How We Grow in the Great Northwest

THIRTY years ago he who went westward as far as St. Louis — then about the Ultima Thule of westward travel to ordinary mortals who were not pioneers or trappers — took ten days or a fortnight for the journey, if he stopped over Sunday, for conscience’ sake, at some intervening city, as at Pittsburg, Cincinnati, or Louisville. He made the journey mainly by canal and steamboat, — except a day or two of railroad through Pennsylvania from the starting-point at Philadelphia,—by canal through the valley of the lovely Juniata, and by steamboat down the Ohio and up the Mississippi Rivers. The journey, for these fifteen years past, has been made from New York to Chicago — a place which most people who know anything know something about now, but which, thirty years ago, was nothing to speak of and nowheres to go to — in thirty-six hours. The saving of time marks the progress of the country in everything else, — a progress from a hundred miles a day to thirty miles an hour, from an unsettled wilderness to a region rich, populous, and highly civilized. But it is, nevertheless, a question with one who made the journey then and who makes it now, whether the want of speed had not its compensation. He who goes westward now may know something of his place of destination, if he stays there long enough ; but of what intervenes between him and his Eastern home he knows next to nothing, except thirtysix hours of just tolerable discomfort. But he who made the journey twentyfive or thirty years ago glided slowly through a picturesque and charming country, passing, if he were vigorous and wise, many hours on foot on the tow-path of the canal, a mile or two ahead of his boat, or watching from the steamer’s deck, as he went more swiftly down the Ohio and up the Mississippi, the ever-changing and ever-beautiful scenery of the river-banks, and making familiar acquaintance on both canal and river, in his many days’ travel, with every town and hamlet and wood-yard, and almost with every hut, for hundreds and hundreds of miles. It was, in truth, a pleasant journey, full, if not of adventure, at least of incident. For adventure, one must have gone even a few years earlier on horseback through that wilderness, instead of by canal or stage through a settled country, and on flatboats or in canoes upon the rivers, instead of by steamboats. But of incident there was enough a quarter of a century ago to make a journey westward an event to anybody, and to a youngster a romance. To spring from the canal-boat and walk on briskly ahead while it was detained at a lock, and keep ahead for hours, passing through some dot of a village, stopping for a chat at some lonely log-hut in a clearing, gathering the new and strange flowers by the wayside, coming with fresh surprise, in the windings of the lovely river, upon some enchanting bit of scenery among hills that were almost mountains, snow-capped in the late autumn days, and toning down to the rich verdure of their bases; to be delayed sometimes for half a day by a broken lock, when there was time to ramble about the woods for game or for a shooting-match (for most young travellers carried their guns, and I recall the entire satisfaction I gave to the company by shooting off one of my fingers on one of these pleasant occasions), — all this was to win pleasure and experience, such as must be sought for, in these faster but possibly tamer times, by travel in far more distant regions. Then pleasant relations with your fellow-creatures were quite possible, nor were you compelled to look upon them all as natural enemies, one of whom was sure to take the other half of your car-seat, and whom, before the thirtysix hours are over, it would give you so much satisfaction to have killed when he gets off at the next station. A score or two of men and women crowded together for a week on a canalboat, — and generally men and women from the country with sentiments and notions, and not city people without either, — were sure to have some among them worth knowing; and it was so easy for us to get away from each other and from the boat, that there was little danger of boring or of being bored. Constant change and constant variety gave a new zest to every day, and though to be laid away at night on a shelf, three tier deep, was not exactly the most perfect of bedchamber arrangements, it was not much worse than a modern palace car, where the chief improvement is that your shelf is mounted with gorgeous brass or silver-plate, with sides of black-walnut, and hung with worsted damask, instead of being of plain painted pine with calico curtains. The canal-boat shelf was almost as wide, the sheets were quite as clean, the bedding was aired daily, and the ventilation of the boat quite as good as in the elegantly appointed car ; so elegance of appointment is really all the difference. A tin bowl full of clean water from the canal, and a common towel for half a dozen, were the provisions for the morning toilet; but the water alongside was in abundance, and one could wash the bowl clean before using it, if willing to incur the odium of being “ nasty particular.” In the modern “palace car” the passenger has the privilege of a washbowl of china, instead of tin, a little more than a teacupful of water, and the clean corner of a towel if he is at the right end of a cue of half a dozen. True, we submit now to this abridgment of comfort and decency for a day or two only, but in the older time it was quite as tolerable without the gilding, while in the week of easy travelling there was the pleasure of untrammelled movement, the exhilaration of mountain air and active exercise, the enjoyment of beautiful scenery, the association with many people, the