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Whenever possible, these have been omitted from filming/ II se peut que certaines pages blanches ajout6es lors d'une restauration apparaissent dans le texte, mais, lorsque cela 6tait possible, ces pages n'ont pas 6t6 filmdes. L'Institut a microfilm^ le meilleur exemplaire qu'il lui a 6t6 possible de se procurer. Les details de cet exemplaire qui sont peut-dtre uniques du point de vue bibliographique, qui peuvent modifier une image reproduite, ou qui peuvent exiger une modification dans la mdthode normale de filmage sont indiqu6s ci-dessous. □ Coloured pages/ Pages de couleur □ Pages damaged/ Pages endommagdes I — I Pages restored and/or laminated/ Pages restaurdes et/ou pellicul6es Pages discoloured, stained or foxei Pages d6color6es, tachetdes ou piqu6es Pages detached/ Pages d^tach^es rT/f Pages discoloured, stained or foxed/ I I Pages detached/ Q Showthrou. ♦;•»,>.. •-.-f ,-* -?i-'tfr, - ?^ ■-'*;fe^ji>,-.-.ia* ,-ii^.~.-5.^f^>*-SK-?,e^*m»*f. ^Ipf ^ TUE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. TUE GRAIN, PASTORAL, AND GOLD REGIONS OF N OUT II AM Ell IC A. WITH SOME NEW VIEWS OP ITS PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY; AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. BY WILLIAM GILPIN, LAIE OF THE UNITED STATES ARMV. Illuslrateb bg 0ap8. ^'} PHILADELPHIA: SOWER, BARNES & CO. ST. LOUIS: E.K.WOODWARD. 1860. W Entered, accordiag to Act of Congress, in the year 1800, by SOWKR, lUHNES & CO., In the CTerk's Office of Uie District Court of the United States, in ond for the Eastora District of Teunsylvania. MIABS * DUBENBERT, STEREOTYFEBg. Collins, Printer. P 11 E F A C E. Everybody is acquainted with tlio history of tlic American people. Their coinmoinvealth, comnuniced at first by a few republican families voluntarily exiled from the old world, is now, at the end of two and a half centuries, a republican empire of established continental dimensions of policy. Kcstricted heretofore in its deve- lopment, to so much of our continent as belongs to the Atlantic, a point of progress is reached, whence our energies, overOowing towards the west, expand to cm- brace the regions of the Pacific Ocean, and establish direct and familiar relations with Asia. This movement, long in preparation, now engages so large a force, that its advance daily acquires volume and celerity. Federal legislation, to progress 2^'^'^'^ ^)rt,s'.9?A with the people, is demandet^ upon a basis to give ert'ect to the great central movement resulting from their energies. A liberal understanding of the mission of our people, counsels a genial expansion of the federal system to the grandest dimensions which their energies may reach. I have condensed into a small volume, the memoranda and reflections suggested by a residence of twenty years in the wilderness, and in the midst of the pioneer people who occupy the foreground of progress, and clear open the track of empire. (V) i 1 I MlKFAfE. I distingiiisli, as t1io most cssoiitial prcstMit ;^'roun(l of (lovclt)f)rnont; tlic; interval which sepiirates the Missis- si])pi Basin from tlio Pacific Ocean. Tliis defines itself as the "Mountain iSi/staii'^ of our j,'oo<,'raphy. The magnitude of the obstacles which it opposes to the forces of j»r();.(ress assembled on its two fronts, sanctions an apjxial to every form of help discernible to the jiatriotic heart. This neediid hel[) is in short, the construction of the Conlincnlal RailmniL Two ausj)icious elements in human civilization by their rapid growth in power and importance fix our attention: the indefinite multii)lication of gold coin, and international public works. These two elements, so opcratinj^ as to mutually .stimul'to and sustain one another, promise to enthrone industrial or;,'ani/,ation as tho ruling principle of nations. America leads the host of nations as they ascend to this new order of civiliza- tion. Her intermediate geographical position between Asia and Kurope and their* populations, invests her with tho powers and duties of arbiter between them. Our continent is at once a barrier which separates the other two, yet fuses and harmonizes their intercourse in all the relations from which force is absent. Iluman society is then upon the brinlc of a new order of arrangement, inspired by the universal instincts of peace, and is about to assume the grandest dimensions. Fascinated by this vision, which I have seen appear and assume the solid form of a reality in less than half a generation, I discern in it a new power, the People occupied in the wilderness, engaged at once in extracting from its recesses the omnipotent element of gold coin, and disbursing it immediately for the industrial conquest of the world. William Gilpin. Independence, April 7th, 1860. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I OEOGRArmCAI. MEMORANDA ON THE VACIFIO t.\;IROAO. Plan of North American Continent — Atlantic slope— Basin of the Mississippi — Cordilleras of Sierra Madre — Great Plateau — Cordillera of the Andes — Pacitic slope— Plan of European Continent — Plan of Asiatic Continent — American RopuLlic to expand and fit itself to its geographical formation — Bril- liant future before it Page 13 CHAPTER II. OEOGRAPnir.'.I. MEMORANDA ON THE I'ACIFIC RAILROAD — Continued. Humboldt's views — Natural bed for a railroad — Cordilleras pierced by great natural passes — Basins of the Great Plateau — Configuration of the Great Sierra Madre — Platte River — South Pass — Columbia River, 23 CHAPTER III. GEOORAPmCAL MEMORANDA ON THE rACIFIC RAILROAD Continued. Climate, winds, rains — Elevation — Productions — Commerce — Asia and its manufactures — Jefferson — Astor — Monroe, 34 (vii) Vm CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. THE MOUNTAIN FORMATION OF NORTH AMERICA — THE GREAT TABLE- LANDS — GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES. Breadth — Length— Black Hills — Cordillera of the Sierra Madre Gold-producing granite — Pares — Plateau of Table Lands — Not comprehended by the American people — Basin of City of Mexico — Bolson di Mapimi — No drainage — Sierra Mim- bres — Basin of the Del Norte — Basin of the Colorado — Cailou of the Colorado — Basin of the Salt Lake — Basin of the Columbia — Basin of Frazer's River — Delicious climate of the Plateau — Its fertility — Cordillera of the Andes — Pacific Maritime Front, 46 CHAPTER V. THE CORDILLERA OF THE SIERRA MADRE. Mountain System of the Globe — The Andes — Their length, altitude, and auriferous wealth — Chain of the Mother Moun- tain — Its rivers — Cailons — Mesas — Butes — Slanos — Bayous or pares, elevation, breadth — Wind River Mountain — South Pass — The Alps and their pass — Lava Plain of Snake River — Bowl of the Yellowstone — Plain of the South Pass — Sweet- water River — Table Mountain — Placers of gold and precious stones — Northern Pare or Bull-pen — Favorite winter home of trappers — Streams, meadows, flowers, groves, &c. — Middle Paro, mountain spurs, rocky streams, cloudy atmosphere, Bnow-clad summits — Long's Peak — Southern Pare — Pike's Peak — Mountain barrier — No transit — Bayou St. Louis — Sublime scenery, luxuriant fertility, agricultural seasons — Valley of Kashmcre — Secondary mesas or "slanos" — Level surface, poor soil, rainless atmosphere — Perplexity of public mind — Slano Estacado and Slano of the Balsifoeta — A con- tinual terrace — Kansas Basin, 57 CONTENTS. IZ CHAPTER VI. THE PLATEAU OF NORTU AMERICA. Ita area and characteristics — The column of central progress — Plateaux of the Old World — Plateau of American Table Lands not understood — Its basins — Climate uniformly vernal — Fertility of soil — Grasses make natural hay — Immense herds of cattle — Auriferous granite and gold placers — Irrigation — Prepared for an immediate dense population — Its physical characteristics — Geological formation — Mineralogical re- sources — Zone of civilization — Line of progress, . CHAPTER VII. TUE SIERRA SAX JUAN. The gold and silv ■ production of the \rorld — Auriferous or gold-bearing formation — Calcareous formation — Iron, copper, lead — Focal culminations of the Sierra Madre — Pike's Peak — The Sierra Mimbres — Mining in the Andes — Stupendous efforts of the internal volcanic powers of tho globe — Abund- ance of the precious metals — Cafion of the Colorado — Gorgeous variety of scenery — Philosophy of metalliferous deposits — "Great North American Desert" does not exist — Hum- boldt's views — The Great Plateau the seat of empire of the ancient Mexicans — Remarkable focal culmination of the Sierra Madre in the Sierra San Juan — Tlie column of pioneers upon its threshold, 84 CHAPTER VIII. THE SOUTH PASS OF AMERICA. Route from Pans to Pekin — Distance and time reduced — The Plateau and two Cordilleras the only imiiedinients — Basin of the Mediterranean and Basin of the Mississippi — The former salt water — The latter rich, calcareous, and arable soil — The X CONTENTS. former supported a population of one hundred and thirty- one millions — The latter capable of twelve hundred millions — Both the seats of empire in their respective continents — Both traversed by the zodiac of civilization — The South Pass — Its shape, size, and surface — Distance from Astoria and St. Louis — The only pass through the Mountain Formation hence to Tehuantepec — The great trail of Ihe buffalo passes through it — Uninterrupted passage by the bed of great rivers both to the Adantic and Pacific — Uniformity of climate from sea to sea — The great Continental line of empire here — The Pillars of Washington, 98 CHAPTER IX. THE GREAT BASIN OF THE MISSISSIPPI. Its groat river — Its surface a rich and deep sediment — Its climate — Line of timber — Line of grasses — Capacity for popu- lation — Geographical centre of the Basin and North American Continent at same point — Between and equidistant from the 259,000,000 population of Europe and the 050,000,000 popu- lation of Asia and Polynesia — Surface of Europe descends outwards from its centre — Also of Asia — Surface of North Amenip. like a bowl, gathering and centralizing whatever enters within its rim — The Basin of the Mississippi the amphitheatre of the world, .... . . Ill CHAPTER X. PASTORAL REGION. CJreat Plains of America not deserts — The Pastoral Garden of the world — Its surface a gentle slope to the east — Abounds in rivers — Covered with thick nutritious grasses and swarming with animal life — Soil not sandy, but a fine calcareous mould — Convenient to navigation — Climate dry, and temperature even — Herbage perennial, edible, and nutritious throughout the year, and cured into natural hay upon the ground — Sup- CONTENTS. 3U ports one hundred millions of wild cattle — No fires as in prairies — Turkeys, chickens, water-fowl, fish, and game in great variety, abundant— Ample proportion of arable land fo • farms, fuel, building materials, &c. — Climate favorable to health and longevity — Animal food three-fifths of that of the human family — IIow produced spontaneously — Very little labor necessary for support — Pastoral agriculture on a large scale comparatively a new order of industry to our people — Destined to be of immense importance, 120 CHAPTER XI. EXTENT AND CnARACTERISTICS OF THE HEMP-GROWING REGION OF THE UNITED STATES. The Ilemp-Orowing Region of the United States — Production of hemp in 1850 — Course of the Missouri compared to the Nile — Its channel destined to remain the most thronged in the world — The highway from Western Europe to Oriental Asia — Similar channels in ancient times — Salubrity, fertility, and beauty of the Hemp Region — All departments of produc- tion and industry thrive in it — Central extension on the line of the isothermal zodiac the policy of tlie founders of the Republic — Abandoned by Monroe, and for thirty years after — Now resumed — Independence the point from which it starts — Prosperous future before it 128 CHAPTER XII. THE I'ARC OF SAN LUIS; THE SIERRA SAN JUAN; THE SIERRA LA PLATA; THE GOLD FIELDS OF THE " PLATEAU OF NOHTH AMERICA." Focal point of the Cordillera— Mining for gold as yet confined to the mountain flanks— True region of the precious metals not yet reached — Gold and silver found in mass and position — Accompanied by precious stones— Metalliferous character of the Sierra Mimbres— Its culmination in the Sierra San xu CONTENTS. Juan — Region of the precious metala most prolific and inex- haustible — Accoss easy and by a familiar highway — Great tide wave of two millions people annually to the west, • . 138 APPENDIX. I. Speech of Col. William Gilpin, on the subject of the Pacific Railway, delivered at Independence, Mo., at a Mass Meeting of the citizens of Jackson county, held Nov. 5, a. o. 1859, . 145 II. Proceedings of a Mass Meeting of the citizens of Jackson county, at Independence, on the 5tli of November, 1849, to respond to the action of the Great National Railroad Conven- tion, held in St. Louis on the 15th day of October, 1849, . 180 III. pike's peak and the sierra SA.V JUAN. Extracts from an Address by Col. William Gilpin, delivered at Kansas City, November 15th, 1858 ; on the gold production of America and the Sierra San Juan, 183 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. CHAPTER I. GEOGRAPHICAL MEMORAjSDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. Inasmuch as the general mind seems willing to entertain with favor, and judge candidly what may be truthfully said of a National Railroad to the Pacific, and everywhere is indi- cated a growing taste for whatever may solidly enhance the prosperity of our continental system, I have condensed into these few chapters the general views resulting from a long experience. On a subject which touches so profoundly all the existing rela- tions of the human family, connecting three continents and uniting together, by a short line of ten thousand miles, the thousand million of people inhabiting Europe, America, and Asia ; which short line traverses the middle of the north tem- perate zone, perforating nine-tenths of the land, the population, the production, and consumption of the world : I say, it is neces- sary for one who will write with dignity upon such a subject, so faearchiug and omnipotent, to grasp boldly its immense scope of matter, to rely upon solid statistics, to face and brave old opinions, to repudiate the rubbish into which thousands of years of staggering and abortive efforts have submerged it, and to con- (13) 14 THE CENTRAL GOLD KEQION. dense it to the tangible form of propositions, which may bo prac- tically handled for a final solution. The shortest trail whereby the local works, now on hand and proposed, may be understood, the public judgment matured, and opinion instructed and concentrated for action, is to condense by rigid analysis, and draw into one view the multitudinous facts of geography, commerce, politics, and progress under which the American people are so rapidly erecting a supreme democratic republican empire, and fitting it to the surface of the northern American continent and islands. And Jirst, must be emancipated from the rlogmatic European writers (who, with procrustean despotism, rivo up all other por- tions of the globe to fit their own pigmy theories), the symmetri- cal and sublime geographical plan of our continent. This, heretofore veiled from the public mind by every form of contor- tion, is reducible to an exact system, easily understood and eternal. The reverse geographical form in which our continent is moulded, the contrast of all the others, makes a new and original grandeur of society, not only possible, but compulsory upon us. To disinfect ourselves of inane nepotism to Europe in other things as we have done in politics, to ponder boldly on our- selves and our destiny, and develope an indigenous dignity — to appreciate Asiatic science, civilization, commerce, and popula- tion — these are essential preparatory steps to which we must tone our minds. This, then, is the simple plan of North America : — The Andks, having traversed the whole length of South America, passing out from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, continue to follow, unchanged in character, the Pacific shore of North America clear up to Bhering's Straits. Known successively as the Cor- dilleras of Anahuac in Mexico, Sierra Nevada in California, and Cascade Mountains in Oregon, it is all along the same auriferous MEMORANDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 15 aad volcanic Andes, having a narrow base wa.