Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/215

Rh moreover, there are the character and credit which have been gained by the dreamers whose dreams have come true. If the man from Keokuk or Royalton wants to borrow $100,000, his desire alone is quite likely to give him pause, and he is noticed by his neighbors for many days at a time figuring on the backs of envelopes. Then he does a deal of letter-writing, some cautious telegraph-sending, breaking out at last with a telephone message. When he goes to the bank for the loan, he takes good, substantial securities with him, printed on bond-paper, and on his return he very likely tries to make on his borrowed capital one or two per cent, in excess of the rate which he must pay, while the Far-Western brother is hoping for something more than a paltry doubling of his borrowed capital.

The air is full of the stimulus and the mystery of chance. It cannot be escaped. One is not inclined to fly from it, because the prizes are too many and too rich. Along the side of the dusty road between St. Paul and Minneapolis is the wagon of the fortune-teller—the selfsame gypsy who used to add to the mystery of our childhood's Eastern woods, but now he is near cities; and in the railroad yard in Duluth we find the rich blue private car with its silvered letters announcing that it is the palmist's car, and that the palmist will tell his visitor where to strike for fortune, "between the hours of 10 and 3 " Still, these plungers into the dark mysterious things, these snappers-up of every offered opportunity for wealth, are but the restless and often the unsuccessful. The dreams that go back East as security are not likely to be as unsubstantial as the fortune-teller's prediction. They are the visions of men who know what is—who have imaginations which not only tell them what they may expect, but they also convince the man back in the Atlantic seaport who wishes his idle dollars to be doing something.

There is nothing more interesting in the world of modern effort than the solid achievements of the men who are building up the West, and who are really making the empire west of the Mississippi. We have heard of the "pioneers who go out into the wilderness, and whose brawny arms have transformed dark forests into sunny and smiling farms." Poetry has been written about these pioneers, imaginative pictures have been painted of them, speeches have been made to them, and votes have been coaxed from them; but the pioneer of our time is not the pioneer of the seventeenth century who sought religious and civil liberty on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. There is a vast difference between a migration and a raid. There is a distinction, which is to be observed, between the man who moves with his family to a new home and the man who goes out alone in the excitement of a new discovery of gold or silver to get his share and to bring it back, or the man and the woman who go out with the hunters after gold to hunt them in turn for whatever gold they may find. The day of the "pioneer" has gone by in most of the Far-Western country, although some of his habits remain.

The men who do the American country good are the same kind in the Far West and in the Middle West. In the Middle West the pioneers were the seekers after new homes, but in the farther country most of the Americans who first travelled out were not of the settling or of the settled class. They who went to build homes stopped on the plains of Dakota, and many of them were foreigners. They who went to the mines carried in their company the attendant vices. They who went to herd cattle had the stir of adventure, often of thriftlessness, in their blood. The vices went with them also, for they fasten on the nomadic, and the vicious pitched their tents for faro and bad whiskey and other temptations where they might be within easy reach. As the railroads moved their tracks out, the dens faced the railroad track; and once, out of the car window, at a place which hoped to thrive in a sage-brush country, I saw, at the side of the train, on the board walk which ran between the station and the saloon, a faro-table which was presided over by a lady with golden curls, red cheeks, and a pink Mother Hubbard. These things have changed in older and better days, and though a red shade now and then flutters in the wind of the main street, the second lot of Americans have been received, and these are the real builders of the empire. These decent Americans do not care to dwell and to