USA > Mississippi > The pioneers, preachers and people of the Mississippi Valley > Part 23
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Lecture X.
. THE GREAT VALLEY: ITS PAST, ITS PRESENT, AND ITS FUTURE.
THE GREAT VALLEY :
ITS PAST, ITS PRESENT, AND ITS FUTURE.
HAVE now, in a series of isolated pictures, I sketched the history of the Mississippi Valley, by a successive portraiture of its representative men and periods, during three centuries ; from the first voyages of the hardy Spanish discoverers who skirted its coasts, and their bold and ill-fated endeavors to penetrate the hostile realms of its far interior, so long believed to blaze with unimaginable wealth of gold-so fearfully revealed as a fatal forest wilderness swarm- ing with desperate and warlike defenders-down to that strange enterprise of Aaron Burr, which in so many points of wild and hopeless absurdity, of vision- ary hardihood, of unscrupulous, conscienceless wicked- ness, and disregard of rights human or divine, resembles the early inroads of the Spaniard ;- and down to those other crusades, longer in continuance, scarcely less perilous for hardship and danger, and immeasurably loftier in spirit and in aim, the wan- dering self-denying missionary lives of the pioneer preachers-the worthy successors of Marquette, of Brebœuf and of Jaques.
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It remains, in the concluding lecture, to sum up the whole in such a manner as may group into one single picture, the figures, the light and shade, the distance and the foreground of these several sketches -to treat what I will call the nation of the Great Val- ley, as one ; to follow its history from the end of the series of delineations I have given, down to the pre- sent; and to essay the far more venturesome task of tracing some ontline, or I should rather say of indulging in some dream-of its unknown future.
In thus attempting to fix the collective traits and total significance of the Valley and its people, let me ask the reader first to observe what that people is; what manner of race of men is that of the Val- ley. We have already studied them by classes, and by thought ; but what are they historically-ethno- logically ?
It is a most ancient practice, to begin every his- tory at the Creation-a practice honored by great votaries, from the times of the antique chroniclers of Germany, and the monkish Latin historians of the middle ages, down to that eminent authority, Herr Professor von Poddingkopf, so delightfully cited by the most eminent and the latest departed of all the American prose writers, the genial and beloved Irving. But I shall not go back so far; not quite back to the flood.
In Africa and in Asia, and in America too, there
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have existed civilizations more or less exalted in grade, and lasting in endurance. But the works of the mound-builders of the West-for our cycle of allusions may begin at the very point whither it is at last to bring us-and the Aztecs of the south, the Egyptians and Ethopians, the Assyrians, Persians, Hindoos, Chinese-all the monuments of their arts and arms, their codes of laws and systems of thought, have passed either into utter oblivion, complete de- struction, a stiff immovable catalepsy not deserving the name of life, or a superannuated and decrepit age.
But that race, whatever its carlier designations, which was the parent of the various European families of men, possessed higher qualities. It may not have been superior to others in stature, or strength, or beauty, in force or acuteness of intellect, perhaps not always in purity of morals or in religious truth. But in one thing it has demonstrated itself superior: in the capacity of unlimited and universal improve- ment. Through the vicissitudes of ages, under num- berless phases of development, and despite many periods of torpidity and even of retrogression, one people has as it were evolved from within itself ano- ther, and always a better.
The genius of civilization, having done his utmost with Egyptains and Assyrians, led the Greeks and the Romans to far higher summits of intellectual
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achievement and of ethical knowledge. Then Chris- tianity, in like manner, after experiment and failure in Asia, transferred the centres of her dominion to European soil. From the Christian Era, the history of Europe is the history of human progress. Among the nations of Europe, the Germanic civiliza- tion has been of a higher moral tone and a more deeply formed institutional character, than the Latin. And of the Germanic nations, that branch which became the Anglo-Saxon and then the English, stands this day foremost of all. And-now at last returning to this continent-the Anglo-American nation, a new nation, is evolved as it were from within the bosom of the English nation, by that strange process which, a long array of precedents assures us, places every such latest-born people upon a higher level of existence than that of its parent- there to exemplify some still greater principle, to teach some still loftier lesson of destiny and of progress. Last of all, there has arisen within this mighty Valley, streaming over the bordering Allc- ghanies, pushing westward by the side of the great northern Lakes, disembarking on the sandy shore of the Gulf, or struggling up the yellow flood of the Mississippi, yet one more nation within a nation ; and now in the basin of the Great River is abiding and increasing a multitude already numerous enough to wield the political destinies of our land, and in
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possession of opportunities never before in reach of any human community on this earth, for achieving eminence in all that humanity desires-of happiness, nobility and goodness.