«licd on the west by the tido, immense altitude, summits of perpetual snow, and formed of the columnar vulcan rock, or a molten mass of lava. Between this continuous escarpment of rock and the sea, is the maritime, region of the Pacific, which contains all the present American population residing in California and Oregon, upon the smaller rivers running directly into the sea, and parallel to one another. It resembles, and is the counterpart of the maritiine Atlantic declivity, which contains the old thirteen states, and which is shut off from the valleys of the Mississippi and St. Lawrence by the Alleghanies. But, at the Isthmus of Tchuan- tepec, the Andes bifurcates, throwing along the coast of the Mexican G"lf, the great Cordillera of the Sierra Madre, which opening rapidly from the Andes, as the continent widens, and assuming in our territory the name of Rocky Mountains, tra- verses north to the shores of the Arctic sea, being some fourteen hundred miles apart from, and to the east of the Andes, and forming the primary divide, the " divortia aquarum" of America. The absolute separate existence of these two prodigious Cordille- ras, must remain distinctly in the mind^ if anybody intends to understand American geography — the interval between them from end to end is occupied by the Plateau of the table lands, on which are alike the cities of Mexico, Chihuahua, and the Mor- mon city of the Salt Lake. This plateau of the table lands is two- sevenths of the surface of Is Tth America, is some 6000 feet elevated above the external oceans, and gives as complete a sepa- tion between the Cordilleras on the flanks, as does the Atlantic, whose waters "roll between the Alleghanies and the Alps. Thus that side of the American continent which may be defined to front «!^sia, and sheds its waters in that direction, has these four characteristic divisions: — the maritime front; the Andes; the Plateau of the table lands; and the Sierra Madre, IG THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. all extending the whole length from south to north, parallel to one another, and covering in the aggregate two-fifths of its whole area. The remaining three-fifths of the continent sheds its waters towards the Atlantic. Here too the same sublime grandeur and simplicity of plan is discernible. From the Sierra Madre, the whole continent descends to the seas by immense planes, resem- bling the glacis of a fortress, or a flattened octagonal house roof. This plane, once the bed of immense oceans, of which the Sierra Madre was the shore, and bevelled by the action of the watery mass, now forms the gentle slope, down which descend, to re- plenish the oceans, the surplus waters of the Sierra Madre and the plane itself. Guttered everywhere by these descending water- courses, seaming its surface as innumerably as the veins which carry back the blood to the human heart, these aqueoul channcla flow down the different faces of the great plane, proportioned in length and size to the distances to be traversed. Thus down the smaller face, which fronts the Mexican Gulf, at present compre- hended in Texas, run the lower Del Norte, the Nueces, Colorado, Trinity, and Brasos. Down the grand eastern front, called by ua the " Great Prairie Plains," descend the Red river of Louisiana, the Canadian, Arkansas, and Kansas j the Platte (with its three forks), and the sublime Missouri itself: all of these running due east, parallel to one another, very straight and without rapids, are receiyed into the great central troxujh, the Mississippi, which runs from north to south across their direction, and their accumu- lated waters are discharged into the gulf. From the same focal point with the Missouri, radiate two fronts, the one drained by the system of rivers tributary to the Saskatchewan, opening to the north-east, and widening to embrace the immense inland sea of the Hudson's Bay ; the other upon ^the Athabasca oi McKenzie river, sloping due north, and occupying the vast hyperborean region stretching to the Arctic Sea. From an ele- MEMORANDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 17 rated swell in the plane bctwoon the Missouri and Saskatchewan, protruding from the Sierra Madre eastwardly along the forty-ninth degree, about 700 miles, issue the waters of the Upper Missis- sippi and St. Lawrence. The first goes directly south to scour out the trough of the continent. The latter flows down the nar- row basin of the lakes and their river St. Lawrence, to where the glacis reaches the sea, and forms the shores of the gulf of that name. Thus, from the dividing wall of the Sierra Madre, the conti- nent descends uninterruptedly to the gulf, the North Atlantic, and the Arctic Seas. The perfect gentleness of this descent, scarcely di.stingulshable from a level, is perceptible from the rivers, which are entirely free from rapids and everywhere navi- gable when water is sufficient in their beds. The sublimest example is the watery surface of the Missouri, whose liquid plane, dipping by perhaps thirteen inches to the mile, has an unruffled uniformity of descent through its whole course of 5000 miles to the sea. But to render complete this geographical delineation, there rises all along the Atlantic, and parallel with its shore, the dividing range of the Alleghany, uninterrupted from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. External to this is the narrow seaboard declivity which first received the European set- tlements, and still holds the densest population j but within, a reverse glacis descends tt) the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, filled with states to the central trough of the continent. Practically, the basins of these great rivers are narrowed to mere passes at their mouths by the points of the mountain chains which fence them from the sea, expanding to an immense breadth in the inte- rior, and fading into one another, where they touch, by prairie divides of imperceptible elevation. They form together one vast bowl, whose waters flow from the circumfereuce near the seas, 18 THE CENTRAL GOLD BEOION. inwards, to centres which arc near and already connected by art aa at Chicago. This bowl or pliiiii is everywhere calcareous, being paved beneath the soil with an undulating covering of limestone, as is a frozen lake with one of ice. To recapitulate and grave it upon the mind, as with the style wherewith the artist cuts into steel the deeply shaded lines of a picture, the whole Atlantic side of the continent is one calcareous plain of many fronts, each front having a mighty system of arte- ries, demonstrating its gradual slope, and carrying its surplus waters to the sea ; and yet by the rising of the eastern halves of the basins against the Atlantic barriers it is also a sublime bowl, iuto which the waters have first a concentric direction, as they accumulate into the troughs that conduct them to the sea. The superlative wonder about this is, that here, in North America, is rolled out in one uniform expanse of 2,300,000 square miles, an area of arable land equivalent in surface to the aggregate of the valleys of the other continents, which arc small, single, and isolated. Moreover, the interlacing of the rivers forms every- where a complete system of navigation, blended into one by public works of the easiest construction, and forming, by their double banks, a shore line equal in extent to the coasts of all the oceans. To master the geographical portrait of our continent thus in its unity of system, is necessary to every American citizen — as necessary as it is to understand the radical principles of the Federal Government over it, and of political society. Our coun- try is immensely grand, and to understand it in its simple grandeur, is not an extravagance, but is a homespun matter-of- fact duty. If we flinch from this duty, we recede from the dirine mission chalked out for us by the Creator's hand, sink below the dignity of our ancestors, and fall into the decrepitu le of the voluntary, illiterate, and emasculate subjects of Europe. MEMORANDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 10 To enforce these truths with yet greater stringency, and to tempt or la.Nh the popular niiud out of its cringing and criminal torpidity, still another illustration remains of the paramount sig- nificance to us of geographical facts. This is the contrast between ir own and the other four continents. Europe, the smallest of the grand divisions of the land, con- tains in its centre the icy masses of the Alps j from around their declivities rudiate the largo rivers of that continent. The Danube directly east to the Euxino ; the Po and llhone south to the Mediterranean; the Rhine to the Northern Ocean. Walled off by the Pyrenees, and Carpathians, divergent and isolated, are the Tagus, the Elbe, and other single rivers, affluents of the Baltic, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Euxine. Descend- ing from common radiant points, and diverging every way from one another, no intercommunication exists between the rivers of Europe ; navigation is petty and feeble ; nor have art and com- merce, during many centuries, united so many small valleys, remotely isolated by impenetrable barriers. Hence upon each river dwells a distinct people, differing from all the rest in race, language, habits, and interests. Though often politically amal- gamated by conquest, they again relapse into fragments from innate geographical incoherence. The history of these nations is a story of perpetual war, of mutual extermination ; and an appalling dramatic catalogue of a few splendid tyrannies, crush- ing multitudinous millions of submissive and unchroniclod serfs. Exactly similar to Europe, though grander in size and popula- tion, is Asia. From the stupendous central barrier of the Ilim- malehs run the four great rivers of China, due east, to discharge themselves beneath the rising sunj towards the south run the rivers of Cochin China, the Ganges and the Indus j towards the west, the rivers of the Caspian j and north through Siberia to the Arctic seas, "' iny rivers of the first magnitude. During B '}* 20 THE CENTRAL OOLD IlEOrON. fifty conturk'j", ns now, the Alps and lliiiuiluya luountuins have proved insuperable barriers to the anuilj^iiniatioa of the nations nroujid their bases, and dwelling; in the valleys which radiate from their slopes. The continent of Africa, as fur as wo know the details of its surface, is even more than these split into dis- jointed fragments. Such also, in a less degree, is South America. Thus, whilst Northern America opens towards heaven in an expanded bowl to receive and fuse harmoniously whatever entcra within its rim ; so each of the other continents presenting a bowl reversed, scatters everything from a central apex into radiant dis- traction. I'olitical empires and .societies have in all ages con- formed themselves to these emphatic geographical facts. The American Ilepublic is then prcdesdnrd to expand and flt itself to the continent. Much is uncertain, yet through all the vicis- situdes of the future, this much of eternal truth is discernible : In geography the antithesis of the Old World, in society it ia and will be the reverse. Our North America will rapidly attain to a population equalling that of the rest of the world combined ; forming a single people, identical in manners, language, customs, and impulses : preserving the same civilization, the same religion ; imbued with the same opinions, and having the same political liberties. Of this we have two illustrations now under our eye : the one passing away, the other advancing. The aboriginal Indian race, amongst whom, from Darien to the Esquimaux, and from Florida to Vancouve/s Island, exists a great identity in their hair, complexion, features, stature, and language. And second, in the instinctive fusion into one language, and one new race, of immigrant Germans, Knglish, French, and Spanish, whose individuality is obliterated in a single generation ! It is thus that the holy question of our Union lies in the bosom of nature) its perpetuity in the hearts of a great demo- MEMORANDA ON THE PACIFIC nAILUOAD. 21 oratlc people, iinbuod with nn un(lor.st:iii(lin<^ and nustoro revo- ronoc for licr eternal proniiitiii<:s and oriliniinccs: it Uch not in the trivial temporalities of political taxation, African slavery, local power, or the nostrums of orators however eminent. It is the truth, established by uri'rnre, and not the deductions of metaphy- sics, with which the people must fortify themselves. As power resides in the people and the suffra are yet of an arid hardness and naked of all vegetation. The am;,unt of irrigating rains falling upon tho face of the land from the clouds, regulates this. The oceans are the reser- voirs which supply clouds to the atmosphere. The vapors, rising from the whole surface of the ocean into the higher regions of the atmosphere, form themselves, at a cold elevatiou, into natural balloons or clouds. These, carried by currents of air over the land, nnd rising still higher, becomo condensed and distil them- MEMORANDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 37 -i I I; f ;3 selves upon the earth in the form of rain. Those holding vapor in the form least conceutratcJ, rpill it out in the regions near the sea. Others attain to a high degree of concentration, ^-etaiuing the form of clouds until they reach the central regions of the continents and a great elevation. But we have seen that the great snoict/ Cordillera of the Andes lines the whole western seaboard of North America, being in sight of vessels sailing up the sea, from the Gulf of California to Bhering's Strait. The winds coming from the west and over th" ocean, blow against this wall. On this elevated summit of perpetual congelation, water becomes ice, as solid and permanent as the cold lava-rck. The irrigating influence of the Pacific ocean is here abruptly stopped and entirely ceases. , The great citstcrn slope of the continents, however, descending by gentle inclined planes to all the seas, receives, without any geographical interruption, the irrigating winds and clouds of the ocean. The barrier of the Alleghanies diminishes, but docs not stop the inflowing of vapori?. But we have seen that the ■^isds blow perpetually from the west. The inward progress, then, of the atmospheric vapors is by this continually repelled. The vegetation of the continent itself reveals to us the result of this conflict between winds and the gradual exhaustion of the atmospheric vapors, with an exactness as complete as that with which the thermometer indicates temperature. The maritime declivity, the Alleghanies, and the countries between the latter and the troughs of the Mississippi and St. ' awrencc, are densely clad with timber. So are the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and South Missouri, receiving clouds from the Gulf partly, and partly from the Atlantic. Westward and northward the timber grad- ually tapers awaj, still following in narrow lines along the rivers, but leaving the uplands and ridges to the luxuriant prairie grasses. Soon, however, the timber abandons its struggle to grow, and i :i ! I''' hi!- 88 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. ceases entirely. Onward, however, from the last fringe of timber, for some hundred miles, the irrigation continues to preserve the mellowness of th^ soil, and a sward of tall, luxuriant grasses covers the whole smooth expanse of nature. This, in turn, gradually dwaifs under the decreasing irrigation, tapering into the delicate curled grass of the buflFalo plains, which is scarce half an inch in height, and resembles the wool of a lamb. Finally, grass itself fails, and the general characteristic of the surface of the great Si'3rra Madre and the plateau of the table lands is total nakedness of any nutritious vegetable covering. The soil is cither compactly hard, or resembles dry ashes. The surface is here sparsely clothed with dwarfed wormwood and the prickly pear, funereal plants, which seem as car<;les3 of moisture as is the salamander of fire. Such are the great primary laws of nature which decide tho climate and vegetation of our continent. luteriuptions and modi- fications of these laws are innumerable. Nature is everywhere wise. Compensations exist in all these countries, so eccentrically novel to us, which will win for them the detisest populations. No deserts of silicious sand, like those of Arabia and Africa, exist in America, nor are such possible. The only formation of sili- cious sand is the Atlantic declivity, whose soil soon wastes under culture, and the ocean washes this. The great bowl made up of the basins of the interior is everywhere calcareous. The soil which covers the two great Cordilleras, the Table Lands and the Pacific declivity, is the intrinsically fertile decay of basaltic and lava formations. Thirst alone causes its nakedness and apparent aridity. Where this thirst is quenched with a frugal supply of water, it shows an abundant and inexhaustible fertility. Great rivers are everywhere full and convenient. Thus are all the successive varieties of climate, vegetation, and soil explained by the gradual attenuation of the rains, a^ we MEMORANDA ON TIIK PACIFIC RAILnOAD. 