The Awakening of the Desert

The man was soon heard to pass out and close the door.

I did not learn the result of the landlord's quest for a Bible, but I was led to believe that in their hearts there was a latent feeling of reverence for that Book, which an emergency would awaken. The minister, however, may have brought a Bible with him.

On our second day out from Denver our coach was stopped fully half an hour, not by bandits but by a herd of buffalo uncountable in number, which, in a solid body as closely massed as a flock of sheep, crossed the road moving southward on their annual migration. From that time for the two succeeding days there was not a moment when there were not many thousands of buffalo within range of our view. The hills in every direction as far as the eye could reach were dotted with those great, dark-moving objects. It would require no marksmanship at 50 or 100 yards to send our Spencer bullets into the mass without singling out any particular animal. Three buffaloes were left wounded by shots from a passenger who fired at short range from the coach into the first herd we encountered.

The prairies of eastern Kansas, from which the buffalo had been driven, were more fertile and produced grass more luxuriantly than the ranges farther west. When we crossed those eastern plains on our return trip, they had become dry from the frosts and late drouth. As we were sitting on the outside of the coach with the driver one night, we observed an increasing glow in the southeast, which betokened an approaching prairie fire that was being driven northward before a brisk southern breeze. The leaping flames soon became visible and their rapid progress was alarming. We considered the advisability of halting and protecting ourselves for a time with a back fire, which is the common practice when travelers are threatened by such a danger. We certainly could not safely advance. The remedy was easy. Yielding the reins to another, the driver jumped to the ground and applied a lighted match to the little clumps of dry grass on each side of the road. On the leeward side the flames soon gained headway and sped off to the northward widening as they advanced. On the other side they crept slowly toward the oncoming greater conflagration which was approaching with a crackling and subdued roar and lighted up the country in every direction. Beyond us they swept across the road, but when they met the back fire, which advanced but slowly against the wind the two lines of flame melted together into one and died, leaving only the few hot, black ashes, which quickly cooled. For hours the northern sky was luminous from the reflection of the receding flames, which crossed our trail and swept onward, possibly until checked at the shore of some far away stream.

Thus over that broad uncultivated expanse of fertile prairie those awe inspiring fires were sweeping, as they doubtless had often done in centuries past, unheeded except by the wild dwellers of the plains or in later years by a few stray travelers. And this was Kansas, the first and at this time the only trans-Missouri territory that had been welcomed to the sisterhood of states, except those on our western tide-water that were accessible by navigation.

Although its eastern border near the river had been settled somewhat through the stimulus of the intense ante-bellum struggle to make it a free commonwealth, its western and central territory was still unoccupied. There in the dawn of its infant life this great state lay sleeping, awaiting the coming of the day when the farmer would turn its virgin soil, plant it with seed, and reap the abundant harvest. But those prairies, then remote from commercial or mining centers, have no navigable waters, and the planter cannot thrive unless there first be furnished some means for transporting his crops to market. Until these should be provided, Kansas and all those embryo states must slumber on undeveloped. The ox- and mule-trains between the Missouri and the mines or western coast would follow the trails, as they had done in the years gone by, leaving but little tribute on their way.

A decade had passed since Thomas H. Benton in a speech at the St. Louis Court House, in advocacy of a railroad to the Pacific, suddenly pointed toward the West and declared with dramatic emphasis, "There is East, there is India." In his prophetic vision he doubtless saw where the East may be said to meet the West, on the further shore of the broad Pacific, but as the logical result of railroad transportation he also prophesied the development of our own western domain, all of which would be needed for future generations. Horace Greeley also anticipated this awakening.

At the time when the great prairie fires occurred, to which reference has just been made, three years had elapsed since the bill had been passed by Congress providing for the building of the Pacific railroad, and the work was already inaugurated, both from Omaha and Kansas City, pushing out into the unsettled territory. In the following year the work progressed rapidly from both initial points, and a vigorous population composed of thrifty young people from the middle states poured across the Big Muddy, disdainfully leaving behind them the broad and equally fertile areas in Missouri, partly because they were undeveloped by railroads, and these immigrants built a chain of villages along each of the new western railroad lines as rapidly as the tracks were laid. These villages were speedily surrounded by the green fields of husbandmen, until those roads were like necklaces of steel with emerald settings. Colleges were soon built in each of the trans-Missouri territories through which the roads passed, where two decades before the wolves had roamed at will.

A certain twentieth century statesman having apparently a less distinct knowledge of the past than Benton and Greeley seemed to have of the future has recently said, "States made the railroads," and this allegation was assigned as the reason why state legislatures should regulate railroads without interference by the United States Government. In watching the magical development of the West, as I have carefully done, and observing that its evolution, sometimes on its fertile lands, at other times on arid deserts once regarded as hopeless, was always rapid along or near the new lines of transportation and scanty, if at all, elsewhere, one is tempted to invert the statesman's assertion that "States made railroads" and declare with greater justice that "Railroads have made states," and while like men they should be subject to regulation, they also deserve that reasonable protection to which a prime factor in modern civilization is entitled.

Nearly half a century has passed since there began this sudden and wonderful awakening of the Western Wilderness, the processes leading up to which are described in these pages as they were unfolded to one who had observed them from the first quickening of Western emigration.

The Wild West as still caricatured in the arena by dashing, reckless circus cowboys and swift-footed Texas steers is no more. The limitless ranges of semi-arid lands over which those riders coursed their hardy mustangs are now partitioned by wire fences within which steady herdsmen watch their blooded stock.

The old Oregon and Santa Fe trails stretching half way across the continent over wide wastes unpeopled except by savage tribes, once the scene of innumerable thrilling adventures and desperate encounters, are now quite forgotten except as they are held in vivid remembrance by the few still living who have traced their dusty courses across the plains and deserts or their sinuous pathways through the mountain canyons.

Steel railways now parallel those trails along which trains of prairie schooners slowly crept, and thousands of miles of steel branches radiate from them across vast areas hardly visited fifty years ago even by the explorer.

The warrior tribes are subdued and driven to reservations; the buffalo is seen no more on those broad vistas; a dozen great and populous commonwealths have arisen in those territories and have been added to the galaxy of American States, and thriving cities and towns, thoroughly abreast with advanced civilization, are now scattered over the expanse defined on the old maps as the Great American Desert.