Part 19 (2/2)
To the pioneer the forest was no friendly resource for posterity, no object of careful economy. He must wage a hand-to-hand war upon it, cutting and burning a little s.p.a.ce to let in the light upon a dozen acres of hard-won soil, and year after year expanding the clearing into new woodlands against the stubborn resistance of primeval trunks and matted roots. He made war against the rank fertility of the soil. While new worlds of virgin land lay ever just beyond, it was idle to expect the pioneer to stay his hand and turn to scientific farming. Indeed, as Secretary Wilson has said, the pioneer would, in that case, have raised wheat that no one wanted to eat, corn to store on the farm, and cotton not worth the picking.
Thus, fired with the ideal of subduing the wilderness, the destroying pioneer fought his way across the continent, masterful and wasteful, preparing the way by seeking the immediate thing, rejoicing in rude strength and wilful achievement.
But even this backwoodsman was more than a mere destroyer. He had visions. He was finder as well as fighter--the trail-maker for civilization, the inventor of new ways. Although Rudyard Kipling's ”Foreloper”[270:1] deals with the English pioneer in lands beneath the Southern Cross, yet the poem portrays American traits as well:
”The gull shall whistle in his wake, the blind wave break in fire, He shall fulfill G.o.d's utmost will, unknowing his desire; And he shall see old planets pa.s.s and alien stars arise, And give the gale his reckless sail in shadow of new skies.
”Strong l.u.s.t of gear shall drive him out and hunger arm his hand To wring food from desert nude, his foothold from the sand.
His neighbors' smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest; He shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed; He shall desire loneliness and his desire shall bring Hard on his heels, a thousand wheels, a people and a king.
”He shall come back on his own track, and by his scarce cool camp, There shall he meet the roaring street, the derrick and the stamp; For he must blaze a nation's way with hatchet and with brand, Till on his last won wilderness an empire's bulwarks stand.”
This quest after the unknown, this yearning ”beyond the sky line, where the strange roads go down,” is of the very essence of the backwoods pioneer, even though he was unconscious of its spiritual significance.
The pioneer was taught in the school of experience that the crops of one area would not do for a new frontier; that the scythe of the clearing must be replaced by the reaper of the prairies. He was forced to make old tools serve new uses; to shape former habits, inst.i.tutions and ideas to changed conditions; and to find new means when the old proved inapplicable. He was building a new society as well as breaking new soil; he had the ideal of nonconformity and of change. He rebelled against the conventional.
Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the ideal of personal development, free from social and governmental constraint. He came from a civilization based on individual compet.i.tion, and he brought the conception with him to the wilderness where a wealth of resources, and innumerable opportunities gave it a new scope. The prizes were for the keenest and the strongest; for them were the best bottom lands, the finest timber tracts, the best salt-springs, the richest ore beds; and not only these natural gifts, but also the opportunities afforded in the midst of a forming society. Here were mill sites, town sites, transportation lines, banking centers, openings in the law, in politics--all the varied chances for advancement afforded in a rapidly developing society where everything was open to him who knew how to seize the opportunity.
The squatter enforced his claim to lands even against the government's t.i.tle by the use of extra-legal combinations and force. He appealed to lynch law with little hesitation. He was impatient of any governmental restriction upon his individual right to deal with the wilderness.
In our own day we sometimes hear of congressmen sent to jail for violating land laws; but the different spirit in the pioneer days may be ill.u.s.trated by a speech of Delegate Sibley of Minnesota in Congress in 1852. In view of the fact that he became the State's first governor, a regent of its university, president of its historical society, and a doctor of laws of Princeton, we may a.s.sume that he was a pillar of society. He said:
The government has watched its public domain with jealous eye, and there are now enactments upon your statute books, aimed at the trespa.s.sers upon it, which should be expunged as a disgrace to the country and to the nineteenth century.
Especially is he pursued with unrelenting severity, who has dared to break the silence of the primeval forest by the blows of the American ax. The hardy lumberman who has penetrated to the remotest wilds of the Northwest, to drag from their recesses the materials for building up towns and cities in the great valley of the Mississippi, has been particularly marked out as a victim. After enduring all the privations and subjecting himself to all the perils incident to his vocation--when he has toiled for months to add by his honest labor to the comfort of his fellow men, and to the aggregate wealth of the nation, he finds himself suddenly in the clutches of the law for trespa.s.sing on the public domain. The proceeds of his long winter's work are reft from him, and exposed to public sale for the benefit of his paternal government ... and the object of this oppression and wrong is further hara.s.sed by vexatious law proceedings against him.