39 recede from the ocean. Vice versa, these conditions of the atmosphere and land attest the absence of vapor in the former. All secondary phenomena, such as the annual fires of the great prairies of long grass, are consequences of the aridity of the autumnal and winter atmosphere, and not causes of the absence of timber. Again, the elevation of the plain of the SoatJi, Pass is 7800 feet above the sea. The streams which collect and carry oflf its waters — Sweet-water to the east and Sandy to the west — arc only large rivulets, though their courses are long. The amount of rain in summer and snow in winter upon the water-grade of the Platte and Snake rivers, and in the South Pass between them, is so insignificant as to bear no comparison in amount with those between Boston and BuQalo! But the stupendous masses of the Wind River Mountains rise in the northern horizon of the South Pass to an altitude of 14,000 feet. Their great elevation draws down the vapors left in the atmosphere, which clothe their summits with per- petual, and their flanks with winter snows. These supply waters to the great rivers, and cover the flanks and gorges of the great mountains with immense forests. The same '"s the case elsewhere with the great primary mountain-chains, such as the Utah or \7asatch, and the Salmon Hiver Mountains; but the seer Hiuiy mountains and passes arc entirely naked of timber, ha'' '•:■,.. .T, in them neither rains nor snows at any seasoa. iiuu "a . ;i.ivaordiaary/ac< here developes itself. If from the point whe. : '.iC junction of several small streams forms the Kansas river, 120 miles due west from Independence, as a centre, a circle be described tou-^ing the boundary line of forty-nine degrees as a tangent, the opposite side of the circle will pass through the "^.^port of Matagorda in Texas; through N'"-' Orleans and Mobile. This point is, therefore, the centre north and south of our coun- 4 m ff • ^mmmmmm^^ 40 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. !h try. If from the same centre a larger circle be described, it will pass through San Francisco, and through Vancouver City, on the Columbia, exactly grazing the whole coast between them. The same circle will pass through Quebec and Boston on the Atlantic, through Havana on the gulf, and through the city of Mexico. The same point is then the centre between the oceans. Thus, at the forks of the Kansas river a point exists, in lati- tude 38° 45', and longitude 97° west of Greenwich, which is the Geoorai'IIICAL Centre, north and south, east and west, at once of our whole national territory, of our Union, and of the Valley of the Mississippi ! The /acts then whii 1. ontrate themselves to locate the Continental Railway, a . tht line of water-grades from ocean to ocean, sum themselves ap conclusively in its favor and against all others : From Baltimore and New York, through St. Louis to Kansas, this road is now under contract and construction. For this dis- tance the route traverses a country guttered with rivers ; inter- rupted by the narrow and abrupt ribs ^of the Alleghany chain ; covered with timber; having a fitful climate vexed with immense rains and snows; the surface infinitely channelled with water- course^s and perplexed with innumerable ravines, alternating with steep and narrow hills. Yet this half of the whole road pro- gresses over all these difficulties with such ease and celerity, that argument of its impracticability is not tolerated. But against the remaining half of the road, from Kansas to Astoria, tfeese arguments are tolerated, though in truth they have all ceased, and such obstructions and impediments have no existence in nature. The remaining half from Kansas to Astoria crosses no river of any magnitude, yet pursues the banks of great rivers continu- ously the whole distance. The banks of these rivers, rising but 3 ^^\ MEMORANDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 41 a few feet above tLe water surface, arc of imuienrie width, per- fectly hard oiid dry, and smooth as a water level Such is the general churacteristic of the Platte and Columbia from end to end. The plain of the Smith Pass is almost as smooth and hard as a marble pavement, and is of a general breadth exceeding thirty miles. Not a single eminence exists in the whole distance but is tunnelled by these rivers down to the general grade. On the track everywhere is material in every variety of form, and in the sublimest abundance. Lumber exists in abundance in the high mountains to the right and left; iron can be supplied at the ends and upon the navigable rivers, brought from Europe if necessary as it now comes for nearly all the railroads iu America. Mineral coal is abundant from end to end. Rock in every variety — granite, basalt, lava, limestone, and gypsum. The Platte perforates a great range of mountains of (jypsxim. The Snake river a less one of roch-saU. This route is not northern, but exactly central. The sublime order and fitness of nature seems here pre-eminently to vindicate and exemplify itself. Upon the Kansas river it plumbs the geographical centre of the national territory. From hence it curves northward to Baltimore, the most southern Atlantic city of great commercial activity. It curves gently to the northward to the mouth of the Columbia. This is in latitude 4G° 19', being three degrees south of Havre in Franct , and eight degrees souih of Liverpool and Amsterdam. Yet the climate of Western Ame- rica is milder than that of Western Europe. It is also upon the coasts extending fifteen degrees north of the Columbia, that the marine of the Pacific will be constructed, as hero are combined the conveniences of sea-harbors and forests. It is in the Baltic and British Isles that all the marine of Europe is built and owrfed. It is likewise on the St. Lawrence and in New England that the marine of America is constructed and owned. 4 -n 42 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. W i! To speak of the obstruction of Indians upon the route is a monstrous burlesque. The whole aggregate number of men, women, and children, within several hundred miles along the flanks of this route, docs not amount to iiine chousand, or one- fifth of the population of Washington City ! The most moderate pay would make of them valuable herders of stock and hunters. The pastures now maintain meat upon the hoof, or buffalo, to the amount of many millions. An hundred millions of tame cattle will maintain themselves in the buffalo country, fat in condition round the year. Beef is the appropriate food of these dry and high altitudes. The eastern half of this route, from Baltimore to Kansas, tra- verses very centrally the densest population, the largest production and consumption, and consequently the line of greatest travel and commerce. The same will be the case with the western half so soon as the hurlesipie of *• Indian occupation" is brushed out of the way. The immense mass of pioneers in all the elder States, chafes to Issue out and cover this delightful country with republics. The country embracin>'; the sources of the Sweetwater, Colo- rado, and Snake rivers, is a gold country, equalling California or Brazil, but inaccessible to ocean navisiation. The climate docs not, as in these latter countries, pulverize and disintegrate the rock. The gold is in a matrix of quartz. The hard por- phyry and lava will descend in immense quantities and thus economize the paving of the cities of the Valley of the Missis- sippi. One natural production of the eastern edge of the Table Lands will soon repay the cost of the construction of this road. This is SALT. There are mountains near the sources of Snake river, composed of stratified masses of rock-salt — just as our river bluffs are of limestone. This, quarried with light tools, and ground to powder, as grain is reduced to flour, is the pure alum MEMORANDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 43 salt of commerce. Every living soul of America uses salt thrice per day. Every animal requires it as frequently. Every ounce of provisions is preserved with it. It is mixed with hay and preserves timber. It is used in the manufactures and fine arts. Brought hence down to the focal point of navigation in Missouri, this State will become the distributing point of this most valu- able, greatest, and most indispensable article of commerce. By the last national census, the annual production of our country reaches the value of three thousand millions of dollars. Seventy-five per cent, of this is/ooc?, which finds no market among the comparatively limited population of Europe, 205,000,000, who feed themselves. Around the Pacific, in front of Astoria, are 745,000,000 of hungry Asiatics and Polynesians, who have gro- ceries, clothing, spices, and porcelain, to exchange for meat and grain. But the western half of this road departs from the bank of the Missouri, to which all America has access at this hour by the navigiible rivers — and from Astoria these millions of consumers may bo reached directly, over a tranquil ocean and under a tern- perate atmosphere : the equatorial heats are only encountered last and at the place of final delivery. No douht, in the popu- lous, central, food-producing states of Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois, three hundred millions of dollars' worth of produce of industry, fail annually to find a market, and the profit thereon perishes for want of this road exit from the centre to the north- western coast ! But it is important that the people receive with candor, and allow due weight to the overwhelming and conclusive proofs in favor of this route of the water-grades, which Nature, all recorded human experience, and the solid science of civil engineering, con- spire to submit to their judgment. Nature is the supreme engi- neer ; art is prosperous only whilst adhering to her teachings. We have seen in what a simple and sublime harmony the invisible 4* II [0^ 44 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. ■A force of nature cleviites vapors from the sea, forms them into cloud balloons in the upper atmosphere, and transports them on currents of air over the continents : how these become condensed and distil themselves over the face of the land in the form of irrigating rains. This water, having performed its renovating duty, by filtering through the surface soil, begins again to collect, first in remote hollows and undulations ; these unite into rivulets ; rivulets into larger streams ; streams into rivers ; rivers into the great fresh water trovjhs, which return this drainage from the land, to mix with the salt of the ocean, to be renovated and per- form again their part in the circulation of nature. Now the use of public works to human society, is the same as are her works to nature ; to bring in and distribute clothing and groceries ; to collect and carry out surplus food and productions of every variety. In the transferring to and fro of the waters of the universe, nature accomplishes as much heavy transportation in a few hours, as will suffice the social wants of America for a century. This, then, is all that is sound in civil engineering, and compre- hends all the good that it lias, and can do, for human society : — to select those water-grades where, in further imitation of nature, human energy may smooth the asperities and economically adapt to use the curves and grades with which she has everywhere fur- nished the face of the land. Thus, then, to recapitulate and sum up the array of facts which concentrate themselves to decide the location of the Con- tinental Railway. Nature and all sound human experience unite to select the water-grade of the Platte and Snake rivers, and against any departure from it. If this route deflects at all from an exact centraliti/, it is to the south, and not towards the north, that it bears. Its two halves diverging from the centre, give the shortest lines to the sea, through the countries and populations where the work to be done is the greatest, and the necessity foi i § ii t; MEMORANDA ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 45 I 4 it, most immediate, pressing, and lasting. One-half is located and under construction. As a through road it ib the shortest line across North America, most conveniently connecting Asia and Europe. Though meandering amomj immense mountain chains, it passes them all by tunnels completely made by nature. Nulth^r snow nor rain, nor great rivers, embarrass either its construction or its after-use : the climate is. pre-eminently propitious ; material to construct is conveniently at hand, at easy intervals on the right and left; fuel and water abundant for ever; the pastoral excellence of the whole region, combined with a dry atmosphere and health, supplying meat-food and transportation indefinitely, will render easy the immediate influx and residence of an im- mense population. The vicinity where the great Sierra Madre is penetrated, and where five great rivers have their sources together, is prodigiously prolific in salt, hard rock for architecture and paving, medicinal hot springs, all the precious metals and jewels, furs, lumber, and the hides of animals. If I, have delineated with any success, and explained correctly the features of nature, in geography, climate, and topography, there remains to examine the bearing upon this work of the com- bined hostile influence of ocean commerce allied with politics. Why this great central route, successfully opened in the time of Jefiierson and by the energy of Astor, was attacked, stopped, and finally shut %ip, under President Monroe, and its reopening still hampered and postponed by the same remorseless and relentless enemies! I .IS , ■.'■ili f i' 4 'I: ¥ 1,1 I > 46 THE CENTRAL GOLD UEOION. CHAPTER IV. THE MOUNTAIN FORMATION OF NORTH AMERICA— THE GREAT TABLE-LANUS— GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES. I HAVE clscwlicrc given you a sketch of one of the cardinal subdivi.sioiis of our continent and country, the Cheat Plains. I now proceed to .sketch what i.s beyond them, and Gils the space out to the PaciCc Sea. This is the immense Mountain Forma- tion OF North America. I approach the attempt to classify and set down this region with a degree of trepidation, which I find it difficult to master. During the years of war and exploration which I have passed among thorn, every hour has kept alive the awe in.spircd by the immensity of the space they occupy, the grandeur of their bulk and altitude, and the sublime order and symmetry which pervades them as a system, and in the details. Moreover, no one, not even Humboldt, has ever attempted to reduce them to a classic system, or assented to what I have done in the Ilydrographic Map of 1845, which you have seen and studied. These indelibly- graved impressions perpetually recur whenever my memory reverts to that time, and warns me to speak of count ies so novel to a public little curious and uninformed, only after condensing their portrait with the maturcst meditation and with nicely-guarded caution. The mountain formation of North America is that distinct sub- division of its area which occupies the whole space from the Great Plains to the Pacific Sea, and covers two-sevenths of the continent. In its superficial contents, bulk, number and variety of the moun- tain masses, it equals the aggregated mountains of all the other continents. It has peculiar characteristics, which render it more i i 1 1 1 1 1 i 1 i W II V A 4r-r \ \ \ MOUNTAIN FOUMATJON OF NOIITII AMERICA, KTC. 47 jly k'crHolv across 10 broaUth is from iutorcstiiij^ tliuii them all. Travelling Iran; oast to west along the tliirty-ninth degree, miles; the length, continuous from Tehuantepeo to the Arctic Sea, is 4.'J00 miles ; the direction is regular from Kouth-south- east to north-north-west. From cast to west the traveller enters and crosses five physical divisions, as distinct in order and suc- cession as are the prismatic streaks of the rainbow to the eye. These arc: 1st. The IJlaek Hills, or Eastern Piedmont; 2d. The Cordillera of tho Sierra 3Iadrc (Roclcy Mountain); od. The Plateau of tho Table-Lauds, with its mountain chains; 4th. Tho ('ordillcra of tho Snowy Andes (tho Sierra Netada) ; f)th. Tho JIaritimc Piedmont, of the Pacific Shore. These divisions are parallel to one another like tho streaks of the rainbow, and, like them, run throughout from end to end of the mountain furma- tioti, in which they arc blended together in one embodied mass. Beyond tho central line of the Great P' Tins, the undulations of tho surface begin to swell up, until they become elevated into secondary mountain.s, with timber, and crowned with rocky escarpments. These are the Black Hills. They are the out- liers of tho Sierra Madrc, are in tho Basin of tho Mississippi, and, masking tho mountain crest, break and graduate its descent. They are 300 miles in breadth, arc perforated across by all the great rivers, and are washed away and tortured into fragments by their channels. They have rocks ->f porphyritic granite and sandstone, but are for the most part formed of the sulphate of lime, as gypsum or plaster of Paris. Some of them are paved with petrifactions, and others, being composed of light mould, form the suspended matter of the rivers, which goes down to make the alluvial bottoms and delta of tho Mississippi Basin. They have but little snow or rain, a scattered growth of dwarfed timber, and a picturesque and fantastic scenery. They are an important part of the pastoral region, are clothed in perennial ;V' t lit Pi t, ■■<■■. "^. I A \ • /' lit. -.