In historie descent these are the foremost children of men ; the youngest sons, the Benjamins of old mother earth; and truly they are planted in a heri- tage well worthy of a parent's or a brother's partial fondness. As Benjamin's mess was five times that of any of his brethren, so is the vast and fair domain of the Mississippi Valley-including as it naturally does the Gulf States-three times as extensive as the At- lantic slope, and somewhat less than twice as exten- sive as the third great natural division of our terri- tory, the Pacific slope. I need not compare its wealth of soil and climate and rivers and metals, to theirs.
God reserved this goodly land for those who hold it now. Many were the bold voyagers of antiquity ; but none until Columbus was directed across the western sea to America. Enough there were of hardy explorers among the sons of Spain, and enough of wise and strong men, able to found and to govern new kingdoms; but none of them were to establish themselves here. The traders and the soldiery of France were many and hardy and brave, and her Jesuits and Franciscans, with all the zeal that the love of souls and the desire of martyrdom could
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inspire, labored for years among the forest tribes ; and the pliant genius and dextrous skill of her set- tlers almost fused the civilized and savage nations into one. But this splendid domain was not for France. Nor was it even to become a colony of the British empire; a possession of the resolute Anglo- Saxon men, who, if any of the European kingdoms, were fitted to hold and to govern it. All these claimants, one after another, sought to establish a title; but each and every claim was disallowed by him who ruleth both the affairs of the children of men and the armies of heaven. This land was not a land for Spain, nor France nor England. A separate race had been elected and consecrated to the sublime task of redeeming its vast expanse from solitude and barbarism; of conquering it for a cultivated hu- manity ; of making it the home of happy multi- tudes ; a broad foundation for God's church ; a new field for the solution of man's threefold problem, his relations to God, to the earth, and to his neighbor. Neither the spirit of effete feudalism, nor the stron- ger spirit of a ceremonial church ; neither the des- potic power of a monarchy ruling under the civil law, nor the irresponsible destructive sway of any band of greedy traders, was to possess the new realm ; but that strong off-shoot of the noble old Anglo- Saxon stem, which has well been called the Anglo- American, was to have and to rule it; and a long
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and severe discipline was that which had prepared it. The people of England, rising slowly and stubbornly upward from the slavery of the Norman conquest ; helped unconsciously and unintentionally by the extorted gift of the Great Charter ; beginning to con- trol even the brutal bull-dog strength of the Tudor monarchs; then rising and slaying a senselessly oppressive king-a people taught by the sweet sounds of old Chaucer ; around whose path had been thrown the strange and mystic imaginings of Spenser ; who had listened to the "native wood-notes wild," of Shakspcare; and who had found even a nobler poet, and a fearless and mighty defender, in John Milton ; who had learned wisdom of Francis Bacon ; whose imaginations and consciences were at once entranced and convinced by the wondrous spiritual dream of Bunyan ; and whose reason had been instructed by the clear understanding and acute philosophy of Locke : this people had here and there ripened to thie point of capacity and desire for self-government, under the double and opposite stimulus of the lasting Puritan leaven which the Reformation had diffused in England, and of the grinding and intensifying tyranny of the Tudors and Stuarts.