seeing of many places, — all the advantages, in short, that could be gained from travel. No doubt it is a disgraceful confession, but to me the pleasures of the old way, with its week of slow motion, quite counterbalance the advantages of the new, with its thirty-six hours from New York to Chicago in a palace car, in which, an enthusiast in progress says, “a king would only be too happy to ride, sup, sleep, and play whist.” To watch a well-dressed crowd of passengers for a day or two in a modern car; to speculate whether there is difference enough in the looks of them to show that this one sells shoes and that one dry goods; to exchange a dull word or duller newspaper with your next neighbor, duller than either ; to vary the monotony of the ride with a rush into a refreshment-room for food, over which you say grace with a sickening protest, — is such a condensation of blank wearisomeness that one becomes, at length, capable of only one numb sensation, — a longing that the train would increase its speed from thirty miles to a hundred. It was quite another thing to take a steamboat at Pittsburg, twenty-five years ago, for a week’s voyage, to find one’s self surrounded by people not at all like those one had left at home, and no two after the same pattern, — men of different regions, of different thoughts and characters, and formed by totally different circumstances. In that leisurely voyage, while the traveller learned every town and village, every bluff and reach on the Ohio and Mississippi, there was time for many an interesting study of human nature in a hundred different phases. What is a respectable game of whist in a palace car to watching or playing, if one was so minded, a game of poker in the “ social hall ” of a steamboat where a professional river gambler sat down, with a pack of marked cards in one pocket and a six-shooter in the other, and challenged the company to a game, quite ready for the chance of killing somebody or being killed before morning ? What entertainment is there in the ever so respectable dealer in shoes or dry goods on a collecting tour, compared to the possibilities in a Western hunter, leaning on his long rifle, with the air of a man ashamed of himself for being caught in civilisation and bad company, and who might have sat for the portrait of Leather-Stocking ? I recall one of these,— it was more than a quarter of a century ago, remember, — and his like is hardly to be found now except somewhere up toward the sources of the Columbia River. He looked on in silence while a young sportsman just from New York, as nicely and exquisitely appointed in all his habiliments and accoutrements as if he were only out for a stroll down Broadway, explained to a gaping crowd the construction of a beautiful rifle of the newest pattern. “ I wonder,” said Leather-Stocking, what a chap like that would do now in such a snap as I got into once on this very river?” We youngsters, to whom Popinjay with his new breech-loader was much less of a marvel than this weatherbeaten old man in buckskin huntingshirt and breeches, about whom we had gathered, asked for an explanation. Our respectful admiration had broken in upon his taciturnity. “ I was out a hunting once,” he said, in good Westernee which I shall not attempt to imitate, “ on this river [the Mississippi], and I came late in the day to a bayou. My way lay down the river, and round that bayou was six or seven miles, while across it was only two or three hundred yards. I did n’t want the walk, and I did n’t want to be belated, so I determined to try the bayou. There was no water in it ; it was all mud, — that kind of slimy, greasy quick-mud that holds on to a man, and slowly sucks him down in spite of all his strength. I knew the danger, but I thought I could manage it. Hunting about I found two planks washed up from some old flat-boat, maybe years before. With these I started out, stepping from one to the other, pulling first one and then the other from behind me and putting it ahead, till I got to about the middle of the bayou. Every step I had taken was more and more difficult. The farther I went the more my planks were sucked down by the devilish mud, till I could stand up no longer, but was obliged first to sit, and then to lie down flat on my stomach, to divide my weight more equally. Hauling myself on to the foremost, I would turn round as on a pivot, grasp the plank behind, haul it alongside, and then shove it ahead of me. Pretty soon I had to help my hands with my teeth, for all the strength of both was needed to raise the planks from the quagmire that sucked them down. At last one of them sunk beyond my reach. Flat on my face on a single plank, in the middle of the bayou, the mud rising around me ready to swallow me up,— I considered. I could n’t swim ashore, for I was n’t in the water; I could n’t wade, for to stand up was to go down like a plummet; to move six inches either way was sure death. No human aid could ever reach me ; no human creature might pass that way for months ; no house, no road was within miles of me. My only chance for life was another plank. That I must have or lie there till I starved to death, or roll over and make an end of it in the nasty mud. Then I remembered my jackknife. Getting it out of my pocket, I cut under me, lying flat as I was, slowly and patiently upon the plank that long seasoning had made almost as hard as iron, till I cut it in two. Then pulling myself forward on the farther half, I drew the hindmost ahead of me again, and so went on as before. I got out at last; but, stranger, I was the ugliestlooking white man when I crawled ashore that ever you did see ! ” He patted his long rifle affectionately, and added : “ But I never parted with her ! ”