^^ <' '^ B A I'll,,//,: ',\% ( ft <5l |V GREAT MOUNTAIN '. •^ ' {\ Sfii^iuiicllil BASIN -^ ~ \\ ^' i *' «i BASIN ^- ^ ,1 S.,11 l^i^H^ri<«««^ ^ ^ O F HIGH CALIFORrdAw rt St \x. '"' ,' ■-, .,.w<**ii' ■■■■ ^ I V-- COLO RiA DA B A * I N ElOUTX ^ /i // r*aiiif .JV* -^ ^~^ ' ^^<- V (BASIN) \ ^l^,\ \An.,K-'J*' -U nori\e m^ -^•^.~/^^y,.^.n\ ^ /^.■% I :flu v., but of all the departments into which science has arranged thi physical geography of the globe, this appears to me the most interestin the most crowded with various and attractive features, and the most certainly destined eventually to contain the most enlight- ened and powerful empire of the world. At present it is no more known or comprehended, as it is, by the American people than was America itself to the poet Homer, and is to them as much a myth as the continent of Atalanta. Nevertheless it is of such great area as to contain within itself three rivers which rank with the Ganges and Danube in size, and five great ranges of primary mountains. You will see it exactly defined upon the ^1 i m •55 ■ !'■■, Ui 50 THK CENTRAL GOLD REGION. bydrographic map of 1845, as the immense longitudinal region, encased within the Cordilleras and extending from Tchuantepec to the Northern Sea. It would exhaust a largo volume to reciie in detail the interesting features of this region, all worthy to be known. The Plateau of the Table Lands is a succession of intra- montane basins, seven in number, and ranging successively from south to north. The solid mass of the Andes debouches out of the Isthmus of Tehuantcpcc, and forks immediately into the two Cor- dilleras. AdvanciniT; alone; the Western Cordillera into the state of Jalisco, a mountain chain issues from its inner flank, and, travers- ing the Table Lands, plunges into the Sierra Madre, in the state of San Luis Potosi. This cuts off to the south the " Basin of the city of Mexico," which is i\\c first, the smallest, and most southern of the mountain basins. Further north, a second mountain chain crosses from Durango to Coahuila, and cuts off the " Basin of the Bolson di Mapimi.'' This is the second mountain basin. The Cordilleras, which flank these two and fence them from the sea, have so tr^'^at an altitude that the ocean vapors never surmount their crests, nor do any clouds pnss outward over them. These basins, therefore, have no outward drainage, nor any rivers run- ning to the sea. Stagnant lakes alternately receive the drainage from their surrounding mountains, and yield it to them again by evaporation. This last chain is known as the " Mountain of the Rio Florida;" the former as the " Mountain of Queretaro." Pursuing still the Western Cordillera through the state of Sinaloa, a third mountain chain, dividing off, traverses the Table Lands due north, and plunges into the Sierra Madre, between the plain of St. Louis and the Middle Pare. This is an immense and remarkable mountain, is 1300 miles in length, and divides asunder the waters of the Del Norte and Colorado. It is the famous Sierra Mimbres. The area thus cut off between it and MOUNTAIN FORMATION OF NORTH AMERICA, ETC. 51 the mountain of the Rio Florida is drained by the rivers Del Norte, Pecos, and Conchos, which, uniting at the base of the Sierra Madre, perforate it by a canon, and escaping into the external maritime region, form the Rio Grande of Texas. This is the only water-course which perforates the Sierra Madre be- tween Cape Horn and the Arctic Sea. It is here that a profound and distressing error pervades all the existing charts and delinea- tions of our continental geography. Those, omitting the great Sierra Madre for 600 or 700 miles of its length, and assigning its name to the Sierra Mimbres, locate the Rio del Norte and its vast basin with the system of Atlantic rivers. Yet the Sierra Mimbres abounds in pcdrigals of lava, craters, and volcanic phenomena, and the geological altitude, configuration, and a thousand palpable characteristic features of the basin of the Del Norte, locate them upon the Plateau of the Table Lands. This blunder of transposition is more foolish than to construct a map of Europe and forget the Alps, or to draw for the people a pine tree growing erect in the middle of the ocean, whilst dolphins graze upon a mountain slope ! The vast basin of the Del Norte is then the third in order of the mountain basins of the Plateau. The Western Cordillera continues to traverse Sonora, and, passing round the Gulf of California, reappears in sight of the ocean in the state of California. Opposite San Bernardo another mountain chain branches from its eastern flank, traverses the Table Lands by a northern course, dividing the waters of the \^'olorado and Great Salt Lnke, and plunges into the Sierra Madre between the sources of Green river and Snake river. This is the fourth great mountain chain of the Table Lands, is 1000 miles in length, and is the Sierra Wasatch. Between it and the Sierra Mimbres is included the immense 3Iountain Basin of the Co- lorado, which is the fourth subdivision of the area of the Table Lands. This basin has an immense area, great altitude, an 6 D ll ''t' L b Is i »' J.. 1 62 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. iufiolto perplexity of mountains, and is redundant in striking and wonderful novelties. The Rio Verde, Rio Grande of the West, the Rio San Juan, collect its upper waters, and, uniting against the inner flank of the Cordillera of the Snowy Andes, gorge it diagonally through and through, and escape into the Gulf of California. This sublime gorge is 400 miles in length, and is known as the " Canon of the Colorado." It is throughout a narrow mountain chasm, traversing, without interruption, the very bowels of the Andes, having perpendicular mural sides, often many thousand feet in altitude. Other important affluents of the Colorado (the Mohabe, the Little Colorado, and the Gila), force their way into it by an infinite labyrinth of gorges, similarly scooped through the bowels of the mountain mass. These two remarkable basins then — the Del Norte and Colorado — lie against the Sierra Mimbres, as a backbone. The waters of the first gorge the Sierra Madre to the Gulf of Mexjco ; those of the second, the Andes, to the Gulf of California; but no gorge unites them through the Sierra Mimbres, which is unperforated. These basins are both longitudinal in shape and position; they overlap one another, and thereby multiply the number and complexity of mountain barriers. Among the physical phenomena of the globe, this " Caiion of the Colorado" is an isolated fact, unique and sublime in interest. These two basins are, par excellence, the metalliferous department of the world, and are infused through- out with mountains of the precious stones, and precious and base metaJs — of lava, obsidian, and marble — of salt, coal, and with rivers of thermal and medicinal waters. Let me hasten to other subdivisions of equal interest. Near the forty-second degree of latitude, the Western Cordillera throws oflF the Jifth mountain chain of the Table Lands. This has a serpentine course, mainly east and west, is 12Q0 miles long, and forms the division between the basin of the Salt Lake and the MOUNTAIN FORMATION OP NORTH AMERICA, ETC, r)3 basin of the Columbia. It joins with the Sierra Wasatch, and immediately at the point of junction, plunges with it into the Sierra Madrc. The great basin, containing in one of its dopros- sioos the Salt Lake, is the counterpart, on our continent, ( ' the Caspian of Asia. It is, like the first and second basins, encased all around with an unperforated mountain wall, and neither sends nor receives water from any sea. Nearly opposite to Piiiict's Sound, a sixth chain of mountains, breaking oflF from the eastern flank of the Western Cordillera, traverses the Table Lands by a due northern course, and sinks into the Sierra Madre, closely enveloping the sources of the Columbia river. This is called the Okennagan Mountains, and divides the waters of the Colum- bia from those of Frazer's river. The Basin of the Columbia is the sioctJi in order of the basins of the Table Lands. It is the most admirable of them all. A splendid circular configuration and two primary rivers. Its size, position, and configuration, relatively to the Blississippi Valley and the Pacific Ocean, make it the ilite of them all. It extends all across the Table Lands from rim to rim, as do both its great rivers — the Snake river and the Columbia — which uniting, oora:e the Andes at the Cascades, penetrating through them to the Pacific in 46° 19'. They run from east to west, and connect exactly by convenient and single passes across the Sierra Madre, with the great rivers flowing down to the Atlantic. It partakes of all the cardinal characteristics of the other basins, having, in addi- tion, mighty forests, navigation, a larger share of arable qualities, and a superior economy in its topographical surface and position. Such are the six primary basins and mountain chains »vluch chequer and arrange themselves into the Grand Plateau of the Table Lands, as I have seen them and become familiar with them. There is a seventh, the basin of Frazer's river, with which I am acquainted only from the reports of others who have recon- : ■ifi i Li I' I '■'• 64 THE CENTRAL GOLD REOION. li noitercd it. It bus the same general features, though smaller, longitudinal in direction, and narrow. We may now, then, return to the third elementary division of the mountain formation of North America, namely: The Plateau OF THE Table Lands. Wo may understand its variety and vast- ness, yet handle it as a unit. The lowest sedimentary points, which the waters accumulate from the lakes of Mexico, Mappimi, Gusman, and Salt Lake, have an average altitude of GOOO feet above the seas. The whole Plateau has then the elevation of a primary mountain. It is everywhere fertile, being pastoral for the most part, but arable whore irrigation is adopted. Every geological formation exists on a Titanic scale, volcanoes, columnar basalt and pedrigals of crystallized lava, porphyritic granite and sandstone, and secondary basins of the sulphate and carbonate of lime. It is universally a rainless region, and nowhere is arable agriculture possible without artificial irrigation. Pastoral culture is the prominent feature, wherein it rivals the Great Plains. The air is tonic and exhilarating — the atmosphere resplendent with perpetual sunshine by day and with stars by night. The climate is intensely dry, and the temperature variant and delicious. Habitations are not essential in this salubrious and vernal clime; the aborigines dispense with them. During three years that I have passed upon the Plateau, I have rarely slept within a house or beneath any canopy but the sky, infinitely spangled with stars. Upon this Plateau has existed, within our memory, the populous and civilized empire of the Aztecs, and in South America that of the Incas. Timber grows upon the rivers and upon the irri- gated mountain flanks. To arrange the arable lands for irrigation is not more costly than our system of fencing, which it super- sedes. No portion of the globe can maintain a denser population. But the fourth subdivision of the " Mountain Formation of North America" is the Snowy Cordillera of the Andes. MOUNTAIN FORMATION OP NORTH AMERICA, ETC. 55 Everybody is familiar, from cliildhcoJ, with the South Americaa Andes. This of oursi is the same, unchanged in any characteristic, except an increased and superior grandeur. Let us restore to it its ancient and illustrious name! Let us inquire how it has come temporarily to bo lost ! The Andes traverse the American continent, in one unbroken and uniform mass, from Cape Horn to Bhering's Strait. Towards the ocean, to whoso indented shore they are parallel, and from which they are everywhere visible, they present a precipitous front and immense altitude ; they everywhere surmount the lino of perpetual snow. Upon this front, which receives the perpetual winds from the ocean and is bathed with its vapors, cuows and forests accimulate as upon the Alps. But on their summit of perpetual congelation, these vapors, condensed to ice, are as solid, as perpetual as the granite rocks. No vapors pass over to the inner region, which is naked of snow, timber, or irrigation. Hence has come this distinctive Spanish sobriquet of this sublime sea-wall — Cordillera Nevada de los Andes (the snoicy chain of the Andes) — to define it specifically from the naked masses within ! Thus, since this ancient and familiar Andes has come to be domesticated in our empire, within the states of California and Oregon, has it been thoughtlessly plundered of its name, defined only by an expletive, snoivy, and incontinently ignored of its supreme, coronated rank in the mountain system of the world. If, then, you require from me a description of this fourth subdivision of our mountain formation, I bid you to peruse again the fascinating pages of Prescott and his predecessors ; the romantic historians of Cortez, Alvarado, and Pizarro; and, above all, the oracular inspiration with which the illustrious Humboldt has analyzed the geographical wonders of this Cordil- lera of the Snowy Andes, and tinted them with divine eloquence ! Finally, I am bewildered how to speak of the Jl/th subdivision, 5* 66 THE CENTRAL ClOLD IlKOION. which is the PaciI'IC ]Maiutime Fiiont. This brings us out to meet tho ocean, to bloiid together the varieties of sea and hiud, and where, among tho assembled cUmates and countries of the globe, Cornucopia permanently dwells with hor ever-redundant and overflowing horn of ripening beauty and plenty. This Pacific Maritime Front is the counterpart of that outside of tho Alleghany and upon the Atlantic. It is the tide-water region. The Atlantic Front has an area of 271,000 square miles, this of 420,000; it is not much broader from the mountains to the sea, but has a greater longitude. In every detail of climate, vegetation, soil, and physical formation, there is between these two seaboards the completest contrast. On the Pacific arc blended, beneath the eye, and swept in at one sight, the sublime, castellated masses of the Andes — their bases are set in the emerald verdure of the plain, rising gently above the sea level — their middle flanks are clothed with the arborescent grandeur of pine and cedar forests. Naked above and towering into tho upper air, their columnar form of structure resembles an edifice designed to enclose tho whole globe itself; but from this foundation, and rearing their snow-covered crests another mile into tho firmament, shoot up volcanic peaks at intervals of one hundred miles, incasing the throats of the inner world of fire, and coruscated in perpetual snow, beneath coronets of volcanic smoke and flames. The sublimest of the oceans, majestic rivers more worthy to be deified than the Ganges or Egyptian Nile ; the grandest and most elevated of earth's mountains ; superlative forest evergreen ; an emerald verdure and exuberant fertility ; a mellow and delicious atmosphere, imbued with purple tints reflected from the ocean and the mountains ; a soft vernal temperature the year round ; whatsoever can be combined of massive and rugged mountains, picturesque landscape, and a verdant face to nature shining under the richest sunlight, a climate soft and serene ; whatsoever THE CORDILLEHA OF THE SIERRA MADRE. 