It is not necessary to go into further details regarding this primitive commerce of the prairies.It yielded a certain profit;it shaped the character of the men who carried it on.But what is yet more important, it greatly influenced the country which lay back of the border on the Missouri River.It called yet more men from the eastern settlements to those portions which lay upon the edge of the Great Plains.There crowded yet more thickly, up to the line between the certain and the uncertain, the restless westbound population of all the country.
If on the south the valley of the Arkansas led outward to New Spain, yet other pathways made out from the Mississippi River into the unknown lands.The Missouri was the first and last of our great natural frontier roads.Its lower course swept along the eastern edge of the Plains, far to the south, down to the very doors of the most adventurous settlements in the Mississippi Valley.Those who dared its stained and turbulent current had to push up, onward, northward, past the mouth of the Platte, far to the north across degrees of latitude, steadily forward through a vast virgin land.Then the river bent boldly and strongly off to the west, across another empire.Its great falls indicated that it headed high; beyond the great falls its steady sweep westward and at last southward, led into yet other kingdoms.
When we travel by horse or by modern motor car in that now accessible region and look about us, we should not fail to reflect on the long trail of the upbound boats which Manuel Lisa and other traders sent out almost immediately upon the return of the Lewis and Clark expedition.We should see them struggling up against that tremendous current before steam was known, driven by their lust for new lands.We may then understand fully what we have read of the enterprises of the old American Fur Company, and bring to mind the forgotten names of Campbell and Sublette, of General Ashley and of Wyeth--names to be followed by others really of less importance, as those of Bonneville and Fremont.
That there could be farms, that there ever might be homes, in this strange wild country, was, to these early adventurers, unthinkable.
Then we should picture the millions of buffalo which once covered these plains and think of the waste and folly of their slaughtering.We should see the long streams of the Mackinaw boats swimming down the Missouri, bound for St.Louis, laden with bales of buffalo and beaver peltry, every pound of which would be worth ten dollars at the capital of the fur trade; and we should restore to our minds the old pictures of savage tribesmen, decked in fur-trimmed war-shirts and plumed bonnets, armed with lance and sinewed bow and bull-neck shield, not forgetting whence they got their horses and how they got their food.
The great early mid-continental highway, known as the Oregon Trail or the Overland Trail, was by way of the Missouri up the Platte Valley, thence across the mountains.We know more of this route because it was not discontinued, but came steadily more and more into use, for one reason after another.The fur traders used it, the Forty-Niners used it, the cattlemen used it in part, the railroads used it; and, lastly, the settlers and farmers used it most of all.
In physical features the Platte River route was similar to that of the Arkansas Valley.Each at its eastern extremity, for a few days' travel, passed over the rolling grass-covered and flower-besprinkled prairies ere it broke into the high and dry lands of the Plains, with their green or grey or brown covering of practically flowerless short grasses.But between the two trails of the Arkansas and the Platte there existed certain wide differences.At the middle of the nineteenth century the two trails were quite distinct in personnel, if that word may be used.The Santa Fe Trail showed Spanish influences; that of the Platte Valley remained far more nearly American.
Thus far the frontier had always been altering the man who came to it; and, indirectly, always altering those who dwelt back of the frontier, nearer to the Appalachians or the Atlantic.A new people now was in process of formation--a people born of a new environment.America and the American were conceiving.There was soon to be born, soon swiftly to grow, a new and lasting type of man.Man changes an environment only by bringing into it new or better transportation.Environment changes man.Here in the midcontinent, at the mid-century, the frontier and the ways of the frontier were writing their imprint on the human product of our land.
The first great caravans of the Platte Valley, when the wagon-trains went out hundreds strong, were not the same as the scattering cavalcade of the fur hunters, not the same as the ox-trains and mule-trains of the Santa Fe traffic.The men who wore deepest the wheel marks of the Oregon Trail were neither trading nor trapping men, but homebuilding men--the first real emigrants to go West with the intent of making homes beyond the Rockies.
The Oregon Trail had been laid out by the explorers of the fur trade.Zealous missionaries had made their way over the trail in the thirties.The Argonauts of '49 passed over it and left it only after crossing the Rockies.But, before gold in California was dreamed of, there had come back to the States reports of lands rich in resources other than gold, lying in the far Northwest, beyond the great mountain ranges and, before the Forty-Niners were heard of, farmers, homebuilders, emigrants, men with their families, men with their household goods, were steadily passing out for the far-off and unknown country of Oregon.