We don’t hear of these little incidents in palace cars on a westward journey nowadays, at least from the actors in them.

The Mississippi then was a frontier river In St. Louis they pointed out the stake in the court-house yard at which, two or three years back, a slave had been bound and roasted to death by a slow fire, for some real or imaginary crime, all the town standing by, with the utmost decorum, to witness and approve the punishment. At Alton, about that time, Lovejoy was shot down, and the smallest fuss made about it, for daring to publish an antislavery paper. The man who shot him, as I happened to know, was a young Virginian, a student at law at Alton, and who was himself shot in a bar-room brawl a few years after in New Orleans. In Alton, not a hand was raised to defend or succor Lovejoy save one, and that was the hand of a woman, — a Mrs. Wait from Boston. She kept one of the two small hotels of the village ; and when the news spread that Lovejoy was besieged with his press, she begged the men of her house, if they were men, to go to his help. None stirred. Puttingon her bonnet and shawl, she rushed to the church and rang an alarm-bell. It was all she could do. The people, indeed, understood the bell, but it only hastened a few more to join the mob which beleaguered the brave printer, and which presently exchanged congratulations over his dead body.

Illinois was good hunting-ground then for Abolitionists and fugitives from slavery, as well as for other game. There was a bustle at the door one night as we sat in the common room of a little wayside tavern in a new settlement of a hundred people, and presently two men, armed to the teeth, walked in with a black man, his hands bound behind his back, between them. He was a brawny fellow, with a bright, intelligent face, who had the wit to run away from Kentucky some months before, and thought he had run far enough when he reached a free State. His master, hearing where he was, had come after him with a friend, and when he was found had only to bid him come back again. Nobody in Illinois then thought it proper to ask any questions of a white man who said that a stray “ nigger ” was his slave. These men tossed the poor fellow some bits of supper from their table as they would toss them to a dog, and when warmed and filled, the master condescended to explain the circumstances of the case.

This boy, he said, was his nigger, He had found him the night before, and had started that morning on their way back to Kentucky. The roads were heavy, and to get on the faster, they had travelled “ tie and go,” letting the negro rest himself by mounting one of the horses — the white men were on horseback — occasionally, and riding a short distance. The black was so submissive and cheerful, mounting and dismounting as he was told, and, whether getting ahead or loitering behind, so obedient to call, that they were thrown entirely off their guard. But at last, as they were approaching a piece of “timber,”—a creek, generally with bluffs more or less steep, always running through the “timber ” of the prairies,— the negro, being a little way ahead, drove his heels into his horse’s sides, and lashing him into a run, made for the woods. The whites at once, of course, saw his purpose and started in pursuit. It was a short chase, but a rapid one. When the negro reached the edge of the bluff his master was close behind him. Without an instant’s hesitation the slave threw himself from the horse and over the cliff, forty feet high and almost perpendicular, and rolled to the bottom. The other followed as unhesitatingly, for a thousand dollars’ worth of “nigger” was worth the risk of a good many bruises, and no decent white man could stand still and see a negro do what he did n’t dare. Before the black could rise the white was upon him, and before the fierce struggle between them was over, and at that point when knives had flashed in the eyes of both, the other white was “counted in” in the fight, and the black at length was overcome and bound. There was no more “ tie and go ” for him that day, but with his hands tied behind him he trudged sullenly along, led captive by a rope at his master’s saddle-bow.

