Sweetwater. From this point the water-channels of the Yellowstone, the Missouri, and the Saskatchewan form a continu- ous and easy gradation to Hadson^s Bay. Passing by the Green and Snake Rivers, where their extreme sources intersect, a similar continuous gradation is found out to the North Pacific. Thus, upon this mountain summit of Colorado, the ascending valleys converge as so many enormous wedges, ten in number, arranged with their points grouped in contact. The passes over the Sierras, at the prolonged extremities of these valleys, re-entering thus upon one another, are numerous and easy. They complete the through lines of passage across the continent. These make a convergence here, from the two fronts of the continent, resembling the globes of an hour-glass communicating through the stem which unites them. The miracle of these broadly expanded altitudes is their climatology. Altitude above the seas ; latitude and longitude ; seclusion from the seas ; combine to perfect the moderation in temperature, the dryness, the salu- brity, and the splendor of the atmosphere. The light and fire of the sun rule the day and night, the seasons, the tides, the vegetation of nature, life and death upon the land and in the sea. Isothermal science thus explains how the mind of man, in harmony with the supreme order of nature, intuitively adjusts itself to the revolu- tions of the sun and is tempered by his heat. The northern hemisj^here of the globe has around it all the continents of the laud, holding the diminished seas in the intervals between them. The races white in color inhabit and restrict themselves to a narrow belt or zodiac, girdling this hemisphere of the continents round and round. This belt straddles an axis of intensity whose annual mean temperature is 52 degrees of Fahrenheit : it has thirty degrees of breadth, being fifteen degrees to the south and fifteen degrees to the north of the axis. Incorrectly delineated on the miniature globes, this axis of intensity would correspond with the 40th degree of north latitude, and the zone of tem- perate warmth will embrace the belt of the globe fenced within the 25th and 55th degrees. But profound modifications of temperature are wrought by the alter- nating presence and special configurations of oceans and continents ; by the power of atmospheric and of ocean currents ; by the subtle forces of electricity, gravitation, and the mercurial gestations of nature. 112 THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. This axis of intensity is, therefore, an undulating line. It arches towards the equator, where it traverses the depths of the continent. It arches towards the north pole over the expanses of the oceans. Within this isothermal belt, and restricted to it, the column of the human family, with whom abides the sacred and inspired fire of civilization, accompany- ing the sun, has marched from east to west, since the birth of time. Uj)on this axis of intensity have been constructed the great primary cities, which have been from age to age the foci from which have radiated intellectual activity and power. Inwards, and converging upon this axis, have always pressed the periodical migratory and military movements of the human masses. These, recoiling alike from northern cold and from southern heats, seek instinctively a temperate and congenial warmth. Of this highly artificial and disciplined system of civilization we Americans form a part. It is transmitted from the very dawn of antiquity, and is inherited. History is the diary of its geographical progress, of its periods of brightness and obscurity, of its struggles and of its energies. When society has attained its largest numerical strength, accomplish- ing the highest level of intelligence and the longest duration, it is defined to be an emjnre. History occupies itself with the biography of these empires — their rise, culmination, and decadence. They form a succession along the undulating zone of the northern hemisphere of the globe, within the isothermal belt. They form within it a continuous zodiac from east to west. These empires are the Chinese, the Indian, the Persian, the Grecian, the Roman, the Spanish, the British, finally, the republican empire of the people of North America. These are the essential organizations which have received ; held intelli- gently for a few centuries each, the vestal torch of civilization ; perpetu- ated and transmitted it with more or less fidelity. / repeat again tJie fact, that this zone belts the globe around where the continents expand and the oceans contract : it undulates with the axis of warm temperature (52 degrees of mean heat) : it contains ninety-five one-hundredths of the white people of the globe, and all its civilization ! As a perpetual and instinctive pressure tends to condense population on to the isothermal axis, so it thins out and attenuates in vitality and num- bers — repelled by hostile heats on the one hand, and by cold on the other ■ — until the edge is reached beyond which the white races make no perma- nent lodgment in either direction. CHAPTER XII. THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION — CONTINUED. On the Oriental slope of Asia, between the abrupt termination ol' the vast mountain bulk and the Eastern Ocean, is found an ample region where the whole width of the temperate zone invites and fuses popular tion. This favored area is occupied by the Chinese, whose institutions exhibit a growth of development extending over five thousand years. Never seriously interrupted, progress has so perfected a homogeneous municipal system of laws and education, that 450,000,000 of population (double that of all Europe) are united in one harmonious political system in concord and tranquillity. But the western frontier of China is blockaded by the inhospitable mountain system which prolongs itself continuously from hence to West- ern Europe. The column of progress has recoiled abruptly from their inclement altitudes, and restricts itself to the narrow margin between their southern base and the raggedly indented sea-coast. Here the northern half, or semi-zone, of the isothermal belt, has been left unoccupied ; society is cut in half, crippled in territory, and fatally dwarfed in variety and numbers. It has vegetated without elasticity ; unin- telligent and sluggish. Everywhere pinched in or repelled by inland seas, the omvard pro- gress hence to the western shores of Europe, exhibits only transient exemp- tions from demoralization and disorder. Absorbed by the sterile areas of the Persian Gulf, the Pontic, Propontic and Mediterranean Seas, land in the southern half of the isothermal zone is here either totally wanting, or the water surface is only freckled by a stingy succession of peninsulas and small islands, inhabited in broken links. If, then, the area occupied by China be alone excepted, the narrow and hostile geographical structure of the margin along which the column of society has struggled through Asia and Europe, explains its slow, embar- rassed, and fitful advance. The small empires which have partially ripened have been distorted in form, short-lived ; disordered by anarchy ; heterogeneous and confused in 8 113 114 THE NOETH AMERICAN MISSION. elements. In Asia they appear emasculated by the loss of the northern temperate semi-zone ; in Europe, \sy a counterpart deficiency of the southern semi-zone. As the great ocean chafes perpetually, and tortures itself among the narrow seas, only to become crippled in power and turbid in color and temper : so, a similar acrid turbulence, and loss of the inspiring instincts of power and of moderation, have characterized the mutilated society cramped in along the line of march through Southern Asia and the south and west of Europe. The sanguinary incubation of military despotisms over multitudinous millions of passive and unchronicled serfs, presents a sombre canopy, through whose darkness the lightning of intelligence has scarcely flashed. Sanguinary monarchies and submissive subjects alone are seen. The instinct of the American people has located and erected the grand maritime cities of Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore, where our continent receives the axis of the 'isothermal zone. Entering here from the east^ and favored by the auspicious architecture of our continent, this axis of intensity traverses it athwart to the Pacific Ocean. It deviates little from the fortieth degree of latitude, arching from it slightly in the middle range towards the south. Here auspicious nature unveils every propitious gift. The energy of progress, always salient upon this line, has located along it all the first selected and chief cities — Pitts- burg, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Leavenworth and Kansas, Denver, Salt Lake City, Virginia, San Francisco. Sere the intrepid energies of the pioneer pojmlation have first and chiefly condensed themselves in force. But we harve seen that North America is a vast amphitheatre, and is concave in configuration. Its valleys, its mountain chains, its rivers, its Cordilleras, its ocean boundaries, are all and all alike longitudinal. The whole breadth of continent, beneath the isothermal zone from Cuba to Hudson's Bay, presents an undeviating harmony. This longitudinal expansion runs flush into the arctic zone, and into the equatorial zone, absolutely without any barrier or obstruction to its undulating smoothness of surface. Nature is benignant and graceful throughout her whole scheme, and is propitious in the working of all her laws, and in every element. The longitudinal moxintains receive the glory of the morning and evening sun upon their flanks, the noontide beams upon their summits — they cast no chilling shadow. The sun's immortal flame is never withheld, hut perpettiaUy instils his meridian fire through all living nature, and into the hearts of men, of women, and of growing children. Humanity, nurtured in this affluence THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. 115 of divine warmtli, instinctively receives and cultivates discipline, elasticity, and immortal progress. The contrasted structure of the continents is therefore familiarly discernible. The one convex — its surface segregated — and aflBicted with perennial discord. The other concave — formed to concentrate all things, and condense them into everlasting unity, order, and concord. In Asia resides a population of 840,000,000, distributed into 350 dis- cordant nationalities. In Europe 259,000,000 of population, distracted by 137 independent monarchies. Among these immense hosts, and over this vast area, since the dawn of history, monarchy and military despot- ism have been invariable and universal. The struggles to achieve the indi- vidual liberties, self-government, and civilization of the people have been few, transient, and abortive. North America has a population of 50,000,000. With them the liberties, self-government, and civilization of the people are and have been normal and universal in principle and practice. Monarchy and military despotism have been always unknown and absent from our con- tinent. The indestructible principles of social and political science are rescued, one by one, from the chaos and rubbish of Europe. They are known in sufficient numbers to perpetuate, to combine and fortify themselves — to advance from discovery to discovery — from victory to. victory, over force, ignorance, and blind error. Rescued from the quicksands of the past, democratic-r€j)uhUcan])ower, rightly understanding itself, has here set and perpetuated in the world its own indestructible foundations. As the continents and oceans of the northern hemisphere wrap the globe in a closed circle, America is an island. She is intermediate between the oceans and the outward protruding extremities of the other continent, being equidistant from them. Europe opens all the outlets of its inland seas and rivers towards the west, debouching on to our Atlantic front, towards which its whole surface slopes. Asia similarly presents to our Pacific front an Oriental slope. This contains her great rivers, the densest masses of her population, and detached islands of great area. These gorgeous archipelagoes are brim- ful of active populations, and of infinite production. The distance from the European to the Asian shores, as we accompany the sun, is 10,000 geographical miles ! These ancient masses of population, then, hach to hack, and descending these contrasted slopes, both front America — they face one another across America. The short line of mutual approach is the axis of isothermal 116 THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. warmth, penetrating four-fifths of the land, and nine-tenths of the popu- lation of the globe ! This is the line of way-travel of all the white races, of the commercial activity and industry of the zodiac of civilization ! As, then, this interval of North America is filled up, the afiiliation of all mankind will be accomplished : proximity recognized : the distractions of intervening oceans and equatorial heats cease : the remotest nations Ite grouped together and fused into one universal and harmonious system of fraternal relations. Here, then, at this moment, by the arrival of the American people on the summit of the Cordillera, ascending and conquering both its flanks simultaneously, the most startling fact of all time reveals itself — aus- , picious to the whole human race, and pregnant with the most portentous and immediate consequences. Suddenly the mysteries of geographical progress are resolved — light and victory substitute themselves for darkness and distrust. Why the halves of the human race, marching the one half towards the setting sun, and the other half towards the rising sun, and perpetually departing asunder — separated in the rear by insuperable physical barriers — broken apart by hostile forces and obstacles — ^have maintained feebly, and often entirely lost, their mutual relations, is clearly revealed ! Now, at this hour, this progress of mutual departure is complete, and completely reversed. Upon the auspicious arena of the American conti- nent and the Pacific Ocean, these columns surprise one another in over- whelming force and numbers. They encounter, face to face, and front to front. The mission of each and both manifests itself. That peace and charity are possible in the world is recognized — chronic war unnecessary, and a consuming blunder. These multitudes behold one another — the weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away — the sanguinary passions of a consuming rapacity find a check — a majority of the human family is found to accept and protect the essential teachings of Christianity in practice. Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet — they mutually explain and under- stand one another — they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to re- constitute human relations and institutions in harmony with nature and with God. The world may cease to be a unanimous military camp, incubated only by the malignant principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these iajmense concurrent discoveries and events. THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. 117 The great heart of American society palpitates with new fires, impelled by a universal instinct, inspiring discipline in action and rectitude of purpose. Science illuminates their work ; circumstances favor and dictate success to their energies. A divine light, issuing out of the obscurity of the past, shines upon our country and upon our people. It speaks out in the never-silent oracles of Nature, in response to which each individual heart is free to re-echo and reflect. A finite goal is unveiled to them, and distinctly seen — its pos- session and fruition are intelligibly revealed. The decade, from 1840 to 1850, has become forever memorable by a crowning discovery made and victory won by the genius of the pioneers. I mean the " GOLD fever." The indefinite production and midtipli- cation of sound imoney hy the individual and voluntary labor of the people. Labor and industry construct their own empire and assume the adminis- tration of governments. Steam upon the ocean and upon the land: more potent than armies : condenses labor, and magnifies indefinitely its power and its results. The ameliorating graces of commerce are rescued from the despotic monopoly of riparian cities, isolated on the fringe of the sea. They transport themselves in generous profusion to the homes of the people, where they live in the depths of the continents. They are dif- fused to them as the renovating rain of summer distils its drops to every forest tree, to every blade of grain, and to each individual flower. The consuming voracity of government : administered only in the interests of trade and the engulfing rapacity of maritime cities : is uprooted. Equality and equity in the administration of power are brought within the reach and 'practice of rural populations. Whereas the energies and the conquests of the pioneer army of tlie people ; during the last quarter of a century ; have caused the most significant and profound perturbations of society throughout the world — as to them also, the City of Denver owes her location and her future — it is necessary to illustrate the causes of this extraordinary freshness and activity. On July 4th, 1849, speaking by their invitation to the California emi grants about to depart from the Missouri River, I used this language : — ■ "Up to the year 1840, the progress whereby twenty-six States and four Territories have been established and peopled, has amounted to a solid strip, rescued from the wilderness, 24 miles in depth, added annually along the western face of the Union, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. " This occupation of wild territory, accumulating outward like the annual rings of our forest trees, proceeds with all the solemnity of a providential 118 THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. ordinance. It is at this moment sweeping onward to tlie Pacific witL accelerated activity and force, like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly, and daily pushed onward by the hand of God. " Fronting the Union, on every side, is a vast army of pioneers. This active host, numbering 500,000 at least, has the movements and obeys the discipline of a perfectly organized military force. It is momentarily recruited by single individuals, by families : and in some instances by whole communities : from every village, county, city, and State of the Union, and by immigrants from other nations. " Each man in the moving throng is in force a platoon. He makes a farm on the outer edge of the settlements, which he occupies for a year. He then sells to the leading files pressing up to him from behind. He again advances 24 miles, renews his farm, is again overtaken and again sells. As individuals fall out from the front ranks, or fix themselves permanently, others rush from behind, pass to the front, and assail the wilderness in their turn. " Previous to the recently concluded war with Mexico, this energetic throng was engaged at one point in occupying the Peninsula of Florida and lands vacated by emigrant Indian tribes. At another point in reach- ing the copper region of Lake Superior : in absorbing Iowa and Wis- consin. From this very spot had gone forth a forlorn hope to occupy Oregon and California. Texas was thus annexed — the Indian country pressed upon its flanks — spy companies reconnoitred New and Old Mexico. ~ " Even then : obeying the mysterious and inscrutable impulse which drives our nation to its goal : a body of the hardiest race that ever faced varied and unnumbered dangers and privations, embarked upon the trail to the Pacific coast. They forced their way to the end : encountering and defying difiiculties unparalleled ; with a courage and success the like to which the world has not heretofore seen. " Thus, then, overland sweeps this tidal wave of population, absorbing in its thundering march the glebe, the savages, and the wild beasts of the wilderness : scaling the mountains, and debouching down upon the seaboard. Upon the high Atlantic sea-coast, the pioneer force has thrown itself into ships, and found in the ocean fisheries food for its creative genius. The whaling fleet is the rtiarine force of the pioneer army. These two forces, by land and by sea, have both worked steadily onward to the North Pacific. " They now re-unite in the harbors of California and Oregon, about to bring into existence upon the Pacific a commercial grandeur identical with that which has followed and gathered to them upon the Atlantic. THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. 119 " Hence have already come these new States : this other seahoard : and the renewed vivacity of progress with which the general heart now pal- pitates ! " Will this cease or slacken ? Has the pouring forth of the stream from Europe ever ceased since the day of Columbus? Has the grass obliterated the trails down the Alleghanies, or across the Mississippi ? Rather let him who doubts seat himself upon the bank of the supreme Missouri River, and await the running dry of his yellow waters ! For sooner shall he see this, than a cessation in the crowd now flowing loose to the Western seaboard ! " Gold is dug — lumber is manufactured — ^pastoral and arable agriculture grow apace — a marine flashes into existence — commerce resounds — the fish- eries are prosecuted — vessels are built — steam pants through all the waters. Each interest stimulating all the rest, and perpetually creating novelties, a career is commenced, to which, as it glances across the Pacific, the human eye assigns no term !" It is to the infallible judgment and the intrepid valor of the pioneers that the American people owe the selection of Colorado and the auspicious cosmopolitan site of Denver. The one crowns and embraces the supreme altitude of the continent, and majestically arches the Cordillera : the other rests in the focus of the continental scheme of activity and fresh forces. By the exalted energy and devotion of tlie pioneer army, the imperilled Union has been saved from obscure speculations and blind theories. We had beheld a period of repression ; during which our people had been driven by malignant legislation in a maritime shell around the conti- nent : its vast centre had been retained as a desert disc. The patriotism and energies of the people, pent up and exasperated by malignant politics, had become deformed and distorted by civil strife : our soil incarnadined with fraternal blood. With the pioneer army rests the glory which has vindicated the mis- sion of America : which preserves, enlarges, and perpetuates the con- tinental union of the States; elsewhere rocked to its foundations, and enervated by nepotism to the foolish fashions of Europe. While European sentiment and its dismal political bigotry has every- where fomented civil war and slaughter ; invaded Mexico ; bombarded the West Indies and South America ; filled Canada with incendiaries, and the ocean with pirates : ancient, bountiful, wise, prolific, and luxuriant Asia, has cultivated and pressed upon us peace, friendship, sympathy, and the afiiliation of her redundant populations and productions. Advancing to meet and embrace this fresh and splendid arena : march- ing with the double puipose to assimilate with the Asiatic system and 120 THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. activities, and to emancipate itself from the impoverisliing and sterile monopoly of the Atlantic, the pioneer army selects Denver. Here the geography and drainage of the Atlantic comes to an end ; that of the Pacific is reached. Infallible instinct adheres to the isother- mal axis. Here is the propitious point to receive the column from Asia, de- l)0uching from the ocean and the mountains to radiate and expand itself eastward over the unobstructed area of the Mississippi basin ! We con- sent to face about ! The rear becomes the front ! Asia in front ; Europe in the rear ! Denver is 875 miles from Sacramento : 1461 from Mexico City : 1100 from St. Louis : and 2200 from New York. It is, therefore, by proximity identified with the Pacific Ocean and with Mexico. It is the salient point to which Asia and Polynesia will come, seeking a central base from which to distribute themselves over the eastern area of America and to Europe. The selection thus first made by the inspired and infallible judgment of ihe. pioneers of the wilderness will forever re- main unanimously acceptable to the American people. The instinct., the whole embodied force and pressure of interest, judg- ment, power, and patriotism of the people of the Pacific, will construct the Central Railroad of North America, from San Francisco to Denver ! Why this conclusion dictates itself as eminently probable, is illustrated by innumerable shining and concurrent facts of nature and experiences of progress. Denver is in a focal point of impregnable power in the topographical configuration of the continent. It is a focal point for the great radiant rivers, six in number, whose channels form a multitude of unbroken grades descending to the Atlantic. It is equally so for those streams which, scalping the escarpments of the Cordillera, prolong these gradients and graft them, through and through, on the counterpart /oca? system of the rivers of the Pacific. The symmetrical propinquity and mier-radiation' of the plains of the Arkansas and Platte Rivers — enveloping and fusing into the plain of the Kansas — carry the Great Plains, like an undulating ocean, sheer up to the primeval Cordillera. This is here unembarrassed hy outliers. The Great Plains form a descending slope to the longitudinal trough of the Mississippi River, basking themselves in the eastern sun. By their intense fertility and immense area, they are about to give to our people supremacy in the world. The Great Plains extend from the Mexican Gulf to the Arctic Sea. TEE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. 121 They are of a uniform drift fonnation, alluvial and diluvial : they have a width, from west to east, of 1200 miles; a longitudinal length of 3500. The destruction of the mountains forms their soils, in which every active element of fertility and production is mingled. This huge area owes its construction and its smoothness to the vast net-work of rivers which meander down its slojie ; but still more especially to the atmospheric currents flowing perpetually from the icest. In this work Nature employs the industiy of multitudinous myriads of minute animals. The zoophytes erect coral islands from the abyss of the ocean. Here the ants, the marmots, the badgers, the foxes, the wolves, everywhere erect their multitudinous nests from the powder and minute gravel of the subsoil. Dried by the sun and fanned by the tcest tvind, from each separate hillock rises, to the height of thirty feet, a whirlpool of soil. This travels, from west to east, a few hundred feet, bursts and sows itself broadcast. Periodiccdly come sand-storms of force and violence, which, to a less dis- tance and similarly, transport the fine gravel and small boulders. This system of natural forces, acting through countless ages, has formed by the atmospheric currents this prodigious sloping glacis. As lai'ge in ex- panse as is the Atlantic Sea, the winds sweep over and mould its surface as completely as they ruffle the water surface and drive the waves of the ocean. This porous drift material absorbs promptly and hides the water coming from the clouds. These waters permeate down and underflow upon the bed-rock foundation, which has the same perpetual slope and is parallel with the top surface. Elevated for irrigation by artesian wells, after use it again sinks to its home beneath, and is protected from evaporation. Of the fattest fertility ; drained beneath ; everywhere supplied with artesian waters, there is no interruption to this propitious structure and uniform adaptability to arable culture. Every acre of this ocean prairie thus offers itself for the production of the cereals. In their undisturbed nature these plains are pastoral : they have, within the knowledge of our people — within my own knowledge — sustained 100,000,000 of aboriginal grazing stock, feeding themselves upon the perennial grasses, as fish in the sea. Animal life is as multitudinous, and as various in kinds, as is the coun- terpart marine population of the ocean ! IMineral fuel, and material for building and fencing, are abundant and universally distributed. The atmosphere is uniformly moderate in temperature, favorable to health, to longevity, to intellectual and physical development, and stimulative of an exalted tone of social civilization and refinement. 122 THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. SucIl is the grandeur whieli displays itself around us to the north, to the east, and to the south. Nature groups her favors in endless varieties, in the most auspicious forms, and in the palmiest dimensions. Towering above us on the west are the cloud-compelling summits of the Eastern Cordillera. We have seen that the system of the North American Andes here reaches its extreme departure from the oceans ; its most salient angle of expansion ; culminating also in supreme bulk and altitude. Enveloped within them are the Pares : adjacent to and beyond these, are the immense mountain basins of the Rio del Norte ; the Colorado ; Salt Lake ; and Columbia : all upon the expanse of the Plateau. In and around the Parcs is preparing itself the mining laboratory of the world. The rare economy in structure, climate, inter-oceanic con- venience, prolific food, miscellaneous materials and metals, constitute and locate here the paragon of all geographical positions. CHAPTER XIII. THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION — CONTINUED. The discoveries of exact science teach us conclusively what is desirable to be known. Everybody is familiar with the manufacture of shot. This is accom- jjlished by pouring liquid lead at a high elevation through perforated moulds. Each pellet of lead descending through the air is formed into a sphere, as it cools, by the invisible force of gravity. The globe of the earth has had a similar origin ; once a liquid mass ; now a solid gravitating sphere of 8000 miles in diameter, such as we in- habit it. Geology explains how the material mass of this great sphere has arranged itself into layers or shells, enveloping one another like the successive coatings of an onion, or rather as the pulp of an orange with many successive rinds. Specific gravity accounts for the relative positions of these layers one upon the other : it explains to us where and how to penetrate to their metalliferous contents. It is in the primeval rocJcs exclusively that the precious metals and gems are found. The base metals are found in the calcareous rocks. Specific gravity guides us to discover the rocks in which the metals are found and when they are totally absent. If into a hollow pillar of glass there be poured a quart of quicksilver, one of water, one of oil, and one of alcohol, these liquids will rest one upon the other in this order. If a piece of gold, of iron, of wood, and a feather, be thrown in, they will sink — the gold to the bottom, the iron to the quicksilver, the wood to the water, the feather to the oil. If this whole mass be congealed to ice, this arrangement will remain solid and permanent.- The gold must be sought for sedimentary to the quicksilver ; the iron above it, but sedi- mentary to the water ; the wood resting upon the water, but sedimentary to the oil. In the stupendous projiortions and exact order of nature, a similar arrangement holds in the rocks which envelop the globe of the earth in a crust, as the contents of an egg are held within its shell. This crust or shell is known to be 125 miles in thickness. 123 124 THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. These rocks, once all soft or liquid, are now all permanently solid, in the order of their relative specific gravities. But, as the bottom contents of a meadow-field are ripped up by the driving force of" a subsoil plow, so the compressed fires and chaotic forces of the interior globe, tearing through its crust, have thrown up the titanic longitudinal furrow which is now the elevated Cordillera from Cape Horn to Behring's Strait. The lowest rocks, therefore, split asunder and driven up vertically, now form the summit of the Cordillera. The rended facings of the bottom plates become the surmounting top of the Sierra. The warped sides, bent upwards, form the sloping flanks of the Sierra. Piled against these, the superincumbent strata are lapped. These appear as successive benches upon the flanks of the Cordillera, forming a rugged staircase, whose steps are each of continental magnitude and dimensions. Such is the aboriginal profile of the primeval Cor- dillera., now rasped away and ragged by corrosion and the play of the elements during countless millions of seasons. But science, with equal truth and simplicity, ascending upwards from the earth's surface, explains the atjiospheres which embrace the globe outside, and handles them without obscurity. The globe is covered externally with a liquid shell of water, through which the contents protrude : this is the ocean, aqueous atmosplieo-e, being dense and visible to the eye. External to this, and resting upon it, is the shell of the aerial atmos- phere. This atmosphere is invisible to the eye ; but the vapors exhaled from the land and the ocean ascend into it ; are condensed into mists and rain-clouds, which float through it in visible masses. At an altitude of 4000 feet, this aerial atmosphere terminates as abruptly and completely as has the aqueous atmosphere at our feet. Above its limit, or upper surface, the ratft-clouds do not ascend, but have their termination and level similarly to the aqueous atmosphere beneath. External to the aerial atmosphere is the ETHEREAL atmosphere, beyond which animal life, vegetation, and clouds cease to exist. Physical geography defines those portions of the earth's surface within the aerial atmosphere to possess a MARITIME climate ; those within the ethereal atmosphere to possess a continental climate. The Plateaux of North America, of Central Asia, and of South America enjoy a conti- nental climate ; the rest of the earth's surface lies within the maritime climate. How perfectly the area of Colorado possesses a continental climate and lies within the etherecd atmosphere, manifests itself to every obsei-v- TBE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. 