Thus it came to pass that there went out from Eng- land that small body of strong men, who " builded wiser than they knew," and founded this nation. Well trained in cool self-reliance, iron courage,
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impregnable perseverance ; strong and ready of hand and of heart, wise in thought, learned in that phi- losophy which is most readily transmuted into right and efficient action, and above all, clothed and pene- trated and borne onward by a strength incredible to those not of them, the strength of Faith in God-they sailed away across the sea. With all these high and noble traits, unconsciously the greatest statesmen on earth, having prepared the iron pillars of their little nation of a hundred men in their ship, they landed in America, with the fabric of their church and State all ready prepared for erection.
And as in after years the posterity of these small colonies entered within the vast inland realm of which I am speaking-as the hostile savages faded away, and the forests began to fall, and the sunlight to work its wondrous chemistries upon the wealthy soil beneath, and bountiful mother Earth bared her bosom to the plough and hoe-how marvellously did that Providence which had planted them there, provide one aid after another, coordinate with the increasing needs of the increasing nation !
Small centres of inhabitants, feeble, unconnected, isolated, mere points of crystallization upon the vast expanse, lie like distant dots along the great rivers, or in the wide woods. It is intercourse that consoli- dates a nation. Life blood must circulate. A huge inert overgrown body dies of mere magnitude. But
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how shall this indispensable need be supplied ? Antiquity hath no answer to the problem, or the Roman empire might have held together. Modern science has no suggestion to make : horses and men are the swiftest and strongest messengers, except the inconstant, treacherous winds. But James Watt studied the boiling of a teakettle, and as in the oriental tale there rose up from the thin vapor of a sealed jug a mighty giant, so did the genius of the Scotch mechanician evolve from the vapors of that mean vessel the superhuman might of the steam engine. Then one of our own countrymen, laying in turn his modifying hand upon the volatile essence of fire and water, constrains its giant strength into the service of the steamboat-and the wants of the nation of the valley are supplied ! Again, as population thickens and wealth increases, and men begin more and more, after the mysterious word of the prophet, to go to and fro in the earth, Robert Stephenson invents the locomotive ; and straightway the hurry- ing millions of the Valley, no longer confined to the channels of the rivers, flit over the mountains or through them and across the plain, on that stronger and closer network of civilization, and of interwoven civic strength, the railroad. And last of all, within these last years we have the electric telegraph, which may fitly be likened to that great system called the sympathetic nerve, which flashes hither and thither
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through the body the constant sustaining streams of unconscious life ; which maintains the health and action of all the wondrous processes, and keeps all alive, but which the imperial, central, conscious will cannot reach. For so does the little telegraphic wire, flashing endless communication hither and thither all over the land, hold us, mind with mind, in a compre- hensive, indissoluble unitary life. Ah, it is in such pecuniary enterprises as these, set up in the fervent worship of Mammon, that we shall find a power, all quiet and unrecognized, but with all the unimaginable strength of a truly Divine messenger, infinitely more potent against the rising yells of that infernal army of Disunion, this day thickening around us, than in any such old world fancies as patriotism and humanity, justice and forbearance !
Nor has less wisdom or kindness been shown in providing for the needs of the intellectual and reli- gious faculties. I have already referred to the zeal and intrepid perseverance of the ancient Catholic missionaries, whose not unworthy successors, Father De Smet, Bishop Blanchet and their brethren are still faithfully and efficiently laboring among the fierce tribes of the distant Northwest. I have also spoken of the Protestant missionaries who quickly followed on over the mountains, to look after their small flocks in the wilderness. The minister and the schoolmas- ter were provided, as the rising generation began to
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need their aid. The fierce stern exigencies of their perilous life in the wilderness trained them in quick- ness of eye and readiness of hand, in prompt and lofty courage, in fruitfulness of resource and a hardy self-reliant perseverance that never yielded. While thus the hard school of necessity trained them, by rude, incessant, inevitable lessons, into a rough but noble strength, it was the duty of the teacher and of the missionary, not so much to excite the forces of nerve and soul-for that external stimulus so com- monly needed elsewhere had here been supplied by nature and the wilderness and the savage, and mind and soul were here all awake, full of force and acti- vity-but to direct, to moderate, to restrain. The work is prosperously in progress. The school-houses, log-built and humble though they were, have yet been the centres of a continual and increasing diffu- sion of knowledge and of goodness. In those obscure edifices, all the week, the teacher led his youthful charge in the paths of learning; and on the seventh day, the same lowly building became the sanctuary of the Most High, and the backwoods preacher expounded to the same children and to their parents also, the message of God, preparing them both for this life and for that which is to come.