“And now, Jim,” said his master, as he finished his story, “ are n’t you sorry for what you done ? ”

The prisoner raised his head and looked upon the jury, — four boys fresh from Massachusetts, who had never given a serious thought to slavery till they stood face to face with it here in this man who had only a few hours before had that desperate fight for life and freedom,—he looked upon the jury, and said, “ No, massa ! ”

“ What! ” screamed the Kentuckian, jumping from his chair, and striding across the room with a threatening gesture ; “are n’t sorry! You black rascal you; are n’t sorry! Why! didn't I always treat you well ? Did n’t you always have enough to eat and to wear ? Was n’t I always a good master ? ”

“ Yes, massa.”

“ And you are n’t sorry ! A year ago you run away from a good home ; and to-day, when I’m taking you back to it, you tried to escape and I only secured you at the risk of my life. My God ! and you are n’t sorry ! ”

“ No ! massa ; and I ’ll do it agin if I gits a chance ! ”

They started on their homeward journey in the morning, the negro secured as before. In the course of the day, however, he contrived to slip out of his bonds and, with better luck than the day before, escaped and eluded recapture. How be contrived it we never learned, but for days afterward we heard of the two Kentuckians in the next town hunting for and cursing the ingratitude and cunning of a runaway “nigger.” But they never found him.

To be sure one need n’t have gone to Illinois thirty or twenty or even a dozen years ago, to see a slave-hunt. It was only in 1855 that Anthony Burns was led through the streets of Boston, under military escort. Thank God all that is over now !

I do not remember, and I shall not look into the last census — anybody else can who chooses — to see what the population of Illinois was then and what it is now. I know the difference is wonderful. There was n’t then a railroad in the State, and he was rather a bold man who thought there ever would be. There were not even many stages. Everybody travelled on horseback, or in long, lumbering wagons in which the farmer carried his wheat to market or an emigrant sought, with his family and all his worldly goods, a new home. Occasionally men froze to death on the prairies when a snow-storm covered up the faint track of wheels that was called a road. To swim a horse across a swollen stream, or to run him over a newly frozen one, lest his weight, in a slow progress, should break through the thin ice ; to run a team, “on the lope,” down the steep and slippery banks of a creek to be forded when the question was which should first get to the bottom, wagon or horses ; to take an empty log-house for a week’s shooting on the edge of a bit of “timber,” and miles away from any settlement, with a good chance of starving if a great snow-fall cut off your retreat and game was scarce ; to stop at night at the farm-house that happened to be in sight, for a supper and a night’s lodging, — a farm-house almost always of logs and of one room only, in which, when the whole family and the guests had done supper, the whole family and the guests went to rest, in a bed or two and about the floor, with no more thought of indelicacy than that young lady had, who, in such a house, said to Judge Douglas, foolish enough to indulge in the luxury of taking off his trousers before getting into bed, “ A mighty small chance of legs there, stranger ” ; to pass through the long summer night over the quiet prairies, as lonely and almost as pathless as the sea ; to avoid the flies that sometimes rising from the timber would settle in black swarms upon the horses and drive them to frenzy and often to death ; to go to a dance at sunset — such bouncing and free-mannered girls ! — and stay till sunrise, only wishing that the nights were longer ; to meet everywhere a simplicity of manners and of character, such as poets have dreamed of, and with ignorance, especially among Southern emigrants, as refreshing as it was astounding, as, for example, in the question: “Massachusetts? that, now, is next to Virginny, are n’t it?” or “ Massachusetts ? that’s under a kingly government, is n’t it ? ” — such was travelling to the West and in the West twenty-five or thirty years ago, with everywhere a different civilization from that which one left behind on the seaboard, — a semi-civilization full of a charm of its own, the like of which can hardly be found now, in these days of railroads and newspapers and telegraphs, in all this broad land.