125 ing eye. The illustrations and proofs of this are conclusive in every department and minute detail of nature — upon the surface of the Plains: in the canopy overhead ; in the mountains ; in animal life ; and in the vegetation. To the traveller who ascends from east to loest, at the passage of the 102d meridian, the metamorphosis over the whole landscape is complete. The surface of the earth is uniformly dry, compact, and free from mud ; the forest has disappeared even from the rivers ; where irrigation, other than that supplied from the clouds, is absent, wormwood, the cactus, and delicate perennial grasses only grow ; the air is intensely pungent, tonic to the taste, dry, and translucent ; the atmospheric pressure diminishes, and animal digestion is modified. Across the canopy, which is intensely blue in color and brilliancy, rush incessantly, like horsed couriers of the air, cumuli clouds, burnished with and radiating silver fire. This gorgeous meteoric display of clouds is multi- tudinous and incessant round the year : they contain neither rain nor electricity; and descend over us with mysterious and incalculable velocity in the aerial atmosphere. The atmospheric currents pour incessantly from the west — the moun- tains gather but little snow — they are naked and dry at midsummer. The rivers are without afiluents, and expend their waters by evaporation. The incessant passage of clouds does not obscure the sun, but refracts and intensifies his insj^iring light. There are neither moisture, miasmas, nor perceptible exhalations of any kind. Dust is not frequent. Serenity, moderation, and purity reign within the complete circuit of the horizon. The mind of man is soothed, tem- pered, and modified by this immense benignity throughout nature, which infuses itself, and assimilates everything but human avarice and rapacity. The superb richness of color and of dissolving shades are infinitely variegated and delicate. The vision, aided by the continually increasing elevation, is far penetrating and distinct in its recognitions. Within and among the mountains and upon the Plateau, the rainless character, serenity, and splendor of the atmosphere are the same. All these gener- ous attributes gather in force, and are enhanced by the superlative beauty and sublimity of their marvellous structure, magnitude, and number. The jvecise facts which fix the supreme climatic excellence of Colorado are these : the latitude — the elevation above the sea — the remote seclu- sion from the sea. These all attain here their maximum, and unite har- moniously. This results from the astonishing and auspicious concord between the grand laws of nature ; the comprehensive scale of the ai'chi- tecture ; and the favorable local configuration. 126 THE NORTH AMEBIC AN MISSION. The North American Andes everywliere prove themselves to have been driven up through the bed of a primeval ocean, of which the Mississippi basin is the still unaltered bowl. The sedimentary strata, like a nest of bowls lining the abyss, are broken ojff and tilted up along the indented base of the mountains. A traveller who approaches the Atlantic seaboard, coming from the east, sees that ocean penetrating every bay, gulf, harbor, and indentation of the land, preserving an unalterable level. In the same way, wrapped against the Cordillera, and meandering its infinitely indented roots with the same undeviating fidelity, are seen the rended edges of the calcareous strata. Each stratum having its characteristic color, this fringe of a departed ocean is traced without intermission lengthwise through the continent. It is easily discernible, as though a continuous rainbow were plaited in to mark the line of junction, where the sedimentary and primeval rocks join together and depart in opposite directions, each to maintain exclusive dominion. Thus, ascending along the arc of the 40th degree of latitude, a dis- tance of twenty miles from the Plains, directly up to the summit of the Cordillera, every elementary rock of the geological scale is crossed, arranged in order and placed in position. At the lower end appears diluvial drift, the top settlings of the sea ; at the other end the primeval porphyry, upheaved from the lowest crust. Here, in economical juxtaposition and luxuriant profligacy, are found every metal, every rock, every clay, every salt, every alkali, fuel, arbores- cence, vegetation of grasses and flora— every and each element of the geological scale to which human industry applies its skill, or manufactures and converts to social use. I am awed by these marvellous facts of nature, which cannot escape recognition. I have not discovered that they exist, or can so exist, else- where round the earth's circumference, in any such complete combination, of such purity and magnitude, as here — intermediate — upon the condensed track of way-travel of the populous and active zodiac of mankind. A startling and profound novelty here displays itself and fixes our attention. All along the longitudinal Plateau, altitude and the protection of the Cordilleras temper the heat towards the equatorial zone ; the same causes temper the cold towards the polar zone. These extremes of temperature for the day and for the night are great ; for the seasons round the year scarcely perceptible. In one word, the temperature is uniformly vernal. By this, the genial and propitious climate of the isothermal zodiac is THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. 127 prolonged outward upon its nortli flank, and its south flank : it extends up and down the area of the Plateau, and is felt to both its extremities. Thus is illustrated the severe contrast among the ^continents, North America being in its configuration concave — -all the others convex.. Else- whei'e, hostile structure, perpetuating incorrigible distraction, segregates society and dwarfs its energies. In North America a homogeneous unity of language, population, and manners is unavoidable. This is benignantly amplified by an undulating variety of contour, pervading equally the mountain system and the plains. This happy combination provokes the highest development and discipline of energy, and the most exalted civilization. As for the site upon which the City op Denver is founded, it is pre- eminently cosmopolitan. It pre-occupies the auspicious focus into which Nature groups all her colossal elements. We are at the base of the East- ern Cordillera, whose summit, nowhere penetrated by navigation for ten thousand miles, forms the physical meridian which parts and unites the two hemispheres of the globe. Here the vast arena of the Pacific basin fits itself to the basin of the Atlantic, edge to edge. The goal is reached where the zodiac of nations closes its circle. The gap between the hemispheres is bridged over forever. We are upon the isothermal axis, which is the trunk line (the thalweg) of intense and intelligent energy ; where civilization has its largest field, its highest development, its inspired form. There is an intoxicating grandeur in the 2>anorama which unveils itself to the spectator looking out from the crest of the neighboring Cordillera. In front, in rear, and on either flank, Nature ascends to her highest standard of excellence. Behold to the right the IMississippi Basin : to the left the Plateau of the Table Lands : beneath, the family of Pares : around, the radiating backs of the primeval mountains : the primary rivers starting to the seas : a uniform altitude of 8000 feet : a translucent atmosphere, a thousand miles removed from the ocean and its influences : a checkered landscape, from which no element of sublimity is left out — fertility and food upon the surface ; metals beneath ; uninterrupted facility of transit. Behold here the panorama which crowns the middle region of our Union ; fans the immortal fire of i^atriotism ; and beckons on the ener- getic host of our people ! Here, through the heart of our territory, our population, our States, our cities, our mines, our farms and habitations, will traverse the con- densed commerce of mankind — where passengers and cargoes may, at any time or place, embark upon or leave the vehicles of transportation. 128 THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. Down witli the parricidal policy which will banish it from the land — from among the broadcast dwellings of the people — to force it on to the sterile ocean : outside of society, through foreign nations — into the torrid heats : along solitary, circuitous routes : imprisoned for months and dwarfed in great ships I Railways, multiplied and spanning the continent, are essential domestic institutions ; more powerful and more permanent than law, or popular con- sent, or political constitutions, to thoroughly complete the grand system of fluvial arteries which fraternize us into one people — to bind the two seaboards to this one continental union, like ears to the human head — to radicate the rural foundations of the Union so broad and deep, and establish its structures so solid, that no possible force or stratagem can shake its permanence — to secure such scope and space to progress, that equality and prosperity shall never be impaired, or chafe for want of room ! To Denver is secured a career into which all these favorable facts of position and circumferent area are now united. The North American people number Ji/t^ millions in strength. Two millions annually shift their homes. This force is, par excellence, the pioneer army of the North American people. This movement causes an uninterrupted pressure of the people from east to west, resembling the drift of the ocean which accompanies the great tidal wave. Diurnally is the surface of the sea lifted up in silence and poured upon the coasts of the continents. Exactly similar to this is the movement, annually gathering force, and seen to impel our people through and through from the eastern to the western limit of the land. The inscrutable force of gravity, which with minute accuracy holds the planets in their orbits, or causes each drop of rain to fall, sways the instinct of society. This gravitation presses from all directions upon the axis, and to the focus of intensity. This regular instinct of movement has been transiently interfered with by the artificial passions and demorali- zation of civil strife. It rapidly assumes again its temper and its regularity. Our neighbors from California work up to us with miraculous energy and celerity. They bring with them the open avenue to us from Asia. The Mexican column reaches us from the south. On the north the activity is great, and in close contact. These several columns simultane- ously converge upon us. They increase every moment in numbers, weight, and celerity of motion. We ho longer march into the blind wilderness, dependent upon and chained exclusively to Europe in the rear. We open up in front the gorgeous arena of the Asiatic Ocean THE XOUTII AMERICAN MISSION. 129 At present, tlie huge city of London monopolizes the imports from the Oriental world. These are stored there, and retailed to the people re- siding in the basin of the Atlantic. Upon the labor of the American people, so far as they participate 'w the consumption of Oriental ivares, is harnessed the frightful burden to support the British people and the British Empire, a id to be devoui-ed by their voracious despotism of trade. The work of emancipation is accomplished by the intrepid energies and conquests of the pioneer army of North America. It only remains to be appreciated and accepted by the people. We are about to supply by direct export the food and precious and base metals to 850,000,000 of neighboring Asiatics ! To Japan : to China : to India. To the gorgeous islands of Borneo : Sumatra : Java. To the Philippines : the Celebes. To the Archipelagoes of the Sooloo Sea and Polynesia ! These are larger in aggregate area, and more populous, than Europe ; and are nearer to us. Included within the equatorial zone, but approached by us through the temperate zone, they overflow with merchandises desirable to our people, in multitudinous aflSuence. To us will belong the prodigious carrying trade upon the seas for these infinite multitudes. The equatorial Jieats are outflanked and avoided. The conflict for dominion over the mul- tiplied commerce of the world is fought, and the conclusive victory is won for our country. A large majority of the American people now reside within the Mis- sissippi Basin, and in this Asiatic front of our continent, which is born from us. Nascent powers, herculean from the hour of their birth, unveil their forms and demand their rights. States for the pioneers; self-govern- ment for the pioneers ; untrammelled way for the imperial energies of the forces of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Sea, may not long be withheld by covetous, arbitrary, and arrogant jealousy and injustice ! In the conflict for freedom, it is not numbers or cunning that conquers ; but rather daring, discipline, and judgment, combined and tempered by the condensed fire of faith and intrepid valor. As it is my hope, in these notes, to contribute what may be valuable, I adhere strictly to severe fiicts, and reject absolutely all theory and speculation. These facts are as indestructibly established as is the alpha- bet, and are as worthy of unquestioning faith and credence. That we may look into the gathering achievements of the near future, without obscurity, and with an accurate prophetic vision, I may without censure submit what is within my own personal experience. 9 130 THE NORTH AMERICAN MISSION. It fell to my lot, during the years from 1840 to 1845, alone and in extreme youth, to seek and chalk out, in the immense solitudes filling the space from Missouri to China, the lines of this dazzling empire of which we now hold the oracular crown — to have stood by its cradle — to be the witness of its miraculous growth. It is not for me, in this season of gathering splendor, to speak tamely upon a subject of such intense and engrossing novelty and interest. I may properly here quote the concluding sentences of a report which I was re- quired to make on the 2d of March, 1846, to the United States Senate, at that time brimful of illustrious statesmen. What I said then and there, in the first dawning twilight of our glory, I will now repeat : " The calm, wise man sets himself to study aright and understand clearly the deep designs of Providence — to scan the great volume of nature — to fathom, if possible, the will of the Creator, and to receive with respect what may be revealed to him. " Two centuries have rolled over our race upon this continent. From nothing we have become 20,000,000. From nothing we are grown to be in agriculture, in commerce, in civilization, and in natural strength, the first among nations existing or in history. So much is our destiny — so far, up to this time — transacted, accomplished, certain, and not to be disputed. From this threshold we read the future. " The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific. Ocean — to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward — to set the principle of self-government at work — to agitate these herculean masses — to establish a new order in human affairs — to set free the en- slaved—to regenerate superannuated nations — to change darkness into light — to stir up the sleep of a hundred centuries — to teach old nations a new civilization — to confirm the destiny of the human race — to cany the career of mankind to its culminating point — to cause stjignant people to be re-born — to perfect science — to emblazon history with the conquest of peace — ^to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind — to unite the world in one social family — to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt charity — to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world ! '■' Divine task ! immortal mission ! Let us tread fast and joyfully the open trail before us ! Let every American heart open wide for patriotism to glow undimmed, and confide with religious faith in the sublime and prodigious destiny of his well-loved country." APPENDIX. I. MEXICAN WAR. REMARKS OF MAJOR GILPIN, AT THE BARBECUE GIVEX THE COLE INFANTRY, AT JEFFERSON CITY, THURSDAY, AUGUST 10, 1847. Happy are those wlio, after hopes long suspended and harassing anxieties long and doubtingly endured, come to find their hopes consum- mated by brilliant successes, their anxieties relieved by enthusiastic praises and the shouts of triumph. Such are the soldiers who, their trials ended and their long and ex- hausting services at an end, are here assembled to receive the greetings of their kindred, and listen to their flattering praises and their shouts of victory and welcome. During thirty-two years of peace, — a long period, which includes the birth of nine-tenths of us, — our own State has joined the confederacy. War came suddenly. With the same pen which signed the declaration of hostilities between Mexico and the United States, the President di- rected to Missouri the first requisition for the War ! It asked a slender force of 1500 men, — all volunteers but 300 dragoons — to cross the Great Plains and penetrate Mexico by the north. Bounding forth at the sound of the war-bugle, in one month were as- sembled at Fort Leavenworth, beyond the western verge of our Union, the 1st Regiment of Missouri Cavalry, the battalion of Artillery from St. Louis, the battalion of Cole Infantry, and the Laclede Rangers, 1200 in all, and forth they marched. Wars had occupied mankind for one hundred centuries, but they had been wars between adjacent nations — marches had been confined to inhab- ited countries, where provisions abounded on the routes. Here was a wilderness of a thousand miles to be traversed, and the enemy to be encountered at home, in great strength, and abounding in resources. A failure to transport with us complete supplies was certain disaster and Starvation — a check received from the enemy at their threshold would 131 132 APPENDIX. eventuate the same. This enemy was the people of Mexico, a sister Re- public. Years had been exhausted in ingenious devices on our part to avoid this conflict. Our citizens had been massacred in Texas amidst the very- orgies of barbarism — our merchants had been plundered and imprisoned — our flag insulted in their metropolis — our citizens murdered, maltreated, and scoff"ed for their religion — debts accumulating during thirty years unpaid — treaties contemptuously violated — more than all, an attempt to imitate our republican system, productive only of anarchy, stood as a bur- lesque beside us on our own continent, furnishing to the malevolent food for satires upon popular freedom in the New World. Forth, then, into the wilderness plunged the little army of Missouri to encounter these enemies of their country — their country to them always right. The plains were passed, and the rugged mountains which, dividing from the Rocky Mountains, encircle New Mexico, were reached. Their rapid progress had outstripped the provision-trains. Amidst fatiguing marches, dust, solstitial heats, and scanty water, subsisting on one-quarter of the ordinary ration, they rushed onward to Santa Fe. , The ai'my of New Mexico, in numbers three to one of our force, occu- pying the impregnable gorge of G-allisteo, which covers the approach to Santa Fe, dispersed in dismay. On the 18th of August, three months from the proclamation of war, made at Washington City, 2300 miles dis- tant, the state of New Mexico lay conquered, and the American flag floated over the Capitol at Santa Fe. Occupied until the middle of September in securing the subjugation of the country, the 1st Regiment descended the Del Norte to the lower set- tlements, receiving the submission of the towns and people, and returned to Santa Fe. New Mexico contains 100,000 inhabitants, vast resources, and by its basin-like configuration is easily defensible, and difficult to be conquered or long held in subjection. New Mexico is surrounded by powerful tribes of military Indians : the Comanches, towards Texas— the Yutas and Navajos in the Rocky Moun- tains, and on their slope towards the Pacific. Issuing from the surrounding mountains, these warlike Indians strike down the people, devastate the banks of the Del Norte, and drive forth the stock. In years past they have plundered from Mexicans many mil- lions of sheep and cattle. By the submission of New Mexico we had become the guardinns of her people and territory. The pious duty re- mained to tame her savage foes. MEXICAN WAR. 133 The infantry, artillery, and dragoons remained to garrison Santa Fe — a fort was built to command its appr(jaches — a treaty was asked for and made by the Comanches. The 1st llegiment, in three detachments, de- parted for the recesses of the Rocky Mountains late in September : the one penetrating towards the northwest by Canada and the Chamas against the Yutas and Navajos ; another southwest by Albuquerque and Sabo- letta ; a third descended by the Del Norte, covering the American traders bound eventually to Chihuahua. The northern column passed out through a denuded country and devas- tated villages, to which the fugitive Mexicans returned under its protec- tion, and, reaching the recesses of the Rocky Mountains by the sources of the river Chamas, in one month delivered to the authorities in Santa Fe 65 Yutas, including their chiefs and chief warriors. With them was formed a treaty of peace, since faithfully observed by those Indians. This restored many thousand families of Mexicans to their farms and firesides, and gave quiet to the northern frontier. Supplies having been with great difficulty collected, this same column prepared to pass the eternal barrier of the Rocky Mountains, and scare up the Navajos, reposing in security on their western slope. On the 2d of November (in this climate the depth of winter, indicated by the snows which enwrapped the surrounding mountains), this little force, 300 strong, abandoning their tents and wagons-, entered the gorges' that led up to the " Pass of the San Juan," the head of this great river which flows to the Pacific. With us were 70 Mexican allies and 100 pack-mules transporting pro- visions. In seven days, contending against snow-storms and ice at an altitude of 10,000 feet in mid-winter, and unpalatable water, the passage of the " Great Mother Mountain" of the continent was accomplished. The measles scourged our camj). The brave boys, Foster and Bryant, fell a prey to its ravages. Following for some days the great San Juan, leaving its banks swarming with the sheep and horses of the Navajos, and crossing towards the south the impracticable mountain of Tunicha (never before trodden by white men), we descended into the cavernous region of Challa, amidst the seclu- sion of which are the forts and fastnesses of the Navajos. Astounded at the appearance of an American force where they had trusted it could never penetrate, the chiefs tendered presents, restored the horses which had been stolen from New Mexico, and promised abject sub- mission. Taking with us nine chiefs commissioned to bind the nation, we hast- ened toward the snowy peaks which rose 200 miles to the east and barred 134 APPENDIX. our return to New IMexico. At the western base of these, in the territory of the Zuui Indians, we awaited the arrival of the colonel commanding, to whom the Navajos' chiefs swore eternal friendship to the white jaan. Marching hence under the western edge of the mountain crest, we visited and smoked the pipe in the city of the Zuni Indians. This people, many of them albinos, one of the lost specks of the antique Aztec race, inhabit a solitary city in the centre of the immense plain traversed by a northern branch of the Gila River. Hence, reerossing the " Great Mother Mountain" by the Zuni Pass on the four first days of Decemhcr, we descended to the Del Norte. Joyously did we meet again our fellow-soldiers, and soon the 1st Regiment found itself reunited at Valverde, 250 miles below Santa Fe, about to pass onward to the conquest of El Paso and Chihuahua. Thus, since our departure from Santa Fe, had our little force under my conmiand reduced to peace the Yuta and Navajo nations, 40,000 strong, accomplished a march of 750 miles, crossed and recrossed the Sierra Madre, passed the Tunicha and Chiuska Mountains, and many rivers. During many successive nights the cold descended to the freezing-point of mercury : the streams were frozen solid : the pasture scanty : and of fuel there was but a stingy handful of evergreen weeds : — two brave men and many horses had perished : for the rest, their health was good, and their spirits always gay and undaunted. This is the first military force of our nation which, crossing the Rocky IMountains and unfurling the national standard upon the ivafers of the Pacific, has received for it the submission of a hostile people ; and this was accomplished in the depth of winter. A portion of our little army (the artillery and infantry) remained to occupy New Mexico ; another, accompanying General Kearney, had gone to secure the conquest of California. The Indians having been subdued, the 1st Regiment was now concentrated at Valverde, on the lower edge of New Mexico, meditating the conquest of the rich and populous state of Chihuahua. This was the 12th of December. Our regiment mustered 760 men. The weather was intensely cold, the river ran with ice — we had no tents — and our animals starved upon the harsh, dry grass. In El Paso, 200 miles below, are comfort and plenty — wine and corn, and houses, and a delicious climate ; but there, too, are a regular force of 1500 Mexicans and five pieces of artillery. Between the armies is the " Jornada," or " Journey of the Dead," a dreary stretch of 100 mUes, without wood or water. At the entrance of the " Jornada,' ' awaiting our advance, were the MEXICAN WAR. 135 American merchants, liaviiig 300 wagons, charged with $1,000,000 worth of merchandise. One hundred men under Captain Hudson subsequently came to us from Santa Fe, called the " Chihuahua Rangers" — they were drawn from the 2d Regiment (Colonel Price's). An express was sent back to Santa Fe for one company of artillery, commanded by Captain Waitman. This company overtook us afterwards in El Paso — about the 1st of February. On the 12th, a forlorn hope of 300 passed onward to open the passage through the "Jornada" — with this were Captains Parsons, Waldo, Reid, and Rodgers. We expected to meet the enemy as we should pass onward from its jaws. The passage was accomplished — no enemy obstructed our exit at the farther end — we descended to the river and quenched our thirst, con- tinued during three days and nights. Robledo is the name given to the lower mouth of the Jornada. Twelve miles below is the little town of Dona- Ana — it has plenty of corn and GOO people. This is the only settlement above El Paso, which is 80 miles distant. On the morrow we entered Dona-Ana, and there learned that the Mexican army would advance to meet us as we should descend to El Paso. On the 23d, our whole force, having successfully passed the Jornada, reunited at Dona-Ana. On the 24th, our march was 18 miles. On the 25th, advancing rapidly ahead of the wagon train, we encamped at Brazito, 19 miles, about one o'clock. The camp-guard, GO strong, the wagon-guards, and many men with jaded horses, were in the rear. This tons Christmas day. At two o'clock, the aj^proaching cloud of dust revealed the advance of the Mexicans. The bugles sounding to arms, our force was deployed in a single line on foot upon the prairie in front, and enveloping the wagons: — we numbered 424. The Mexicans deployed immediately in our front, in gallant style, and rapidly : — they numbered 1250. The veteran Vera Cruz Dragoons Avere on the right — the Chihuahua Cavalry on the left — in the centre, infantry. Now it was that a black flag was flapped in our eyes from the centre of the Mexican line. It was defied — the shock of battle followed. The Mexicans charged upon our line — their cavalry converging to our front, their infantry advancing. Our men, sitting down and receiving many volleys from their artillery, musketry, and escoi)ettes, decoyed them close — when suddenly rising and pouring in a lurid sheet of fire, the enemy, riddled everywhere, fled howling. Their artillery was taken, G3 were killed, and a vast quantity of arms taken from them. Those who escaped deserted from the Mexican army. 136 APPENDIX. This was Christmas day, the 9th anniversary of Okechobee. Thus did the Missouri volunteers confirm upon him the great lie uttered against them by their commander on that former day. Victory hastened our marches. On the morning of the 27th, we entered El Paso. Awaiting the arrival of artillery, we lingered six weeks in the delicious settlements of El Paso. About 20,000 Mexicans here cultivate the grajDe, and enjoy much prosperity and a delicious climate. On the 9th of February, we moved on to Chihuahua. The interval, 280 miles, if seen by you who inhabit this our verdant land, would be pro- nounced a howling desert, such is its austere and forbidding aridity — Sahara does not exceed it — -jornadas of 75 miles, without water, wood, or grass — gravel, sand, and rocks possess it merely — benumbing cold at night, at mid-day hot and dusty. On the 27th, we reached Sous, 40 miles from Chihuahua: midway between Sous and Chihuahua is Sacramento : here is the only water in that whole distance, and between us and the opportunity to slake our thirst, was entrenched the Mexican army. On the afternoon of the 28th, was gained the marvellous victory of Sacramento, in which your soldiers covered themselves with imperishable glory. On the following and succeeding days our whole column entered Chihuahua. At Chihuahua we heard with exultation of the gallant conduct of the Cole Infantry and Fisher's Artillery, at Caiiada and Taos — of their good discipline and gallant bearing whilst in garrison at Santa Fe. These were soldiers of the first requisition, and tried with us the opening campaign of the prairies. Let us here, then, as at Chihuahua, crown with the same chaplet the soldiers of Brazito, Sacramento, Caiiada, Taos, and El Paso — ■ sharing alike the honors won by all. During two months did the Missouri column hold undisturbed pos- session of the metropolis of Chihuahua, and control its dependencies. Insurrections planned both here and at El Paso were anticipated and nipped in the germ. American traders and messengers traversed the State unharmed. It had been said that so small a force could not hold Chihua- hua. It loas done, and that with a firm and tranquil grasp. But the period of our service neared its close. From our own govern- ment not a whisper had reached us from the outstart — no pay — no ammu- nition (our cartridges were made of powder taken at Brazito) — no reinforcements — no money — no reminiscence of our own existence was discernible. General Wool had deflected from his first intentions, and never appeared at Chihuahua. On the 28th of April, Chihuahua was evacuated, in obe- MEXICAN WAJl. 137 dience to an order from General Taylor, that we should johi his column at Bucna Vista and Monterey. The march to Monterey, 650 miles, was accomplished in 29 days — 17 pieces of artillery, with their caissons, and a train of 200 heavy wagons, accompanied us. It was upon this descent from the table lands to the maritime region, that our sufferings, from brackish water, suftbcating dust, night marches rendered necessary by long stretches and heat, were most excessive. Here, too, at El Paso, near the city of Parras, was won a glorious victory over the Camanche Indians, by a small handful of our gallant men, led by Captain Reid : 17 Indians bit the dust. From the outposts of the "southern army," beyond Buena Vista, we reached Camargo, on the Ilio del Norte, in nine days — j^assing through the cities of Saltillo, Monterey, and through Coralvo. Since the departure of the Missouri column from the western, border up to our return to our homes by the eastern border of our State, we have traversed the full distance of 7500 miles. No position of equal importance to that of Chihuahua has ever yet been held by the United States in IMexico, nor anywhere by so small a force. One thousand Missourians, occupying Chihuahua, cut off" from Mexico, New Mexico, and the two Californias in their rear. Fearing perpetually to be invaded, the States of Durango and Sonora withheld from the Mexican government all men, military supplies, or financial aid. The ample wealth, resources, mints, cannon, foundries, and materiel of Chihuahua were converted to oitr uses. Thus, then, by this central position, were held in check and severed from the enemy three-fifths of the territorial soil of the republic of Mexico, and 500,000 of her population. This position, too, commands the great and magnificent road which leads down the central table lands, through the capitals of Durango, Zacatecas, Aguas-Calientes, Leon, Guanaxuato, and Queretaro, to the city of Mexico. This route is unobstructed by mountains, and leads to Mexico through an abundant and very healthy region. It is the one by which the traders from Missouri annually visit the great " fair of San Juan" and the city of Mexico. It appears to me that the column of Missouri is the only one which has made war with effect and obtained from it worthy results. To be sure, our government has thrown them away, as unworthy of notice, and worthless ; but this does not lessen our merits. In June, '40, when the Missouri column left Fort Leavenworth, Gen- eral Taylor's column was at Camaigo, ready to march on Mexico by the 138 APPENDIX. route of San Luis Potosi. In June, '47, the Missouri column, returning hy the Chdf, found