Sibley's protest in congress against these ”outrages” by which the northern lumbermen were ”hara.s.sed” in their work of what would now be called stealing government timber, aroused no protest from his colleagues. No president called this congressman an undesirable citizen or gave him over to the courts.
Thus many of the pioneers, following the ideal of the right of the individual to rise, subordinated the rights of the nation and posterity to the desire that the country should be ”developed” and that the individual should advance with as little interference as possible.
Squatter doctrines and individualism have left deep traces upon American conceptions.
But quite as deeply fixed in the pioneer's mind as the ideal of individualism was the ideal of democracy. He had a pa.s.sionate hatred for aristocracy, monopoly and special privilege; he believed in simplicity, economy and in the rule of the people. It is true that he honored the successful man, and that he strove in all ways to advance himself. But the West was so free and so vast, the barriers to individual achievement were so remote, that the pioneer was hardly conscious that any danger to equality could come from his compet.i.tion for natural resources. He thought of democracy as in some way the result of our political inst.i.tutions, and he failed to see that it was primarily the result of the free lands and immense opportunities which surrounded him.
Occasional statesmen voiced the idea that American democracy was based on the abundance of unoccupied land, even in the first debates on the public domain.
This early recognition of the influence of abundance of land in shaping the economic conditions of American democracy is peculiarly significant to-day in view of the practical exhaustion of the supply of cheap arable public lands open to the poor man, and the coincident development of labor unions to keep up wages.
Certain it is that the strength of democratic movements has chiefly lain in the regions of the pioneer. ”Our governments tend too much to democracy,” wrote Izard, of South Carolina, to Jefferson, in 1785. ”A handicraftsman thinks an apprentices.h.i.+p necessary to make him acquainted with his business. But our backcountrymen are of the opinion that a politician may be born just as well as a poet.”
The Revolutionary ideas, of course, gave a great impetus to democracy, and in substantially every colony there was a double revolution, one for independence and the other for the overthrow of aristocratic control.
But in the long run the effective force behind American democracy was the presence of the practically free land into which men might escape from oppression or inequalities which burdened them in the older settlements. This possibility compelled the coastwise States to liberalize the franchise; and it prevented the formation of a dominant cla.s.s, whether based on property or on custom. Among the pioneers one man was as good as his neighbor. He had the same chance; conditions were simple and free. Economic equality fostered political equality. An optimistic and buoyant belief in the worth of the plain people, a devout faith in man prevailed in the West. Democracy became almost the religion of the pioneer. He held with pa.s.sionate devotion the idea that he was building under freedom a new society, based on self government, and for the welfare of the average man.
And yet even as he proclaimed the gospel of democracy the pioneer showed a vague apprehension lest the time be short--lest equality should not endure--lest he might fall behind in the ascending movement of Western society. This led him on in feverish haste to acquire advantages as though he only half believed his dream. ”Before him lies a boundless continent,” wrote De Tocqueville, in the days when pioneer democracy was triumphant under Jackson, ”and he urges forward as if time pressed and he was afraid of finding no room for his exertions.”
Even while Jackson lived, labor leaders and speculative thinkers were demanding legislation to place a limit on the amount of land which one person might acquire and to provide free farms. De Tocqueville saw the signs of change. ”Between the workman and the master,” he said, ”there are frequent relations but no real a.s.sociation... . I am of the opinion, upon the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest which ever existed in the world; ... if ever a permanent inequality, of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.” But the sanative influences of the free s.p.a.ces of the West were destined to ameliorate labor's condition, to afford new hopes and new faith to pioneer democracy, and to postpone the problem.
As the settlers advanced into provinces whose area dwarfed that of the older sections, pioneer democracy itself began to undergo changes, both in its composition and in its processes of expansion. At the close of the Civil War, when settlement was spreading with greatest vigor across the Mississippi, the railways began their work as colonists. Their land grants from the government, amounting altogether by 1871 to an area five times that of the State of Pennsylvania, demanded purchasers, and so the railroads pioneered the way for the pioneer.
<script>