The wonderful story of Chicago has been told more than once in these pages and elsewhere. Within a month a gentleman of that city has celebrated his silver-wedding, who was the fourth white man who ventured to settle outside Fort Dearborn, where now a quarter of a million of people make a municipality, and who travelled alone through the wilderness on horseback to the Wabash to bring up a detachment of United States troops to cut off the Winnebagoes then threatening to destroy the feeble “station.” Nor is he the only “ first settler” — the Chicago title of nobility — now living in that stately city who knew it when it was a prairie swamp. Gentlemen in search ot the marvellous, go to Chicago, but the real marvel, after all, is not there, but outside of it. Hong Kong, in a country where it takes a century to change a fashion, is only about half as old as Chicago, and is almost as large as Chicago was at the same age. Where it stands was a barren hillside fiveand-twenty years ago, with hardly one “flowery” fellow-citizen to the square mile. To-day Hong Kong has, probably, somewhere from thirty to forty thousand people, which is more than Chicago had till it passed 1850. What made this sudden growth of a new city in a country where everything was finished before the rest of the world was begun, and where nothing has changed since the time of Moses ? Simply the transfer of the trade of Canton : with the trade came the people.

Given a cause for the transfer of that ancient commerce from one shop to another in a densely populated country, and there is nothing marvellous in a city springing up in a night. Chicago grew from the same cause, only the process was reversed. In the Chinese city the people followed the trade as certainly as water follows the opening of floodgates ; in the Illinois settlement it was trade that followed the people. The real marvel is in the country, not in the town. Had Illinois and Iowa and Wisconsin and Michigan grown only with that comparatively slow growth of the Eastern States for the last two and a half centuries, Chicago would be to-day what she was thirty years ago, — only a promising village, and not a great city. Given the country, and the town had to be. Given the populous back regions, and the port was a necessity. Given the products, and there had to be the mart. The only question was, as the armies of emigrants came marching in and encamping over that broad surface of two or three hundred thousand square miles, whereabouts on that opal sea of Michigan the entrepot was to be ? And a shallow, muddy, sluggish creek capable of being made into a harbor settled it in favor of Chicago. The first settlers foresaw the future so plainly that lots in certain parts of the expected city were as high in 1837 as they are to-day. True these men made a mistake of a mile or two, and bought and sold lots at three hundred dollars the front foot in the one place, and acres at five or ten dollars each in another. Whether the new town would stretch a mile or two this way or half a dozen that, they failed to foresee; but they did foresee a great city in the near future as the inevitable consequence of that vast tide of emigration that was flowing so noiselessly but so unceasingly out upon the prairies, and was to cover them with farms and villages, with wheat and corn, with cattle and swine. New England sent the best of her sons and daughters to scatter over the Northwest, — sons who could endure and work ; daughters who could endure and work and bear children,—and in a generation the land was filled with millions of intelligent and thrifty people, and teemed with wealth. Herein is the real marvel. It is not that a town of five thousand people has grown in thirty years to one of two hundred and fifty thousand, but that a region which thirty years ago was sparsely settled with a people poor and ignorant and rude should in that period have attained, with its wonderful growth in population, to a wealth, a power, and an intelligence that was never known in any commonwealth before, save, perhaps, in the State of Massachusetts. Chicago is only the result, a beautiful and remarkable, but still only an inevitable result, of that sudden springing of an empire into existence. One sees that at a glance, and marvels at it; reads the figures, and is bewildered ; hears, but hardly ciedits the stories of the increase in the value of real estate ; looks with amazement at the broad avenues, more imposing than almost any other city streets on this Continent, at the miles of cattle-yards, at the stupendous mills and grain-elevators, at the spacious warehouses, at the luxurious dwellings, and is told by the man standing beside him that he remembers when the site of this Chicago was a prairie - swamp, without a habitation save one small log-fort. But, after all, it is a palpable wonder; his eyes see it, and his understanding grasps it ; it is all spread out before him as on a map, and he cannot escape from it. But out on the prairie, along the banks of many rivers, great and small, have sprung up many other cities and towns and villages, and farms and factories have gathered and grown millions of people, which the eyes do not see, which the understanding does not comprehend, at a glance, but whose industry and thrift and intelligence have made the Northwest what it is, and compelled Chicago to keep pace with and be its visible exponent and outgrowth.