Greneral Taylor's advance posts at Buena Vista, ONLY NINE days' march in advance of that same Camargo. To be sure, Taylor's column had won great victories ; hut so also had the column of Missouri, against a variety of enemies. The southern army lay helpless upon an unimportant edge of Mexico, hemmed in by guerrillas — such as we found it, its expenses amounted to $1,000,000 per week. 75,000 American soldiers had been sent in and out of Mexico in a single year in this direction. The numbers of soldiers had borne a small ratio to those employed in men-of-war, in fleets of transports and steamers, at the depots, and with wagon trains. Four months had been consumed advancing from the Del Norte to Monterey, 280 miles. Five months from Monterey to Saltillo, 80 miles. Hence forward all has been complete stagnation. The possessions of the southern army are strictly confined to the dties of Monterey and Saltillo. A whole army is consumed in guarding from massacre and destruction the trains passing along the road that connects them with the Del Norte, only 300 miles. The column of Missouri supported itself from the Mexican purse. After fulfilling its orders completely, by the conquest of the States of New Mexico, Chihuahua, the two Californias, and punishing many Indian nations — closing its onward progress at Chihuahua, we have marched 600 miles from the heart of the Mexican territory, coming out te Generals Taylor and Wool. Finally, one great result is proved by these various campaigns. It is hy the route of the plains and the table lands of Mexico ONLY, that the Mexi- can nation can he conquered and held in suhjection hy the Americans. The configuration of the country, the health, the supplies upon the route, its shortness, and the extraordinary results accomplished by the Missouri column, demonstrate this. The slender means and small cost of our campaign add more strong proofs of this. Fellow-countrymen and Ladies : The soldiers of the first requisition from Missouri, excepting those who sleep forever beneath the shadows of the Sierra Madre, have returned to receive the greetings of their friends and kindred. We bring with us the spoil of the enemy as trophies of our victories. These assemblies — these crowds of fair women and brave men — these complimentary festivals and flattering words resounding in our ears from every village and from every cabin, are the gratifying rewards of our eff'orts and our deeds. Thus are our long-suspended hopes and painful anxieties consummated MEXICAN WAR. I39 by a deep and gratifying sense of triumph. So have we performed oui- task, and such is our munificent reward. Suffer me to say, — as one elevated by their own suffrages to an impor- tant command among them, — as well to my fellow-soldiers as to those here present who have sons, or brothers, or friends among them, that I found at all times the most admirable discipline: the most prompt and spon- taneous obedience — at all times a modest unassuming bravery, which met thirst and cold and starvation and exhausting night marches, with songs and gayety and merriment. Displayed on the field and in the hour of battle by a quiet anxiety for the charge, and then plunging down upon the enemy with a fiery fury which overwhelmed them with defeat and stung them with despair. These qualities they adorned with moderation after victory, and clemency to the vanquished. But the career of your soldiers, so happily begun, closes not here. May they not yet devote their young energies to a country which they ardently love, and which thus generously illustrates its love for them ? War has been to our progressive nation the fruitful season of generating new offspring to our confederation. During the Revolution, little armies, issuing from the Alleghanies, passed over Kentucky, the Northwest Territory, and Tennessee. These new coun- tries had been reconnoitred and admired. With hardy frames, confirmed health, and recruited by a year or two of peace, these soldiers returned to occupy the choice spots which had been their bivouac and camping- grounds. From the campaigns of war grew the settlements of peace, and populous States displaced the wilderness. Another war came with another generation — armies penetrated Michigan, upper Illinois, and into Missis- sippi. The great Mississippi, crossed at many points, ceased to be a bar- rier, and the steamboat appeared, plowing its yellow flow. Five great States and 2,000,000 of people emblazon its western bank. And noic, again^ have come another generation and anothtr ivar. Your little armies have scaled the eternal barriers of the " Mother Mountain" of the New World, and, buried for a time in the mazes of its manifold peaks and ridges, have debouched at many points upon the briny beach of the Pacific. Passing round by the great oceans, a military marine simultaneously strikes the shore and lends them aid. Thus is the wilderness •. recon- noitred in war, its geography illustrated, and its conquerors disciplined. Your soldiers, resting for a time at home, will sally forth again, and, wielding the weapons of husbandry, give to you roads that will nurture commei'ce and a sisterhood of maritime States on the neic-fouhd ocean. 140 APPENDIX. We return, then, to tlie bosom of our glorious State, to bury our bound- ing hearts in the joys of responsive gratulations. Coming from arid wastes and the unreUeved steriHty of mountains and plains, to scan again the verdant fields and mautliug forests of our mother-land, which of us all does not apostrophize, with glowing hearts, pur native scenes ? — Hail to Columbia, land of our birth — hail to her magnificent domain — hail to her generous people — hail to her matrons and her maidens — hail to her victorious soldiers — all hail to her as she is — hail to the sublime destiny which bears her on through peace and war., to make the limits of the continent her own, and to endure forever ! IX. SPEECH OF COL. WILLIAM GILPIN UX THE SUBJECT OF THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. FIRST SPOIvEN AT THE CAMP OF FIVE THOUSAND CALIFORNIA EMIGRANTS, AT WAKERUSA (NOW THE CITY OK LAWRENCE), KANSAS. REPEATED AT INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI, AT A MASS MEETING OF THE CITIZENS OF JACKSON COUNTY, HELD NOVEMBER 5, 1849. It is with profound pleasure, Mr. Chairman, that I address my fellow- citizens here assembled to respond approvingly to the National Conven- tion at St. Louis. Having shared with the pioneers from Missouri in the original explora- tion and settlement of Oregon and California — ^having since been one among those soldiers who carried, during war, our national flag across the Sierra Madre, and planted it upon the waters descending to the Pacific (never thence to recede) — I greet with enthusiastic joy these civic move- ments of the people to consummate, with the great works of peace, what war and exploration have opened. Diplomacy and war have brought to us the completion of our territory and peace. From this we advance to the results. These results are, for the present, the imperial expansion of our republic to the other ocean : fraternity with Asia : and the construction across the centre of our ter- ritory, from ocean to ocean, of a great iron pathway, specially national to us, international to the northern continents of America, Asia, and Europe. In approaching a discussion of a " National Railroad from the Missis- sippi to the Pacific," infinite in number and variety are the matters which swarm up and demand to array themselves in its advocacy. Thus do I feel embarrassed how to say such things only as are true and sensible in themselves, as well as interesting to my hearers : let me,- then, sketch what I may say under the following heads : — 1st. The national character of this work, and its necessity. 2d. Its practicability, and the present capacity of the nation. 3d. The time and manner of its construction. Progress, political liberty, equality. These, the most ancient and car- dinal rights of human society, perplexed in the obscurity of military des- potism, and almost lost for many centuries, are now struggling throughout / 141 142 APPENDIX. the world to re-establish, their pre-eminence. In America they occupy the vantage-ground ; for sovereignty resides in the suffrage, and with us it is universal. Progress, then, in America has the intensity of the whole people, show- ing itself in forms as infinite as the thoughts of the human mind. But it is to that department of progress which creates for us new States in the wilderness, and expands the area of our Republic, that I here restrict myself. Let us understand this ; what it is at the present hour — what stimulates — what retards it. Since 1608 we have grown from nothing to 22,000,000 : from a gar- den-patch, to be thirty States and many Territories ! This, with agricul- ture, manufactures, commerce, power, and happiness, is our progress so far. The annual yield in money of this agriculture and manufactures is now $2,000,000,000. This commerce vexes all the waters and penetrates to all the nations of the earth. This power, tranquilly complete on our own continent, compels peaceful deference abroad. This happiness, so benefi- cently felt at home, recruits us with the oppressed of all nations. But the life of a nation is long. Unlike human life, briefly extin. guished in the grave, a nation breathes ever on with the vigor of genera- tions of men daily arriving at maturity, and then departing. A nation has then a normal law of growth ; and it is this law which every American citizen ought familiarly to understand, for obedience to it is the first duty of j)atriotism. Up to the year 1840, the progress whereby twenty-six States and four Territories had been established and peopled, had amounted to a solid strip of tioenty-Jive miles in depth, added annually, along the western face of the Union from Canada to the Gulf. This occupation of wild territorj^, accumulating outward like the annual rings of our forest trees, proceeds with all the solemnity of a Providential ordinance. It is at this moment sweeping onward to the. Pacific with accelerated activity and force, like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly, and daily pushed onward by the hand of Grod. It is from the statistics accumulated in the bureaux at Washington (the decennial census, sales of public lands, assessments of State and national taxes) that we deduce with certainty the law of this deluge of human beings, which nothing interrupts and no power can stop. Fronting the Union on every side is a vast ai-my of pioneers. This vast body, numbering 500,000 at least, has the movements and obeys the discipline of a perfectly organized military force. It is momentarily re- cruited by single individuals, families, and, in some instances, communities, THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. 143 from every village, county, city, and State in the Union, and by emi- grants from other nations. Each man in this moving throng is in force a platoon. He makes a farm upon the outer edge of the settlements, which he occupies for a year, and then sells to the leading files of the mass pressing up to him from behind. He again advances twenty-five miles, renews his farm, is again over- taken, and again sells. As individuals fall out from the front rank, or fix themselves permanently, others rush from behind, pass to the front, and assail the wilderness in their turn. Previous to the late war with Mexico, this busy throng was engaged at one point in occupying the peninsula of Florida and lands vacated by emigrant Indian tribes — at another in reaching the copper region of Lake Superior — in absorbing Iowa and AVisconsin. From this very spot had gone forth a forlorn hope to occupy Oregon and California : Texas was thus annexed : the Indian country pressed upon its flanks ; and spy companies reconnoitring New and Old IMexico. Even then, obeying that mysterious and uncontrollable impulse which drives our nation to its goal, a body of the hardiest race that ever faced varied and unnumbered privations and dangers embarked upon the trail to the Pacific coast, forced their way to the end, encountering and def}^- ing dangers and difficulties unparalleled, with a courage and success the like to which the world has not heretofore seen. Thus, then, overland sweeps this tide-wave of population, absorbing in its thundering march the glebe, the savages, and the wild beasts of the wilderness, scaling the mountains and debouching down upon the sea- board. Upon the high Atlantic sea-coast, the pioneer force has thrown itself into ships, and found in the ocean-fisheries food for its creative genius. The whaling fleet is the marine force of the pioneer army. These two forces, by land and sea, have both worked steadily onward to the North Pacific. They now reunite in the harbors of Oregon and California, about to bring into existence upon the Pacific a commercial grandeur identical with that which has followed them upon the Atlantic. National wars stimulate progress, for they are the consequence of indis- creet opposition and jealousy of its march — and because in these periods of excitement the adventurous brush through the cobweb laws spun by the metaphysics of peace. Then it is that the jowng pioneers^ entering the armies of the frontier, rush out and reconnoitre the unpruned wilder- ness. During the Revolution, little armies, issuing down the Alleghanies. 144 APPENDIX. passed over Kentucky, Tennessee, and tlie Northwest Territory. These new countries were reconnoitred and admired. With hardy frames, con- firmed health, and recruited by a year or two of peace, these soldiers returned to occupy the choice spots which had been their bivouac and camping-grounds. From the campaigns of war grew the settlements of peace, and populous States displaced the wilderness. Another war came with another generation. Armies penetrated into Michigan, upper Illinois, and through Mississippi. The great Mississippi River, crossed at many points, ceased to be a barrier, and the steamboat appeared, plowing its yellow flood. Five great States, jive Territories, and three millions of people now emblazon its western side ! And now again have come another generation and another war. Your armies have scaled the icy barriers of the '■'■Mother Ilountain'^ and the Andes. Hid for a time in the mazes of their manifold peaks and ridges, they have issued out at many points upon the beach of the blue Pacific. Passing round by the great oceans, a military marine simultaneously strikes the shore and lends them aid. Thus is the wilderness reconnoitred in war, its geography illustrated, and its conquerors disciplined. Your young soldiers, resting for a moment at home, resuming the civic wreath and weapons of husbandry, have sallied forth again to give to you great roads for commerce and a sisterhood of maritime States on the new- found ocean. Only four years ago, the nation, misled by prejudices artfully instilled into the general mind, regarded the great Western wilds uninhabitable, and the new ocean out of reach. War came : 100,000 soldiers, and as many citizens, went forth, penetrated everywhere, and returned to relate in every open ear the wonderful excellence of the climates and countries they had seen. Hence have come already these new States, this other seaboard, and the renewed vivacity of progress with which the general heart now palpitates. Will this cease or slacken ? Has the pouring forth of the stream from Europe ever ceased since the day of Columbus ? Has the grass obliterated the trails down the Alleghanies or across the Mississippi? Rather let him who doubts seat himself upon the bank of our magnificent river and await the running dry of its yellow waters ; for sooner shall he see this, than a cessation in the crowd now flowing loose to the loestern seaboard ! Grold is dug : lumber is manufactured : pastoral and arable agriculture grow apace ; a marine flashes into existence : commerce resounds : the fish- eries are prosecuted : vessels are built : steam pants through all the waters. Each interest stimulating all the rest, and perpetually creating novel- THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. 145 ties, a career ia commenced to which, as it glances across the Pacific, the human eye assigns no term. The distance from the top of the Sierra Madre (Rocky Mountains), where you leave behind the waters flowing to the Atlantic, is everywhere some 1500 miles. The topographical character of this ultramontane region is very grand and characteristic. It is identical with the region at the sources of the La Plata, Amazon, and Magdalena of South America, but more immense. Sketched by its great outlines, it is simply this : The chain of the Andes, debouching north from the Isthmus, opens like the letter Y into two primary chains (^Cordilleras). On the right the Sierra Madre, trending along the coast of the Mexi- can Gulf, divides the northern continent almost centrally, forming an un- broken water-shed to Behring's Strait. On the left, the .Andes follows the coast of the Pacific, warps around the Gulf of California, and, passing along the coast of California and Oregon (under the name of Sierra Nevada) terminates also near Behring's Strait. The immense interval between these chains is a succession of intra- montane basins, seven in number, and ranging from south to north. The whole forms the Great Plateau of the Table Lands. First, is the " Basin of the City of Mexico," receiving the interior drainage of both Cordilleras, which waters, having no outlet to either ocean, are dispersed again by evaporation. Second, the " Bolson de Mapimi," collecting into the Laguna the streams draining many States, from San Luis Potosi to Coahuila, also without any outflow to either ocean. Third, the " Basin of the Del Norte," whose vast area feeds the Rio del Norte, the Conchos and Pecos. These, concentrated into the Rio Grande del Norte behind the Sierra Madre, have, by their united volume, burst through its wall and found an outlet towards the Atlantic. The geological character of this basin, its altitude, its configuration and locality, all assign it this position, as distinguishing it from all others contributing their waters to the Atlantic. Fourth, the " Basin of the Great Colorado of the West." This im- mense basin embraces above, the great rivers Rio Verde and Rio Grande, whose confluent waters, penetrating the mighty Cordillera of the Andes athwart from base to base, discharge themselves into the Gulf of Cali- fornia. Into this sublime gorge (the Canon of the Colorado) the human eye has never swept, for an interval of 575 miles : so stern a character does Nature assume where such stupendous mountains resist the passage of such mighty rivers. 10 146 APPENDIX. Fifths the "Basin of the Great Salt Lake," like the Caspian of Asia, containing many small basins within one great rim, and losing its scattered waters by evaporation, has no outflow to either ocean. Sixth, the " Basin of the Columbia," lying across the northern flanks of the two last, and grand above them all in position and configuration. Many great rivers, besides the Snake and Upper Columbia, descend from the great arc of the Sierra Madre, where it circles towards the north- west from the 43d to Ihe 52d degree, flowing from east to west, and con- centrating above the Cascades into a single trunk. It here strikes the mighty Cordillera of the Andes (narrowed to one ridge), and disgorges itself through this sublime pass at once into the open Pacific. It is here, descending by the grade of this river the whole distance from the rim of the Valley of the Mississippi and through the Andes to the Pacific, that the great debouch of the American continent towards the west is found. Here will be the pathway of future generations, as the people of the Old World pass down the Mediterranean and out by Gribraltar. Above, the " Basin of Frazer River" forms a seventh of the Table Lands. This has burst a caiion through the Andes, and like the fourth and sixth basins, sends its waters to the Pacific. With the geography of the more northern region we are imperfectly acquainted, knowing, however, that from Puget's Sound to Behring's Strait, the wall of the Andes forms the beach itself of the Pacific, whilst the Sierra Madre forms the western rim of the basins of the Saskatchewan of Hudson Bay and the Athabasca of the Arctic Seas. Thus, then, briefly we arrive at this great cardinal department of the geography of the continent, viz. : The Table Lands — being a longitudi- nal section (about two-sevenths of its whole area) — intermediate between the two oceans, but walled off from both, and having but three outlets for its waters, viz., the cartons of the Rio Grande, the Colorado, and the Columbia. Columnar basalt forms the basement of this whole region, and volcanic action is everywhere prominent. Its general level, ascertained upon the lakes of the different basins, is about 6000 feet above the sea. Rain seldom falls, and timber is rare. The ranges of mountains which separate the basins are often rugged and capped with perpetual snow, whilst isolated masses of great height elevate themselves from the plains. This whole formation abounds in the preciotis metals. Such is the region of the Table Lands. Beyond these is the maritime region ; for the great wall of the Andes, receding from the beach of the Pacific, leaves between itself and the sea a half- valley, as it were, forming the seaboard slope from San Diego to the THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. 147 Straits of Juan di Fuca. This is 1200 miles in length and 250 broad. Across it descend to the sea a series of fine rivers, ranging from south to north, like the little streams descending from the Alleghanies to the Atlantic. These are the San Gabriel, the Buenaventura, the San Joakim and Sacramento, the Rogue, Tlameth, and Umqua rivers, the Wallamette and Columbia, the Cowlitz, Chekalis, and Nasqually of Puget Sound. This resembles and balances the maritime slope of the Atlantic side of the continent : but it is vastly larger superficially : of the highest agri- cultural excellence : basaltic in formation : grand beyond the powers of description, the snowy points and volcanoes of the Andes being everywhere visible from the sea, whilst its climate is entirely exempt from the frosts of winter. Such, and so grand, is our continent towards the Pacific. Let us turn our glance towards the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, and scan the geography in our front. Four great valleys appear, each one drained by a river of the first magnitude. First. The Mississippi Valley, greatest in magnitude, and embracing the heart and splendor of the continent, gathers the waters of 1,500,000 square miles and sheds them into the Gulf of Mexico. 2d. The St. Lawrence, whose river flows into the North Atlantic. 3d. The Nelson and Severn Rivers, into Hudson Bay. 4th. The great valley of the McKensie River, rushing north into the Hyperborean Sea. These valleys, everywhere calcareous, have a uniform surface, gently rolling, but destitute of mountains, and pass into one another by dividing ridges, which distribute its own waters into each, but whose superior elevation is only distinguishable among the general undulations, by the water-sheds which they form. Around the whole continent, following the coasts of the oceans, runs a rim of mountains, giving the idea of a vast amphitheatre. Through this rim penetrate towards the south, east, and north, the above great rivers only, forming at their debouches the natural doors of the interior ; but no stream penetrates west through the Sierra Madre, which forms an un- broken water-shed from Magellan's to Behring's Strait. Thus we find more than three-fifths of our continent to consist of a limitless plain, intersected by countless navigable streams, flowing every- where from the circumference towards common centres : grouped in close proximity : and only divided by what connects them into one homogeneous plan. To the American people, then, belongs this vast interior space, covered 148 APPENDIX. over its uniform surface of 2,300,000 square miles, with the richest calcareous soil : touching the snows towards the north, and the torrid heats towards the south : bound together by an infinite internal naviga- tion : of a temperate climate : and constituting, in the whole, the most magnificent dwelling-place marked out by God for man's abode. As the complete beneficence of the Almighty has thus given to us, the owners of the continent, the great natural outlets of the Mississippi to the Grulf, and the St. Lawrence to the North Atlantic, so is it left to a pious and grateful people, appreciating this goodness, to construct through the gorge of the Sierra Madre, a great artificial monument, an iron path, a National Railway to the Western Sea. Here we perceive, in the formation of the American continent, a sub- lime simplicity, a complete economy of arrangement, singular to itself, and the reverse of what distinguishes the ancient world. To understand this, let us compare them. Europe, the smallest of the grand divisions of the land^ contains in its centre, the icy masses of the AIjds ; from around their declivities radiate the large rivers of that continent : the Danube directly east to the Euxine ; the Po and Rhone, south to the Mediterranean ; the Rhine to the Northern Ocean. Walled off" by the Pyrenees and Carpathians, divergent and isolated, are the Tagus, the Elbe, and other single rivers, affluents of the Baltic, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Euxine. Descending /y-om common radiant points, and diverging every way from one another, no intercommunication exists between the rivers of Europe : navigation is petty and feeble : nor have art and commerce, duiing many centuries, united so many small valleys, remotely isolated by impenetrable barriers. Hence upon each river dwells a distinct people, differing from all the rest in race, language, habits, and interests. Though often politically amalgamated by conquest, they again relapse into fragments, from innate geographical incoherence. The history of these nations is a story of perpetual war and mutual extermination. Exactly similar to Europe, though grander in size and population, is Asia. From the stupendous central barrier of the Himalayas run the four great rivers of China, due east^ to discharge themselves beneath the rising siin : towards the south run the rivers of Cochin China, the Ganges and the Indus : towards the loest the rivers of the Caspian : and north, through Siberia to the Arctic Seas, many rivers of the first magnitude. During fifty centuries, as now, the Alps and Himalaya Mountains have proved insuperable barriers to the amalgamation of the nations THE PACIFIC It AIL WAY. 149 around their bases, and dwelling in the valleys which radiate from their slopes. The continent of Africa, as far as we know the details of its surface, is, even more than these, split into disjointed fragments. Thus the continents of the Old World resemble a bowl placed bottom upwards, which scatters everything poured upon it, whilst Northern America, right side up, receives and gathers towards its centre whatever falls within its rim ! Behold, then, the future of America, graven, in the geographical lines and arteries of her symmetrical, ocean-bound expanse ! Behold it fore- told in the oracular prophecies of past and present progress. In geography the antithesis of the Old World, in society it will be the reverse. Our North America will rapidly attain to a population equal- ling that of the rest of the world combined : forming a single people, identical in manners, language, customs, and impulses : preserving the same civilization, the same religion : imbued with the same opinions, and having the same political liberties. Of this we have two illustrations now under our eye : the one passing away, the other advancing. The aboriginal Indian race, among whom, from Darien to the Esquimaux, and from Florida to Vancouver's Island, exists a perfect identity in their hair, complexion, features, stature, and language. And second, in the instinctive fusion into one language and one new race, of immigrant Germans, English, French, and Spanish, whose individuality is obliterated in a single generation ! At this moment, the maritime policy, planned with dark genius, and pur- sued with sci'upulous selfishness, palls our march. Nothing behind us in history at all rivals in rapidity of growth, in wealth, power, and splendor, those States masking the seaboard, and called at home " the Old Thirteen." Here are cities (and a great number of them) surpassing, at one cen- tury old, those of a thousand years upon the old continents ! The States have swelled as fast. This admirable greatness is due to the mastery of the continent which they exercise by majorities in the national councils, to the immense income of revenue which they thus collect and use, and to their monoj^oly of all foreign commerce. A new and rival seaboard — " a New 77iirteen" — would halve and dis- tribute all of these. It was foreseen how progress, travelling centrally across the continent, was striding point-blank to this consummation. To retard this, indefinitely, arose the maritime policy, invented by sophistry, and sustained by metaphysics. Mr. Jefferson having, with consummate prescience, added to our domain the Louisiana purchase : the most splendid portion of the habitable globe: 150 APPENDIX. hastened to give it popTxlation and a maritime wing to the Pacific. Ex- plorations under Clarke and Lewis, and others, followed by Astor's enter- prise, opened, forty years ago, the great commercial route between the oceans, since shut up by the maritime policy, but now reopened. These were checked and overthrown by the exigencies of foreign war. That over, the discussion of a route to Asia was revived by the press and in Congress : Astor sought to renew his enterprises, and aid was demanded from the government by the people of the West, and by patriotic indi- viduals in the East. This was refused by the policy of President Monroe's administration, in whose cabinet were conjoined Messrs. J. Q. Adams, of Massachusetts, and J. C. Calhoun, of South Carolina — subtle statesmen of the most penetrating foresight and the loftiest ambition. Power emigrates as time rolls on. The pride and fascination of its possession linger supremely potent in the human heart. From this pro- found source has sprung the unequitable maritime policy, arrayed against the march of progress and the westward migration of power. The former State, Massachusetts, had proclaimed a national war uncon- stitutional, and initiated at Hartford the preparatory plans to secede from and dissolve the Union. The latter, South Carolina, has done the same, pronouncing the general power of taxation unconstitutional in a particular form ; and now again appear the same dreadful threats of " force and terror," pronouncing unconstitutional a specific legislation for the Terri- tories. Behind this gorgon of alarm (^Nullification^, and unperceived by the general mind, lashed into dismay and distracted by " terror and force," threatening the Union, the subtle maritime policy has been riveted down. Within the" young States, the public glebe has been held by the central government and withheld from taxation. Thus is State revenue cut off. These public lands are held at a tyrannical price, the sales naade cash, donations of homestead rights, pre-emption, and graduation refused. Savages, ejected from the older States, have been bought up and planted as a wall along the western frontier and across the line of progress. These are metaphysically called foreign nations. Recently there has been given to the soldiers of the nation a bounty of $100 in money, or $200 in land. This is legislative declaration that the price is 100 per cent, above their highest value. The revenue raised from the customs is collected at the seaports, where the expenses of collection are disbursed. The heavy part of this revenue is paid by the agriculturists of the West, who are the consumers. $3,000,000 annually of direct land revenue is exclusively paid by these latter. But where is this splendid income of $40,000,000, thus levied for the THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. 