Page:Architectural Review and American Builders' Journal, Volume 1, 1869.djvu/18

 6 Sloan's Architectural Review and Builders' Journal of his fellows ; there are also the spread- eagles of Russia and Austria, both double-headed and both very enterpris- ing in their careers, which they strove not to hide ; the spread-eagle of Prussia, with talons scarcely dulled since the seizure of his last prey ; and the partly spread-eagle of the second French em- pire ; there is even, in addition, return- ing to North America, the nearly spread- eagle of Mexico, lodged upon the prickly pear and destroying the serpent ; yet, with all these pinions outstretched, or ready to outstretch before an admiring world, the republic of America is sup- posed to have the greatest flight. In a short trip along the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, in 1859, our senior editor saw, throughout the entire dis- tance of about one hundred and seventy- five miles, the waving and flowery ver- dure of the gently-rolling virgin prairie, apparently as boundless, and really, after the first earnest look, as monot- onous as the open ocean. In 1864, he had the curiosity to pass along the same line again. Every section of the lately outspread fertile waste had been taken up for cultivation ; fenced houses and hamlets abounded, and towns, peopled by thousands, had sprung up. The reader will understand that, as yet, there was nothing of archi- tecture. The domiciles were of so- called balloon structure, framed of ordi- nary light timbers, covered with inch weather-boards, and shingled. Others, again, were of much ruder make, and guiltless of paint. But it had grown to be a country teeming with men and enterprise. Shafts to the valuable beds of bituminous coal, eveiywhere under- lying the region, were seen in all direc- tions ; and the jetty product, in length- ening trains, wound towards Cairo, there to be discharged in bulk into the capacious bunkers of the down-river steamers, or dumped into arks or barges, to be towed along in the wake of steam- boats for trip emergencies, while many others were bound in cargo to New [July, Orleans, to supply the up-river steamers and the smiths of the coasts of Louisi- ana, Mississippi, Texas, and Mexico. No more will the Mississippi through- passenger chafe and pace the decks, at his floating palace, being tied up to a tree, to take in wood, about every hundred miles throughout her course, either to the Gulf, or the upper land ; no more shall there be any interest, save that of reminiscence, in the song of " Wood up," which, for all living purposes, might now as well be couched in Sanscrit ; and no more shall the tall denizens of the forest fall- before the axe of the woodman, but rather wait to be the pride of the car- penter or the prey of the hurricane. The West and the Northwest, charac- terized by a vast expanse of rolling plain, generate spontaneously a large style of planning and building. The Northwest contains many thousand Norwegians, Swedes and Danes, whose tendencies are greatly for industry and thrift, but whose education, grounded in the nar- row scope of Northern Europe, disposes them to operate on a very safe but very narrow scale, reaping with the sickle, and scarcely reaching the sc3'the and the cradle. There, satisfied with quar- ter sections of land, if their old accus- tomed neighbors have quarter sections all around them, and the vicinage is crowded ; they carry out the ideas of their Scandinavian fathers. Their chil- dren, however, knowing the language and the people better, will not be quite so slow. Yet the houses of all these will be more comfortable and better arranged than the habitations of Americans of much larger estates, because the for- eigner builds for comparative perma- nence and gradual improvement, while the native is content to live a few years in a shanty, in order thereafter better to relish a stately villa uj:>on the same spot. The born American, when settled in the West or North- west, adds section to section, plants copiously, reaps by the platoon of two- horse machine-reapers, going into the