Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/214

198 West took the step forward. It is interesting, however, that in the midway of our national life, when the seething of adventure was in the young blood of the East, the youth of New England and of its neighbors sailed round the Horn, or toiled in prairie-schooners over the mountains, to the gold-fields of the Pacific, so that these and their descendants coming inward toward the Rocky Mountains met on the slopes the sons of their New England kin settled on the plains and ranges which had been skipped by the eager hunters for the gold of California.

Nowhere better than in Duluth is illustrated this meeting of the sections. In one end of the town, which, years ago, began the race so joyously, fell heavily, gathered itself up and went forward so bravely and so successfully,—in one end of this young community are the houses and shops of the East, the temples to the so-called Anne, the shop-windows shining with the colonial mahogany of Grand Rapids, Michigan, or behind which are displayed the most recent additions to the joys and comforts of life; where also, as in the older parts of the country, you may find the most talked-about novel of the minute, "just in" or "just out." In the other end of the same town are the beginnings of settlements. The first part being grandiloquized as "residential," after the manner prevailing in Woolet and elsewhere, it may be appropriate to describe the second part as extemporential. Many of the houses in this part are home-made, constructed out of flotsam and jetsam, while the aspect of the spot as a whole is that of new countries generally, suggestive of such haste to get to work that there has been no time for building homes, the earnest "developers of the country" being content with shelters.

There are other indications of the mixing, for meeting thus always comes in the end to mixing; this, however, is the indication afforded by the look of the town. These two parts constitute its features. The dividing-line is very distinct, but the seed of culture is germinating in the shop-windows. Here we catch, among the people who are laying out the territory of the great Northwest, a glimpse of a social phenomenon that is sure to grow on us as we wander farther on toward Asia. The leaders and lieutenants of industry in the smaller towns have not only great conceptions of enterprise and Oriental dreams of future magnificence, but they are possessed of a larger metropolitan manner than one can find in like settlements—like in size—of the more thickly settled, the more finished parts of the country. Indeed, it is just because the smaller town in the East is rounded out and complete, as it were, and has got through with the disfiguring process of growth, that people there begin to fit their minds and habits to their simple environments. It is the impatient custom to call these people of the rural town of the elder land human vegetables, perhaps because it is pleasant to resort to them after a too rich dish of the red blood of the money-market or of the ranches. At any rate, throughout this Northwest country we find the city man in evidence, usually managing the bank, "making the advances," and, in a large, general way, keeping up the connection of farms and mines, of railroads and of "bunches" of cattle, with the investors of capital. Usually he is the kind of man whom we expect to see back in New York, and as a permanence, in the near future—the kind of man who will suddenly appear as the owner of a box at the Metropolitan Opera House, having plunged into the society which is stretching out its hands in welcome to all the millions that are willing to come its way.

It seems to be much easier to a man at, say, Butte to grab a "grip" and to board a train for Chicago or New York than would be even the contemplation of such a journey to a man at Keokuk, or at Dayton, or even at Elmira. If the Butte man wants a million dollars for an enterprise, he takes a train for the most likely lending centre. He carries his dreams with him as security; usually the dreams take, and often they materialize. Let it not be understood that dreams as security are always to be classified with the visions of Colonel Sellers. These dreams make our West our Orient, and investment in them has enormously increased the wealth of the whole country. Besides, there is calculation behind many of them, a considerable experience to add substance to them;