151 most part from Western industry, expended ? To tlie navy is devoted $9,000,000 (all upon the tide-waters of the seaboard). To the civil list $5,000,000 — all there also. To seaboard improvements, viz. : custom- houses, mints, harbors, breakwaters, fortifications, navy-yards, light-houses, coast survey, post-offices, armories, etc., $2,500,000. All this too is upon the tide-water. To the army $5,000,000 — this is expended on a military academy, ord- nance foundries, four artillery regiments, engineers — all upon the seaboard. True it is that a few stingy details of cavalry and infantry are posted in shanties upon the Western frontier, and a largess of half a million sowed among the Indians. But the single fortress of " Old Point Comfort" has cost more than the sum total of Western military structures. Thus do we come at one cardinal item of maritime power — $40,000,000 collected annually from thirty States, of which $39,000,000 is annually paid out to thirteen only ! Such is the income which maritime policy secures to itself by taxation. Further, the foreign exports and imports amount to $350,000,000 per annum — every pound of this leaves our shores or comes to us in the ships of these maritime States, and is stored at their seaports. To them, then, belongs the complete and prodigious monopoly of the carrying trade of America ! Is it wonderful, then, that a policy should have been projected with foresight and pursued with obstinate will, to preserve to its possessors an income so splendid, and a monopoly of such infinite profit ? With these maritime States, too, rests the political mastery of the continent : because they have as yet always had the majority of the Houses of Congress, and still retain that in the House of Representatives, in spite of the accession of Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin, which have changed the Senate. It is the decennial census of 1850 which will give in the thirty-third Congress a majority to this great indigenous American people, residing within the mountains, in the great basins of the continent. To them will belong the glorious task to give to the public domain its true, patriotic use, and root out the scorching tyranny, of which it is now the engine. To make taxation and the expenditures of revenue national and equal among the States and people. To pay, not grind, the pioneers. To reverse the uses of the national wilderness, so that its glebe shall be the beneficent fountain of great roads, unlimited agriculture, population, commerce, and rich States. To give us maritime rivalry, and a new seaboard. To recon- cile the white man and the Indian, now kept by infamous laws in a state of implacable feuds and mutual piracy. It is very wicked that our government, being republican, has ravished 152 APPENDIX. republican liberty and rigbts from the Indian, and re-enacted for his race all tbe odious inequalities and oppressions of feudality. The set purpose of maritime policy to crush progress developed itself with the admission into the Union of Missouri, a State beyond the Mis- sissippi, and aalient upon the routes and rivers towards the Pacific. A wall of Indians was planted along the frontier from the Missouri to the Red River. These foreign nations ! were planted upon soil which they could not sell. Commerce was prohibited, and the white man for- bidden entrance under penitentiary imprisonment. The army, its duties reversed, was withdrawn from danger, and planted on the line to bayonet back the pioneers. By these nefarious sophistries it was designed to fence across the pioneer army in front. Hush-money to the amount of $85,000,000 was paid to get these Indians out of the older States for the use of the fron- tier. In combination with this it was necessary to gain a maritime ex- tension, and the national purse was opened. A couple of thousand Indians were discovered in the pocket of East Florida — the Semincles and Micka- sukies. Ten years of terrible war, during which 100,000 military emigrants and $45,000,000 had supplied the material of a State to balance Michi- gan, brought about a treaty allowing those tribes to remain among the Everglades ! During this time Indian piracies swarmed over the Great Plains and upon the commercial roads to Mexico and the mountains. Many hundred whites and innumerable Indians fell beneath the toma- hawk. Protection, military police, and revenge were denied at Washing- ton. Not a dollar was here disposable, for these terrors of the wilderness helped the policy which kept it so. The reannexation of Texas was consummated. This was a maritime State, extending the shell of maritime influence farther round the conti- nent. Texas owed debts — some $7,000,000. Her public lands were speciously left to her to pay them — 208,000,000 of acres, by valuation $260,000,000, to pay $7,000,000 of debts ! Is it, then, by chance or by design that the great domain is to one State the source of imperial revenues and advancement, to another of poverty and repression? Express laws of Congress produce these ex- tremes. To understand this rightly, let us examine it. The soil of Missouri is held, until sold, at $1.25 per acre by the central government. At present $600,000 per annum is extracted in specie through the land offices. Thus are we impoverished. Two-thirds of our soil is withheld from State taxa- tion. As real estate is the substantial source of State revenue, no public THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. 3^53 enterprises, no geological surveys, no internal improvements, not even highways and bridges, are possible in Missouri. Our insignificant State and county revenues fall with onerous weight upon less than one-third of the glebe lands, upon personal property, and licenses. The disastrous wreck suiFered by Mississippi, Illinois, and other new States is proof enough of this. How is this reversed in Texas ? An immense domain fills her treasury — she taxes and sells for taxes at will — unlimited credit and resources invite her to construct the greatest works, without danger. By reducing and graduating the price of lands, she invites forth the agriculturists of our States, and warps progress towards the Gulf. On the pledge of her public lands she may herself alone procure means to construct a railroad to the Pacific ! Across the western frontier is unobstructed access to the 8,000,000 of Mexicans ! Western commerce, then, walled in and made piracy in Missouri, crushed and persecuted, must migrate hence to Texas. Again, war with Mexico arose. This was a land war of armies, be- tween nations having a common frontier of many thousand miles. A single American army of 30,000 cavalry and flying artillery, marching by the magnificent road from Fort Leavenworth, passing by the great table lands to the city of Mexico, and subsisting their animals of food and transportation upon the pastures, would have conquered and held all the Mexican States in eighteen months. Forty millions of expenditure would have brought peace on our own dictation — great roads for commerce would have been established forever, and the disbursements returned to us in the ceded territory. A war thus economically conducted, however, would have opened the avenue and planted central States to the new seaboard. But fleets of transports must plow the Gulf, and the maritime States of Jacinto and Sierra Madre extend to embrace Tampico. One hundred thousand soldiers were sent to the impracticable entrance by Saltillo and Potosi — one hundred millions expended upon this army, which, stagnating upon the waters of the Rio Grande, never passed beyond them ; for Saltillo is upon an afiluent of the Rio Grande, and only 250 miles from its main bank. Thus was profligately re-enacted the drama of the State of Florida. The maritime policy hX^n^s. the double object of blocking up the inte- rior, and extending the seaboard in a shell around the continent. For this the navy is enormously increased and the army emasculated. Enter- prises in the central States are marred, but those of the seaboard sus- tained directly from the National Treasury. Of this let us take a recent illustration. 154 APPENDIX. A proposition was submitted to ttie Twenty-nintli Congress, early in its first session (1845-46) to carry onward to the coast of California and Oregon, and to Santa Fe, monthly, the mail which comes tri-weekly to our city of Independence. A law authorizing the Postmaster-Greneral to let the contract for such an extended mail-route to the lowest bidder, in the ordinary way, was alone required. Contractors were ready to execute the whole undertaking for $50,000 per annum, carrying the mails in fifteen days, making the time from ocean to ocean twenty five days. This proposition, admirable for its practicability, its economy in time and cost, was belabored by orators and suppressed. To this hour all over- land mails are prohibited by statute. At this same session of this same Congress, and under the promptings of these orators, the government was, by statute, made the partner with ship-building companies of New York City. To construct four mail steamers, the sum of $1,250,000 was advanced to these companies, to whom was also given the monopoly of future government transportation for ten years. The transportation of o\ir mails through the Isthmus is confided to the Spaniards of New Granada ! All this enormous expenditure has pro- duced at the end of four years, an uncertain monthly mail, outside of our country : and exposed to the hostilities of the whole world : which trav- erses 9000 miles of sterile ocean in fifty days ! In the interval the con- tracts have been doubled in amount by doubling the size and cost of the ships. It is a condition of these contracts that these " mail steamers" may be appraised and purchased by government for the navy. Thus is the navy clandestinely increased by eight or a dozen war steamers. Thus, whilst we may transport the domestic mails between our distant people and seaboards through the heart of our territories, every inch upon our own soil, and 1000 miles from any foreign foe or frontier — whilst this can be done and is offered to be done, by our citizens, for prices at which the mails will yield remunerating revenues — whilst this admits of an in- crease to daily mails at any time, and a reduction of time to one-half — whilst this allows of innumerable way mails, telegraphs, and the most intimate domestic intercourse — involves neither increase of military force nor expenditures by sea or land, and avoids the possibility of foreign inter- ference or molestation — opening roads and crowding them with population and settlements — concentrating to the seaport where it reaches the Pacific, tbe American shipping and business on that ocean, at once creating a great American emporium. Instead of all this, which is sensible and natural, and understood by our THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. I55 people, whose cardinal rigid it is to have the circulation of their domestic thoughts and business through home channels which are short, safe, and expeditious ! Yes, instead of this, we are taxed millions, to have our letters sent 9000 miles in fifty days, under the equator, by sea, through foreign nations : exposed to delay, dangers, and destruction in every form, ruflBing the jealousies of rival nations, and exposed to their cannon — and all this to fill the maws of maritime speculators and political ambition. Such are a few examples of a policy hourly influencing our glorious State for weal or woe, whose efi'ect upon you, my fellow-citizens, fills me with the most puzzling astonishment. You drop your own interests with facility when told they are difficult and inexpedient, and stand at ease, whilst rival enterprises, planned to destroy you, and a thousand times more difficult, costly, and fanciful, are finished completely ! Mr. Chairman, eloquence is not nurtured in the depths of the silent wilderness, and there have I passed my youth. Did I possess those graces of language and polished elocution, which many youths, my cotempo- raries, trained in the courts and halls of legislation, ought to do, then should my voice sound, like the rappel beat on John de Zitzka's skin, into every cabin of our glorious State ; to call forth her citizens, and, roused from their ignoble apathy, animate them to resume their stolen rights and vindicate their crippled honor. For this apathy is, towards this our State and our nation, the crime of the sentinel slumbering on his post. The configuration of the Sierra Madre (^the Mother Mountain of the world) is transcendently massive and sublime. Rising from a base- ment whose roots spread out two thousand miles and more : its crest splits almost centrally the Northern continent, and divides its waters to the two oceans. Novel terms have been introduced to define its characteristics. Mesa, expresses the level plateaux of its summits. Canon^ the gorges rent in its slopes by the descending rivers. Bute, the conical mountains isolated and trimmed into symmetrical peaks by atmospheric corrosion. Everybody has seen the card-houses built by children in the nursery. Suppose three of these in a row, having a second story over the centre: this toy familiarly delineates a transverse section of the Sierra IMadre. This upper story represents the central, primary mesa of the Cordillera — its summit a great plain, descending on both flanks by a perpendicular wall of 6000 feet to the level of the second mesa or steppe. Towards the icest the second mesa fills the whole space to the Andes, whose farther side descends abruptly to the tide-level of the Pacific. This is again what has been before described at length as the Great Table 156 APPENDIX. Lands. But towards the east, the second mesa forms a piedmont, rent into peaks by the fissures of innumerable streams. This piedmont, called by us the Black Hills, masks the front of the Sierra Madre, from end to end. So completely is it torn and rent by the perplexity of water-courses, that patches alone are left to define the origi- nal plateau. These are the eastern envelope of the basin of the Yellow- stone, the Laramie plain (between the Plattes), the Ratone, and the Llano Estacado of Texas. Beneath this the tMrd mesa (or steppe), is that superlative region, the Great Prairie Plains, whose gentle slope forms a glacis to the Gulf through Texas: and in front to the trough formed by the Mississippi River from Itasca Lake to the Balize. Neither are the other three basins of the St. Lawrence, Hudson Bay, and Athabasca anything else but pro- longations of this same glacis, sloping towards the east and north. It is this vastness of geographical configuration which leads the glance of the engineer with unerring certainty to that line of natural grades from ocean to ocean, the discovery of which mankind now awaits with the keen- est curiosity, and along which the American nation is resolved to construct the consummate work of art — the Asiatic and European Railway. Advancing north along the comb of the Sierra Madre from below Mexico, you find at the sources of the Platte (Sweetwater) a wide gap, where, the high mesa suddenly giving out for the space of forty miles, the second mesa passes through from east to west, the continued water- ridge being scarcely perceptible among its gentle undulations. This is the South Pass. It is so named as being the most southern pass to which you may ascend by an affluent of the Atlantic and step immediately over on to a stream descending directly to the Pacific. This name is as ancient as the pass itself Into it concentrate the great trails of the bufialo, geographers and road makers by instinct, before the coming of man. The Indian, the Mexican, and the American, successors of one another, have not improved or de- flected from the instincts of the bufialo, nor will they whilst the moun- tains last in their present unshattered bulk. The South Pass has a towering grandeur, in keeping with the rivers between which it is the avenue (the Missouri, the Colorado, and the Columbia), all of which, issuing from the wall of the Wind River Moun- tain, come out of it on to the second mesa, at the same level, and into which they immediately commence burrowing their canons of descent to the seas. Here, then, is the route, the Southern route, of the National Railroad, ascending by the water-grade of the Platte on to the top of the second THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. 157 mesa, where it forms the summit, following the lerel of this mesa along the base of the high mesa, to the Columbia (Snake River), and descend- ing its Avater-grade clear out to the Pacific. The distance from the Platte to the Columbia has not been accu- rately ascertained, though by the present wagon road, which crosses a corner of the Salt Basin, it is less than 300 miles. Here is that double inclined plane, to find which has been the first essential in every work of art existing in the world. There is none south of this, because everywhere the basins of the Table Lands overlap and envelop one another, so that the passes lead merely from one of these into another : nor are there any natural tunnels through the precipitous walls of the Andes, and between the basins. The Columbia, running across the Table Lands from east to west, dis- tributes the descent of 8500 feet, equally along its course of 1200 miles, and tunnels the great ranges of Blue Mountains and the Andes. This whole course of the river is a continuity of rapids having three falls — the American Falls of 30 feet at Portneuf, the Salmon Falls of 45 feet, 200 miles below, and the Chuttes of 12 feet, near the Dalles. This river-grade is then as rapid as the descent to be accomplished will admit of; for, distributed into long levels and steep grades, it would im- mensely impair the utility of the whole work, and fatally impede trans- portation. The great Colorado runs diagonally across the Table Lands, debouch- ing into the Grulf of California ; but has its course and those of its great affluents, parallel with the mountain ranges, which are scored with un- fathomed canons, perplexing the traveller with an infinity of impassable ridges, among which the water-courses are embowelled. North of the South Pass, however, exist many single passes where the higher branches of the Missouri and Columbia interlock. These circui- tous routes have all the same termini as that of the South Pass, for they also descend the same two rivers to the seas. Thus between the South Pass and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec there^xists no railroad route, owing to the longitudinal courses of the rivere, the complexity of the basins, and the double barrier of primary mountain chains. To the north, other passes exist, which future generations may develop, and on which navigation may be used for four-fifths of the whole dis- tance. True it is that potential fashion now exalts the little maritime basin of California, San Francisco Bay, into the haven of hope and fortune of the new seaboard, whilst the sublime basin of the Columbia, and its magnificent river harbor, are banished from public fiivor. The basin of San Francisco is small, tropical in climate, sterile, and the 158 APPENDIX. most isolated spot, to reach from tlie interior, on the whole coast of the Pacific. No great river gives it access to the Mississippi Valley, from which it is cut off by the basins of the Salt Lake, the Colorado, and the Del Norte, overlapping each other. The Columbia is larger than the Danube, and equal to the Ganges. In size, climate, agricultural excellence, capacity for population, and its won- derful circular configuration, the basin of the Columbia surpasses both of these others. The mouth of the Columbia, a salient point upon the open coast, more than any other central and convenient to the whole North Pacific and Asia, is in size, depth of water, safety and facility of ingress or egress, equal to San Francisco. As the mouth of the greatest river descending from our continent into the Pacific, it is infinitely before it. It is eight degrees south of Liverpool, having the climate of Bordeaux, Marseilles, or Savannah. Why is not the deep sea navigation concentrated at Norfolk or Hamp- ton. Roads, the finest harbor of the whole Atlantic? Why rather is it found at New York and New Orleans, accessible only through every dan- ger that can menace shipping? Why, because the former is the outlet of the basin of the St. Lawrence, the latter of the Mississippi. The ship- ping of commerce goes to where cargoes can be found. Less than fifty years ago, fashion pronounced the little ravines of James River and the Connecticut the proud spots of America, and held the great uninhabitable wastes of the Mississippi and its unnavigated streams as worthy only to balance codfish! This same splenetic spirit oi fashion now manufactures a similarly ridiculous misdirection for the energy of the pioneers, by setting up what the geologist would call a " pot-hole of the Andes," against the grand Columbia. Commerce, provident like every other department of industry, makes herself harbors with charts, pilots, buoys, and beacons. The shallowest channel of the Columbia has thirty-five feet water — the deepest of New York, twenty-nine. Climate distinctly controls the migrations of the human race, which has steadily adhered to an isothermal line around the world. The extremely mild climate of our Western seaboard is only the consequence of the same great laws of nature which operate in Western Europe. These are the regular and fixed ordinances of the code of nature, to which the migra- tions of man, in common with the animal, yield an instinctive obedience. Within the torrid zone and up to 30° of the Northern hemisphere, blow the trade tciiids and variables, constantly from the east and northeast all around the world ; but the upper halves of elliptical orbits followed by the THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. 159 winds lie in the temperate zone, from 35° to 60°, within which the winds flow constantly from the west and southwest all around the world. These winds reach the tcesterii coasts of America and Europe alter trav- ersing the expanse of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Warmed to the same temperature as these oceans, they impart again this same mild atmos- phere to the maritime fronts of the continents which receive them. These same winds, passing onward over great extensions of continent of low tem- perature, covered with snow, or frozen during winter, often warped upward by mountain ranges, becoming exhausted of their warmth, have upon the eastern portions of both hemispheres an exactly opposite effect upon the climate. Hence the variant temperature of New York and Lisbon, which face one another on the opposite coasts of the Atlantic — of Pekin and San Francisco, similarly opposite upon the Pacific. At San Francisco and Lisbon the seasons are but modulations of one continuous summer. At New York and Pekin, winter suspends vegetation during seven months, whilst ice and snow bridge the land and waters. These four cities are all close upon the same parallel of latitude, the 40th degree. It is here manifest how in Asia the masses of population lie below the 40th degree, in Europe above, and again (so far) in America, curving downward on the eastern face of our continent, to rise again to the north upon the warm coast of the Pacific. Thus has the zodiac of nations, our own nation similarly with the rest, pursued a serpentine line of equal temperatwe, retaining all around the world similar employments, similar industrial pursuits, similar food and clothing, requiring similarity of climate, and recoiling alike from the torrid and the arctic zones. The scientific men of the nation- oppose the National Railroad — so did those of Europe persecute Galileo and Columbus. Science, like the army and navy, is fed from the national revenues, which maritime policy distributes to all that serve its ends. Science is rare ; the spurious quackery of science redundant. It is not the scientific doctors of the schools, the bureaux and military wings of government, that have hewed out this republican empire from the wilderness. This has been reared by the genuine heroism and sublime instincts of the pioneer arm^/, unpaid, unblessed, nay, scoffed and loaded with burdens by government and its swarm of dependents. To bridle progress has been the policy of thirty years. To keep the people out of the wilderness. To refuse Territorial governments, and prevent Territories from becoming States. At this moment scientific men arc especially busy distracting us with 160 APPENDIX. multitudinous routes and invented difficulties : devised to perplex and scatter the energies of the citizens : whose unanimous resolve it is to plow open a great central trail to the Pacific. Science cannot unmake the eternal ordinances of nature, and reset the universe to suit local fancies and idle fashion. It is the humble duty of science to investigate nature as she is, and promulgate the truths discover- able for the guidance of governments and men. The experience gained from the great works constructed by the last generation, in digging through the Alleghanies routes for commerce to the Atlantic, settles for us the rules that shall guide us across the Sierra Madre to the Pacific. In 1818 the State of New York cut through the low and narrow ridge between Rome and Syracuse, the former on an affluent of the Hudson, the latter of Lake Ontario. Thus the Jirst expenditures, perforating the dividing mountain, let through that infant commerce, which in thirty years has grown to such a grandeur of quantity and profit, that this great thoroughfare is itself quadrupled in capacity and lengthened out to Mon- treal, to Boston, to New York City, and into Pennsylvania, towards the east. Westioard, it reaches through Ohio and Indiana to the Ohio River : and by the Illinois and Wisconsin Rivers to the Missouri and Mississippi. What the single State of New York, of 1,200,000 population, accom- plished by her own intrinsic bravery and resources, undismayed by ridicule and unappalled by the then experimental character of such works in a republic and upon our continent: — just such a work now invites the national bravery, power, and wealth of this imperial repi/blic : namely, to lay, over the dividing barrier of the Sierra Madre, along the floor of its natural tunnel at the South Pass, an iron pathway : which, descend- ing the grades of the Platte and Columbia to the highest points of navi- gation, shall let through the first infant stream of that supreme Oriental commerce, whose annually expanding flood will, during our generation, elongate its arms and fingers through all the States and to every harbor of the two seaboards ! Climate : the configuration of the continent : the location of our States and people : the isothermal line of progress : the high latitudes of the ultra- oceanic nations here locate the " National Railroad." The climate is here most favorable : because the whole region from the Missouri to the Colum- bia, far removed from any ocean, is so dry as to be free from rains in summer and snows in winter. ^■ Thus the snows within the South Pass itself are not so deep as upon the St. Lawrence, or between Boston and Buffalo. Upon the Wind River I THE PAOIFIO RAILWAY. 161 Mountain there is no snow in summer, at an altitude where it is perpetual on the Andes beneath the equator and near the ocean ! On the Table Lands rain and snow are so rare that they may be said never to occur. This obstruction, then, stated on theory to be fatal, has no existence — whilst this route, pursuing great rivers all the way, has abun- dance of water. Mineral coal is abundant from end to end. Lumber and rock infinite in quantity and convenient in position. It is, then, I repeat, through the heart of our Territories, our popula- tion, our States, our farms and habitations, that we need this broad current of commerce. Where passengers and cargo may, at any time or place, embark upon or leave the vehicles of transportation. It is foul treason to banish it from the land : from among the people : to force it on to the barren ocean : outside of society : through foreign nations : into the torrid heats and along solitary circuitous routes, im- prisoned for months in great ships. This central railroad is an essential domestic institution: more power- ful and permanent than law, or popular consent: to thoroughly complete the great systems of fluvial arteries which fraternize us into one people : to bind the two seaboards to this one nation, like ears to the human head : to radicate the foundations of the Union so broad and deep, and render its structure so solid, that no possible force or stratagem can shake its permanence : and to secure such scope and space to progress, that pros- perity and equality shall never be impaired or chafe for want of room. What, sirs, are these populous empires of Japan and China, now be- come our neighbors ? They are the most ancient, the most highly civil- ized, the most polished of the earth. It was from Sinim (China) that the Judean king Solomon imported the architects, the mechanics, the furniture of his gorgeous temple. Hence, the Tyrians brought tapestry, carpets, shawls of wool, cotton and silk fabrics, wares of porcelain and metals, dyes, gums, and spices, jewels polished and set. Hence, came the climax of all human inventions, letters and figures, which fix language and numbers, making them eternal : astronomy, arith- metic, algebra, decimals, chemistry, printing, navigation, agriculture, and horticulture. All these, erroneously ascribed as the inventions of the Arabs or to the exiles of Constantinople, who brought them into Western Europe, are the creations of Oriental genius and study. Tea, sugar : the peach produced from the wild almond : the orange from the sour lime : the apple from the crab : the fruits : the flowers : the vegetables of our gardens, are the creations of Chinese horticultural science. 162 APPENDIX. The horse, cattle, the swine and poultry of our farms, come to us from thence. The culture of the cereal grains, wheat, rice, barley bread, wine, the olive and silk, have come to us from the farthest Orient. Hence also came gunpowder, the magnetic needle, and calomel. The paints, varnish, and tools of the art have come, and the remedies used in pharmacy. Our historic records, commencing with the arrival of progressive civil- ization at the extremity of the Mediterranean, relate from tradition the antique empire of Bacchus and the religion of Zoroaster upon the Granges and the Indus. The Chaldeans of the Persian Sea followed. Fleets came from the extreme Orient into the Bengal Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea ; and caravans overland by the Oxus and the Caspian brought the camel, the horse, cattle, manufactured wool, silks, cotton, and metals, agriculture, commerce, and coin. Empires expanding westward along the Ganges, the Euphrates, and the Nile, reached to the Mediterranean and Euxine. From Egypt, Phoe- nicia, and Colchis (Trebisond), sprang European Greece. Such as Progress is to-day, the same has it been for ten thousand years. It is the stream of the human race flowing from the east to the west, im- pelled by the same divine instinct that pervades creation. By this track comes the .'un diurnally to cheer the world. Thus come the tides of men and of the waters : learning : law : religion : the plague : the smallpox : and the cholera. The sources of life and happiness — the pestilence that saddens both. These empires of which we have spoken have left upon the ground they occupied their uames, political society, their organized systems of gov- ernment and religion. Does not society, then, once founded become perennial ? It is within a belt of the earth straddling the 40th degree of north latitude that the greatest mass of land surrounds the world, and where the continents most nearly approach. Within this belt (from 30° to 50°) four-fifths of the human race is assembled, and here the civilized nations, of whom we possess any history, have succeeded one another, commencing at the farthest extremity of Asia, and forming a zodiac towards the setting sun. This succession has flowed onward in an even course, undulating along an isothermal line, until in our time the ring is about to close around the earth's circumference, by the arrival of the American nation on the coast of the Pacific, which looks over on to Asia. In this age and in this march of human race, as elsewhere : the bold, energetic, and indomitable : the picked spirits of the world lead the van ; and such is the pioneer army. What means that expression in the Declaration of Independence, "life, THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. 163 liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" ? What brought the Cavaliers to Virginia in 1608 ? It was " the pursuit of happiness." What animated the Pilgrims to endure the rigors of Plymouth Rock ? Why, " the pur- suit of happiness." What sought Boone and his companions plunging a thousand miles into the wilderness? This same " pursuit of happiness." What secret motive now brings foreigners to our shores, and impels our own citizens onward to the Pacific? Again, it is " the pursuit of happi- ness." Progress^ then, is one of the immortal rights sanctified in the Charter of human liberty. Why, then, is advent into the wilderness — the field for the discontented, the oppressed, the needy, the restless, the ambitious, and the virtuous, thus closed by a policy at once sinister, nefarious, and unconstitutional ? Unquiet for our sacred Union is this present time, when political power, about to cross the Alleghanies, see-saws on their crests, counting the days that precede her eternal transit over them ! It is by the rapid propagation of new States : the immediate occupation of the broad platform of the continent : the aggregation of the Pacific Ocean and Asiatic commerce : that inquietude will be swallowed up, and the murmurs of discontent lost in the onward sound of advancement. Discontent, distanced, will die out. The immense wants of the Pacific will draw off, over the Western out- lets, the over-teeming crops of the Mississippi Valley. Thus will the present seaboard States resume again their once profitable monopoly of the European market, relieved from the competition of the interior States. The cotton and rice culture of Georgia and the Carolinas will revive. The tobacco of Virginia and Maryland will again alone reach Europe. Ships withdrawn from the Northern States to the Pacific, will regenerate the noble business of nautical construction in New England and New York. The established domestic manufactures of clothing and metals will find, in our great home extension, that protection which they in vain seek to create by unequal legislation, nocuous and impracticable in our present incomplete and unbalanced geographical form. Thus calmly weighed and liberally appreciated, does this great Central Railroad minister to the interests and invite the advocacy and co-opera- tion of every section of our territory, and every citizen of our common country. The exclusion of foreigners from Japan, China, and Cochin China is not then an institution of barbarism, but a domestic tax'iff of protection. 