But in thus seeking to sketch the characteristic elements of the people of the Great Valley, I must not omit to allude to one important feature, viz., the
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mingled currents of its blood. The main stock is
Anglo-Saxon. Important infusions of Scotch and Irish blood were in the veins of very many of its best and bravest men. There has always been some small admixture from amongst the French of Illinois and Louisiana. Scarce a tinge of Spanish blood can be traced. On one of the outskirts or appendages of the Valley-the peninsula of Florida-a colony of fifteen hundred Greeks was once planted, whose blood still runs in the veins of some of the best fami- lies of St. Augustine. A somewhat more diffused intermixture may be followed, from those Huguenot French who settled along the Atlantic coast from Boston to Charleston. ( Great numbers of Germans have long contributed toward this miscellaneous national stock the solid or the graceful traits of the old Teutonic character. In the North may be traced colonies of Norwegians, of Dutch, a few Swedes and Danes. There has been no perceptible addition of Italian blood ; nor of that of the Aborigines ; for the border intercourse of centuries has been bloody and murderous, with a strange, sad uniformity. No modification is yet visible, and let us hope that none will be, from the last strange immigration of brutal Chinamen to our distant Pacific coast.
And thus we find the western people to-day, not one of those pure races whose uniform destiny seems to be to disappear, but a community of bloods rather
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than a race, one of those homogeneous mixtures of character not found except in these latter days of his- tory, whose value and power amongst the great republic of nations no precedents enable us to ascer- tain, but for whom there are many reasons to antici- pate a grand and noble future.
Having thus endeavored to represent the original and added constituents of the People of the Great Val- ley, let us next observe them and their landed common- wealths, at the point to which they have now attained.
Imagine, therefore, a spectator-yourself, if you will-with an ideal vision broad and keen enough to embrace and discern so much, and lifted high up in air, even so that you may look far abroad over all the Great Valley, and those adjuncts or appendixes which naturally and politically belong with it, namely the Gulf States and Michigan. And observe, being in spirit with this visionary beholder of mine, the mul- tiplied features of power and grandeur presented to your eye. From the white and sunny sands of Flo- ridian Cape Sable and the sea-washed little Wreck City of Key West, to the cold remote northwestern village of wintry log-built forest-circled Pembina and the improvised mining towns of Aurora and Denver, raised as it were in a night by the strong sorcery of Mammon on barren hill-sides all treeless and forlorn : from smoke-canopied Pittsburg, grimy dwelling of forges and mills, on the antique site of
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vanished Fort Du Quesne, to the struggling semi- prosperous frontier town of Brownsville, where Texans look with faces sour and contemptuous, yet eager and expectant, to the wide territories of Mexico, and where there seems to prevail a chronic border warfare, the frictional irritation between chafing races : from the skirting Alleghanies on the east to the interrupted but sufficient ramparts of the Rocky Mountains in the West, and from the warm blue of the salt Gulf to the cooler waters and hues of the great northern chain of fresh-water seas: over all this vast domain, grown up to its present level of magnificent power within three-quarters of a century -the lifetime of one man-how wonderful, how mighty, how complicated, are the masses and forms and movements of human life and labor !
Twelve millions of souls are fulfilling their desti- nies within the space of this great panorama ; belonging to sixteen sovereign States, and five younger sisters-Territories, some of them already impatiently knocking at the doors of Congress for admission into the Union of their elder sisters; and if I do not add to this number that of their brethren beyond the western mountains, the half-million and more of California, and the thousands of Utah, and Oregon and Washington Territory, it is for the sake of geographical rather than logical correctness, for those Pacific States are most properly out-
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skirts, suburbs, advanced posts of the great hive of men in the Valley.