57 / of all these, blended and enjoyed in combination, will accomplish to give grace, elevation, and reflncnicnt to the social world, arc here united to woo and develope the genius of our country and our people. ^ In all these natural favors our western seaboard front is Bupremcly more gifted than the classic shores of the 3Icditcrra- nean and the Asian Seas, for flfty centuries the favorite theme of history, poetry, and song. The embelli.sluncnts which old society and the accumulating contributions of a hundred successive generations add to nature, are not yet there ; but these will come, and to us who fan the career of our great country whilst we live, the future, which posterity will possess and enjoy, is full of the radiance of true glory. Such is a homespun and laconic detail of a few essential facts necessary to comprehend the "Mountain Formation of North America," and to know where and what it is. The subject is above the reach of imagination or ornament, and of a higher level. Intelligent and candid judgment must supply the rest and fill up the portrait. CHAPTER V. THE CORDILLERA OF THE SIERRA MADRE. This is an immense department of our country, of primary significance and interest. Vaguely denominated as the " Stony or Rocky Mountains," occupying an inhospitable waste beyond the energies of social adventure, mankind has heretofore heard the name with indifference, and all minute details with dogmatic aversion. To establish its title to esteem in the popular opinion of the world, the complete reverse of this, is my object. m ! h t. -*', 58 THE fKNTIlAIi (lOM) ItKOION. Prominent in tho " iMountiiin Sy.stom of 'ihc Globe" is an iin- incnsc pirdio of mountiiins, granitic in fonnatiun, croHtcJ with nnow, having volcanoes on its flanivs, and auriferous luriughout. Tliis coiuMicnces at Capo Horn, traverses tho wholo length of America to lihcrin;,";'s Strait, traverses Asia aud Europo to tho Pillars of Hercules, traverses Africa and appears in tho islands of 3Iadairascar, Australasia, aud Now Zealand. If tho sintrle strait of Hercules were closed, and Suez opened, this continuous mountain crest would exactly contain all tho salt and fresh waters of the Pacific Ocean in a closed circle, und divide them from those of the Atlantic. This continuous girdle becomes, in some localities, very jmuch condensed in breadth and altitude, as at the Isthmus of Central America, and in Franco. Elsewhere it assumes immense expan- sion in area and altitude, .spreading out and elevfi'lug itself into tho continental plateau, which occupies tho whole of Central Asia, and the still grander " Plateau of the Table Lands" of our North America. Tho " mountain formation of North America" is, then, aa important section of this immonso girdle, which bisects all the continents. It has an area, a massiveness and altitude, a position and climate, a fertility, a variety which blends all the peculiarities of all other sections, a simplicity of configu- ration, and a sublimity of profile which transcends all tho rest. Thus, in the " Cordillera Nevada do los Andes" is found tho full equivalent of the South American mountains, volcanoes, active and extinct, crowned with glaciers and of immonso altitude, bat- tlements of columnar basalt, podrigals of lava, subterranean and thermal streams. The plateau and its primary chains outrival in area and interest those of South America and Asia combined. Finally, the stern and stupendous masses of tho Himalaya find themselves surpassed by the primeval bulk, the prodigious length and breadth, the immense mesas, tho romantic pares, the far pro- i THE CORDir.LF.n.V OF TIIR SIERRA MAPRF, 59 trutling slunos, an J tlic 'louJ-couipoUing icy peaks of tho Cordil- lera of tho yierra Madro. "The Chain of tho Mother Mountain" is tho pcnoric nnino \vhi(;h piety awards ti I'lis continuous crest, down whose flanli.s descend all the feeders of tho oceans. Let mo name thoin : tho Athabasca, the Saskatch(!wan, tho supremo ^lississippi, tlio Texan rivers, and tho lUo (jrando del Norte, tho Frasor, tho Columbia, and the Colorado in the northern continent. In tho southern, tlio Magdalena, tho Oronoco, the Amazon, tho La I'lata, the Patagonia rivers, and those of the PaelBc .slope ! Is not this Cordillera then riglitly called tho Mother of Kivers? The IVesh waters of tho earth conio from the clouds ; the clouds come by evaporation from the expanses of the oceans. Wo ahall know that the Sierra Madro divides and rules tlic invisible fluids of tlio atmosphere, equally as the waters which wo sco descending down tho flanks. But lot mo at present restrict myself to the Cordillera as it runs athwart our own country, and deflno its varied features as they display themselves to my eye, looking out as I now am westward to tho 'acifio. It is where t.^c 'juntain mass debouches north from tho Isthmus of Tchuantcpcc, that it bifurcates into the two primary Cordilleras, which continue to expand from one another. Tho Mother Mountain, on the cast, gives its form to the Gulf of Mexico, whoso shore it pursues nearly to the Pass of Monterey and Saltillo. Ilcnec to the Arctic Sea the crest preserves a very regular line to the north-north-west. At the point of entrance into our present territory, it is gorged by the caiion of the Rio Grande del Norte. This caiion is a gorge cut obliquely through and through the bowels of tuo Cordillera, where the river, bur- rowing a chasm 125 miles in length, accomplishes at once its exit into the maritime region and its descent from the " Plateau n 'I fcl:( 60 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. of the Tabic Lands." This gorge, impracticable for commoa uses, is the ouly water current by which the Sierra Madre is perforated anywhere between the extremities of the continent. I have elsewhere spoken of this caiiou, together with that of the Colorado and that of the Columbia, as the three remarkable water- gaps whereby the plateau discharges its surplus waters to the seas. The Cordillera of the Sierra Madre enters our territory in lati- tude 29°, longitude 103°, and passes beyond the 49th°, in longi- tude 114°. Its length, then, witlia these limits, exceeds IGOO miles. It maintains an average distance from the Mississippi river exceeding 1000 miles, and has the same distance from the beach of the Pacific Ocean ; it forms, therefore, a continuous summit crest parallel to and midway between them. All the varieties of formation which distingnish the mountain chains of the continents here follow one another, or are blended in groups, and exist on a Titanic scale o-f magnitude. Mesas exist, being mountains of immense base, and perpendicular walls, whose summits have the level surface and smoothness of a table ; Butes, which are conical P'jaks wrought into perfect symmetry of contour by the corroding power of the atmosphere ; Slanos, being mesas of inferior eleva- tion prolor ^ed outward as promontories protruding from the mountain flanks, and separating from one another the descending rives ; Caiions, chasms walled in on either side with mural prR • cipicos of mountain altitude fl^ayou, or parks, valleys scooped out of the m;iiu u.^rsal mass of the Cordillera, within which they are encased, each as ao '•mphitheatrc. This mountain crest, ex- hibiting all these varieties ot ^-rofile, has, when seen against the horizon, the resemblance of a saw or cock's-comb, whence the sobriquet Sierra ; the continuous mass on which they rest resembles a chain of links, or cord with knots, whc o the name Cordillera. Thus is seen the expressive definition wherein the first Europeans, the Spanin'-ds, our predecessors, have compressed THE CORDILLERA OF THE SIERRA MADUE. 61 1 this supreme mountain feature of our continent, Cordillera de la Sierra Madre ! To bring the mind to an easy and familiar understanding of this subject, embracing so many details, it is necessary to ascend to the summit crest at the forty-ninth degree, to follow ita sinuous edge to the south, to skim from point to point of the ser- rated profile, and, from this elevation, to extend the vision out- ward on either flank to where it subsides into the general fouudu- tiou of the continent. From such a position the eye continually overlooks the "Plateau of the Table Lands" on the west, the " Basin of the Mississippi" on the east. The average elevation of the crest is 12,000 feet above the sea, that of the broad pedi- meni, from whose longitudinal axis it rises, 6000 feet ; the breadth across is 300 miles; so stupendous in area, bulk, and solidity, is the mass of the Sierra Madre ! Every one has built card houses in childhood, having a second story over the centre; such a structure illustrates a cross section of the Sierra Madre in its primeval form. This regularity of form has disappeared under the corroding influences of the atmosphere, operating during countless ages, and the abrading powers of a thousand rivers, carrying down their attritions to the sea ; what is left presents an immense labyrinth of mountain summits, undermined and channelled to a profound depth by the yawning gorges of the streams. Advancing then along the Mother crest in the direction indi- cated, the whole eastern flank of the 43d° of latitude, and lOOth" of longitude (the South Pass), is striped with the rivers which converge to form the Missouri proper and the Yellowstone. These are the Milk river, the Missouri, the Wisdom, Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin forks, all converging into the Missouri j the Yellowstone proper, the Wind, Pokeagie, and Powder rivers, 11 1 n 1^1 wv|i|ii.i|^^.B>f«miin«wqiwniuii mu p^^ipipt . ^ 62 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. all converging into the Yellowstone. These rivers, each having its complement of affluents, are all of great length, and pour down an immense volume of waters. A very small proportion reaches the sea, for where they debouch from the mountains at the lowest altitude, these waters are consumed by evaporation, rising to quench the thirst of the arid atmosphere and surface of the great prairie ocean. But down the western flank, within the same limits, descend rivers of equal number and magnitude, going to traverse the elevated "Basin of the Columbia;" these are the Columbia proper, the Cottonais, the Flatbow, Peud-oreilles, Spokaw, Salmon, and Snake rivers. These rivers have a more immediate descent to the sea than those upon the east; the mountain spurs between them are, therefore, more numerous, abrupt, and of greater altitude. It is easily discernible that over this serrated crest, whence so many rivers radiate as from a single knife edge, there are many depressions or passes, having every variety of altitude and accessibility. The gorges which lead out- ward from these passes, all eventually converge to the Missouri and to the Columbia. The more southern portion of this mountain crest, where it divides the waters of the Yellowstone and Snake rivers, and is seen from the great road of the South Pass travelled by our people, has the local name of " Wind River Mountain." The mountain crest, curving to the east, and describiug a semicircle, envelops the whole basin of the Yellowstone as in a cul-de-sac, and subsiding gradually, in altitude, disappears upon the bank of the Missouri, It is by this peculiar configuration that the mountain crest here practically disappears, and leaves the open depression of the South Pass, into which we gain access by the Sweetwater on the east, and by Snake river on the west, passing, by this means, completely around the arc described by the Wind River Mountain crest. THE CORDILLERA OF THE SIERRA MADRE. G3 A similar configuration to this exists, on a small scale, in the Alps dividing France from Italy, which may be mentioned here on account of the aptness of the illustration and the familiarity with which history has for twenty centuries invested it. It is where the Alpine crest, under the successive names of Savoy. Alps, Mount St. Cenis, and Maritime Alps, sweeps round in a regular arc from Geneva to Genoa, and thence subsiding into the Apennines, bisects Italy lengthwise to the sea. Within this arc is embraced the basin of the Po, called once Liguria, but now Piedmont. Around this arc marched the armies of Brcnnus and Hannibal ; those of the Romans passing into Gaul by the plain of the Rhone j and here also still pass the armies and people of France and the modern Europeans. Upon Snake river is developed the most northern of the parks. As this river descends from the Sierra Madrc, it debouches into and bisects an immense plain of the most novel and remarkable features. This is the Lava Plain. It is an elliptical bowl, em- braced between the Salmon river and Snake river jMountains, 325 miles in length and 95 in breadth. It is a uniform pcdrigal or flat surface of vitrified basalt, melted by volcanic fires, and congealed as into a lake of c^st iron. Along its longitudinal axis stand isolated peaks, known as the " Three Butos," which erect themselves to the snow line, like volcanic cones protruding above the sea. Cracks of profound depth traverse this plain, whose blasted surface is without vegetation or water. It is traversed beneath by subterranean streams, which issue from natural tun- nels in the wall of Snake river, plunging into its bod by magnifi- cent cascades. Bald nakedness, rather than sterility, is the extreme characteristic of this wonderful plain, which has around its rim a fringe of little " vases" upon the streams bubbling from the mountain base, of exquisite fertility and of the most perfect romantic beauty. When we call to memory the interest attracted 6 ^^i I *f I 41 11 !) 64 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGIOX. in every age to the diminutive formations of crystalline basalt upon the north of Ireland, near the city of Mexico, and in Southern Italy, we are struck with awe at the repetition here of these same phenomena, on a scale of stupendous grandeur. Upon the alternate flank of the Sierra Madre, the bowl of the Yellowstone properly classifies itself as the Sucond in order of the paves, having its oval form streaked longitudinally with many parallel and narrow mountain ridges gorged by parallel rivers. This pare is very fertile, of the grandest scenery, and a delight- ful climate. Such is a partial sketch of the Cordillera of the Sierra Madre, from the 49th° to the 43th° of latitude. A few denominating features only are pointed out; the serrated crests, alternately rising into peaks and mesas above the snows, and depressed by passes; the flanks gorged by descending rivers or branching out into mountain spurs between them — the pares; the general direction is south-south-east. I omit to speak of the regions around the higher sources of the Missouri and Columbia, and still onward to the north, not because they are less interesting and attractive, but because I have not myself seen them, and be- cause they are of identical features, and are as yet remote from the column of progressing empire. The third pare is the plain of the South Pass. Although adjacent to the other two, it is in perfect contrast to them in all its characteristic features. Its surface of clay has the perfect smoothness of a water plain, over which the eye ranges witbout interruption. Rain is rare, and the vegetation of grass and astemisia scanty and uniform. Upon its south front rises again the Cordillera, under the local name of Table Mountain. This forms an immense arc, similar to the Wind River Mountain, but in the opposite direction, for, turning to the south-west, it sub- sides to the Rio Verd, which is the great Colorado. These two THE CORDILLERA OF THE SIERRA MADRE. 65 arcs approach one another within thirty miles, forming a double corner over the gorge through which the Sweetwater escapes. To mark the continuity of the mother crest, a gentle crown tra- verses the plain from one mountain corner to the other, only traceable by the perfect division which it makes between the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In the Table Mountain the Cordillera rises again. It resumes its direction, configuration, and alHtude, which it preserves with uninterrupted uniformity clear through the continent to Tchuan- tepec. As far as the 38th° of latitude it sheds the waters of the great Colorado from its western flank j those of the Platte and Arkansas rivers from its eastern flank. I am admonished here to pause and fix attention on the num- ber, grandeur, and variety of the physical elements combined around this culminating point of the mountains and the rivers of our continent. Nature here, more perfectly than at any other point upon the globe, unites into one grand coup d'oeil all her grandest features, which, harmoniously grouped, present to the mind a combination of superlative sublimity. These contrasted pares, so diSerent, yet so close together ! the intense massiveness of the Cordillera ! the number and proximity of great rivers ! the brilliancy and serenity of the atmosphere in which they shine ! the awful storms which at long intervals brew among and shatter the iced mountain tops ! the graphic conviction ever pre- sent to the mind of the immediate presence and presiding omni- potence of the Creator ! The impression left with me, and made by the peculiar grit and appearance of the soil which overlays the plain of the South Pass, is of a " placer of kaoline," resembling the biscuit from which porcelain is burned. This is disintegra- ted, and washed down from the bald mountain flanks of porphy- ritic granite. Whether there may be also here concealed immense placers of !r,o\d and precious stones, coming from the same source, ^ 1 ti 66 THE CENTHAL GOLD REGION. ia not yet tested ; but such ought to bo the fact, from the pure auriferous material of the mountains. To resume again the pursuit of the mountain crest. This con- tinues to recover its altitude. Soon upon the eastern flank the Northern Pare, or Bull-pen, reveals itself; along whoso centre meanders the great Platte river, here running to the north in a direction contrary to the mountain crest. This is the fourth in number of the pares, but has been the first and best known in popular reputation. Being very large, very central, and easily accessible to us going out from the lower Missouri, it became the first favorite winter home of the early trappers and explorers. It is an amphitheatre of large area, whose mountain sides, covered with soil, vegetation, and scattered forests of evergreens, slope gradually up on every side. Its level plain is laced with streams and checkered with meadows, sparkling with flowers and romantic groves, in perfectly graceful alternations ; its atmosphere is genial and exhilarating, and the temperature mild throughout the year. Immediately beyond the highest extremity of the fourth, but upon the west or alternate flank of the mountain crest, the eye drops into the bowl of the fifth or IMiddle Pare, expanding to contain the confluent streams which form the grand river of the Colorado. This pare is larger in area than the fourth, but is vexed with far-protruding mountain spurs, narrow streams rat- tling over rocky beds, and a cloudy atmosphere, made fitful by the altitude and close proximity of snow-clad mountain backs. This pare has its mouth towards the Pacific. Towering up from the mountain crest, where it divides these two pares, rises the snowy head of Long's Peak, whose eastern front beetles over the Great Plains, from which it is seen for fifty leagues by those who travel up the Basin of the Kansas. Still immediately follows on the eastern flanks the Bayoti THE CORDILLEUA OF THE SIKRUA MADRE. 