164 APPENDIX. It is designed, like the combination of Christian nations against piracy, to protect their nationality and freedom against those fierce military nations of Northmen, who for twenty centuries have rent Europe and Western Asia with perpetual massacre ; who ransack all the seas in their war-ships : store the rocks of the ocean with munitions of war : crush the millions of India with cannon and the bayonet : plunder Africa of a million annually of her swarthy children to rot in foreign slavery : and even exterminate one another in deadly strife when they meet among the an- tipodes, in the solitudes of the Southern Ocean. When, however, o%ir diplomacy shall receive a wise direction — when our foolish nepotism to Europe shall be run out — when men of sense, such as Franklin was of old, shall sail over from Astoria to Pekin, and there converse, with the Oriental Courts of Republican America as she is ■ — when her civic growth and pacific policy shall be there understood — when the central position of our continent shall be known : forming the avenue for trade and barrier against war with the Northmen of Europe — then will mutual confidence between these, the oldest and youngest of the human family, the extremes met, show itself in the graces of a free commerce, and the ties of an harmonious fraternity. It is for you especially, people of Missouri, to seek these new relations with the Oriental people, with the zeal of faith and the fixed will of con- viction. It is arch mockery for us to be duped by the flippant caricatures of these ancient and polished Asiatics : invented by British envy to mislead us, and fed out to us by the British press to cloak sinister designs of sub- jugation and world-wide plunder. Rather let us take alarm at the tone and source of this monstrous flood of calumny : and know that a direc' inspection for ourselves will reveal to us, in Asia, empires of people illustrious for their antique civilization : ren- dered enduring and perfect by political equality, and wise civic institutions, wini owed and renovated during fifty centuries of uninterrupted experi- ence — among whom the science and art of war, indeed, are decayed from long disuse : but all useful sciences highly perfected — with whom govern- ment has reached the mildest form of patriarchal despotism, eliminating political priestcraft and the disseminated tyranny of a patrician order — who have so admirably refined and perfected municipal government and police that 400,000,000 of population (double that of all Europe) are united under one harmonious political system in concord and tranquillity. It is among these swarming hives of ingenious people that we will find markets on a scale commensurate with our own prolific industry. This is ngt now the case in Europe. The Europeans are in all things THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. 165 our rivals and competitors. Are we agriculturists ? So are they, and wall off our competition with corn-law tariffs. Are we miners and manu- facturers ? So are they, and overtop us by abundance of labor and capi- tal. Are we ship-owners? So are they, having an immense marine cheaply navigated. They conquer and colonize foreign countries, of whose trade they make monopolies ! They are northern nations, whose clothing is of wool and flax, consuming a very limited amount of cotton. What they take from us is to manufacture for exportation. Tobacco is prohibited — hemp and metals they^export. The population of Europe is 205,000,000— of the Atlantic all round, 253,000,000. On the Pacific, in front of us, are 400,000,000 people of the tropics — Polynesians, South Americans, Southern Asiatics — among whom wheat is not cultivated, and animal food, other than fish and poultry, very scai'ce. Their clothing is exclusively cloth of cotton, grass, and silk. Opium is excessively used among them. Rice, the plantain, banana, and fruits are their unsubstantial diet. Here, then, will be the market for raw and manufactured cotton. Here our rank manufactured tobacco will substitute itself for opium. Here our substantial articles of food — flour, meats, and fish — will find purchasers in all who eat. Lead and hemp will be sold. In return will come to us groceries, spices, teas, coffee, sugar — porce- lain, Japan ware, furniture, works in ivory — drugs, paints, dyes, medi- cines — beautiful fabrics of silk, satin, velvet, crapes; nankeens, the delicate shawls of Cashmere, the carpets of Persia — jewelry, trinkets, and toys — the hemp of Manilla — luscious fruits dried and preserved. The people of the Pacific have no marine adapted to cross the great ocean — the carrying to and fro will be in our ships, and a monopoly to us — ship-building and navigation will occupy our people of the new sea- board, and the metals, lumber, and hemp of the interior find a prodigious demand. The population of the Pacific all round exceeds 645,000,000 ! Will not then our people find in this, that certain panacea of all their wants and wishes, namely, an infinite market of consumption ? Surely this people, which has submitted to the nostrums of political quackery : tariffs of protection : banks to make money plenty : home manufactures and systems of internal improvement: all invented to create markets at home, by changing our producing agriculturists into consuming opera- tives: but all of which little experiments have produced industrial anarchy and commercial bankruptcy. Surely this people will not hesitate to construct for themselves this great " National Highway," at small comparative cost: and leading as level as a cannon to its blank : to a new ocean, teeming with 645,000,000 of 166 APPENDIX. people, of wants unlimited, and having a genius active, intelligent, and com- mercial ! To effect this, it is only necessary to untrammel progress from the snares and dead-falls of maritime policy. To reopen the legitimate onward trail of the pioneer army, and rein- vigorate its march. The cause of the pioneers at this hour pre-eminently demands the undivided energies of Missouri. It is for us that the pioneer army is now conquering the vast wilderness that hems in our commerce and blocks the frontier : for us it throws down the perfidious Indian wall : reopens the central tr^il of advancement so long insidiously closed — and to us, for us, it re-establishes that crowning excellence of position of which hostile policy has for thirty years bereft us. It is not ambition that impels us, citizens of Missouri, to advance to the advocacy of this great work with our whole unshackled energies — it is high religious duty. Central to the continent, to its internal navigation, to its States, to its commerce, and to its variety of agriculture : neutral to all sectional antipa- thies, and the converging heart of all interests: WE must occupy this central position with power and dignity equal to its importance ; with a strength of grasp and intensity of enterprise to cope with the tallest exi- gencies. Let us appreciate this, and stand up to the work with hearts of contro- versy and sinews of endurance : that the fame of our glorious State, sallying forth from her seat in the centre, may resound in and outward all round from the centre to the circumfluent oceans ! Observe the foreign commerce of America, and the splendid marine which it sustains ! This has grown u]) in two hundred years. But com- pare with it the commerce and navigation of the interior, grown up in less than forty years, for such is the age of steam navigation on the rivers and lakes. The latter already equals the former, for it transports internally what is consumed at home, as well as what is collected at the seaports for expor- tation. Thus, St. Louis, in the amount of tonnage arriving and departing annually, is the fourth city of the Union, ranking next to Boston. Indefinitely grand is this domestic, internal commerce. Let us com- pare the two. The commerce between New York and Liverpool, 3500 miles asunder, requires powerful vessels of great size and strength to carry much, and resist the storms of the ocean. The intervening space is a desert waste of salt water. A vessel of 600 tons must be filled with cargo before her departure, to make so long a voyage profitable. She goes to Liverpool and back — sails 3500 miles, touches only two points of land, and carries two loads — ^four months of time, at least, is consumed in THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. 167 this. Such are the voyages of ocean commerce — expensive, dilatory and full of dangers. Compare with this the river voyage. From Pittsburg (or New Or- leans) to Fort Union, the distance is 3500 miles, by the Ohio and Mis- souri Rivers — a steamer of 600 tons, cheaply constructed and navigated, performs the voyage to and fro, with perfect safety, in two and a half months, and absolutely without danger, along a continuous river channel. This channel has a double bank, so that this vessel coasts along a shore of 14,000 miles, at any square rod of which she may take in and discharge passengers and cargo. Thus it is possible that no single passenger or cargo remains on board over 100 miles, and yet the vessel is full through- out the voyage. These same advantages belong to railroads traversing populous countries. Such is our internal navigation — cheap, expeditious, and absolutely without danger. Now the circuitous seaboard surrounding the Atlantic may be estimated at 69,000 miles, with harbors indenting it — but small vessels cannot navi- gate the broad sea, nor large vessels enter all the harbors. On the other hand, within the united basins of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, is a continuous river navigation for 45,000 miles, having a double bank or 90,000 miles of coast, the whole extent of which may be visited by the same steamer, which can land anywhere ! Such is one illustration of the supremely beneficent formation of this great interior basin, of which our own State occupies the centre and focus. Let a railroad from the Missouri elongate this to the Pacific : carrying population clear up all the rivers to their sources and down those beyond the Sierras : and behold the greatness of an internal commerce ! Everybody is acquainted with the commercial intercourse between the continents which fringe the Atlantic. The life, the vivacity, the grand energies which resound upon its buoyant waves. All this is the result of the discovery of America and its population with European stock — hence all this has its growth ! Antiquity had for its field the Mediterranean, and galleys sufficed. This was commerce in its infancy, confined to the nursery and content with toys. Since Columbus, America has become greater than the Europe of Columbus — and as this period has expanded the field of human activity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, from Western Europe to America and Europe, blending all this vast space under one international relationship. So now we advance to consummate the blending of the Pacific with these other seas : — Asia with these other continents — and urge to its goal that expanding progression, which marches on to complete the zodiac of 168 APPENDIX. the globe, and blend into bonds of confraternity all the continents, all the seas, and all the nations ! In the vast region of Northwestern Texas, traversed by the rivers Brazos, Trinity, Rio Roxo, Canadian, Arkansas, and Del Norte, exists a fertile region much larger than France, the dryness of whose climate, whose red soils, impregnated with the sulphate of lime (plaster), and whose altitude, present in perfect combination the qualities for the culti- vation of the grape and the production of wines. These rivers all have their sources in prodigious mountains of plaster, from which the red tinge and the fertility of their valleys below is derived. Natural vineyards, covering millions of acres, and annually pruned down by the nibbling herds of buflfalo and antelope, here now yearly waste an infinite vintage. This has already become known to the German pioneers of Texas, and soon will be seen rising a vine culture, rivalling in national importance the cotton culture, the tobacco crop, and even the production of provisions. Then too will be seen the universal consumption of mild and healthy wines by our people, and the gay and exhilarating spirits which generous wines inspire, will transpose the fell passions and fiery madness of alcohol. Again, the region of gold and precious metals and stones is not limited, but is absolutely infinite. It is over the whole extent of that primary and volcanic formation extending from the antarctic to the arctic extremities of America, including in its expanse the Andes of South and North America, the Sierra Madre and the Table Lands. This abundance of the material of coin, wrought and developed by sober American industry, is to the human race the supremest gift of Divine Beneficence. Has not the American cotton culture obliterated harsh aristocratic dis- tinctions in dress, and thus democratized the costume of society over the world ? What cotton has done for equality in dress, the same will gold effect for individual equality in property and physical comforts. Study how the stiff, icy servitude of European feudal times has melted, since the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro opened the sources from which portable personal property has exalted itself above fixed and immutable glebe land ! Beyond the Sierra IMadre, upon the Great Table Lands, is a parallel vein of thin mountains, whose masses consist of rock-salt. As streams else- where bring down gravel and soil, so here they liquefy the rocks down which they descend, and reaching the small inland seas and lakes, yield it again in the crystalline coverings which pave their bowls. In another parallel vein is a continuous line of plaster mountains. THE PACIFIC HAIL WAY. 1G9 In auotlier, a continuous line of thermal and medicinal springs, some of which are the first appearance above ground of subterranean rivers, having flowed hundreds of miles under plains of lava. Secondary basins of great size abound, having freestone, marble, and coal formations — iron, lead, and the metals of the arts. All forms, indeed, into which geology classifies matter, here follow one another in appro- priate positions and proportions, with the regularity of the stripes of the rainbow : the whole deriving prominence and distinctness of detail from the immensity of the general scale. Thus, instead of inferiority in abundance and variety of things used by and useful to man, it is here that they especially abound in variety, good quality, and vastness. Across all these must pass any highway connecting the two oceans, distributing outward the infinite natural resources of this intra-montane world. No other portion of the world will better accommodate a dense popu- lation than these Table Lands, on which, farther south, is the chief popula- tion of Mexico. In the dryness and salubrity of its climate, its extraor- dinary pastoral excellence, and its mineral wealth, are the equivalents of the richer lands, but uncertain seasons and health of countries of less altitude. Its intermediate position will secure perpetual communication with the seaboards. An admirable economy of arrangement given by nature to the industri/ of our peojile, points with great power to this central route, which also cor- responds to the positions and courses of the great navigable rivers. In New England and at the extreme north, where winter dwarfs agri- culture, there are no planters, but ships are built, owned, and navigated. Here are the marine of America, her sailors. On the shores of the Gulf, and where southern warmth invites men to agriculture, no ships are built, owned, or navigated — the people here plant and produce cargoes for the ships of the north — not a native sailor is found in these countries. Between these, occupying a broad central belt, are the farmers, pro- ducers of food. These latter equal in number the other two combined. The farmer recoils from a southern sun, where heat forbids labor, and where the culture of wheat and swine languishes; in like manner, he recoils from the long winter of the north, where cattle and Indian corn cease to yield abundantly. ' It is this central farming 2wpulation which feed the commercial people of the North and the planting people of the South, and support them- selves and furnish for export. They precede all other occupants, and head the movement into the wilderness, where the first requisites are 170 APPENDIX. food and transportation. Yet it is among the farming population that domestic commerce finds its great volume of employments — and among them are required, first and chiefly, the great channels of trade which find their termini among the other two. It is this mass, which, stopped by the artificial net-work of maritime policy, is now rushing through and tearing its meshes from their fasten- ings. In resuming their ancient vigor, concentrated by long restraint, they now demand a National Railway to th^ ocean which they seek. What I have here stated, Mr. Chairman and fellow-citizens, of geo- grapliical facts, are of my own knowledge : for with the works of Lewis and Clarke, Fremont, Emory, and Humboldt, I have during six toilsome years of war and exploration, traversed the countries they describe, and the vast intervals between, which tliey have never visited. In these wanderings, undertaken of my own will, I have descended the Andes to the Pacific and returned : crossed and recrossed by many routes all the basins of the Table Lands, excepting only that of the city of Mexico, and coasted along the base of the Sierra Madre from 45° to 25°. This " mother range" I have crossed and reci'ossed at six different passes in this long interval, and its supreme grandeur is stamped indelibly in my memory. What I have said ofpolict/ is from the mouths of those eminent states- men who have contrived it, and those equally eminent who have unsuc- cessfully opposed it. I have expressed my convictions very positively, but not immodestly : for in the terrible vastness of these solitudes. Nature speaks her iron will from summits of etei-nal ice, and where she frowns iipon our advances, our foolish efforts shrivel into ashes. It is, then, this stern and certain language of Nature that I have sought to penetrate, and here struggle to repeat. Many routes for a National Highway, cunningly contrived and speciously reasoned out, are before the people — all these will vanish beneath exact geographical scrutiny, for they violate nature at hap-hazard, with whom human skill must act in unison. This unison is happily attainable, and discussion will reveal it. Let us, then, understand Nature rightly — let us cease from conflict, and feather our onward march in unison with her beneficent aid and guidance. This gTeat work nuist come, and come noiv, to this generation. No diffi- culty lies in the enterprise itself — but such as will instantly vanish before the concentrated will and energies of the people. III. PROCEEDINGS OF A MASS MEETING OF TUE CITIZENS OF JACKSON COUNTY, AT INDEPENDENCE, ON THE 5TH OF NOVEM- BER, 1S49, TO KESPOND TO THE ACTION OF THE GREAT NATIONAL RAILROAD CON VENTION, UELD IN ST. LOUIS, ON THE 15TH DAT OF OCTOBER, 1819. On motion of Mr. J. W. Modie, Colonel James Chiles was appointed Chairman, and on motion of R. G. Smart, Esq., J. R. Palmer was ap- pointed Secretary. Colonel William Gilpin was then called upon to address the meet- ing, and explain its object. He responded to the call in a speech which interested and occupied the attention of the meeting for about one hour and a half; in conclusion he moved the appointment of a committee of twelve to write and report to the meeting resolutions responsive to the action of the great Convention at St. Louis. The motion having been adopted, the Chairman appointed as the Committee : Colonel William Gil- pin, A. Brooking, General S. D. Lucas, Samuel Ralston, Major Robert Rickman, Colonel James M. Cogswell, James Patton, Esq., Colonel Oliver Caldwell, R. G. Smart, Esq., William R. Singleton, Alexander Collins, and S. H. Woodson, Esq. The Committee, after consultation, reported the following resolutions, which were unanimously adopted : — 1. Resolved, That we heartily and zealously approve of, and concur in, the proceeding of the "National Railroad Convention," held at St Louis on the 15th ultimo. 2. Resolved, That in the great national work, that shall connect the two seaboards of our country, and the interior with the seaboards, we behold an enterprise as universal to the inhabitants of our Union as their language, their politics, and their commerce — a bond of unanimous action, and not a bone of contention and strife. 3. Resolved, That to the people of the " Valley of the Mississippi," intimate and direct connection with the seaboards and people of the Pacific, is as essential and as interesting as with those of the Atlantic. 4. Resolved, That, inasmuch as our people in their natural progressive growth have extended their habitations across the continent, and along the 171 172 APPENDIX. Western seaboard, it is our duty, and tlie duty of our government, to give to this new seaboard, fleets, fortifications, and arms for defence — harbors, light-houses, and marine police, for the encouragement and protection of commerce and highways — and a military police to confirm and make safe the connection with the interior. 5. Resohed, further, That a NATIONAL Railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific is the most direct, economical, and constitutional means of effecting the above objects. 6. Resolved, That, whereas the Almighty has placed the territories of the American Union in the centre, between Asia and Europe, and the route of the " Asiatic and European Railway" through the heart of our national domain, it is our duty to the human family to prosecute, vigor- ously, through its new channel, that supreme commerce between the Ori- ental nations and the nations of the Atlantic, which history proves to have existed in all ages, and to be necessary to keep alive comity, science, and civilization among mankind. 7. Resolved, That, whereas the people of China, Japan, Polynesia, and Southern America now receiA^e from British India agricidtural produce (raw and manufactured cotton, indigo, opium, rice, wool, etc.) to the amount of $150,000,000, annually ; we believe these same people will take from the Americans, hi 'preference, more than twice this amount of agricultural produce (substituting tobacco for opium, and flour and meats for rice), so soon as the barrier of the Rocky Mountains be removed by a National Railway. 8. Resolved, That, apart from the great benefits which shall accrue to us and the other nations of the Atlantic from this National Railway, we regard it as a beneficent doviestic work, to open to our people access to the immense and glorious domain of the Plains, the Sierra Madre, the great Table Lands, and the Andes, known to abound in metals, mountains and lakes of salt, mountains of plaster and marble, thermal and medicinal spring's, wild cattle, salubrious climates, sulphur, coal, lumber, arable and pastoral lands of the finest quality, and staple productions unlimited in variety and abundance. 9. Resolved, That, whereas, during the last thirty years, the generation of our fathers has covered the eastern half of our continent with States, and, commencing with the New York Canal in 1818, has everywhere ren- dered the connection between the " Valley of the Mississippi" and the Atlantic seaboard complete, and carried the commerce of the Atlantic to the grandest development — it is the high and glorious mission and duty of us their sons and heirs, of the growing generation, in like manner, to cover the western half of the continent with States, to render complete GREAT NATIONAL RAILROAD CONVENTION. I73 witli great works the connection of the " Valley of the Mississippi" with the Pacific seaboard, and expand upon the Pacific Ocean a similarly mag- nificent commerce. 10. Renolvcd^ That we earnestly entreat our fellow-citizens, in all sec- tions of our Union, to unite with us in this central domestic work in pref- erence to dissipating the national energies upon circuitous routes, running near the equator, through foreign countries beyond our control, and certain to involve us in the competitions, the jealousies, and the hostile interests of foreigners and rivals. 11. Reaohed^ That we invite our fellow-citizens throughout the State to assemble in their counties and cities, and join in a general and unani- mous response to the St. Louis Convention, and unite with us in respect- fully instructing our Representatives and Senators in Congress to vote for such measures as may be introduced at the coming session of our National Legislature to carry out the views embodied in the foregoing resolutions. 12. Resolved^ That the Secretary of this Mass Meeting forward to each of our Representatives and Senators in Congress a copy of these resolutions. Mr. George W. Ilhoades offered the following resolutions : — 1. Resolved, That Colonel Gilpin be requested to write out for publica- tion the speech made by him to this meeting on to-day. 2. Resolved, That the " Missouri Commonwealth," and all other papers in this State friendly to a project of constructing a National Railroad to the Pacific from the " Valley of the Mississippi," be requested to publish the proceedings of this meeting. PIKE'S PEAK AND THE SIEKRA SAN JUAN. BXTKACTS JROM AN ADDKESS BY COLONEL WILLIAM. GILPIN, DELIYEKED AT KANSAS CITY, NOVEMBER 15, 1858 ; ON THE GOLD PBODUCTION OF AMERICA AND THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. I SUBMIT to your inspection three maps. The first is a " Hydro- graphic Map of North America," exhibiting in daguerreotype the physical divisions of our continent ; the second is a map of the world, exhibiting America in the centre, between Asia and Europe, and having delineated upon it the Isothermal Zodiac of Nations, filling the north temperate zone of the globe ; the third is a map of the " Basin of the Mississippi." Physical geography arranges the surface of the continents into basins and the mountain crests which divide them. Thus the basin of the Mis- sissippi is that surface which, being drained by all the confluent branches of this river, discharges its fresh waters into the Gulf of Mexico. This surface is an undulating, calcareous plain of 1,200,000 square miles of area : it is embraced entirely within the temperate zone ; occu- pies the heart and splendors of our continent : and is the most magnifi- cent dwelling-place marked out by Grod for man's abode. Three more similar calcareous basins, each drained by a single system of rivers : the basin of the St. Lawrence : the basin of the Saskatchewan of Hudson Bay ; and the arctic basin of the Athabasca, resting upon one another and upon the basin of the Mississippi, form together one continu- ous expanse, geologically uniform and identical. This immense expanse defines itself as the Calcareous Plain of North America. Limestone, horizontally stratified, underlies this whole expanse, being formed, like cheese from milk, from the sediment and pressure of the ocean which once rolled over it, but has now retired. This calcareous plain, thus forming a unit in physical geography, em- braces four-sevenths of the area of our continent. It is encompassed all round by a circuit of primary mountains, within which it forms an amphi- theatre. 174 PIKE'S PEAK AND THE SIERPA SAN JUAN. 175 These mountains are the Alleghanies, towards the Atlantic ; tlie Cor- dilleras of the Sierra Madre and the Andes, towards the Pacific. The mouths of the great rivers form the doors or outlets through them to the oceans. This circumferent wall of mountains is of immense breadth towards the Pacific. It is the second unit in physical geography, and covers two-sevenths of the area of our continent. External to the Mountain Formation is the Maritime Slope^ washed by the oceans, and penetrated by the tides. This external division is the third unit in physical geography, and forms all round one-seventh of the area of our continent. Behold, then, the physical arrangement of our continent ; at once simple, complete, and sublime : — the Calcareous Plain, four-sevenths ; the Mountain Formation, two-sevenths ; the Maritime Slope, one-seventh. The geological structure of our continent has the same order, a like magnitude of dimensions and arrangements, a parallel simplicity. The Calcareous Plain is a uniform secondary formation of limestone, horizon- tally deposited and stratified. The Mountain Formation is of granite, pi'esenting the primeval crust of the globe rent by volcanic forces and elevated vertically. The Maritime Slope presents the external mountain base partly revealed, and partly covered by the washings of the sea. Everybody Is familiar witli the manufacture of shot. This is accom- plished by pouring liquid lead, at a high elevation, through perforated moulds. Each pellet of lead, descending through the air, is formed, as it cools, into a sphere, by the invisible force of gravity. The globe of the earth has had a similar origin — once a liquid mass, now a solid, gravi- tating sphere, such as we inhabit it. Geology explains how the material mass of this great sphere has ar- ranged itself, in cooling, into layers enveloping one another, like the successive coatings of an onion. Specific gravity accounts for the relative position of these layers, one upon the other, and explains to us when and how to penetrate to their metalliferous content!^. It is in the primeval rocks exclusively that tho» precious metals and precious stones are found. The base metals are con- tained in the calcareous or secondary rocks. The same stupendous scale holds in the abundance of the metals, their purity, and their widely ex- tended distribution. It is your request that I speak, specially, on this evening, of the gold production of our country, and specifically of the reg'on surrounding Pike's Peak and th? Sier a h'an Juan. Specific gravity guides us to discover the rocks in which the precious metals may be found, and where they are totally absent. If into a hollow 176 APPENDIX. pillar of glass there be poured a quart of quicksilver, one of water, one of oil, and one of alcohol, these liquids will rest one upon the other, in this order : if a piece of gold, of iron, of wood, and a feather, be thrown in, they will sink : the gold to the bottom, the iron to the quicksilver, the wood to the water, the feather to the oil. If this mass be congealed to ice, this arrangement will remain solid and permanent : the gold must be sought for sedimentary to the quicksilver ; the iron above it, but sedimentary to the water ; the wood sedimentary to the oil. In the great order of nature, a similar arrangement holds in the rocks which compose the globe of the earth, and in their contents, once all liquid, but now permanently solid in the order of their relative specific gravities. It is the primeval mass, then, of the Mountain Formation, which alone is auriferous, and within it only can the precious metals, and especially gold, be sought for with success. The Mountain Formation, which occupies the western portion of our continent to the extent of two-sevenths of its whole area, consists of the Cordillera of the Sierra Madre on the east, the Cordillera of the Andes on the west, and the Plateau of the Table Lands embraced between them. It is uniformly primeval and everywhere auriferous. The Plateau of the Table Lands commences above Tehuantepec, where the Cordilleras begin to open from one another. It runs through the continent to Behring's Strait, and is 1000 miles in width, in our latitude (39°). The general elevation of its surface is 6000 feet above the sea ; that of the Cordilleras is 12,000 feet. The Plateau is traversed across by great mountain chains, which subdivide it into basins. Three of these basins contain, respectively, the great rivers the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Rio del Norte, which gorge the Cordilleras and escape to the seas. Three other basins contain the stagnant lakes, the Grreat Salt Lake, the Laguna, and the Lake of the City of Mexico ; these have no outlets or drainage to the seas. ' Of these mountain chains the most interesting to us is the Sierra Mimbres. This divides asunder the basins of the Colo- rado and the Del Norte, which rest against it as a backbone. It leaves the western flanh of the Cordillera of the Sierra Madre in latitude 39°, and, traversing the Plateau by a due southern course for 1400 miles, joins the Cordillera of the Andes in the Mexican State of Durango, in latitude 23°. This mountain chain is volcanic, containing craters and the overflow of lava. The Cordillera of the Andes is also volcanic. These mountain chains consist of the'primeval rocks, broken from their original positions, heaved up edgewise by the expansive power of the in- PIKE'S PEAK AND THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. 