Amid this vast and busy throng of men whose multiplied labors have already done so much to change the dark unbroken forest, and silent open prairie into a garden of God, are efficiently operating the manifold engineries of civilized life. To and fro, along the thousands of miles of the vast river system, are rushing a thousand steamers, from eleven hundred tons burden downward, in place of the little awk- ward Orleans, of a hundred tons, launched by Fulton and Livingston at Pittsburg, in 1812. The lake fleet, over and above this, is of twelve hundred vessels and more; and from the great southern marts of the Valley, another vast auxiliary ocean fleet brings in or bears away an annual mass of imports and exports of a hundred and twenty-five millions of dollars. The network of railroads has but barely begun to knit itself through and over a few portions of the Valley ; but this beginning is a giant one. Over thirteen thousand miles of railroad, the more eager spirits of the Valley fly hither and thither on errands of business, or affection, or pleasure.
In 1776, the Baptist John Hickman first began to labor as a Protestant minister west of the Alleghanies. Now, in seventeen thousand churches, of twenty sects, the Word of God is statedly dispensed to an average of something like five millions of regular hearers.
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When or where the first log school-house was erected, and the first little platoon of recruits of learning
"Discharged their a-b ab's against the dame,"
-or master, I cannot say, except that it was within the last eighty years. But now, a hundred and fifty colleges crown woody heights, or shelter themselves in retired valleys; and in these, and in fifty thousand public and private schools, nearly two millions of youth are receiving a moral and intellectual train- ing whose depth, and breadth, and thoroughness is yearly greater, and which yearly better prepares its graduates to plunge out into the great battle of life -- to perform wisely and well his or her single duty as a citizen or a wife.
Once more : let me repeat a few similar statistics --- dry kernels, but, to a reflective mind, nevertheless, the seeds of infinite conceptions of grandeur and beauty -- relative to one section of the great domain of the Valley-the Northwest. This is the tract between the Ohio, the Lakes, and the Mississippi, which contains two hundred and sixty thousand square miles, and which Washington, who early owned lands within it, called a "western world."
A hundred years ago-in 1751-it contained five little French towns, with about one thousand inhabi- tants, all nestled down together, like a little group of
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timid lambs, within a hidden valley in the southwest of Illinois-and no other European settlements. The first State admitted into the Union from it was Ohio, in 1802. The earliest English settlements within Ohio were made in 1774, but none was of any im- portance until the settlement of Marietta, in 1788, when the English inhabitants may have numbered five thousand. Little more than three-quarters of a century has passed, and into what gigantic propor- tions has this section of the great Valley already grown! Five great States occupy its territory ; not less than seven millions of people inhabit it; every year its farms produce not far from three hundred millions of dollars in value; its mines, eighty mil- lions ; its lumber, seventy millions; its twenty thou- sand and more of manufactories, a hundred and thirty millions ; its fisheries, three millions. It has nine thousand miles and more of railroads; fourteen hun- dred miles of canals; seven thousand miles of tele- graph. It contains two hundred banks, with twenty millions of capital. Its whole material extent, real and personal property together, is reckoned to be worth more than one and three-quarters billions of dollars.
But this startling expansion is not to be reckoned by business and statistics alone. The Northwest has built eight thousand churches, which will hold four millions of people; fifty colleges, and twenty-five
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thousand schools, where are studying a million and a half of pupils; and it supports a thousand news- papers, twelve hundred libraries more or less public, and scientific and literary societies innumerable.
Again, a yet more wondrous exemplification of the exuberant, gigantic vital strength of this great inland realm is afforded by the growth of its cities. In former ages of the world, many enormous cities were raised up by despotic power, or increased during centuries by a slow process of accretion. But in our great Valley it is as if the strong, rich soil gave birth to the sudden vastness of the marts, that rise almost like exhalations on lake-side and river-bank. A proud and glorious instance do they furnish of the superiority of the power of a free and enterprising people, over the spiritless, slavish obedience of Asiatic subjects, or of monarchical conservatisms.
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