67 Salado, or Southern Pare, wbiuh is the sixth. This is the luouutaiu's bowl, scooped out for itself by the Southern Platte, as it descends from the snowy cap of Pike's Peak. This pare has the sanjo general characteristics as the fourth, but is greatly inferior to it in size, fertility, and climate, being closely hedged in by great mountains, from whose snows descend incessant storms, and a febrile dampness infesting the atmosphere. From the same glacier which surmounts Pike's Peak descends the Arkansas river upon the reverse slope. The river has no pare j it defiles into the plains through a caiion. Here is discernible in the mountain crest the same curvilinear sweep as in the "Wind river mass. Hero occurs a similar con- centric knot of mountain crests, rivers, and pares. But here the mountain crests, having curved outward to accomplish the sepa- ration of the Platte and Arkansas, condenses into the snowy pro- montory of Pike's Peak, and terminates in an abrupt precipice to the Great Plains. At both of these remarkable focal points, nature seems to have instituted a primeval conflict between the abrading power of the rivers and the stubborn resistance of the porphyritic durability of the mountain barrier. At the northern focus, the triumph of the rivers presents a complete harmony of the passes, which enter at all points upon the plain of the South Pass, and connect across it. At the southern focus, the unscathed impenetrability of the mountain porphyry presents on every front its mural pre- cipice of undiminished altitude ; here, then, the austere rigidity of the mountain mass triumphs and admits no transit through. To complete the perfect counterpart resemblance between these foci, opens from the western flank of the mother crest, the Bayou St. Louis, which is the seventh Pare. This is, in physical for- mation and in every detail, the exact twin-counterpart of the pare of the '< Plain of the South Pass." The Sierra Mimbres u, If' a* £ t !l *' w 68 THE CENTRAL OOtD REOION, bounds its western edge, along whoso base flows the Rio Bravo del Norto. Triangular in shape, level as the sea, equal to the third pare in area, encompassed by the sublimest scenery, abundantly irrigated by streams, G500 feet ia altitude, it has au alluvial soil of luxuriant fertility, and seasons eminently propitious to agriculture. It is in this delicious " Bay of the Sierras" that the current flow of time will find renewed, identified, and dove- loped, all the charms with which Oriental narrative and song have invested the lovely Valley of Kashmere ! The Spanish Peaks surmount the mountain crest under the 38th° of latitude. From hence to the 29th° it sheds the waters of the Rio Bravo del Norte from its western flank ; from the eastern flank descend the Arkansas and the Red river, flowing to the Mississippi, and the rivers of Texas, flowing directly to the Gulf. The whole front is masked towards the cast with a screen of secondary mesas (tables) termed distinctively slaiios. These are immense triangular terraces, of half the altitude of the Sierra, resting against its flank, protruding outward many hundred miles, gradually dwarfing in breadth until they terminate in an acute angle. They have an uninterrupted level surface of calca- reous soil, a scanty herbage, and rainless atmosphere, an imper- ceptible dip towards their terminations, where they present an abrupt wall of many thousand feet in altitude, suspended above the Great Plains. All along these mural flanks come out innu- merable streams, which go to form the Arkansas, the Red river, and all the rivers which traverse Texas. Thus is explained the confusion which perplexes the public mind, struggling to arrange the physical configuration of this immense region, as yet only partially explored. To the Mexican people who inhabit the higher mountain region, this is known as the lower plain ; by the people of the maritime region, who see from below its ragged THE CORDILLERA OF THE SIERRA MADUE. 09 front, it is designated as the Guaduloupo IMountains, and by other names. But this system of slanos, seen most distinctly in Texas as the Slano Estacado and the Slano of the Balsifoeta, has an extent and magnitude on a scale commensurate with all the other dis- tinctive formations. It is the continuous screen or Piedmont which graduates the immense declination in altitude, from the summit crest of the Cordillera to the smooth expanse of the Great Plains, appearing from above as a depressed mesa; from below as a series of ragged mountain chains. Geologically it is, as it were, a continental terrace or steppe, or bench of the sul- phate of lime (plaster of Paris), elevated above the Great Plains, which are carbonate of lime ; depressed below the Cordillera, which is porphyritic of granite. I may, with propriety, pause here to speak of the Basin of the Kansas, both on account of the fitness of the opportunity, and because this delicious country, surrounding the very navel of our continent, and embracing its geographical centre, has from that fact a perpetual and paramount interest. The Kansas river has its extreme sources beneath the roots of Pike's Peak, where they have ceased to interrupt the plains. The Platte and Arkansas envelop it, and form a line of drainage between it and the Cor- dillera. But in front of the Kansas Basin, the screen of the Piedmont is interrupted and disappears, so that the Great Plains stretch up to the base of the naked Cordillera, which reveals at one sight the towering masses of Pike's and Long's Peaks, and the curtain of snowy mountains which connects them. A similar coup d'ceil is seen, as presents itself to an Italian standing upon the Po above Milan, whose eye sweeps the Plain of Lombardy, and ascends to the snowy summits of the highest Alps, without any intervening objects to interrupt the vision. A similar resemblance to the Alpine formation which characterizes the par- 's ■ , f-'u i 70 THE CF.NXnAL GOLD REGION. :i tially-cxplorcd masses iranicdiately to the west, has acquired for them the local name of " Helvetian Mouiitaiiis." From these two peaks — Long's Peak to the north, and Pike's Peak to the south — as from twin-radiating points, the Piedmont expands from the casteii- flank of the Cordillera, like a half-open fan. Towards the north is the Mcdicin-Bow Mountain and the Laramie Plain; towards the south, the Ratouc Mountain, the Slano Balsifoota, and the Slano Estacado. Such is an effort to delineate and classify the prominent phy- sical features of the Mother Cordillera of our country; the .serrated axis which forms its core ; the .system of parks ; the system of rivers and mountain spurs ; the peaks and mesas ; the system of slanos. Its material mass is primeval granite. Volcanoes, active or extinct, craters and their igneous discharges, are not found. (These exist upon the plateau and iu the Andes beyond.) This Cordillera is auriferous throughout. It c tains all forms of minerals, metals, stones, salts, and earths ; iu short, every useful shape in which matter is elsewhere found to arrange itself, and in all the geological gradation.s. The prominent agricultural feature of the Cordillera is fertility —pastoral fertility. Stupendous peaks and battlements exist, extreme in bald and sterile nakedness ; plains there arc blasted with perpetual aridity and congealed by perpetual frosts. The space thus occupied is small; indigenous grasses, fruits, and vegetables abound ; it swarms with animal life and aboriginal cattle; food of grazing and carnivorous animals, fowls and fish, is everywhere found ; the forests and flora are superlative ; the immense dimensions of nature render accessibility universal. An atmosphere of intense brilliancy and tonic tone overflows and embalms all nature ; health and longevity are the lot of man. It is necessary to be condensed and brief. A million of interesting facts are left unmentioned. Then the Cordillera of ■ T'll ■ THE PLATEAU OF NOaXll AMERICA. 71 the Sierra Madro is hut a third part in area of our " mountain formation." If the intjuiring .spirit and patriarchal fire of JolTor- 8on and of Astor still hums in the popular heart, the contiijciital uii.ssion of 1776 will revive and reanimate our generation. Counterfeit „cography, promulgated with ofEcial dogmati.sm, will cea.so to bo fashionable, or to defeat the divine instinct of the people. Patriotism, pioneered by truth and genuine science, will reveal and comprehend our continental geography as it in, huge iu dimensions, sublime in order and symmetry, a unity in plan. Our political and social empire, expanded to the same dimensions, harmonized to the same che(iuercd variety, will assume a similar order, a like .symmetry, and crown hope with a Bimilar solid and enduring perpetuity. CHAPTER VI. THE PLATEAU OF NORTH AMERICA. It is now fifteen years, nearly half a generation, since I sub- mitted to the scrutiny of science and the public " A Hydro- graphic Map of North America," exhibiting in daguerr, Mcype the cardinal physical arrangement of our continent. Upon this, is exactly defined the Mountain Formation, enclosing the Plateau of the Table Lands. This subdivision of our country, amounting to one-third of the whole area, comes now in the bounding march of empire, to have a necessary, an intense, a pre-eminent interest to our people. Undoubtedly the scheme of Independence, inaugurated in 1776, sustained through the forti- tude of the Revolution, and consummated in the Union of 1787, 'hi [ 72 THE CENTUAL OOI.U UEtJION, ^•!li coMtcinpliitoJ and cuimuonccd a Coiitiiicntiil lloiiublio I In the ripening of tiwo, wo uro now calloJ upon to receive into this oon- tinentul Union, the iudepcnilent and equal Status of tlio Plateau, and to construct across it the continental railway. IIo''' it is that imuienso facts, dormant since creation, and noticed only to be unanimously rejected by human society, flash suddenly out of midnight obscurity, and by a single step plant themselves upon the very throne itself of public attuntion, may be thus illustrated : Columbus, intent upon discovering a direct route by sea to Oriental Asia, died without any thought of the now continent, or knowledge that ho had seen it. Amerigo Vespucci, a younger navigator, identified the new continent, established its existenco in the popular mind, and gave to it his own name, America. Thus, in 1842, commenced to agitate itself throughout America, the energetic geographical movement, to reorganize the 'joluum of central progress artificially stagnated in 3Iissouri since 1320. Exploration, conquest, the conversion of the wilderness, have since advanced with intense celerity. As is the case with all normal instincts, war, peace, domestic and foreign schemes of opposition, have each contributed to precipitate its advance and fire its activity. The American people are then, now advancing, victoriously to plant democratic empire co-ccjual with the area of the continent. The grand novelty which rises in front, is the Plateau of the Table Lands. This Plateau, enclosed within the Cordilleras of the Mountain Formation, possesses characteristics new to mankind, and about to arrest the attention and sway the mental energies of America. In the first place it is necessary, by reference and comparison, to identify this plateau; to discover what and where it is; and thence to go on and demonstrate its area, its climate, its capacity, and its geographical power in the world. Tin; I'l.ATKAU OF NOtlTII AMKHICA. 73 Asia contains two plateaux : South Amorica, one : Nurth America, one. Europe and Africa have great uiountaiu chaiiia, but uo phitcau. The iiauionso Plateau of Asia occupies the ccntrnl region of that continent, extending east and west from the Pontic Sea to Middle China. It is enclosed between the Uinulaya Mountains and those of Siberia, embracing the upper and lower jjlains of Thibet and the great lakes, the Caspian Soa, the fer: of Aral, and the Balkash Sea, with the rivers that flow into them. Thi'j great space is fenced imperviously from the oceans by a circuit of primeval mountains : it oxicn-l" cast and west 4S00 miles, between the latitudes 35° and 50°. Its average breadth, north and south, is 1200 miles. Such is the immense continental plateau of Asia, of which our knowledge is imperfect, as to its population and the grade of civilization they Oil. "We know that from primeval time, periodical swarms of conquering barbarians have descended down its flanks and deluged all the continents to the seas, convulsing empires and displacing all organized socie- ties. These convulsions have extended to the extremities of China, of India, of Europe, and into Africa. Such is a short and significant memorandum of this plateau, remarkable for the high antiquity, the numbers, and the uniforn. barbarism of its populations. It is entirely north of the Isothermal temperate zone. The Plateau of .?yria occupies the space between the Persian and lied seas : the Dead Sea is within it and the peninsula of Arabia : it has no large rivers, but is flanked by the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Mediterranean. It lies across the Isothermal temperate zone from edge to edge. Here is the original birth- place and cradle of human history and inspired civilization. Down its flanks have descended all the ethereal systems of the world, which enter the heart of men and inspire true religion, 'Ut ■i* • n 74 THE CENTRAL GOLD ItEQIOX. true knowledge, political liberty, and which erect, enlarge, and perpetuate civilized society. Hence have gone forth to the extremities of the earth and to the human race throughout all time, the genuine oracles of God revealing religion and liberty, to achieve the conquest of idolatry and barbarism, and displace them from the human heart. Beneath ihc equator, upon the summit of the Peruvian moun- tains, is the Plateau of the Andes. TIcrt was the delicate empire and system of the Ineas, which withered before Pizarro and the Spaniards as a vine before the tropical siroc. It contains the Lake of Tidcacii, and is vrithout rivers. Of excessive elevation and aridity, small in urea, arduous of access, and approochah! ? only through torrid heais which surround its base and flanks, this Platcju is entirely without the belt of the Isotherm-il tem perato zone. Such are the three other Plateaux! We now approu' h ** .> fourth — our own — the Plateau of North America. I have heretofore written of this Plateau : I speak with great diffidence; but of all the departments into which science has arranged the physical geography of the globe, this appears to me the most interesting, the most crowded with various and attractive features, and the most certainly destined eventually to contain the most powerful and c ilightened empire of the world. At pre- sent it is no r ore known or comprehended as it is, by the Amevi- can people, than was America itself by the poet Iloiucr. It is to them as muoh a myth as was then the continent of Atalanta. Nevertheless, it is of such great area as to contain within itself three great rivers which rank with the Nile, the Ganges, and the Danube in length, anJ five groat ranges of primary mountains. The x\.ndes, where it issues from the Isthmus of Tchuantepec, divides into the two Cordilleras of the north. The one pursues the shores of the Mexican Gulf; the other, the shores of the THE PLATEAU OF NORTH AMERICA. 70 'f Pacific Ocean. The Cordilleras, continuing to open from one another, run with great uniformity of bulk and altitude, through to the Polar Sea. At the 43d degree of latitude they are 1400 miles asunder, which is here the breodth of the Plateau. The eastern Cordillera is the Sierra Madro (the Mother Mountain); the western Cordillera is the Sierra Nevada de los Andes (the Snowy Andes). This then, the whole immense area encased within the Cordilleras from Tchuantepec to the Polar Sea, is the Plateau of North America ! The Cordill Tn have a general altitude of 12,000 feet ; the Plateau of GOOO. The Plateau is 4000 miles in length, having its direction from south-east to north-west ; its superficial area is 2,000,000 square miles. The portion within our territories is one-third of the whole country. Such, then, is the geographical position, the area, and the alti- tude of the Plateau. Its longitudinal position is remarkable, having its extremities withiu the equatorial and the polar zones ; but its greatest breadth and area is across the Isothermal tem- perate zone. Its whole western front is closely flanked by the Pacific Ocean ; its eastern front by the Gulf of Mexico and the Calcareous Plain. It erects itself continuously along between these, and cither connects them together or separates them asunder. The Plateau has a general confi;.xiration, simple as a unit in the physical geography of the earth ; the details are infinite and complicated, all marked by a grandeur in harmony with its vast- ness. In the elements which attract and perpetuate the social host of civilized men, nc other region can assert or hold commu- nion with it. It denominates as a standard, which can have no equal. It is subdivided into seven great basins, which succeed one another in order from the south towards the north. The basin of the city of Mexico is the first md most known. A cei 7 i ^^'^: r i 76 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. 