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THE NEW TRAITS DEVELOPED ON THE SLOPE.

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public funds being only an encouragement and aid to corporate enterprise. The initiation and completion of the western half were due, in large part, to the courage, prudence and perseverance of a single firm of merchants in Sacramento. Begun in 1865 it was completed in four years. Previously, in the summer of 1861, a telegraph line had been built in a similar way by two companies, one commencing that season at Fort Kearney, on the Missouri plains, and another at Fort Churchill, in California, and meeting, in about four months, at Salt Lake City. The magnitude of the undertaking seemed then very great indeed, for the line passed over a desert of arid waste, well nigh impassible mountains, with little water or wood on much of the route, and all the material, implements, food supplies, and men must be transported in wagons. Yet, once undertaken, both these great ventures were driven through with an energy that made little account of obstacles-except to devise the means of overcoming them.

These triumphant contests with natural difficulties indicate the dauntless spirit that animated the pioneers of the Pacific Slope. They were fully seconded in the East when Eastern aid was required, but the men of the West had disadvantages to struggle with that could not be experienced in the East. The Western pioneer was the Eastern citizen set down in the midst of new difficulties greater than he had ever known; but he found his courage and his intelligence equal to the demand. The great progress achieved required unwearied energy, prudent good sense and intelligence, with broad conceptions and a prompt daring almost peculiar to these regions. AngloAmerican capacity was developed in new directions and special sectional peculiarities of character, acquirement and habitude were added to what the race before possessed on the Atlantic Slope and in the Mississippi Valley; but they are harmonious in interest and kindred in spirit with the rest of the Union.

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"natural selection, the persons possessing the most suitable qualities for use in this region of great opportunities were drawn there by the spirit of unrest and aspiration which has ever done so much to keep up human progress. Sometimes it was educated and conscious ability seeking a larger field; sometimes the instinctive promptings of uncultured and unconscions genius. Both here found the field and the means for doing full justice to innate capacities. Sometimes the educated scapegrace of the East or Europe would suddenly feel the promptings of unused powers, and become wealthy and honored; sometimes the penniless laborer, successful in catching a portion of the golden shower, would find that he possessed financial gifts of a high order, and become a power in the land.

The most various gifts found opportunity for a surprising development. Many extensive undertakings, originated and conducted by individuals for private gain but serving the public admirably, showed, before the railroads susperseded them, what it was possible for a single man to do when opportunity and stimulus were furnished him. An overland stage in the hands of one man had a route of 3,000 miles; 6,000 horses and mules, and over 300 coaches were used on the whole route. The cost of maintaining all these, and the army of employes to use them and maintain the stations for them and passengers on the desert plains and mountains over which the route passed, was immense. He received half a million of dollars annually from the Government for carrying the mails for he had a daily stage-and five hundred dollars from passengers for a trip across the continent. Though costly it was a great convenience and a financial success.

Hundreds of opportunities which, in any other country, would be considered impossible for individuals to undertake were similarly found and made successful in connection with the early Pacific Slope development. Any other public would scarcely have supported such enterprises by a suffi

GREAT OPPORTUNITIES GRANDLY USED.

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cient energy and lavish use of money. Americans almost or quite alone, of all people, venture to leap, at so great expense, from the conception to the realization of their undertakings. All American experience has tended to educate its practical men to hasten towards their ends rapidly, while the full flush of enthusiasm was on them, seemingly regardless of expense. Yet expense has been well calculated, though apparently disregarded. Great designs have been rapidly completed and made to pay. The world itself has caught some of this fiery energy, and all nations are now feeling its strong pulsations in some form.

California, and the mountain regions generally, have matured still further this spirit of bold, broad enterprise by the immensity of their distances and singular difficulties, and also of the rewards they were capable of yielding to it. Therefore settlers gain a certain breadth and freshness of mental tone on the Pacific Slope. The close relations between the East and the West produce a general reaction of this spirit through all parts of the country, so that the Republic as a whole is mentally matured in this quality of high enterprise -of dauntless undertaking.

There is not likely to be any serious or permanent arrest of this side of American growth. The opportunity for development within this vast area, on the Plains, in the South, around the Gulf of Mexico, over all South America and across the broad Pacific, under innumerable forms, is measureless-as yet. At ordinary times and with an ordinary people, it would remain so for centuries; but the American genius is so rapid that its flights can scarcely be followed-much less anticipated. The stalwart New Englanders and Virginians and their comrades of a century ago, became still more stalwart in working up the Great Valley, and they have not ceased that kind of growth on the Pacific Slope. There can scarcely be too much anticipated when reality has so greatly outrun imagined possibility as in the past half century of the Republic.

Another half century may find as large a population westward of the high crest of the Rocky Mountains as the whole United States now numbers. The Arizona valleys and mesas, the Utah and upper Columbia basins, will quite change their appearance under cultivation, and the amelioration of climate it will produce. California will be more delightful than the choicest portions of southern France, and western Oregon and Washington will excel central New York and eastern Pennsylvania or the Ohio valley, in the bountiful supplies of their fields and streams and green pastures. The commerce of the north Pacific will build up immense cities, vast manufactures, and distribute over the world the products of the forests of the coast, the abundant fisheries and the prolific volcanic soil. The interchanges between the East, the West and the Center-the Great Valley, the finest alluvial basin in the world-will be almost immeasurable in value. Thus the liveliest activities and a boundless prosperity will cover all the plateaus, fill all the basins and valleys of the wide Slope, and help to double the greatness and fame of the Anglo-American race.

THE ATLANTIC SLOPE.

CHAPTER IX.

THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE REPUBLIC.

This was on the Atlantic Slope and needed to be somewhat rough and rude to give the Englishman the training which should develop a new race-the Anglo-American. No one of the sturdy, sensible, vigorous qualities of a thoroughgoing race, as characterized in English history, was to be lost. The personal independence of the Teuton, as formerly existing in the forests of Germany, was to be preserved, and all the lessons in constitutional government which had been learned during a thousand years in the British Isles were to serve as models or warnings to the English colonists in the New World.

The traits of character that had made England a steadily progressive nation until, in 1688, the Representatives of the People--its Parliament-became the paramount authority, and established a substantial republic under the forms of a monarchy, were to be preserved and to acquire greater freedom of action in the Western Wilderness. To safely reject King and Aristocracy a long discipline of the masses who were to be the final depositaries of power was needful. A hundred and fifty years residence on the Atlantic Slope prepared the way for this new essay in government. Thirteen colonies settled the long line of coast from Maine to Georgia, each having direct relations to England, the ocean as a common highway, and considerable resources in their forests and lands.

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