it were easy enough to tabulate the progress of the West ; to show by dates and figures when railroads and telegraphs were begun, and how many miles of iron web have been woven through and over the land ; to tell off in bushels the increase in the production of corn and wheat; to number the cattle and the hogs, and the pounds they make of beef and pork to feed a hungry world; to count the schools with their tens of thousands of pupils preparing to be the West of the future ; to give the long, proud list of young men who went to the war, and of those who never came back ; to estimate assessable property and the taxes paid by each man and woman and child ; — all this it were easy to do again, as it has been done so many times already. They are astounding figures, unexampled in the world’s history ; but I shall not repeat them. No wonder that the South was sure rebellion would be successful, when she counted all that wealth and power of the West on her side. In a contest against such odds, the Northern Atlantic States could only have stipulated that they should be “ let alone,” and would have been fortunate had that been granted them. But the slave States made two mistakes: they forgot that the Northwest was the child of New England; and they had put off the Rebellion too long by a quarter of a century. Fiveand-twenty years ago the outlet of the West to the sea was by the Mississippi, and the threat to shut up that channel was to threaten isolation and poverty. Canals and railroads have moved the Gulf of Mexico to the mouth of the Hudson, and Boston and Portland harbors. Should the Union ever fall to pieces, the dividing boundary will be the Alleghany range or Mason and Dixon’s line, as the West chooses. Heaven help the Union if such a question ever arises between the East and the West!

The West can stand alone, and command her allies. It is not only that she has grown with such marvellous rapidity, but that her people are cultivated, intelligent, and ingenious. The first steel plough was made at the West; the great reaping-machines come from the West; from a grainelevator, which New York has hardly yet learned the use of, to a watch which New England has been fifty years learning to make; in all the range, from the most stupendous to the most delicate manufactures, the West is beginning to be equally at home. Chicago could not do without the elevator ; it came from the necessity of the case, as power-presses grew from the necessities of daily newspapers, and telegraphs from the exigencies of commerce. Watches the West makes, not so much because she needed to make them, but because watches are a good thing to make, and she chooses to do anything that can be done anywhere else. Free trade is not a Western plant, but it has taken deep root there, and will dictate the future policy of the nation. Such a people are not dependent upon other sections ; it is other sections that are dependent upon them. “ New York,” said a Western man who visited it for the first time, “ is the Chicago of the East! ”

Twenty-five or thirty years ago the men of the West were rough, the women rougher, the children roughest. Now the children — some of them, at least, and all are capable of doing what others have learned to do — make watches! Perhaps a mechanical fact of this sort is as good an illustration as can be found of character and intelligence. Forty miles west of Chicago is the town of Elgin. One who thinks of Illinois as a wide and flat and lonely prairie would get a new idea of it in visiting that region. The Fox River runs through it, — a shallow stream, valuable, no doubt, for its gathered waterpower here and there upon its banks, but marked by the passing traveller only for its beauty. Hills crowned with woods, high enough to be seen a dozen miles away; valleys between so rich as to look like English parks ; houses, — not log-houses, or, less attractive still, the rude frame-houses of thirty years ago, — but of the better sort, with architectural pretensions and cultivated grounds such as one sees in the immediate neighborhood of Eastern cities; huge barns, and more than one to each house, and, near these, mountains — not stacks, but mountains bigger than either barns or houses —of hay, recalling those miles of stocks-yards at Chicago to which these mountains move in due season ; — through all this pleasant landscape, which has nowhere a look of newness or of rudeness, and everywhere the aspect of plenty and of culture, winds the charming Fox, oozing here through meadows, washing there the soft verdure of a hill sloping gently down to the water’s edge, now rippling on some tiny reach of beach, and now darkening in the shadow of a wood whose feet it kisses. In such a region a New-Englander might almost forget that he had left his home a thousand miles away. In this valley of the Fox lies Elgin, compact and close, with the smoke from half a dozen factories of different kinds rising above it, the town ravelling out upon the prairie and up the hills into suburban residences and great rich farms, — dairy and stock farms, whose milk and whose meat are condensed and concentrated by the Borden Company in Elgin, to go wherever a ship sails or a white man travels. Now my point is, that the most remarkable evidence of rapid growth to be found anywhere is seen in such a fact as this : that in thirty years a town — taking Elgin merely as a representative case, for it is only one of many — springs up in the wilderness, where thousands are gathered together (and most of them native to the soil) with hands cunning enough and brains subtile enough to establish such handicrafts and manufactures as require the utmost skill in mechanism, and are usually supposed to be possible only in crowded communities where the difficulty of living sharpens men’s wits to the last degree. About two years ago the first watch made at Elgin was shown to the dealers in New York as a specimen of what it was proposed to do out upon the prairies of the West. This one watch, coming from where it did, was looked at with a good deal of curiosity by these dealers, who had not studied very deeply the prairie phenomena ; that it was only a typical watch, the forerunner of a new branch of industry, from a region where, hitherto, packing hogs was supposed to be the highest point of skilled labor yet reached, or likely to be, for some time to come, was held to be altogether incredible if not ludicrous. This was in March, 1867. Where that first watch was made they now make one hundred every day, or about three thousand every year ; and while the capacity of production is enlarged as fast as possible, the supply is always lagging behind the demand. For the true Western man is proud of, and must have, the Western watch. Nor are these rude and clumsy timepieces, but watches of as fine a finish, of as accurate a movement, of as perfect a mechanism as the ingenuity of man has yet accomplished in this most delicate of all machines. Now — and this seems to me the significant fact — the operatives in this Elgin manufactory are almost all Western men and women, or even boys and girls who were born and reared in the country round about, and who learned here to do what they do so deftly. Of course skilled workmen came from the East, — graduates, probably, all of them of the famous works at Waltham, — to establish and then conduct this Elgin manufacture as superintendents in its many departments. But the enterprise that conceived, the energy that persevered against unusual and unforeseen difficulties, the capital that was never held back for an instant, though fivefold more, it was found, was wanted before the end was attained than was supposed would be necessary, — all these were Western, pure, characteristic Western ; and so too are the workpeople of native growth, the farmers’ and the villagers’ sons and daughters who were prompt to welcome and follow a new calling which it would be useless for those to try who had not skilful hands and clear, quick brains.