4 If lake collects the waters of the basin, Which has no drainage to the sea. The second basin is the Bolson de Mapimi. The Laguna de Mapimi collects its waters, and is also unconnected with the sea. These basins are divided asunder by the Sierra of Queretaro, which connects the Cordilleras across. The third is the basin of the llio Bravo del Norte, which is divided from the second by the transverse mountain chain of the E,io Florida. This immense basin is drained by the rivers Del Norte, Pecos, and Conchos, which, uniting against the Sierra Madre, gorge it by a caiiou and form below the llio Grande of the Mexican Gulf. The fourth is the basin of the Colorado. The great Sierra Minibres divides these t'^o basins asunder after the manner of a back-bone, from which their waters descend down the reverse slopes. They are longitudinal, parallel, and overlap one another. Distinguished by stupendous volcanic phenomena, they pre- eminently constitute the metalliferous region of the world. Tbj confluent rivers of this basin, where they unite to form the Colorado, gorge the Andes by the wonderful canon of that name, and debouch into the California Gulf. The fifth is the basin of the Salt Lake, divided from the last by the great Sierra Wasatch. Within the vast circuit of its mountain rims, are contained many stagnant lakes receiving rivers of fresh water. This basin has no outlet to the sea. The sixth is the basin of the Columbia. The transverse chain of the Snake River Mountains parts these two last basins. Here is seen a most wonderful display of natural phenomena. The Snake and Columbia rivers, coming from opposite di.'octions and penetrating immense mountains, unite together, gorge the Andes at the Cascades, and debouch into the Nci'th Pacific Ocean. The seventh is the basin of Frazer river. The Olym- pian chain diviiles it from the Columbia. From hence the THE PLATEAU OF NORTH AMERICA. 77 Plateau continues its direction through a region as yet but little known, and opens out upon the Polar Sea. If a thread be drawn longitudinally through the Plateau, equi- distant from the Cordilleras, it will bisect a line of sedimentary lakes resting as in the bottom of a trough. These are the Lake of Mexico, the Laguna, Gusraan's Lake, the Great Salt Lake, the Pend'oreilles and Okanagan lakes. These waters have an average elevation of GOOO feet above the sea. The whole bulk of the Plateau has then the altitude of a primary mountain. If the stupendous features of nature arc allov. ed their solemnity of impression, and the majestic length and bulk of the Cordilleras be admitted, wc ma 7 now understand what is the immense sub- division of our continent encased within them. We may receive and handle it as a unit, assign to it a name, " The Plate a," and identify its extent, its distinctive profile and position. The climate of the Plateau is local and peculiar, but very uniform. The Cordilleras, by their altitude and remoteness from the sea, exclude the ocean vapors from the Plateau. A rainless atmosphere, perpetually dry, tonic, and transparent, is the normal condition throughout the year. Altitude and aridity united, temper the heat towar^'s the ccjuatorial zone; the same causes temper the cold towards the polar zone. The extremes of tem- perature for the day and for the night are great; for the seasons of the year scarcely perceptible. In one word, the temperature is uniformly vernal. Thus the genial and propitious climate of the isothermal temperate zone extends up and down the summit of the Plateau, and is folt to both estromities ! The soils of the Plateau are of the highest order of fertility, alike upon the moiintains, the valleys, and the mesas or extensive plains. The dry and serene atmosphere converts the grasses into hay, and, preserving them without decay, perpetuates the food of grazing animals around the year. This gives to pastoral ■ '&■ ■ i 78 THE CKNTRAL GOLD REGION. ngrlculture an infinite capacity for production and superlative excellence. Meat food, leather, wool, fowls, fish, and dairy food arc of spontaneous production. The soils, accumulated from the attrition and decay of lava and of carboniferous and sulphurous limestones, possess an exu- berant fertility. Spots of arid sands are few and insignificant j such as exist are from the auriferous granite, and contain placers of gold ! These soils, then, composed of the essential elements of fertility and production, and warmed by an unclouded sun, need only irrigation to ferment their activity. For this, nature has provided in the configuration of the surface and the infinite abundance of snowy mountains, of streams and of rivers descend- ing from their glaciers or bursting from their flanks. The descent from the longitudinal crests of the mountain ran2;es to the lowest levels, is everywhere by terraces or steppes arranged against the mountain flanks. Across these are channelled the gorges of the descending waters, coming from the gradually melting snows above. To guide these waters out upon these terraces and distribute it over the surface, involves neither exces- sive labor nor intelligence. It is understood and practised by the aboriginal people. The laborious systems of culture to provoke germination, the uncertain yield common to our people of the maritime region of timber and uncertain seasons, are here unknown and unnecessary. A perpetual sun and systematic irrigation (as in Egypt) dispense with laborious manual tillage ; the use of the plow is not indispensable : the waters for irrigation descend from a higher level and are constant. The laborious extermination of the primeval forest; fuel and refuge from the inclement seasons of heat and cold ; periodical and uncertain inflictions of drought and saturation; dependence upon an atmosphere ever changing and for ever fickle and trer. Jiic'"^'"; : none of these vicissitudes are seen or known upon the Plateau. • The adobe THE PLATEAU OF NORTH AMERICA. 79 brick, of unbuniod clay, constmcts fences and houses, inhabited more for domestic seclusion and convenience than from necessity. Upon the high mountain flanks, within the influence of constant snow, exist abundant forests with the rank summer grasses and vegetation ; the proportion of these is ample and harmoniously distributed. The Plateau presents itself, therefore, prepared and equipped by nature in all departments at every point, and throughout its whole length, for the immediate entrance and occupation of organized society, and the densest population. Of this we have an absolute illustration. It is where, upon the ter- races surrounding the Great Salt Luke, six or seven years has deveioped in the wilderness a powerful people, possessing in practice all the elements of mature and stable society; and, moreover, in the ease with which a numerous army has trans- ported and sustained itself, without disaster or calamity, at the same remote destination. Accessibility on to the Plateau, is wonderfully facile and unobstructed over a tranquil ocean on the one hand, by the Great Plains on the other. Amidst the chequered variety which distinguishes the surface of the Plateau, the most systematic order is discernible. The transverse mountain chains are parallel to one another. They, as well as the great rivers, have their courses due north and south, and are longitudinal in direction. The only exception is Snake river, and the Snake river chain of mountains. They exhibit a stupendous display of volcanic convulsions, extending over the basin of the Salt Lake. This is such as to excite the convi'^tion that in primeval times the Blue Mountains of Oregon were imperforated, and between them and the Sierra "Wasatch flowed a great river, discharging into the maritime basin of Cali- fornia. If this were so, the harmonious configuration of the Plateau, from end to end, would be undeviatiug. w 80 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. The groat mountain chains, six in nnmler, enumerated as the Sierra of Quoretaro, of the Rio Florida, the Sierra 3Iimbres, the Sierra Wasatch, the Snake River Mountains, and the Olympian chain, all form continuous divides across from one Cordillera to the other. They arc unperforutcd by any running waters, and block off the area of the Plateau into the seven isolated basins above named. Other mountain masses, branching from these sierras, protrude far out into the basins, arc capped with snow, and rival them in bulk aid altiiude. Such are the Sierra La Plata, the Humboldt Mountains, and the Rlue jMountains of Oregon. Spurs and minor mountain chains appear everywhere. The central regions of the basins are occupied by great plains, surrounding the sedimentary lakes, or forming the immense troughs of the rivers ; the pares arc amphitheatres secluded within the sierras, around the sources of the great rivers. The most remarkable are the Pare of San Luis, the Middle Pare, the South Pass, and the Lava Plain of Snake river. Elsewhere the groat rivers assault the flanks of the Sierras and gorge them athwart, traversing them by profound chasms, and foam for hundreds of miles between perpendicular walls of rock. Such canons are seen upon the Rio del Norte, the Colorado, the Snake river, and the Columbia, especially where they gorge the Cor- dilleras to reach the seas. Such is the infinite assemblage of mountains, plains, great rivers, in every variety and magnitude, that unite themselves to form the immense area of the Plateau op America ! The features of its geology are equally various, vast, and wonderful j both mountains and plains promiscuously appear, of carboniferous and sulphurous limestones, lava, porphyritic gruuite, <.'ulumnar basalt, obsidian, sand-stone, accomp.^uied by their appropriate contents of precious and base metals, precious stones, ooal, mar- bles, earth, thermal and medicinal streams and fountains; and :■; I ml i s' II 1 r '■'U or ^ lOJ THE PLATEAU OF NORTH AMEUICA, 81 all of these adorned by scenery for ever varying, fascinating, and Bubiiuio. For agriculture, both pastoral and arable, no region of the world is more propitious, not even the IJasin of the Mississippi, which is by its side. One remarkable characteristic pervades all the rivers ; their waters arc supplied (as are those of the Nile) from the high mountains, whence they descend. Such rivulets as abound in maritime countries are not known, but subterranean streams burst forth and again disappear. This systematic feature at once demonstrates the porous naturo of the soils and the ferti- lizing character of the waters. To revert again to the characteristic climate of the Plateau. It is continental, as contrasted with the 'maritime climates of regions open to the influences of the oceans and overflowed by their clouds and vapors. The Plateau is secluded from the pre- sence of these clouds and vapors by the uninterrupted envelope of the Cordilleras, surmounting the lino of perpetual snow These clouds and vapors lodge themselves upon the summits of the Cordilleras, and of such of the Sierras as have sufEcient altitude. From these the rivers are fed and descend to traverse the lower altitudes, and upon their summits are observable the atmospheric changes of maritime countries. But out upon the Plateau these changes do not reach. Hero the constant alterna- tions arising from rain-clouds are not felt. The atmosphere has a perpetual vernal temperature, unvarying, rainless, transparent, splendid, and serene. It is along the axis of the isothermal temperate zone of the northern hemisphere that revealed civilization makes the circuit of the globe. Here, the continents expand; the oceans contract; this zone contains the zodiac of empires : along its axis, at dis- tances scarcely varying from one hundred leagues, appear the great cities of the world, from Pekiu^ in China, to St. Louis, in T fit. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) © 1.0 I.I UiM2B |2.5 ^ 1^ 12.2 ^ 1^ 112.0 ly 1.8 1.25 1.4 1.6 M 6" - ► '^2. V] / y v^ Photographic Sdences Corporation £: d # S5§ .V % ^\^ o^ ^ '«^ 23 WEST ^t^'^ n%l^J WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716) 872-4503 ''^" 4^s 82 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. America. During anti(fuity this zodiac was narrow; it never expanded beyond the North African shore; nor beyond the Pontic Sea, the Danube, and the Bhine. Along this narrow belt, civilization planted its system from Oriental Asia to the western extremity of Europe, with a more or less perfect development. Modern times have recently seen it widen to embrace the region of the Baltic Sea. In America, it starts with the broad front from Cuba to the Hudson's Bay. As in all previous time, it advances along a line central between these extremes, in the densest form and with the greatest celerity. Here are the chief cities of intelligence and power, and the greatest intensity of energy and of progress. In 1820, this middle column of the centre had reached the western frontier of Missouri, and opened trails along to the Pacific Sea; the flanks were then behind in New York, Lower Canada, and in Georgia. In the overwhelming revulsion of all previous political precedents, which pervaded our Federal councils from 181G to 1828, central progress was forcibly interdicted. Abruptly stopped by an Jadian barrier and Draconic code, and forced to recoil for forty years, the flanks have come up to an even front upon the right and upon the left. Science has recently very perfectly established, by observation, this axis of the isothermal temperate zone. It reveals to the world this shining fact, that along it civilization has travelled, as by an inevitable instinct of nature, since creation's dawn. From this line has radiated intelligence of mind to the north and to the south, and towards it all people have struggled to converge. Thus, in harmony with the supreme order of nature, is the mind of man instinctively adjusted to the revolutions of the sun and tempered by his heat. Behold, then, in the geographical position and features of the Plateau of America, a crowning mercy and a miraculous light THE PLATEAU OP NORTH AMERICA. 83 displayed by God in our front, to illuminate for us the safe line of march and the whole area of expanding empire ! The central column of progress has already ascended on to the Plateau by the entrance of the South Pass, and established itself on the fertile terraces that surround the East Salt Lake ; it is established in New Mexico, upon the Upper Del Norte ; it pre- pares to enter by the passes of Pike's Peak and the Arkansas into the delicious pares that surround the gold region of the San J uan ; it is upon the Columbia and Frazer rivers ; it has also passed over the Cordillera of the Andes, and it presents itself fronting to the east and entering from California. Such is the Plateau of America, transcendent in position, im- mense in area, superlative in climate, fertility, and variety of configuration. Here are blended all the elements which distin- guish the other plateaux of the world. Its longitudinal form ; the rainless character and perennial brilliancy of atmosphere ; its perpetual vernal temperature; its alternate basins, pares, and snowy sierras ; its great rivers ; its indefinite and propitious capacity to produce and to sustain population j its gold, metals, and gems ; finally, its dominant position, beetling over the Asiatic ocean on the one hand, over the calcareous plain on the other hand, continuously from the Polar Sea to the equatorial bolt; aU these arise successively and together to announce to the American people their accession to the most attractive, the most wonderful, and the most powerful department of their continent and country. But the Plateau has the prestige of antiquity to commend it to favor. It was here that Cortes and the conquerors found the gorgeous empire of the Montezumi '■ ! a polished people, highly cultivated, numbering many milliors, and martyrs to their heroic devotion to the arts of peace ! The same marked characteristics still show themselves undiminished in the existing aboriginal 1 I ! .t !' Il i 84 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. people, thinly scattered to the extreme north : curious, intelligent, and credulous, heroic and timid, vibrating quickly from super- stitious veneration to despair. They invite and receive the white man as a new divinity, and then recoil, to shun him with hate implacable till death. This is my understanding of the Plateau of America, condensed to a general but a compact view. At my first entrance upon it in 1843, my impressions were far otherwise. Everywhere ap- peared novel phenomena; nature wore an impenetrable com- plexity of features alternately fantastic, sublime, bizarre, and incomprehensible. Time, reiterated exploration, study, and me- litation, have revealed it to me as it is. It is necessary to ponder long before we may penetrate the deep designs of Provi- dence, or be permitted to comprehend tiie austere and perfect order with which nature is everywhere replete. CHAPTER VII. THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. To command the gold and silver production of the world, and combine this with an intelligent policy, is to rule the world. The present ability of the American people to do this, will become manifest so soon as the geography of their territory shall become correctly understood by them, and its economical development made a systematic policy. A few standard facts in physical geography and geology being currently grafted in to guide the popular mind, the ease with which the people of America will / M i t' i hi n^ • f mmmm m 4 ! THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. 