177 ternal fires of the globe, and revealed to sight and search. Moreover, the Colcrrado River, in escaping to the sea, gorges the Cordillera of the Andes diagonally, having rent its way by a chasm bored through the very bowels of the Cordillera, athwart from base to base. This chasm, 400 miles in length, is known as the Caiion of the Colorado. This caiion presents the unique and novel fact to mankind, that a pri- mary mou.ntain chain whose summit is of the auriferous rocks, is thus gorged to its foundations, many thousand feet in depth ! It is here, upon the Plateau, in the arcana of the mountain formation, and the activity of the stupendous forges of nature, that the precious metals may be sought in mass and in position. Moreover, the Sierra Mimbres, where its southern half bisects the Mexican States of Durango and Chihuahua, contains twenty-one mines of silver, which, wrought for three centuries by the Spaniards, have fur- nished the world with its silver coin and bullion. Moreover, where the Sierra Mimbres, in its course to the north, approaches to its junction with the Sierra Madre, it increases to a prodigious bulk. It rises to the altitude of perpetual snow, and assumes for 200 miles the local name of Sierra San Jiian. Here it is that the dislocation of nature by volcanic forces, and the consequent metalliferous development, attain their highest culmination. What is about to follow the arrival of our pioneer people within this region, may be exactly illustrated by what is already done within the region of the great Calcareous Plain. We have seen that the calcareous plain, being formed beneath a great ocean, condensed from its filtration and by its pressure, contains only the base metals, copper, iron, lead, zinc. A metalliferous band of these metals is traced diagonally aci'oss it, traversing from Southwestern Texas, through that State, through Arkansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, brushing the shores of Lake Superior and of Hudson Bay, to the ocean shore opposite Green- land. Points of culmination of these various metals are found where they reveal themselves above the general surface in mass and inposition. Thus, iron appears in Missouri in native purity, protruding' in mountain masses over many hundred square miles of surface ; the same is the form of copper adjacent to Lake Superior ; so also with lead in Missouri and in Wisconsin. Now, the same arrangement characterizes the immense primeval forma- tion which occupies our continent from Cape Horn to Behriug's Strait, and which is throughout impregnated with the precious metals ! As gold is every- where else found within it in the form of grains or scales, or minute 12 178 APPENDIX. lumps : so is it possible for it to culminate in mass and in position, where the auriferous rocks are upheaved to form the vertical masses of the Sierra San Juan and the Andes, and are then gorged into their bowels by the caiion of the Colorado. The search for gold has heretofore confined itself to the external flanks of the primeval mountains, where they front the sea, and where the rivers descend from their backs. Why it has here been found only in grains, scales, and small lumps may be thus illustrated : I suppose myself at my camp-fire in the wilderness, engaged in boiling rice : into a camp-kettle of boiling water I throw a cup of rice. This rice, after a time, settles by its specific gravity into a sedimentary mass beneath the water — the water above retains a milky whiteness. This whiteness is due to the presence of minute particles of rice remaining suspended through the body of the fluid. Being frozen into ice, this condition remains fixed in solid form. The presence of the gold in the auriferous rocks has had a similar ori- gin, and presents identical conditions. It is the attrition of the elements upon the surface rocks and veins only that have as yet attracted at- tention. It is beneath that we must search for the sedimentary mass ; the possibility to do which now first presents itself as we advance within the labyrinth of the volcanic masses and canons of the Plateau. My own personal experience, earned during three military expeditions made between the years 1844-49, rendered desperate from the then un- known complication of the country added to the numerical strength and savage character of the Indians, is not without value. The facts then and since collected by me are so numerous and so posi- tive, that I entertain an absolute conviction, derived from them, that gold in mass and in position and infinite in quantity will, within the coming three years, reveal itself to the energy of our pioneers. All the precious metals and precious stones will also reveal themselves in equal abundance in this region so propitious to their production. Such a development has nothing in it speculative or theoretical. It comes of necessity in the order of time, and as an inevitable sequence to the planting of empire in Texas, in California, in Oregon, in Kansas, and in Utah. As these other developments have preceded it in the order of time, and encompass it all round, this now comes to unite, to complete, to consum- mate the rest, and to give form and power and splendor to the whole. The inquiry which acquaints us with the climate, the agriculture, and the domestic geography of this immense region, is still equally interesting and important as its metals. It was upon the summit of this plateau, PIKE'S PEAK AND TUE SIERRA SAN JUAN. 179 where it traverses Mexico and Peru, tliat the semi-civilized empires of Montezuma and the Incas were found, when a sterile barbarism pervaded every other portion of the continent of America. The distance hence to Pike's Peak is less than 700 miles. It is reached by the great road of the Arkansas River, traversing straight to the west, and ascending the imperceptible grade of the Great Plains clear to the mountain base. Gold is here discovered as soon as the primeval rocks rise from beneath the calcareous plain. Pike's Peak, which rises to the altitude of 14,300 feet above the sea, is the abrupt colossal termination of the mountain promontory, which, protruding eastward from the Cordillera 100 miles, sunders from one another the sources of the South Platte and the Arkansas Rivers. Where this promontory connects with the Cordillera is a supremely grand focal point of primary mountain chains, primary rivers, and pares. This focal point is in the same latitude as San Francisco and St. Louis (39°), is about 1000 miles from each, and in the centre between them. The direction of the Cordillera is from northivest to southeast. From its western flank protrudes a promontory, balancing and similar to Pike's Peak, known as Elk Mountain : it sunders from one another the Grand River of the Colorado and the Eagle, terminating abruptly within the angle of their junction. Radiating due south is the Sierra 3Iimhres, known for 200 miles by the snowy peaks of San Juan: this chain sunders the waters of Eagle River from the Rio del Norte. The southern arm of the Cordillei'a sunders the waters of the Rio del Norte from the Arkansas River : the northern arm, the waters of the Platte River from the Rio Grande of the Colorado. Such is this focal summit, from which five primary mountains and five rivers simultaneously depart. Upon the Platte is the pare known as the Bayou Salado ; upon the Rio Grande of the Colorado, the pare known as the Middle Pare ; upon the Rio del Norte, the pare called the Bayou of San Luis. The Arkansas and Eagle Rivers have no pares : they defile outward through stupendous canons. The pares, scooped out of the main dorsal mass of the Cordillera by the rivers which bisect them, are, each one of them, an immense amphitheatre of singular beauty, fertility, and temperate atmosphere ; they approach one another where they rest against the Cordillera at the extreme sources of the rivers. Behold, then, the panorama which salutes the vision of one who has surmounted this supreme focal summit of the Cordillera ! Infinite in variety of features ; each feature intense in the magnitude and the gran- 180 APPENDIX. deur of its mould ; in front, in rear, and on either Land, Nature ascending in all her elements to the standard of superlative sublimity ! Beneath, the family of Pares : around, the radiating backs of the pri- meyal mountains : the primary rivers starting to the seas : above, the ethereal canopy intensely blue, effulgent with the unclouded sun by day, and stars by night : to the east, the undulating plains, expanding one hun- dred leagues, to dip, like the ocean, beneath the encircling horizon : to the west, the sublime Plateau, checkered by volcanic peaks and mesas, chan- nelled as a labyrinth by the profound gorges of the streams ! It is manifest with what ease the pioneers, already engaged in mining at the entrance of the Bayou Salado, will in another season ascend through it to the Cordillera, surmount its crests, and descend into the Bayou San Luis. They will develop at every step gold in new and increasing abundance. Besides, access is equally facile by the Huerfano, an affluent of the Arkansas coming down from the Spanish Peak, 100 miles farther to the south. From New Mexico, the approach is by ascending the Bio Bravo del Norte. The snowy battlements of the Sierra San Juan form the west- ern wall of the Bayou San Luis. From its middle flank the Sierra San Juan projects to the southwest a chain of remarkable volcanic mountains, known as the Sierra La Plata (silver mountain). This chain divides asunder the waters of the Great Colorado from the Bio San Juan, and, filling the angle of their junction, forms the perpendicular wall of the Great Canon. It is to this remarkable mountain chain, and its surrounding region, that I have desired to conduct you, and here stop, in the midst of the veritable arcana of the Mountain Formation and its metalliferous elements. The Sierra La Plata is 400 miles in length, having its course west-south- west. Along its dorsal crest are volcanic masses penetrating to perpetual snow ; its flanks descend by immense terraces of carboniferous and sul- phvirous limestone. All formations of the globe here come together, mingle with one another, acquire harmony, and arrange themselves side by side in gigantic proportions. Lava, porphyritic granite, sandstone, limestone, the precious and base metals, precious stones, salt, marble, coal, thermal and medicinal streams, fantastic mountains called cristones, or abrupt peaks, level mesas of great fertility, canons, delicious valleys, rivers, and great forests ; all these, and a thousand other varieties, find room, appear in succession, in perfect order and in perfectly graceful proportions. Bemoteness from the sea, and altitude, secure to this region a tonic atmosphere, warm, cloudless, brilliant, and serene. The aboriginal people PIKE'S PEAK AND THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. 181 are numerous, robust, and iutelligent. They are the Navujos and Yuta Indians. They have skill in agriculture and weaving, rear great herds of horses, cattle, and sheep, but construct neither permanent nor tem- porary houses, so dry and favorable is the atmosphere. Here, also, occurs a remarkable, isolated mountain, known to rumor for half a century, but only now locally identified. This is Cerro di Sal (Salt Mountain). This rises among the western spurs of th3 Sierra La Plata, to an altitude of 9000 feet, appearing as an irregular cone of great bulk. A pure stratified mass of rock-salt, its flanks are channelled by the little river Dolores, whose waters, saturated with liquid salt, yield it again in its lower course, in granulated beds of snowy whiteness, tinted with Ver- million streaks from the beds of seleuite with which the salt formation alternates. Such, my fellow-citizens, are the facts and reflections which I have selected for your attention in speaking upon the gold region of Pike's Peak and the Sierra San Juan. The superlative character of this region engaged the enthusiastic pen and jjatriotic instincts of President Jefi'erson, more than half a century ago. Overshadowed during this long interval by political and military excite- ments, which have deflected elsewhere the progressive columns of our pioneer people, it now recurs to restore the pre-eminent centinental char- acter which inspired the generation who founded our republican Union. Who, and what, are these people that I now address ? We are not the people of the North ; we are not the people of the South ; nor of the East ; nor of the West. We are emphatically, and par excellence, the people of the Centre ! Inspirations, oracular by their source and their antiquity, admonish us to resume our distributive position, and develop the energies which assume and keep the lead. Look upon this map of the world, upon which science delineates the zodiac of empires and the isothermal axis of progress ! We have our homes around the centre of this our northern continent, the centre of our continental Union, the centre of the Mississippi basin. Behold, upon the right hand, the European continent, with its 260,000,000 of people ; it slopes towards our eastern seaboard and faces towards the west ! Behold, upon the left hand, the continent of Oriental Asia and its islands, with its population of 650,000,000 ; it slopes towards our western seaboard and faces to the east! These external continents, dividing between them the population of the world, both face America and face one another across America. We occupy the middle space between them, and at once separate them asunder and connect them together. From Paris to Pekin, travelling by our 182 APPENDIX. tliresliold, is but a journey of 10,000 miles. It bisects tbe temperate zone — it is the line of land and way travel of mankind. But a fact of profound significance to us, revealed by physical geog- raphy, remains to be considered. It is along the axis of the isothermal zone of the Northern Hemisphere, that the principles of revealed civiliza- tion make the circuit of the globe. This isothermal zone deflects from the geographical zone (which is a flat section of the globe), undulating to the north and to the south, to preserve a constant identity of temperature. Under the influence of the warm maritime climates, it rises high above the 40th degree of latitude ; under the influence of the continental climates, it is depressed to the south of the •iOth degree. With what the history of sis thousand years practically demonstrates, the proofs of physical geography agree. Along this axis have arisen successively the great cities of China and of India, of Babylon, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Paris, London, in the older continents — upon our continent, the seaboard cities, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore ; Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. The channel of the Missouri is its onward track to us : whence it passes by the Kansas basins, the Sweetwater, Snake Biver, and the Columbia, to Vancouver's Island, upon the North Pacific shore. We, then, the people of the centre, are upon the lines of intense and intelligent energy, where civilization has its largest field, its highest devel- opments, its inspired form. Along this line have come, from the plateau of Syria, our religion, our sciences, our civilization, our social manners, our arts and agriculture, the horse, our articles of food and raiment ; and here is the eternal fire from which is rekindled, when it has expired, the spirit of the " unconquerable mind, and freedom's holy flame." We have seen depart a perverse generation, distinguished by civic discord. An unscrupulous seaboard power has aspired to found a repub- lic of the North ; a republic of the South ; a republic of the Pacific shores. A nefarious federal policy, operating for forty years, has occluded with savages and deserts the delicious central region of the prairies, the great plains, the plateau, and the mountains. The physical geography of our country has been ofiicially caricatured, concealed, and maligned. The solid continental republic, founded in 1776 and completed in 1787, has been nullified by interpolated monarchies. The Land system has crushed and plundered the continental people with the brutalizing pressure of mediaeval feudalism. The Indian system has walled up, as in a Bastile, the whole central meridian of our continent. Forced out artificially upon the flanks, we have seen our pioneer energies PIKE'S PEAK AND THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. 183 driven in fragments into Florida, into Texas, into California, into Oregon, into Minnesota. We behold on the one hand a tier of artificial seaboard States, isolated upon the maritime slope ; on the other hand, the continental centre, an immense disc of howling wilderness. Foreign wars have been waged, federal revenues and patronage ex- hausted, federal law and power stretched out to every device of tyranny, the federal constitution violated in every sacred principle, to erect this monarchical seaboard power, and establish it in perpetual dominance over the continent. For the centre^ civil wars, civil discords, false geography, calumnies, every form of meretricious and deceptive political agitation, have been suicidally fomented. The foundations of the Union, lost in the centre and scattered around an invisible circumference : the Union itself, incessantly assailed and per • petually menaced : has seemed to approach the twilight of its existence, and, lost to the guardian care of the people, has been in suspense between the infuriated passions of extreme sectional fanatics. Our great country demands a period of stern virtue, of holy zeal, of regenerating patriotism, of devoted citizens. It is to the people of the great central State of Missouri that I speak. To exalt their intrepid enthusiasm is my aim. Open the track across the Plateau to the other sea, and we are absolutely the leaders of the world, heading the column to the Oriental shores. With us are the continental eagles and the continental cause, immortal- ized by the purity of Washington, illuminated by the wisdom of JeflPerson, vindicated and restored by the illustrious Jackson. Let us condense around these eagles and advance. It is the predestined mission of mankind, confided to America to fulfil, to our generation to complete. Night wanes, the vapors round the mountains curled Burst into morn, and light awakes the world ! "V. aEOaHAPHICAL MEMORANDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILEOAD. CHAPTEE I. Inasmuch as tLe general mind seems willing to entertain with fovor and judge candidly what maybe truthfully said of a National Rail- road TO THE Pacific, and everywhere is indicated a growing taste for whatever may solidly enhance the prosperity of our continental system, I have condensed into these few chapters the general views resulting from a long..experience. This subject touches profoundly all the existing relations of the human family, connecting three continents, and unites together, by a short line of ten thousand miles, the thousand millions of people inhabiting Europe, America, and Asia. This short line traverses the middle of the north temperate zone, perforating nine-tenths of the land, the population, the production, and the consumption of the world. I say, it is necessary for one who will write with dignity upon such a subject, so searching and omnipotent, to grasp boldly its immense scope of matter ; to rely upon solid statistics ; to face and brave old opinions ; to repudiate the rubbish into which thousands of years of staggering and abortive efforts have submerged it ; and to condense it to the tangible form of propositions, which may be practically/ handled for a final solu- tion. The shortest trail whereby the local works, now on hand and proposed, may be understood, the public judgment matured, and opinion instructed and concentrated for action, is to condense by rigid analysis, and draw into one view, the multitudinous facts of geography, commerce, politics, and progress under which the American people are so rapidly erecting a supreme democratic republican empire, and fitting it to the surface of the northern American continent and islands. And first, must be emancipated from the dogmatic European writers (who, with Procrustean despotism, rive up all other portions of the globe to fit their own pigmy theories) the symmetrical and sublime geograph- ical plan of our continent. 184 MEMORANDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 185 This, heretofore veiled from the public mind by every form of contor- tion, is reducible to an exact system, easily understood and eternal. The reverse geographical form in which our continent is moulded : the contrast of all the others : makes a new and original grandeur of society, not only possible, but compulsory upon us. To disinfect ourselves of inane nepotism to Europe in other things as we have done in politics : to jjonder boldly on ourselves and our mission, and develop an indigenous dignity — to appreciate Asiatic science, civilization, commerce, and population — these are essential preparatory steps to which we must tone our minds. This, then, is the simple plan of North America : — The Andes, having traversed the whole length of South America, passing out from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, continue to follow, unchanged in character, the Pacific shore of North America clear up to Behring's Strait. Known successively as the Cordilleras of Anahuac in Mexico, Siei'ra Nevada in California, and Cascade Mountains in Oregon, it is all along the same auriferous and volcanic Andes. It has a narrow base washed on the west by the tide ; immense altitude ; summits of j^erpetual snow ; and is formed of the columnar vulcan rock, or a molten mass of lava. Between this continuous escarpment of rock and the sea, is the mari- time region of the Pacific, which contains all the present American popu- lation residing in California and Oregon, upon the smaller rivers run- ning directly into the sea, and parallel to one another. It resembles, and is the counterpart of, the maritime Atlantic declivity ; which contains the old thirteen States, and which is shut ofi" from the valleys of the Mississippi and St. Lawrence by the Alleghanies. But, at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Andes bifurcates, throwing along the coast of the Mexican Gulf the great Cordillera of the Sierra Madre, which opens rapidly from the Andes, as the continent widens. This assumes in our territory the name of Roclzy Mountains., and traverses north to the shores of the Arctic Sea. It is some 1400 miles apart from, and to the east of, the Andes, and forms the primary divide, the " divor- tia aqtiarum" of America. The absolute separate existence of these tico prodigious Cordilleras, must remain distinctly in the mind, if anybody intends to understand American geographi/. The interval between them, from end to end, is occupied by the Pla- teau OP THE Table Lands, on which are alike the cities of Mexico, Chihuahua, and the Mormon city of the Salt Lake. This Plateau OP THE Table Lands is two-sevenths of tlie surface of North America : is some 6000 feet elevated above the external oceans : and gives as complete a 186 APPENDIX. separation between the Cordilleras on tlie flanks, as does the Atlantic, whose waters roll between the Alleghanies and the Alps. Thus that side of the American continent which may be defined to front Asia, and sheds its waters in that direction, has these four charac- teristic divisions : — ^the maritime front ; the Andes ; the Plateau of THE Table Lands ; and the Sierra Madre, all extending the whole length from south to north, parallel to one another, and covering in the aggregate two-fifths of its whole area. These two continuous primary mountain chains define themselves as the Western and the Eastern Cordilleras. The remaining three-fifths of the continent sheds its waters towards the Atlantic. Here too the same sublime grandeur and simplicity of plan are discernible. From the Sierra Madre, the whole continent descends to the seas by immense planes, resembling the glacis of a fortress, or a flat- tened octagonal house-roof. This plane, once the bed of immense oceans, of which the Sierra Madre was the shore, and bevelled by the action of the watery mass, now forms the gentle slope down which descend, to replenish the oceans, the surplus waters of the Sierra Madre and the plane itself Guttered evei-y where by these descending water-courses, seaming its surface as innumerably as the veins which carry back the blood to the human heart, these aqueous channels flow down the difierent faces of the great plane, proportioned in length and size to the distances to be traversed. Thus, down the smaller face, which fronts the Mexican Grulf, — at present comprehended in Texas, — run the lower Del Norte, the Nueces, Colorado, Trinity, and Brazos. Down the grand eastern front, called by us the " Great Prairie Plains," descend the Red Eiver of Louisiana, the Canadian, Arkansas, and Kansas, the Platte (with its three forks), and the sublime Missouri itself. All of these, running due east, parallel to one another, very straight and without rapids, are received into the great central trough, the Mississippi, which runs from north to south across their direction, and their accumulated waters are discharged into the Gulf. From the same focal point with the Missouri, radiate two fronts. The one is drained by the system of rivers tributary to the Saskatchewan, opening to the northeast, and widening to embrace the immense inland sea of Hudson Bay. The other is upon the Athabasca or McKenzie River, sloping due north, and occupying the vast hyperhorean region stretching to the Arctic Sea. From an elevated swell in the plane between the Missouri and Sas- katchewan, protruding from the Sierra Madre eastwardly along the 49th MEJWBAXDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILEOAD. 187 degree, about 700 miles, issue the waters of the Upper Mississippi and St. Lawrence. The first goes directly south to scour out the trough of the continent. The latter flows down the narrow basin of the lakes and their river St. Lawrence, to where the glacis reaches the sea and forms the shores of the gulf of that name. Thus, from the dividing wall of the Sierra Madre, the continent de- scends uninterruptedly to the Gulf: the North Atlantic : and the Arctic Seas. The perfect gentleness of this descent, scarcely distinguishable from a level, is perceptible from the rivers, which are entirely free from rapids and everywhere navigable when water is sufficient in their beds. The sublimest example is the watery surface of the Missouri, whose liquid plane, dipping by perhaps thirteen inches to the mile, has an un- ruffled uniformity of descent through its whole course of 5000 miles to the sea. But to render complete this geographical delineation, there rises all along the Atlantic, and parallel with its shore, the dividing range of the Alleghany, uninterrupted from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. External to this is the narrow seaboard declivity which first received the European settlements, and still holds the densest population : but ivithin, a reverse glacis descends to the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, filled with States to the central trough of the continent. Practically, the basins of these great rivers are narrowed to mere passes at their mouths by the points of the mountain chains which fence them from the sea, expanding to an immense breadth in the interior, and fading into one another, where they touch, by prairie divides of imperceptible elevation. They form together one vast boid, whose waters flow from the circumference near the seas, inwards, to centres which are near and already connected by art as at Chicago. This bowl or plain is everywhere calcareous, being paved beneath the soil with an undulating covering of limestone, as is a frozen lake with one of ice. To recapitulate and grave it upon the mind : as with the style where- with the artist cuts into steel the deeply shaded lines of a picture : the whole Atlantic side of the continent is one calcareous plain of many fronts. Each front has a mighty system of arteries, demonstrating its gradual slope, and carrying its surplus waters to the sea. Yet by the rising of the eastern halves of the basins against the Atlantic barriers it is also a sublime bowl, into which the waters have first a concentric direction, as they accumulate into the troughs that conduct them to the sea. The superlative wonder about this is, that here, in North America, is rolled out in one uniform expanse of 2,300,000 square miles, an area of 188 APPEXDIX. arable land equivalent in surface to the aggregate of the valleys of the other continents, which are small, single, and isolated. Moreover^ the interlacing of the rivers forms everywhere a complete sys- tem of navigation : blended into one by public works of the easiest con- struction : and forming, by their double banks, a shore-line equal in extent to the coasts of all the oceans. To master the geographical portiKiit of our continent thus in its unity of system, is necessary to every American citizen — as necessary, as it is to understand the radical principles of the Federal Government over it, and of political society. Our country is immensely grand, and to understand it in its simple grandeur, it is not an extravagance, but is a homespun matter-of-fact duty. If we flinch from this duty, we recede from the divine mission chalked out for us by the Creator's hand, sink below the dignity of our ancestors, and fall into the decrepitude of the voluntary, illiterate, and emasculate subjects of Europe. To enforce these truths with yet greater stringency, and to tempt or lash the popular mind out of its cringing and criminal torpidity, still another illustration remains of the paramount significance to us of geo- graphical/acts. This is the contrast between our own and the other four contineats. Europe, the smallest of the grand divisions of the land, contains in its centre the icy masses of the Alps ; from round their declivities radiate the large rivers of that continent ; the Danube directly east to the Euxine ; the Po and Khone south to the Mediterranean ; the Rhine to the Northern Ocean. Walled off by the Pyi-enees and Carpathians, divergent and isolated, are the Tagus, the Elbe, and other single rivers, affluents of the Baltic, the. Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Euxine. Descending /ro?/! common radiant points, and diverging every way from one another, no intercommunication exists between the rivers of Eui-ope : navigation is petty and feeble : nor have art and commerce, during many centuries, united so many small valleys, remotely isolated by impenetrable barriers. Hence upon each river dwells a distinct people, differing from all the rest in race, language, habits, and interests. Though often politically amalgamated by conquest, they again relapse into fragments from innate geographical incoherence. The history of these nations is a story of per- petual war ; of mutual extermination ; and an appalling dramatic cata- logTie of a few splendid tyrannies, crushing multitudinous millions of submissive and unchronicled serfs. MEMORANDA OX THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. jgg Exactly similar to Europe, though grander in size and population, ia Asia. From the stupendous central barrier of the Himalayas run the four great rivers of China, due east, to discharge themselves beneath the rising sun : towards the south run the rivers of Cochin China, the Ganges, and the Indus : towards the tcest, the rivers of the Caspian : and north through Siberia to the Arctic Seas, many rivers of the first magnitude. During fifty centuries, as now, the Alps and Himalaya Mountains have proved insuperable barriers to the amalgamation of the nations around their bases and dwelling in the valleys which radiate from their slopes. The continent of Africa, as far as we know the details of its surface, is even more than these split into disjointed fragments. Such also, in a less degree, is South America. Thus, whilst Northern America opens towards heaven in an expanded bowl to receive and fuse harmoniously whatever enters within its rim : so each of the other continents, presenting a bowl reversed, scatters every- thing from a central apex into radiant distraction. Political empires and societies have in all ages conformed themselves to these emphatic geographical facts. The American Republic is then predestined to expand and fit itself to the continent. Much is uncertain, yet through all the vicissitudes of the future, this much of eternal truth is discernible : In geography the an- tithesis of the Old World, in society it is and will be. the reverse. North America will rapidly attain to a population equalling that of the rest of the world combined : forming a single people, identical in manners, language, customs, and impulses: preserving the same civiliza- tion, the same religion : imbued with the same opinions, and having the same political liberties. Of this we have two illustrations now under our eye : the one passing away, the other advancing. The aboriginal Indian race, among whom, from Darien to the Esquimaux, and from Florida to Vancouver's Island, exists a great identity in their hair, comj^lexion, features, stature, and language. And second, in the instinctive fusion into one language, and one new race, of immigrant Germans, English, French, and Spanish, whose individuality is obliterated in a single generation ! It is thus that the holy question of our Uiiion lies in the bosom of nature : its perpetuity in the hearts of a great democratic people, imbued with an understanding and austere reverence for her eternal promptings and ordinances. It lies not in the trivial temporalities of political taxation, African slavery, local power, or the nostrums of orators however eminent. It is the truth, established by science, and not the deductions of meta- physics, with which the peoj^le must fortify themselves. 190 APPENDIX. As power resides in the people and the suffrage is its exercise, with them also must reside intelligent and wise counsel. To be certain that the gi'eat principles on which they rely to strengthen and^ perpetuate human rights, are the truthful deductions of exact science^ and in harmony vnih nature, is the individual duty of the citizen. To reject what is otherwise, is the only safety from usurpation and tyranny. To assert that the mass are deficient in intelligence to comprehend and use familiarly the truth of science^ is the language of tyrants and perfectly false. Behold an eternal example of universal dissemination and familiar use of scientific truths. The alphabet of tioenty-six letters and the numerals of ten figures are the most profound, condensed, and sublime forms of abstract truth which science has or can give to the human race. How many ages and how great a mass of intellectual analysis and research consumed itself to reach this abstract quintessence of truth, has not come to us with the inventions themselves. At sight of a volume printed, or a newspaper, the intelligent savage is crushed with a sense of despair, not knowing that a few years of study will render intelligible to him this mass of chaotic mystery. The child of civilized society, on the contrary, commencing with the alphabet which science has discovered and bequeathed, accepts it through faith^ com- bines letters into syllables, syllables into words, words into sentences, and has opened to him, by an easy ascent, the knowledge which written lan- guage has accumulated and perpetuated since its invention, some thousands of years ago. Believing that abstract truth, wherever reached in other departments of human affairs — as for instance in geography — may, in like manner as the alphabet, be universally received, trusted, and used by the people, I have written these remarks and constructed the map which accompanies them. They agree with the speculations of the scientific writers whom I have been able to consult, especially Humboldt and Jefferson. If this abstract of simple geographical elements be truth, then should they stand the basis of political reason, as the Ten Commandments stand in the field of religion. Admitted to be true, the future of the Ameri- can Eepublic, expanding to fit the continent, as the human foot within a shoe, and brightening the world with its radiance, is familiarly dis- cernible. The general continental geography, filling up the details of its surface, as the flesh and muscles cover the human skeleton, will readily be con- ceived in the mind, and assume order and symmetry. Variety of climates and of altitude : the consequent distribution of iudus- MEMORANDA ON TIIF. PACIFIC RAILROAD. 