One need not be a watchmaker or a machinist to understand that making watches by machinery — a thing done first in this country, and so successfully as to leave foreign-made watches almost out of competition — is, so far, at least, one of the greatest achievements of mechanics. It is easy enough to conceive that all those wheels, in the watch which you, my friend, have in your pocket, were punched out with great accuracy; not so easy to conceive that each one of them was successfully submitted a second time to the same punching process in order that, from all its edges on segment and circumference, there should be cut away exactly two and a half one-thousandths of an inch to make it perfect. Here, indeed, the thing we remark is, not so much the skilful guidance of the workman, as the wonderful accuracy and perfection of workmanship in the machine itself, which, ever so many thousand times a day can, with never a failure, pare off its almost invisible shaving of brass of just so much, — no more, no less; but then it was within those walls that the machine was made. When these wheels pass from this first process to be notched with tiny teeth, fitted with axles, some with minute grooves and shoulders, and all to be done with an exactness so absolute that no microscope can detect an inequality or flaw, then the more direct agency of the hands and eyes of men and women must perfect the work which machinery alone cannot do. The automaton may give the motive-power, but the eye and the hand must guide and use the drills and chisels, so small, sometimes, as to be hardly visible, at the right time and at the right place ; and to the complete training of these living workmen to this exquisite workmanship is due the perfection of the final result. One of the wheels, the balance-wheel, which, when begun upon, is a plain brass disk, goes through between seventy and eighty processes before it is fit for its place, — a round rim of brass with an outer rim of steel and a brass diameter, and pierced for about twenty almost invisible screws. The making of these screws, for this and other parts of the watch, is a thing marvellous to see ; or not to see, for these bits of metal which are shown the visitor, though each one is a perfect screw, with thread and head and slot, the unaccustomed eye cannot detect as screws at all. The smallest of them are only two one hundredths of an inch in diameter with a perfect thread in the proportion of two hundred and twenty to the inch ; and of these atoms, each a perfect screw, it takes one hundred and forty-four thousand to weigh a pound. Not that this is the most remarkable thing in this delicate manufacturing ; I only happen to remember it. Take another illustration : In the upper plate of a watch there are thirty holes into which the various wheels are adjusted. More than twenty of these are exceedingly minute, and must not only be cut out with a drill finer than the finest needle, but they must be at absolutely exact distances from each other. This indispensable accuracy, to insure the perfect movement of the watch, is obtained by machinery, and were it not that one sees in other processes seemingly almost impossible what the human hand and eye, assisted by the microscope, are capable of, one would be disposed to think that nothing but machinery could secure the exactness required for these punctures. And even then our wonder is only transferred from the thing done to the thing doing it. But this delicate machine is run by a young girl, who guides the fine drill from point to point on a steel plate to which the brass plate is fastened, and through which the holes are drilled. Her eye never wavers and her hand never errs, as in a few seconds she guides the implement from point to point to be driven by the motive-power through the plate; and by another young girl this process is repeated, that these punctures may be as accurate in finish as in position ; and any unsteadiness of hand or eye in either performance, any deviation even to the thousandth part of an inch, would spoil the work. But such unsteadiness is very rare, while they turn off hundreds of these plates, in which it is impossible to detect the slightest variations, in a day.