191 try: the immense commerce which will adjust the interchanges of so vast a surface, so variously occupied : the union by public works of the fluvial arteries descending opposite slopes : the connections with the external continents : and the forms of Stiites, rising consecutively till they shall number one hundred : All these successive events become the current creations of a natural order of progress, and will be the easy deductions of exact calculation of time from statistical data. To come finally to solve the question of the construction of the Pacific Railroad^ it is necessary to analyze the present condition of commerce, both of our own and external countries : how far it is friendly or hostile to the immense modifications such a new route will engender : to probe the temper and force of political power and jealousies : to reason out and balance the friendly and hostile elements that bear upon it : and finally, to subject to the most searching scrutiny tlie topograpldcal character of the immense space of our continent interrupted by the " Plateau of the Table Lands," the great mountain ranges of the Sierra Madre, and the Andes, with their external slopes. To such a complete discussion, this is preliminary. CHAPTEK 11. I HAVE mentioned in the preceding chapter, in which I endeavored to delineate, in a condensed form, the abstract geographical elements of our continent, that I had compiled, with great labor, a map, exhibiting to the eye, as it were in daguen-eotype, what is so difficult to make comprehensi- ble in writing to the popular mind. In truth, this simple classification has long ago suggested itself to me, resulting from observations made and facts collected during immense jour- neys, which I have made out to the rim of the continent, on all its coasts — sometimes as a solitary pioneer, and at others in the military service. These wanderings have extended over thirty years of time, and more than one hundred thousand miles ! Uncertain as to the accuracy of these facts, long rendered indistinct and hazy by the vastness of the details — finding myself everywhere repelled by the soi-disant learned in science and politics ; and being, also, without the pecuniary means to reach the people, it is only now that I venture to appear before them. Neither do I rely upon my own reflections exclusively. 192 APPENDIX. The world lias lately received from the learned Humboldt his two works, " Cosmos" and " The Aspects of Nature." This pre-eminent veteran in science commenced sixty years ago to hive and condense the truths that he now gives us in these small volumes. Nine years were then given by him to exploration and study among the Andes of South America and Mexico, and subsequently ten years among the Himalayas of Central Asia. It is only now, at the age of eiglity years, that he ventures to give to the world the condensed quintessence of a whole life of travel, intense study, rigid analysis, and meditation. Though not clearly known to him (for he has not visited our country, or been able to collect the material, to supply this deficiency, from others), he has, in his delineations of Peru and Mexico, exactly sketched our own Andes in California and Oregon. His descriptions of the great plateaux of Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, and Thibet, with their surrounding mountain chains, applied to our continent, solve for us the enigma of our own geography. Indeed, if the continent of Asia be turned at right angles, so that Siberia should face the rising sun, it would almost exactly resemble and explain all North America included between the trough of the Mississippi and the Pacific. In short, in these small volumes — " Notes on Virginia" and " Cosmos" — of the brave apostles of truth, Jefierson and Humboldt, — in these we have condensed facts enough to guide us to the most distinct and perfect ffolution of the whole scheme of our own continental geography. To resume, then, the discussion of geographical facts, and approach cau- tiously, step by step, the location made by nature for the Continental Railroad, we must have clearly in the mind the great central crest of the Sierra Madre, and the two sides of the continent sloping on either hand to the oceans. Yery many great rivers, bursting from the eastern mountain flank, descend, without rapids, by the Mississippi to the Grulf ; by the St. Lawrence to the North Atlantic. Even the Alleghanies, having but 2000 feet elevation, present but a secondary obstacle. Abundant routes exist, therefore, whereby a railroad may pass up from the eastern coast line of the continent to the flanks of the Sierra Madre. Whatever slight elevations may exist in the general surface, they are all perforated successively by continuous rivers, whose banks offer water- grades uninterrupted during the whole ascent. No difficulty here presents itself. But " that side of the American continent which may be defined to front Asia, and sheds its waters in that direction, has these four charac- teristic divisions : the maritime front, the Andes, the Plateau OE the Table Lands, and the Sierra Madre ; all extending the whole length, MEMORANDA ON TUE PACIFIC RAILROAD. I93 from south to north, parallel to one another, and covering, in the aggre- gate, two-fifths of its whole area." The maritime front is narrow, has many small streams in which the flowing tide reaches the base of the Andes, and presents no obstacles of any significance. Through the two Cordilleras, the Andes, and the Sierra Madre, which flank and elevate themselves above the level of the Table Lands, are many passes admitting of the passage of rail- roads, but merely from the outside on to the Table Lands within. The Table Lands are, however, ribbed by latitudinal ranges of moun- tains, of immense bulk and height. The solution, therefore, condenses itself to the discovery of a single line, whereby the Sierra Madre, the ribs of the Table Lands, the lofty crest of the Andes, and its abrupt western wall, may all be continuously and consecutively overcome, surmounted, or evaded. I quote from a memoir given to the public by myself, some years ago, this description of the Table Lands : — The distance to the Pacific from the top of the Sierra Madre (Rocky Mountains), where you leave behind the waters flowing to the Atlantic, is everywhere some 1500 miles. The toijogroplucal character of this ultramontane region is very grand and characteristic. It is identical with the region at the sources of the La Plata, Amazon, and Magdalena, of South America, but more immense. Sketched by its great outlines it is simply this : The chain of the Andes, debouching north from the Isthmus, opens like the letter Y into two primary chains (Cordilleras). On the right, the Sierra Madre, trending along the coast of the Mexican Gulf, divides the Northern Continent almost centrally, foi-ming an unbroken water-shed to Behring's Strait. On the left, the Andes follows the coast of the Pacific, warps around the Gulf of California, and, passing along the coast of California and Oregon (under the name of Sierra Nevada), terminates also near Behring's Strait. The immense interval between these chains is a succession of intra- montane basins, seven in number, and ranging from south to north. The whole forms the great Plateau of the Table Lands. First, is the " Basin of the City of Mexico," receiving the interior drainage of both Cordilleras, which waters, having no outlet to either ocean, are dispersed again by evaporation. Second, the " Bolson de Mapimi," collecting into the Laguna the streams draining many States, from San Luis Potosi to Coahuila, also without any outflow to either ocean. Third, the " Basin of the Del Norte," whose vast area feeds the Rio 13 194' APPENDIX. del Norte, the Conchos, and Pecos. These, concentrated into the Eio Grrande del Norte, behind the Sierra Madre, have, by their united volume, burst through its wall and found an outlet towards the Atlantic. The geological character of this basin, its altitude, its configuration and locality, all assign it this position, as distinguishing it from all others contributing their waters to the Atlantic. Fourth, the " Basin of the Great Colorado of the West." This im- mense basin embraces above the great rivers Rio Verde and Rio Grrande, whose confluent waters, penetrating the mighty Cordillera of the Andes athwart, from base to base, discharge themselves into the Gulf of Califor- nia. Into this sublime gorge (the Canon of the Colorado^ the human eye has never swept for an interval of 575 miles. So stern a character does Nature assume where such stupendous mountains resist the passage of such mighty rivers. Fifth, the " Basin of the Great Salt Lake," like the Caspian of Asia, containing many small basins within one great rim, and losing its scattered waters by evaporation, has no outflow to either ocean. Sixth, the "Basin of the Columbia," lying across the northern flanks of the two last, and grand above them all in position and configuration. Many great rivers, besides the Snake and Upper Columbia, descend from the great arc of the Sierra Madre, where it circles towards the northwest from 43° to 52°, flow from east to west and concentrate above the Cas- cades into a single trunk. This here strikes the mighty Cordillera of the Andes (narrowed to one ridge), and disgorges itself through this sublime pass at once into the open Pacific. It is Ziere, descending by the grade of this river the whole distance from the rim of the Yalley of the Mississippi, and through the Andes to the Pacific, that the great debouch of the American Continent towards the West is found ; and here will be the pathway of future generations of the New World, as the people of the Old World pass down the Mediterranean and out by Gibraltar. Above^ the " Basin of Frazer River" forms a seventh of the Table Lands. This has burst a canon through the Andes, and, like the fourth and sixth basins, sends its waters to the Pacific. With the geography of the more northern region we are imperfectly acquainted, knowing, how- ever, that from Puget Sound to Behring's Strait the wall of the Andes forms the beach itself of the Pacific, whilst the Sierra Madre forms the western rim of the basins of the Saskatchewan of Hudson Bay, and the Athabasca of the Arctic Seas. Thus, then, briefly we arrive at this great cardinal department of the geography of the continent, viz. .: the Table Lands, — being a longitudi- MEMORANDA OX THE PACIFIC It A I LEO AD. I95 nal section (about two-seveuths of its whole area), intermediate between the two oceans, but walled off" from both, and having but three outlets for its waters, viz. : the caiions of the Rio Grande, the Colorado, and the Columbia. Columnar basalt forms the basement of this whole region, and volcanic action is everywhere prominent. Its general level, ascertained upon the lakes of the different basins, is about 6000 feet above the sea. Rain seldom falls, and timber is rare. The ranges of mountains which separate the basins are often rugged, and capped with perpetual snow, whilst isolated masses of great height elevate them- selves from the plains. This whole formation abounds in the precious metals. Such is the region of the Table Lands. Beyond these is the Pacific maritime region. The great wall of the Andes, receding from the beach of the Pacific, leaves between itself and the sea a half valley, as it were, forming the seaboard slope from San Diego to the Straits of Juan de Fuca. This is 1200 miles in length, and 200 broad. Across it descend to the sea a series of fine rivers, ranging fi'om south to north, like the little streams descending from the Allegha- nies to the Atlantic. These are the San Gabriel, the Buenaventura, the San Joachim and Sacramento, the Rogue, Tlameth, and Umqua Rivers : the Wallamette and Columbia, the Cowlitz, Chekalis, and Nasqually, of Puget Sound. This resembles and balances the maritime slope of the Atlantic side of the continent ; but it is vastly larger superficially ; of the highest agricul- tural excellence ; basaltic in formation ; grand beyond the powers of description. The snowy points and volcanoes of the Andes are every- whei-e visible from the sea ; whilst its climate is entirely exempt from the frosts of winter. The configuration of the Sierra Madre (the Mother Mountain of the world) is transcendently massive and sublime. Rising from a basement whose roots spread out 2000 miles and more, its crest sjilits almost cen- trally the Northern Continent, and divides its waters to the two oceans. Novel terms have been introduced to define its characteristics. 3Iesa, expresses the level plateaux of its summits. Canon, the gorges rent in its slopes by the descending rivers. Bute, the conical mountains isolated and trimmed into symmetrical peaks by atmospheric corrosion. Everybody has seen the card-houses built by children in the nurseiy. Suppose three of these in a row, having a second story over the centre : this toy familiarly delineates a transverse section of the Sierra jMadre. The top of this upper story represents the central primary mesa of the Cordillera — its summit a great plain, descending on both flanks by a per- pendicular wall of 6000 feet to the level of the second mesa, or steppe. 196 APPENDIX. Towards the west the second mesa fills the whole space to the Andes, whose farther side descends abruptly to the tide-level of the Pacific. This is again what has been before described at length as the Great Table Lands. But towards the east the second mesa forms a piedmont, rent into peaks by the fissures of innumerable streams. This piedmont, called by us the Black Hills, masks the front of the Sierra Madre from end to end. So completely is it torn and rent by the perplexity of water-courses, that patches alone are left to define the original plateau. These are the east- ern envelope of the basin of the Yellowstone, the Laramie Plain (between the Plattes), the Batone and the Llano Estacado of Texas. Beneath this the third mesa (or steppe) is that superlative region, the Great Prairie Plains, whose gentle slope forms a glacis to the Gulf through Texas, and in front to the trough formed by the Mississippi Biver from Itasca Lake to the Balize. It is this vastness of geographical configuration which leads the glance of the engineer with unerring certainty to that line of natural grades from ocean to ocean, the discovery of which mankind now awaits with the keenest interest, and along which the American nation is resolved to construct the consummate work of art — the Asiatic and European Railway. Advancing north along the comh of the Sierra Madre from below Mexico, you find at the sources of the Platte (Sweetwater) a wide gap, where, the high mesa suddenly giving out for the space of forty miles, the second mesa passes through from east to west, the continued water-ridge being scarcely perceptible among its gentle undulations. This is the '■'■South Pass." It is so named as being the most soiithern pass to which you may ascend by an affluent of the Atlantic, and step immediately over, to a stream de- scending directly to the Pacific. This name is as ancient as the pass itself. Into it concentrate the great trails of the bufialo, geographers and road-makers by instinct, before the coming of man. The Indian, the Mexican, and the American, successors of one another, have not improved or deflected from the instincts of the bufialo, nor will they, whilst the mountains last in their present unshattered bulk. The South Pass has a towering grandeur, in keeping with the rivers between which it is the avenue (the Missouri, the Colorado, and the Columbia), all of which, issuing from the wall of the Wind Biver Mountain, come out of it upon the second mesa, at the same level, and into which they imme- diately commence burrowing their caiions of descent to the seas. Here, then, is the route, the southern route, of the National Bailroad, ME.mORANDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 197 ascendiug by tlie water-grade of the Platte to the top of the second mesa, where it forms the summit, following the level of this mesa along the base of the high mesa, to the Columbia (Snake River), and descending its water-grade clear to the Pacific. The distance from the Platte to the Columbia has not been accurately ascertained, though by the present wagon-road, which crosses a corner of the Salt Basin, it is less than 300 miles. Here is that double-inclined plane, to find which has been the first essential in every line of transpor- tation existing in the world. There is none south of this, because every- where the basins of the Table Lands overlap and envelop one another, so that the jDasses lead merely from one of these into another ; nor are there any natural tunnels through the precipitous walls of the Andes, and between the basins. The Columbia, running acrosa the Table Lands from east to west, dis- tributes the descent of 8500 feet equally along its course of 1200 miles, and tunnels the great ranges of Blue Mountains and the Andes. This whole course of the river is a continuity of rapids, having three falls, the American Falls of thirty feet at Portneuf, the Salmon Falls of forty-five feet, 200 miles below, and the Chuttes of twelve feet, near the Dalles. This river-grade is then as rapid as the descent to be accomplished will admit of; for, distributed into long levels and steep grades, it would immensely impair the utility of the whole work, and fatally impede transportation. The great Colorado runs diagonally across the Table Lands, dehouch- ing into the Gulf of California; but has its course and those of its great aflfluents parallel with the mountain ranges, which are scored with un- fathomed canons, perplexing the traveller with an infinity of impassable ridges, among which the water-courses are embowelled. Here is that immense and complex labyrinth of mountain ribs, whose great height and arid character have heretofore defied every effort to explore or penetrate. Its impenetrability cannot be made to yield to art, in a direct line, owing to the whole space from the Sierra Madre to the Pacific, bristling with parallel ribs of snowy mountains. The rivers penetrate these diagonally, and are sunk in canons, burrowed deep into their roots. North of the South Pass, however, exist many single passes, where the higher branches of the Missouri and Columbia interlock. These circuitous routes have all the same termini as that of the South Pass, for they also descend the same two rivers to the seas. Thus between the South Pass and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec there exists no straight railroad route, owing to the longitudinal courses of the rivers, the complexity of the basins, and the double barrier of primary 198 ArPEXDix. mountain chains. To the north, other passes exist, which future genera- tions may cleTelop, and on which navigation may be used for four-fifths ot the whole distance. True it is that potential fashion now exalts the maritime basin of Cali- fornia, San Francisco Bay, into the haven of hope and fortune of the new seaboard, whilst the sublime basin of the Columbia and its magnificent river harbors are banished from public favor. The basin of San Fran- cisco is small, and an isolated spot to reach from the interior. No great river gives it access to the Mississippi Valley, from which it is cut off by the basins of the Salt Lake, the Colorado, and the Del Norte, overlapping each other. The Columbia is larger than the Danube, and equal to the Ganges. In size, climate, agriciiltural excellence, capacity for population, and its won- derful circular configuration, the basin of the Columbia surpasses both of these others. The mouth of the Columbia, a salient point upon the open coast, more than any other central and convenient to the whole North Pacific and Asia, is, in size, depth of water, safety, and facility of ingress or egress, equal to San Francisco. As the mouth of the gi-eatest river descending from our continent into the Pacific, it is perhaps more valuable. It is eight degrees south of Liverpool, having the climate of Bordeaux, IMarseilles, or Savannah. Why is not the deep sea navigation concentrated at Korfolk, on Hamp- ton Eoads, the finest harbor of the whole Atlantic ? Why, rather, is it found at New York and New Orleans, accessible only through every dan- ger that can menace shipping ? Why, because the former is the outlet of the basin of the St. Lawrence, the latter of the Mississippi. The ship- ping of commerce goes to where cargoes can be found. Less than fifty years ago, fashion pronounced the little ravines of James River and the Connecticut the proud spots of America, and held the great uninhabitable wastes of the Mississippi and its tuinavigated streams as worthy only to balance codfish .' This same splenetic spirit ot fashion now manufactures a similarly ridic- tilous misdirection for the energy of the pioneers, by setting up what the geologist would call a " pot-hole of the Andes," against the grand Colum- bia. Commerce, provident like every other department of industry, makes herself harbors with charts, pilots, buoys, and beacons. The shallowest channel of the Columbia has thirty-five feet of water — the deepest of New York twenty-nine. Thus does Nature, piously appealed to, and calmly consulted, exhaust, bring to a close, and settle, by eternal facts, the various ojiinions which MEMORANDA OX THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. lr[)liyry and lava will descend in immense quantities, and tlius economize the paving of the cities of the Valley of the Mississijipi. One natural production of the eastern edge of the Tablk JjANDS will soon repay the cost of the construction of this road. This is salt. There are mountains near the sources of Snake lliver, composed of stratified masses of rock-salt — just as other river bluffs arc of limestone. This, quarried with light tools, and ground to powder, as grain is re- duced to flour, is the pure alum salt of commerce. Every living soul of America uses salt thrice per day. Every animal requires it as fre(|uently. Every ounce of provisions is preserved with it. It is mixed with hay, and preserves timber. It is used in the manufactures and fine art,s. Brought hence down to the focal ])()int of navigation in Missouri, this State will become the distributing [loint of this most valuable, greatest, and most indispensable article of conmierce. By the last national census, the annual production^ of our country reaches the value of three thousand millions of dollars, f^cventy-five per cent, of this va food^ which finds no market among tlie comparatively lim- ited population of Europe, 205,000,000, who feed themselves. Around the Padfic, in front of Astoria, are 745,000,000 of hungry Asiatics and Polynesians^ who have groceries, clothing, spices, and por- celain, to exchange for meat and grain. But the western half of this road departs from the bank of the Mis- souri, to which all America has ac -chs at this hour by the navigable 206 APPENDIX. rivers ; and from Astoria these millions of consumers may be reached directly, over a tranquil ocean and under a temperate atmosphere: the equatorial heats are only encountered last and at the place of final de- livery. No doubt, in the populous, central, food-producing States of Iowa, Mis- souri, Arkansas, and Illinois, three hundred millions of dollars' worth of produce of industry fail annually to find a market, and the profit thereon perishes, for want of this road out from the centre to the noriS/iwestern coast 1 But it is important that the jpeo'ple receive with candor, and allow due weight to, the overwhelming and conclusive proofs in favor of this route of the water-grades, which Nature, all recorded human experience, and the solid science of civil engineering, conspire to submit to their judgment. Nature is the sujsreme engineer ; art is prosperous only whilst adhering to her teachings. We have seen in what a simple and sublime harmony the invisihle force of Nature elevates vapors from the sea, forms them into cloud balloons in the upper atmosphere, and transports them on currents of air over the continents ; how these become condensed and distil themselves over the face of the land in the form of irrigating rains. This water having performed its renovating duty, by filtering through the surface soil, begins again to collect : first in remote hollows and xxn- dulations : these unite into rivulets : rivulets into larger streams : streams into rivers : rivers into the great fresh-water troughs^ which return this drainage from the land, to mix with the salt of the ocean, to be renovated and perform again their part in the circulation of nature. Now, the use of public loorks to human society is the same as are her works to Nature : to bring in and distribute clothing and groceries ; to collect and carry out surplus food and productions of every variety. Ill the transferring to and fro of the waters of the universe, Nature accomplishes as much heavy transportation in a few hours as will sufiice the social wants of America for a century. This, then, is all that is sound in evil engineering, and comprehends all the good that it has and can do for human society : — to select those water-grades where, in further imitation of Nature, human energy may smooth the asperities and econom- ically adapt to use the curves and grades with which she has everywhere furnished the face of the land. Thus, then, to recapitulate and sum up the array of facts which con- centrate themselves to decide the location of the Continental Rail- way. Nature and all sound human experience unite to select the water- grade of the Platte and Snake Rivers, and against any departure from it. ME MOB AND A ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 207 If this route deflects at all from an exact centrality^ it is to the south^ and not towards the north, that it bears. Its two halves, diverging from the centre., give the shortest lines to the sea, through the countries and popu- lations where the work to be done is the greatest, and the necessity for it most immediate, pressing, and lasting. One-half is located and under construction. As a through road it is the shortest lineticro.ss North America, most conveniently connecting Asia and Europe hy the perpetual line of way travel of all people. Though meandering among immense mountain chains, it passes them all by tun- nels completely made by nature. Neither snow nor rain, nor great rivers, embarrass either its construc- tion or its after-use : the climate is pre-eminently propitious : material to construct is conveniently at hand, at easy intervals on the right and left : fuel and water abundant forever. The pastoral excellence of the whole region, combined Avith a dry atmosjDhere and health, supplying meat-food and transportation indefinitely, will render easy the immediate influx and residence of an immense population. The vicinity where the great Sierra Madre is penetrated, and where five great rivers have their sources together, is prodigiously prolific in salt, hard rock for architecture and paving, medicinal hot springs, all the precious metals and jewels, furs, lumber, and the hides of animals. If I have delineated with any success, and explained correctl}'^ the fea- tures of Nature., in geography, climate, and topography, there remains to examine the bearing upon this work of the combined hostile influence of ocean commerce allied with politics. Why this great central route, suc- cessfully opened in the time of Jeffierson and by the energy of Astor, was attacked, stopped, and finally shut up, under President Monroe. And why its reopening is still hampered and postponed by the .same remorse- less and unrelentin"; enemies. THE HEMP-GEOWING KEGION. There is a region of Missouri and Kmisas of rajjidly rising fame and importance, gaining for itself a State and a national reputation, whicli we will define as tlie " Region of the Hemp Cultured Specially ftiYored by nature in its geographical locality, climate, navigation, and superlative fer- tility, this region has become the seat of a hemp culture which has a strong, organized, and national foundation. The hemp culture receives special attention in twenty counties of West- ern Missouri, bisected by the Missouri River, and all adjacent to its two shores. They form a belt of land east and west, enclosed between the 38th and 40th degrees of latitude. Here is the production of these counties in hemp, in order as they lie along the river — census of 1850 : Jackson, Cole, Platte, Howard, Lafayette, Cass, Clay, Boone, Saline, Johnson, Ray, Clinton, Cooper, Pettis, Carroll, Randolph, Moniteau, Miller, Chariton, Buchanan. The aggregate of annual production being 14,173 tons, or 28,346,000 pounds. Since 1850, the hemp culture has increased in vigor, both in the land assigned toits culture and in the application of machinery to its produc- tion and manufacture. The production of that year, within the above region, was 28,346,000 pounds, estimating the ton at 2000 pounds; and that of the whole State 16,119 tons, or 32,238,000 pounds. The course of the Missouri River through this region of superlative fertility may be compared to the Nile flowing through Lower Egypt to the Mediterranean. It is in the ability of an abundant and bounteous pro- duction that this comparison holds, but not in temperature, climate, or physical features. In Egypt, the arable and inhabitable district is limited to the ravine of the Nile, which is overflowed and irrigated by its waters ; beyond this the 208 THE HEMP-GROWING REGION. 209 primeval desert reigns everywhere sui^reme. With us, the same fertility characterizes the borders of the stream, which has the same abundance of fertilizing waters, the same splendid navigation, the same solemnity in its ever-flowing channel, and the same redundancy of benignant attributes which have deified the Nile. But, on every side, from the gently elevated crest that bounds the ravine of the Missouri, expands, with a radius of 1000 miles, that varie- gated ca^careoi^s plain, which we define as the "Basin of the Mississqyjn.'^ This undulating plain has an area equal in capacity to all the other river basins of the world, and combines all their varieties. So much does the mind revert to the ocean to explain by comparison its exquisite romantic beauty, at once immense and regular, that this hymn to the sea may with propriety describe it : " Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Glasses itself in tempests ; in all time, Calm or convulsed — in breeze, or gale, or storm. Dark heaving; — boundless, endless, and sublime — The image of eternity — the throne Of the Invisible — . . . each zone Obeys thee ; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone !" The current course of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers is from north to south. The latter is so throughout its whole length. The llissonri, after a southern course of 3000 miles, receives the Kansas River in latitude 39^, turns abruptly to the east, penetrates the State of Missouri, and bisects it from west to east, with a channel 4C0 miles in length. Into the eastern mouth of this channel, all the great natural lines of travel coming from the Atlantic by the St. Lawrence, Ohio, and South Mississippi Rivers, concentrate as rays to a focal point. They are altogether carried forward to the central west at the mouth of the Kansas, where the unbroken prairie formation meets the river, and to which the radiant land routes over their expanse, coming from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, similarly concentrate. This channel is noiv, and is destined prospectively to remain, the most thronged and wonderful in the world. It is central, east and uest, to the American Continent, to the Basin of the Mississippi, and to the American Union. It lies along the axis of that isothermal temperate zone, within which is the zodiac of nations, and is also the axis of the population, progress, travel, production, consumption, commerce, transportation, and habitation of the human race. It is the highway from Western Europe to Oriental Asia. It is under that line of latitude where all things northern and southern meet and blend 14 210 APPENDIX. together — where the day and night, the seasons of the year, labor, the growth of nature, and all the elements of human society and of the vege- table and animal world, have the widest range, the greatest variety, and the highest development. Having a double shore, this channel has 800 miles of coast. It has the familiar accommodation and safety of a canal, a railroad, or a street. Its depth of water and capacity for commerce will receive and carry forward the freightage of all the oceans and all the continents. Similar channels have been known and used in both ancient and modern times — such are the Lower Nile, the Bosphorus, and Dardanelles, the Strait of Hercules, the English Channel, the Baltic's mouth, the Hudson from New York to Albany — only this has greater length, divides more fertile shores, and connects more numerous hosts of nations. Such is the Hemp Region. It has an altitude 1000 feet above the sea, a salubrity equal to the Table Lands, a fertility su^perior to the Delta of Louisiana, an unlimited area, a navigation better than the sea, a climate exactly congenial to the white man, a rural beauty forever graceful, fresh, and fascinating. It is, on a vastly magnified scale, the counterpart of that delicious and classic Italy, traversed by the Po, dotted with cities, Venice, Verona, Mantua, Milan, of which Shakspeare has written, and where ViRGiL and Tasso sung. If an ellipse be described extending from the Osage mouth to Fort Riley, some 500 miles, and in breadth 300, it will contain that district of fat, lustrous soil, exuberant vegetation, graceful beauty, and abundant streams, where Nature has bountifully blended all her choicest gifts to locate the rural quintessence of America and of the world ! Stimulated by the inspiring splendor of their natural position, the vigorous population of this region have pursued agriculture, commerce, and manufactures with an ambition and success which indicate a growing empire in nothing unworthy of their prospective destiny. Every department of production and industry has been tried, and all thrive. Hemp, tobacco, flax, the grape and wine, silk, sugar, the cereals and grasses ; cattle of the finest breeds ; agricultural machinery, flowers, steam, and mining. Society exalts its tone by a taste for religious edifices and eloquence ; education receives great and universal care ; music and re- finement are zealously cultivated. Apart from these fascinating gifts of Nature and the promise which germinates beneath their warmth, a prestige entwines itself with and illu- minates the history of this region. This runs back to the golden time of ihe patriarchal founders of our continental empire; it stretches over the THE HEMP-GROWING REGION. 