I do not remember the number of the departments there are in this factory, nor does it matter; for it is not my purpose to describe the manufacture of a watch, even if it were a reasonably easy thing to do, where a single minute part goes through seventy or eighty processes, before it is brought to that absolute perfection which is aimed at in these Elgin watches. A brief and chance visit of a couple of hours can hardly give insight into the thousand intricate and wonderful ways of such a factory. But the ingenuity in mechanics, which seems unlimited, only excites one’s wonder that such things are done here in a country that thirty years ago had hardly begun to be settled, and that the young men and women, children of the soil, are found capable of such work. The statistics of the West are almost bewildering in their magnitude, in the growth of population, the increase in agricultural products, the rapidity with which it is developing into a great manufacturing region, with its wealth of coal and metals and raw material of every kind ready at hand for all that the most sanguine of its people ever dream that it may do. And yet, no doubt, could that most sanguine man be inspired to foretell what the West of five-and-twenty years hence will be and do, his prophecy would be laughed at as the first Elgin watch was received with a doubtful smile, two years ago, in Broadway, when shown as a possible production of the prairies of the West.

But the growth of that inland empire is not the sole nor the most interesting question to be solved there. The dignity of labor is a well-sounding phrase, and many stirring sermons and eloquent lectures have been and will be preached and delivered to prove how good and noble a thing it is. No doubt; but none the less will the native-born lad, with a desire to know more of the world than he can learn in following his father’s oxen, with powers that he feels can be put to better use than in the unskilled toil which the hired Irishman or German, just imported, can do as well as lie, or better, —with no ambition to achieve something worthier in fame or fortune than ever so many bushels of wheat to the acre can ever give to him, — none the less will he disregard the sage advice of the venerable humbugs who bid him avoid the cities and go dig, and follow rather the example which these counsellors set him when they also were full of youth and energy, and, with their worldly possessions tied up in a cotton handkerchief, turned their backs upon the innocence and simplicity and dignity of rural life, and sought a wider sphere where men were plentier and busier. It is a fact which no lecturing can change, that the influx of foreign laborers crowds the native population out of the field of mere manual toil, and sets the young men free to seek a livelihood in towns, in new employments, commerce, and the professions, which they hope will prove more lucrative, and believe to be more honorable. The first result of course is to overstock these new paths to preferment, just as the movement among women to seek new employments has made the supply of that species of labor greater than the demand. But it no more follows, in the one case, that the young man should return to the calling out of which Patrick has crowded him, than that, in the other, the young woman should contend for the place in the kitchen from which Bridget has displaced her. There must be some other solution of the problem, if we are to go forward and not backward. And the great Northwest will solve it. No law’s are so inexorable as these of political economy, and it will not take long for Young America to learn that all cannot be lawyers and doctors and editors and merchants ; that the skilled workmen and workwomen, in the higher branches of manufactures, may be quite as well educated, quite as intelligent, quite as respectable, and quite as thrifty, — and indeed much more so, —as their brothers and sisters who throng the cities and overcrowd there the paths they seek to walk in. One can hardly look, for example, in the faces of the operatives at the Elgin watch-factory, or note their intelligence and bearing, and learn of the iniluence which such a body of young men and women exercise in that community, without having his fears dispelled, if he has any, that the American people are likely to forget the true dignity of labor, or that the class emancipated from the grosser forms of toil will not find in due season that there are other employments beside keeping shop or sitting upon an office stool which may gratify a reasonable ambition and lead to respectability and wealth.