211 dark chasm of seaboard monarch}', and has its fountain in the lumi- nous Aurora and among the immortal patriots who limned out the profile of our continental empire, and inaugurated the march of our destinies. We have here among us the graves of Daniel Boone, Geouge Rogers Clarke, Laclede, and the names of John Jacob Astor, Louis XVL of France, Lasalle, and De Soto, great and intrepid men who led or befriended the pioneers, those stars which shone in the first twilight of empire. To Jefferson and Jackson we were known, and they have been known to us as our friends. To understand this prestige and its strength, it is necessary briefly to select out and set apart to themselves a few facts in the history of progress, which stand along its path, and, like pyramids in the solitude, fix its re- markable epochs. This system of civilized society, of which we Americans form a part, is very ancient, and is inherited. History is the journal of its geographical progress, its vicissitudes, its struggles, and its energies. Where society has assumed its largest form and attained the highest level of civilization and longest endurance, it is defined to be an empire. History chiefly occupies itself with the biography of these empires, their rise, culmination, and decadence. They have appeared, lived, and departed, like generations of men. They lie along a serpentine zone of the north hemisphere of the globe, within an isothermal belt, and form a zodiac thirty-five degrees in width. The axis of this zodiac alternates above and below the 40th degree of latitude, as the neighborhood or remoteness of the oceans modifies the climates of the continents. These empires are the Chinese, the Indian, the Persian, the Grecian, the Roman, the Spanish, the British, and, last, the Republican Empire of North America. These are the essential ones in the regular order of time and upon the hereditary line of progress. It is here that the mass of land is the greatest, and where the continents most neai'ly approach one another. This ZODIAC of nations contains nine-tenths of the white population of the globe, and all its civilization. The territory of the American people,^ extending across this continent, exactly fills this isothermal zone from edge to edge, occupying the whole connecting space between Western Europe and Oriental Asia. It is on these two fronts of the old continents that the two halves of the human race are separately congregated, both fronting America and fronting one another, face to face, across America. The straight line of intercourse between them, only 10,000 miles in length, pursues the axis 212 APPENDIX. of the isothermal zone, out of wliich it never deflects either into the torrid lieats or the frozen north. Here, then, is the tenacious, the divine instinct of progress and liberty, •which fired the soul of Columbus, of Washington, of Jefferson, and of Jackson. In this faith they lived ; this faith they vindicated and never betrayed ; and in this faith they died, to inherit among posterity a supreme, untainted immortality. This faith forms the inspiration of the Declaration of 1776, animated the patriarchal generation, and was renewed and codified in the Constitu- tion of '87. It selected Jefferson in 1798, and Jackson in 1828. Its eagles are now erected among the pioneers out in the wilderness, in Kan- sas, in Utah, in California, and in Oregon. Upon them are embossed the ancient rights of man, the continental union, the continental railroad, the continental cause ! During the administration of Jefferson, central extension, pursuing the isothermal axis through the continent, was prosecuted with great vigor as the favorite policy of the government. Lewis and Clarke recon- noitred and made known the character of the rivers, the mountains, and the connections of the Basins of the Mississippi and Columbia by direct passes. John Jacob Astor planted trading colonies and paths through the wilderness, and upon the bank of the other sea opposite to China. The rapid creation of the States of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, carried forward the Union in a salient column, embracing the water-line of the great rivers and reaching here to the geographical centre in 1820 ! Up to that date the Jlanlcs had remained stationary ia New York and Georgia. The design then was to go through with the parallelogram of central States from sea to sea, and from this base to advance outward, planting States simultaneously towards the south and towards the north. This policy was crippled during the time of Mr. Madison by the vicissitudes of foreign war. It was abandoned and reversed by Messrs. Monroe and Adams. In their time grew up the political divisions of North and South, and a maritime policy inaugurated itself Since that date, central progress has ab.'uptly stopped, and great activity upon the flanks has brought them up to an even front in Iowa, and a greatly advanced position in Texas. The central force has, \iov;c\eY, jumped the continent straight to the front, occupied the sea-coasts of Oregon and California, and founded the new maritime power upon the Pacific and opposite to Asia. Since the selection of the site of the city of Independence, in 1824, to 1854, a chasm in time of thirty years, central extension had rested as THE HEMP-GROWING REGION. 213 stagnant as thougli our great river had been frozen at this point into solid and perpetual ice. It had been stopped by an artificial cordon of Indian tribes and federal law as eifectually as by a continuous wall of brass ex- tending from Louisiana to the 49th degree, and rising in altitude from the prairie foundation to the clouds. Hence is seen the unique and novel sight of a great continental empire, formed of a circular shell of States traced round the circumferent seaboard, and surrounding a hollow and vacant disk of desert continent. Such arc at present the theoretical itrinci^les upon which maritime -poVK-y legislates for the great region of our country connecting the States of Missouri and California straight across. The antagonistic struggle is between the instinct of progress plowing out its highway through the continent, along the isothermal axis hy land, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the external shell of maritime power to hold the continent in a maritime hoop, and subject its industrial greatness to an aiTogant sea-policy. In the great city of New York the active instinct of progress has always had a working vitality. Like Rome, she has pursued an elastic policy, and has planted her commercial colonies at the right time, and in the right spots. These colonies, of the first class, are New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco. With all of these she maintains or needs direct connec- tions by steamers, railroads, and telegraphs, as also with Europe in the rear. The time is rife for another selection, which oflfers itself in the centre of the Mississippi Basin ! A key-point of centrality and radiance, and of unrivalled excellence. This is Kansas City, the metropolis of the Hemp Region. This young and vigorous city, crowning the southern bank of the Missouri River at the point of the angle where it deflects to the east, beetles over the avenues to the prairies of the south and west, like Gibral- tar at the Strait of Hercules. It covers the rear of St. Louis, and confines her to the narrow field of the State of Arkansas. By the through railroad, coming by way of Chi- cago and Keokuk, crossing the Missouri River at Brunswick, and ascend- ing the south bank, an air-line road exists of only fifty hours' time hence to New York City. The river line of the Missouri, Illinois, and St. Lawrence deflects but little from an equal straightness and a similar distance in miles. Railroads passing onwards to Galveston into Texas and New Mexico, to San Fran- cisco, Utah, and Astoria, will be the shortest lines from New York City to all these extremities and various regions of our continent. Here will be found the shortest cZia^onaHine wherewith to bisect the 214 APPEXBIX. productive territory and population of the Union towards tlie soKtIiicest, tliroiigli the grain, hemp, and pastoral regions, to the sugar of Texas and the gold and silver of Mexico. It is shorter to Galveston than any route traversing the maritime At- lantic States and bending with the sea-coast. It traverses a line of the greatest variety of production and largest distribution of gToceries, dry goods, and manufactured metals. This hemp region is not more celebrated for hemp than it is for tobacco, grain, blooded cattle, and wool ; only this former production is not shared with surrounding regions, where the latter engross exclusive attention. The population of the hemp region, in 1850, was 202,413 ; the assessed property §105,449,655. Here, then, is an immense and solid foundation wherefrom to grasp and control the expanding developments in front, consequent upon tlie obliteration of the Indian ban-ier, and the bui-sting forth of the pent-up flood of centra? progress, out over ■ the prairies which undulate to Texas, Mexico, and the 3Ioiuitains. The front wave of this flood-tide is already in motion; its spray sprinkles the Plains almost to the mountain foot. The achievements of the coming decade of years will differ from its predecessor. It will exhibit a greater mass of energy, concentrated in one direction, occupied by a single object, and moving with immense means over a very short line, which is perfectly straight and open. Heretofore the active force of progress has been operating round the rim of our territory, on Lake Superior, in California, in Texas, in Florida: in detached sqitadrons separated from the base of old society, by the diam- eter of the continent, or keeping up its communication round the cir- cumference by sea. The opening decade beholds a concentric advance, flooding into the centre and reducing all movements to the shortest radii ! Its career opens with a general force of 50,000,000 of population, having gold in hand, railroads, steamers, and rivers with prairies on their banks. The difficulties of the wilderness are overcome, the temptations every way increased, the means of motion enormously accumulated. Such is the prosperous future which shines over the central rcest, and fills the atmosphere to the remotest horizon. This prospective view is not too sanguine, it is not exaggerated, it is only in moderate and appro- priate jiroportion to the material long accumulating and now beginning to stir with activity through its whole reanimated bulk. Sound health, complete preparation, fresh and mature vigor, judgment, and a defined and finite object, all blond themselves with the immense and successful movement which closes in to occupy the centre of our countiy, to reunite its flanks, and to adjust its true and geograpJiical balances forever. AN OUATION. spoken bt hon. william gilpin, to the guicsts of the kenian brvotiier- ifood, at denver, colouado, july 4, 18g8. Ladies and Gentlemen, Fellow-citizens, each one and all : — The return of Independence Day brings annually together, both at homo and in foreign lands, the unanimous American people. They unite to express and to renew the fire of devotion ; to burnish afresh the holy flame which illuminated our natal hour ; that hour when our sacred country was born to a mission of unparalleled liberty, virtue, happiness, and glory. We everywhere invoke Heaven, as we surround the innumerable altars of patriotism, to fortify every heart and every will of our now multitudi- nous people ; to tone and forever inspire them to perpetuate the founda- tions, the standard, and the work erected by the patriarchal fathers ; to emulate their energetic works and virtues, plain in form, intense in forti- tude, radiant with political charity and exalted wisdom. The solemnity of this day instructs us to look abroad, with hearts soft- ened by a great love, yet stern with resolution, over our vast country now encircled by the seas. The august Congress of 1776 is seen, filled with heroic men, the choice of an heroic people. Wisdom, resolution, calmness, unanimity, sway and moderate their deliberations and their acts. With unfaltering faith and self-reliance in the rectitude of their inten- tions and their cause, they pronounce the will of the American people re- solved for Liberty and for Independence. In condensed sentences, perfect for logic, simplicity, truth, and eloquence, they face and expel from the American continent tyrants and oppression ; they summon and appeal to the virtue and sympathy of mankind. Their resolutions and their acts, free from doubt, are equally daring, final, and complete. In the rancorous and prolonged conflicts of war, essential to meet and 215 216 APPENDIX. quell the implacable rage and avarice of power, was seen the same reso- lute will, a like impregnable endurance, an equal faith, the same unfal- tering fidelity. From this ordeal, sublime in all its acts and features, came forth a regen- erated people. Regenerated ! Because imanimonsly born to liberty, the menaces and blows of covetous power struck to dwarf its dimensions, to blunt its freshness, to wring subjugation from inflicted tortures, had been understood, resisted, and annihilated. To Liberty was added Independence. To liberty had accrued the supreme power of self-discipline, self-protection, self-rule, self-perpetuation ! But the Congress of 1776, having its origin and its authority from the unanimous will and jiower of the people, declared itself to be the " Con- tinental Congress of the American people." In their name were erected and maintained a continental army ; a continental marine ; a continental currency; a continental caiise. Animated by the loftiest sentiments, unsullied by the meretricious taste ■for power, the profoundly wise and courageous charity which declared and established the independent liberty of the individual man, decreed also that the geographical area of the continent should be dedicated and sanc- tified to the exercise of his freedom. Hence, from these preliminary triumphs, in harmony with them and spontaneously, sprang with ease the Union or the United States or America. Liberty, Independence, Union — these were the benignant fruits gath- ered and perpetuated by the American Eevolution for the American people, and for the example of the human race forever. From July 4, 1776, to the second election of Washington, fifteen years in time, that stupendous and benignant work had matured itself during the maturity of a single generation. A continent cut loose and secured to a new society ! A new society erected on fresh ground, novel in all its elements, even in the seed from which the plant first germinates ! The oracular centre of political faith and power rescued from the huge city of London and transported beyond the ocean to the rural shores of the Potomac! A complete and radical adjustment in the geographical foundations of human institutions was consummated. Thought and speech were unchained, and the elasticity of mind disen- tangled ; the daring spirit of inquiry set free from restraint ; the rights of man, in practice, proclaimed and perpetuated ; monarchy abolished ; universal citizenship and self-government made perpetual; the artificial barriers erected by bigotry to restrict reason and pi'ogress, disappeared, and ORArrox. 217 the hori'zon all ivrouiid was cleared to their unobstructed expansion and I'reo vision. From a whole people, tlius disenthralled and impelled by tlx^ li;2;ht and fire of universal intelligence, sprang the Constitution of the United States of America. This constitution, in itself a sublime mental strnedire and edifice, marka a point of culmination in the struggles and the coidlicl.s of all preceding time. It registers a conclusive victory of the instinct of order, achiiived and recognized. It marks a point of deitarture into the future, new and fresh as the continent which gives it birth. Condensed in size and form, it is comprehensively complete in its details and exact in its definitions. Consolidated wisdom shines from it, as light and fire from (he sun in nature. It provides for minute nuuiicipal governments, and commands self-denial, energy, concession, uniformity, and concord. As in our holy religion we possess the Lord's Prayer, the divine text from which flow all other forms of sui)))lication, and back into it, they are again condensed ; so from the profound principles fixed in the Constitu- tion, governments sound in form may erect themselves, expand to dimen- sions ample as the human family. They may be dwarfed or may decay, but never can finally p(!rish or be lost. Such is the splendid vision which arrests our attention and fills full our hearts with overpowering gratitude, when we devote this day to review the immortal acts and exalted wisdom of the i)(!Ople, of the statesmen, and of the soldiers of our patriarchal generation. Let us remember that the fourth day of July, 1770, was a day of in- tense daring, of unparalleled sterimesa and resolution in its declarations and its acts. By its antagonists it was maligned as intended to unbriille the furies and precipitate the world into infinite and devouring discord. Yet we cannot doubt, we Avho inherit and enjoy its b((nignant results and look out over a world regenerated by its oracles, that Divine Providtincc suficred their hearts to palpitate with His essence and tempered their judgments with His grace. The life of a continental people, charged with an imperial mission, is long. Unlike human life, a pigmy in force and swiftly rushing to the grave, avast people grows even on, aggregating and re-invigftratcd by each generation of men as it appears, matures, and then departs. The life of a nation has also its extreme vicissitudes, its alternating periods of ob.scurity and of brightness. The second generation of American statesmen, whether dazzled by the 218 APPENDIX. brilliancy of their fathers, or staggered to comprehend completely the profound changes, the rapidity, and the immense volume and novelty of their works ; whether a certain awe of the past and recoil, dictated a time of lassitude and rest : yet this period is dimmed by the departure of the government out of harmony with the Constitution and the exalted declara- tions of '76. The divinity of progress seemed to sleep : African slavery was expanded : territory was dwarfed by the loss of Oregon and Texas : all things were repressed under the monopoly of the Atlantic Sea. The grand pioneer energies were arbitrarily curbed and emasculated; a meridian wall of Indians extended as a Bastile from the British northern to the Spanish southern frontier ; the land-system crushed agricultural labor ; immigration from Europe was discouraged ; a bank dwarfed and destroyed money ; immense deserts, stony mountains, an iron-bound sea, and death, were declared to form a fourfold and impregnable barrier to progress to the West. A necessity to resume again the chains of semi-servitude and monarchy was proclaimed. Our immemorial continental mission, coequal with the grand geographical area and structure between the oceans, was lost to speech. Adhesion to rancorous political parties of the North and of the South was alone permitted. Tyranny had re-entered among us. What dismal years of civil war ; what innumerable and heroic battles ; what slaughter and unfathomable griefs ; what sanguinary passions, were seen 1 How nearly was the precipice approached, whence the whole pyra- mid of our glories — Union, Independence, Liberty — should be precipitated and shattered in irreparable ruin I It is here, and upon this day, that we are admonished by pious patriotism to reflect upon the consuming acrimony, rapine, and desolation of civil war ; what positive policy or what lamentable neglect has subjected our country to its destructive torch, and engendered anywhere among our people a chronic and inplacable bitterness. From hence, to ponder boldly, and to see if to avoid it might have been possible, and if its recurrence may be forever averted. As I am now here permitted upon this anniversary to speak to the pioneers, surrounded by their conquests freshly won from the wilderness, and advancing with magic celerity ; so twice before it has been my for- tune to be with them on significant occasions. On the Fourth of July, 1843, 1 was here : on this present site of Den- ver : one of a small, but resolute and intrepid camp. Here were Carson, Fremont, Fitzpatrick, Talbot. The American flag floated over us. ORATION. 219 We had readied the western limit of the American territory, which then closed here in a pocket, formed by the summit of the Sierra and the current of the Arkansas River. In front, beyond the setting sun, were unknown luinintains, strange rivers, mysterious lakes, condemned by the uninstructed opinion of the world and proscribed by its laws, — an obscure and a foreign land. Beyond there was an immense, silent, and unfrequented ocean : on its outward shore were hundreds of millions of Asiatic people, secluded and mysterious empires, barred from the world, and only known to exist. This summer season, a wagon-road was opened, and blazed through and through from the Atlantic to the Pacific Sea. Our flag was baptized in the spray of the Pacific Ocean. The line of way travel round the world was revealed and proclaimed. The truth of geography triumphed over the craft of politics ; the mind of the laboring and industrial world awoke, palpitated with conquering fire, and struck for the emancipation of labor, for its exaltation and its power. The cry for Oregon and Texas arose from the people. During the years of war with Mexico, what enthusiasm animated the pioneer armies, what unparalleled marches, victories, and explorations illustrated the ardent energies of our young soldiers ! How complete the preparations made by them for the advancing power and forces of the people ! Our continental area was doubled ; the American desert rolled aside ; the vast system of the longitudinal mountains revealed in splendor and benignity ; the prodigious arena of the Pacific thrown open, appropriated to America, and occupied in force and permanence I Gold for the j^eople was discovered and secured ! To secure results so pregnant with empire, voluntary forces of occupa- tion gathered to the Missouri River. Assembled, to the number of five thousand on the beautiful prairie where now stands the city of Lawrence, on the Fourth of July, 1849, I was invited to address them. Suffer me to repeat here now some sentiments then spoken: "The region of gold and precious metals and stones is not limited, but is ab- solutely infinite. It is over the whole extent of that primary and volcanic formation extending from the Antarctic to the Arctic extremities of America, including in its expanse the Andes of South and of North America, the Sierra Madre and the Plateau. " This abundance of the material of coin, wrought and developed by sober American industry, is about to be to the human race the supreme.gt gift of divine beneficence. " Has not the American cotton-culture obliterated harsh aristocratic dis- 220 APPENDIX. tinctions iu dress, and thus democratized the costume of society over the world ? What cotton has done for equality in dress, the same will gold effect for individual equality in property and physical comforts ! " Study how the icy servitude of European feudal times has melted since the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro opened the sources from which port- able personal property has exalted itself above fixed and immutable glebe lands !" And again : " Unquiet for this sacred Union is this present time, when political power, about to cross the Alleghanies, see-saws on their crests, counting the days that precede her eternal transit over them ! It is by the rapid propagation of new States, the immediate occupation of the broad plat- form of the continent, the aggregation of the Pacific Ocean and Asiatic commerce, that inquietude will be swallowed up, and the murmurs of discontent lost in the onward sound of advancement. " Discontent, distanced, will die out. The immense wants of the Pacific will draw off, over Western outlets, the overteeming crops of the Missis- sippi Valley. The established domestic manufactures of clothing and metals will find, in our great domestic extension, that protection which they in vain seek to create by unequal legislation, nocuous and impracti- cable in our present incomplete and unbalanced geographical form. " Thus calmly weighed and liberally appreciated, does this Continental Railway minister to the interests, and invite the advocacy and co-opera- tion, of every section of our territor}', and every citizen of our common country!" Looking out at that day from this spot, the eye ranged round for a thousand miles over a silent wilderness, unpeopled and unsought for ; beyond were sluggish people and inert societies. To-day, behold around us the magic creations of the pioneer energies ! Seventeen new States and eight millions of new people surround us ; planted over the area of that wilderness. What an immense geography has been revealed ! what infinite hives of population and laboratories of industry been electrified and set in mo- tion ! The great sea has rolled away its sombre veil. Asia is found and has become our neighbor. Her swarming multitudes, two-thirds of the population of the world, and absorbing four-fifths of the wealth and indus- try of mankind, assume motion and advance to meet us. The world has faced about, and has found its true front. North America is known to our own people. Its concave form and homogeneous structure are revealed. Our continental mission is set to its perennial frame, and the perpetuity of the American Union planted sym- metrically upon its impregnable foundation. ORA TION. 221 Leaving behind the dual political parties on the selvage of the Atlantic Sea, we expand to the universal powers and fraternal sentiments of a con- tinental people. Vast geographical and social differences, strengthened by rivalry and variety, are blended, balanced, and united by permanent accord with the order of nature. Slavery is radically abolished and exiled forever from the continents of America, Asia, and Europe. Universal citizenship, education, and intelli- gence create, expand, and perpetuate themselves. The emancipated mind of the world, reinforced by numbers and new powers of self-government, marches with majesty and moderation from victory to victory. Foreign conquests on American soil are at an end. America beholds a double human sacrifice : Maximilian for the decadence of the Old World ; Lincoln for the renascence of the New. In the littleness of mortality we may yet recognize the divine miracle, which closes the cycle of conquest and slavery in the world, that human- ity may enter upon a new departure, illuminated by universal freedom. A new and grand order in humau affaii-s erects itself upon these immense concurrent disclosures and events. New powers appear, whilst old ones are condensed and made active. Our stupendous system of longitudinal naountains and gold-bearing sierras is a majestic power. Our broad plains, immense valleys, and grand rivers, all parallel, longitudinal, arranged in compact concord, and filling full the temperate zone of warmth, are a power. Our island form and intermediate position between the great oceans, and between Western Eurojie and Oriental Asia, are supreme powers. Our sister States and cities on the Pacific Ocean are a godlike power. The American people, having their common home in the grand amphi- theatre surrounded by the mountains and the external seas, will reach the highest moral standard to which unity of language and manner, combined with the genius of liberty, intelligence, and propitious climate, can elevate empires. The moment is at hand when the traffic and travel of mankind — twelve hundred millions in the aggregate — will condense itself to ferries on the Northern seas and to transit roads. These will be hugely multiplied in volume, and concentrated and devel- oped here ; because they have heretofore been dwarfed to nothing by the equatorial heats and the immense solitudes of the ocean circuit of the globe. To accomplish this within a time reasonably rapid, the hoarded wealth of friendly Asia will be lavishly and generously bestowed. 222 APPENDIX. We see united with us liere to-day, what Europe has most worthy to be honored and remembered : the sons and daughters of the Emerald Isle ; Teutonic men and women ; the representatives of her other hundred States and peoples : they who have had the great faith and energy to leave her and come here, to unite themselves to us, to our country and our mission. Free Europe flows to us and abides with us as fresh waters gather to the sea, whilst monarchy has returned to her wrapt in the mournful shroud of Maximilian. It is thus that the great powers and forces of the external world gravitate to the Mississippi Basin and the mountains, with irresistible pressure and celerity. It is proper that I speak here to-day and to this audience with unre- served sincerity and candor. An exact and careful scrutiny will authorize the assertion, without fear to fail, that when the aj)proaching centennial day of 1876 shall come, the American and Mexican people will be mutually harmonized and fused into one people. Grovernments, withdrawn from the political foci of Washington and Mexico, will be condensed to the convenient and equitable geographical centre in the midst of the rural, the continental people, among the grand prairies and on the rivers of Kansas, remote from and intermediate between the oceans. These events arrive. We are in the midst of them. They surround us as we march. They are the present secretions of the aggregate activities and energies of the people. You, the pioneers of Colorado, have arched with this glorious State the summit ridge and barrier between two hemispheres. You bring to a close the unnumbered ages of their isolation and their hostility. You have opened and possess the highway which alone connects, fuses, and harrtio- nizes them together. Of this State you are the first owners and occupants. You have displayed to the vision and illustrated to mankind the splen- did concave sti'ucture of our continent, and the infinite powers of its august dimensions, its fertility, its salubrious atmosphere and ever-resplen- dent beauty. You have discovered the profound want and necessity of human society, and your labor provides for its relief: Gold — I mean; "the indefinite supply of sound money for the people, by their own individual and volun- tary labor." You occupy the front of the pioneer army of the people ; absolutely the leaders of mankind, heading the column to the Oriental shores ! OB A TION. 223 The mysterious crisis between the clashing continents and civilizations of the world, held and decided, three thousand years ago, by the three hundred Spartans at Therniopyla3, now rests with the geographical States and peojile of Colorado and Utah. Geographical integrity is the oracle of salvation and safety. You are in danger of being partitioned by the Punic ambition of avaricious mo- nopolies, and the covetous cities of the Atlantic Sea. No fragment of the people of the North American Continent can thus suffer their geographical harmonies to be lost and perverted. The mining pioneers of the Rocky Mountains, iu vice untaught, yet skilled where glory leads to arduous enterprise, are fit to confront this crisis. Often distinguished by your favor, a witness of your constant fidelity and courage, it is my duty to sound to you this alarm, to invoke and summon you to confront this danger with Spartan, with American will, unanimity, and victory. Our great country has emerged from trials intensely exhausting and perilous. The energy and devotion of the people have not faltered either in defeat or victory. A cry of joy and admiration sounds over all the seas and all the continents and islands. The past is impregnably preserved — future progress safe, brilliant, and assured : " Night wanes, the vapors round the mountains curled Burst into morn, and light awakes the world." Yielding our hearts to the vivid palpitations inspired by this day, and by the gathering glories of our country, so young and yet so great, let us pronounce to her this parting salutation : Hail to America, land of our birth ! Hail to her magnificent, her con- tinental domain ! Hail to her generous people ! Hail to her victorious soldiers ! Hail to her matrons and her maidens ! Hail to the sacred union of her States ! 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