85 12 rise to the pinnacle of power and empire, becomes both simp and luminous of comprehension. I have in a former chapter defined to itself the " Great Plateau of the Table Lands," and enumerated the primary moun- tain chains, the rivers, and the elevated basins (seven in number) which chequer its immense area. This whole area, together with the great flanking Cordilleras, is of the primeval, auriferous for- mation. Although immense sand-stone and calcareous formations are frequent, and elsewhere igneous rocks have overflowe"d thousands of square miles, these overlay a uniform pediment of porphyritic granite, as uniformly yielding gold. The primeval, gold-bearing formation, therefore, very equally divides the area of the continent, half and half, with the calcareous formation, which latter abounds with the base metals. Thus, within the present territories of the American people, the precious stones and precious metals, platinum, gold, silver, quicksilver, exist in the as yet partially developed half, with the same abundance and universality of distribution, as do the base metals, mineral fuel, and calcareous rocks, within the States. Investigation within " the great calcareous plain" has so far progressed, that we trace along its diagonal axis a metalliferous band, traversing continuously from the neighborhood of Mier, on the Rio Bravo del Norte, to the junction of Coppermine river with the Arctic Sea. This band, resembling a sword-belt sus- pended from the shoulder and knotted upon the hip, traverses Texas in a direction north-north-east, crosses Arkansas and Southern Missouri diagonally, Northern Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and, brushing the extreme shores of Lake Superior, and Hudson's Bay, sinks into the Arctic Sea, near the Magnetic Pole. Everywhere within this band the calcareous rocks and soils are permeated with veins and native masses of the base metals, existing in a plenitude and purity sufficient to supply the •*!-':'1 ■'■[%] M > « m."o MAP OF THE COLD AND SILVER REGION or IMKKS I'KAK.SIKIMIAS SAN MAN AM> LAIM.ATA. Ill lOH III > Sow«r.Barnes. & C° 86 rnK CENTRAL GOLD REGION. i I world for ever. What is scon and known upon the surface, indicates a systematic order throughout in the relative positions of the different metals and their accompanying rocks and earths, as also in the localities where each e.\i.4ts in excess, and may bo said to culminate. Thus in the State of Missouri iron appears pro- truding above the general level, over an immense area, attracting exclusive attention and the appellation of Iron Mountains, by reason of the immense formation of this metal, which displays itself for many hundred square miles above and below the surface, in mass and in position. Copper may likewise be said to culmi- nate, where it displays itself around the extreme waters of the St. Lawrence, in mass and in position. Thus likewise of lead, where it appears in indefinite abundance by itself, in Wisconsin, Missouri, and Arkansas. The existence of the base metals of native purity in mass and in position, on an immense scale and within the calcareous forma- tion of the basins of the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, is now become established. The question arises, therefore, whether there exists within the primeval formation any parallel phenome- non, or any possibility of the existence, accessible to human research, of the precious stones, of gold, silver, and the kindred precious metals, in mass and in position. The possibility, and even more, the prohahillti/ of such a development resulting from persevering exploration among the Sierras of the plateau of the table lands, becomes distinct as their geological configuration is revealed. We have seen, in a former chapter, that the Cordillera of the Sierra Madre presents within our territory two remarkable focal culminations — the one grouped around the Wind River Moun- tain, the other surrounding Pike's Peak. These are about four hundred miles apart ; they are connected by the continuous chain of the Cordillera as by a curtain. Either one, contemplated by THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. 87 itself, fills the siimc sif^nificant placo upon our continent, as does the Alpine group surrounded by the kinjrdoins of Europe, in the topography of that continent. A parallel altitude, grander bulk, larj^er rivers, the sublimest scenery, a rainless atmosphere, and a foundation of broader and more solid dimensions, distinguish our continent. To all who ascend the great plains in the neighborhood of the 39th° of latitude, the snow-crested mass of Pike's Peak, 15,000 feet in altitude, and seeu at a distance of 100 miles from its base, is a pronjinent object. This peak beetles over the plains, pro- truding out to a promontory from the Cordillera, with which it is engrafted by an elevated ridge. From the northern flank of this ridge descend the waters of the South Platte, which, first form- ing the Pare of the Bayou Salado, flow out into the Plains to the north-east ; from the southern flank descends the Arkansas, which defiles by a carton, and issues forth into the Plains towards the south-east. The Cordillera, from whose eastern flanks both of these rivers descend, curving towards the cast, divides asunder the waters of the two great rivers, the Arkansas and the Rio Bravo del Norte. From the western flank of the Cordillera, opposite to Pike's Peak, protrudes similarly an immense moun- tain promontory toward the south ; this is the Sierra San Juan, the local name given to the northern culmination of the Sierra Mimbres. The Sierra Membres, departing from the Cordillera, under the 39th degree of latitude, traverses diagonally athwart the Table Lands, having a due southern course. It joins the Andes in the Mexican State of Durango, in latitude 23° 80'. Its course coincides with the 109th meridian. It is 1200 miles in length. It is a continuous mountain mass, dividing the Rio Bravo del Norte from the great Rio Colorado. The immense basins of these rivers rest against it as a backbone. The Sierra Mimbres is a 8 ml'- !'v-, f;. i; 11 88 THE CENTIIAL nOM) HKflloN. (I niouiitiiin clialti of tho fir>tt onlor in length, iiKissivencss, and altitude. It in entirely within the area of tho Plateau of the Table Ijftnds. ■ It aboiindrt in voleanic phenomena and pedriL'als of lava. Its on.«tern flank \n Heorcd by caflunH deseendinj^ to tho Del Norte; its western flank by the affluents of the Cordillera. Tho variety and grandeur of its geological features and mctallifo- rous (jualitics surpass all other mountains. It produces tho pre- cious stones. Withiii the States of Chihuahua and Durango its flanks are mined for silver, and contain twenty-one known deposits of that metal, which for throe centuries have supplied the silver and silver coin to the world. IJut the labors of tho Spaniards have not penetrat'-d beyo" 1 the Gila river. It is tho portion north of this river and within our territories which is most interesting. Throughout tho whole system of the Andes, it is upon the plateaux and high mountain flanks that mining is profitably pur- sued. Such is tho fact in Chili, Peru, Brazil, and Mexico. It is upon the Plateau of the Table Land.s within our territories that tho mctulllc resources chiefly abound. Of the wholo system, then, of primeval mountains, occupying tho western half of tho New World and uniformly auriferous, it is where the mountain summit spreads out to embrace the prodigious expanse of the three contiguous mountain ba.sins of the Del Norte, Colorado, and Salt Lake, that the internal vidcanio powers of the globe exhibit their efi'ects upon the most stupendous scale. From this pedi- ment, having an altitude of 7000 feet, rise the two bisecting mountain-ohains of the plateau, the Sierra Mimbres and the Sierra Wasatch, by which it is. subdivided into these three speci- fied elevated basins. This immense expanse of continent, pre- senting a uniform mass of the elevated auriferous rocks, places the equally grand abundance of the precious metals beyond con- jecture and above doubt. ■Hlm^ THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. 89 But the Kit) Colorado haviiif; gathered into its ono cliamicl tho large rivers witliin its basin, iiaiju;Iy, tho llio Verde, the Uio Orando of tlio West, the KagU-, Dolores, and Sail Ju»'» rivers, launches its whole force aj^ainst tlie interior flank of the Northern Andes, perforates tliis Cordillera by a caiton, tunnelled diagonally for 450 miles through tho very roots of the mountain mass, and reaches tho ocean at tho head of the Gulf of Cidifornia. It is this solitary fact in physical geography, new to human research, and of transcendent interest, that hero arrests and fixes tho attention of every mind. The dorsal mass of the Andes, thus perforated through from base to bT»e and athwart its coursv?, by a river of the first magnitude, is fonii' !, to its snowy summit, of the upheaved auriferous and ij. iclus rocks I Nowhere else throughout the globe has nftu^'o waged so stern a conflict, nor are similar phenomena elsewhere seen. Upon the other conti- nents, great rivers are seen descniding from the flanks of prime- val mountains, and gorging their outflanking spurs j here only is this universal law of nature defied, and the arcana of tho inner world revealed, surrounded by details of the austcrcst bublimity. Such is one of the stupendous novelties of our own mountain formation, which arrests tho attention and summons tho enthu- siasm of science and the energetic ambition of our people. Nature here abounds in a vast variety of formations, each upon the same miraculous scale, and all sublime. Volcanoes, whose flames and eruptions appear to have ceased but yesterday ; im- mense plains of selenite, fringed with fantastic mountains, called cristoncs (pendent cockscombs) ; mesa.'?, surmounted by prairie plains of wonderful fertility; vast regions of forest upon the irrigated mountain flanks ; crests of perennial snows; j^'^^'^^ of secluded and romantic beauty, having a perpetual verdure, and the temperature of perpetual spring ; canons, incaged by perpen- dicular mountain walls of roseate sandstone, wrought by corrosion ;N f -' :r m » -If 'J ' i « 1 ] I ? : i I i ■ 90 TIIK CENTRAL GOLD REGION. into every form of sculpture ; mountains permeated with broad veins of gold and silver; others having emeralds and the ruby; quicksilver is known to gush forth and deposit its globules in the rough meadows, called " sieiwekus." Thermal streams of all varieties of sanatory waters burst, as subterranean rivers, from beneath the overhanging peaks and mesas; mountains of por- phery and of rocksalt are numerous; vast mountain chains of carboniferous limestone, changing through all varieties of the richest marbles ; iron is found in mountain masses ; copper is scarcely less abundant. Petrifactions, obsidian, cornelians, agates, and chalcedony pave immense regions. Fuel of coal develops itself in beds of unrivalled extent, depth, and compact- ness; caves sparkling with transparent frescoes of crystallized selenite. An abundant flora of the most delicate forms, colors, and fragrance ; a perennial pasturage, overrunning the mountain flanks and summits, on which millions of aboriginal cattle subsist round the year, as fish within the sea; a fat fertility in the soil, at once uniform and universal. Rivers, streams, and fountains, absolutely infinite in number and of miraculous convenience and distribution. Over all this nether world, so chequered with a gorgeous variety of forms and productions, both upon the surface and beneath, floats the aerial atmosphere, shining with a perpetual splendor unknown in regions of less altitude and less remoteness from the sea. Dry, tonic, and exhilarating to the taste, infused with the direct solar warmth, filterc^I through the ether that sur- mounts the atmospheric vapors, the embalming atmosphere tints all nature with a silvery splendor, constantly shining, and con- stantly serene. The nights have an opposite, penetrating cool- ness when the solar rays are withdrawn and his direct beams are quenched ; the canopy of resplendent stars has a parallel sub- « THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. PI limity with the dayj the transparency of the atmosphere and its serenity are the same. Electric storms, short in duration and at long intervals, peri- odically renew the irrigating snows upon the mountains, refresh the air, temper its dryness, and restore the rivers. Why these basins and sierras of the Plateau should be espe- cially metalliferous, becomes evident by reference to a few radical principles of geological research. If quicksilver, water, oil, and alcohol be poured into a hollow pillar of glass, these liquids will subside, according to their specific gravities, into layers in tho above order ; if gold, iron, wood, and feathers be thrown in, they will similarly sink, the gold to the bottom, the iron to the quick- silver, the wood to the water, the feathers to the oil. If this column becomes solid by congelation, the same arrangement will remain, the gold being sedimentary to all, the iron beneath the stratum of frozen water, the wood beneath the oil. Everybody is familiar with the manufacture of shot; each globule of liquid lead precipitated through the air, is formed by gravity, into u sphere. The globe of the earth, 8000 miles in diameter, is similarly formed, the congealing substances arranging themselves, as the shells of an onion, from the centre outward, according to their several specific gravities. I have often boiled rice in an open camp-kettle, when traversing the mountains and my daily march was done ; the rice finally subsides in mass to the bottom, but the water remains of a milky whiteness. This whiteness is caused by minute, buoyant particles of rice, of altered pnecific gravity, suspended throughout the water; congelation into ice fixes in solid form both the mass beneath and the suspended particles. This homespun illustration makes clear the cause of the difi"usion of grain-gold throughout the auriferous rocks. To be found in mass and in position, it must be sought sedimentary, beneath these rocks. All that we have as yet found is granular, in scales 8* 1? i t 92 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. or minute lumps, set free from the upper rocks by disintegration or corrosion, and descending the mountain flanks with the sands abraded by the torrents. But we have seen that the Cordilleras and the Sierras of the Plateau are formed of the auriferous rocks broken from their horizontal beds and the edges rertically upheaved some two or three miles in altitude ; moreover, the Cordillera of the Andes is gorged athwart its roots by the caiion of the Rio Colorado. Is it not, then, possible — even probable — that sufficient exploration may here reveal to the miner the precious metals in mass and in position ? The scientific writers of our country adhere with unanimity to the dogmatic location somewhere of " a great North American desert." Travellers under their promptings, especially search for it. It has been located seriatim in advance of the settlements, in Kentucky, in the North-west, in Missouri, upon the Plains, in California. No explorer or witness who has failed to find a desert, is allowed credence or fame. Yet there is none, either in North or South America ; nor is the existence of one possible. On the contrary, the least fertile portion of our continent is the silicious maritime slope of the Atlantic States, whose climate is also the most inhospitable. Yet here is no desert, and none any- where else exists. This dogmatic mirage has lately receded from the basin of the Salt Lake ; it is about to be expelled from its last resting-place, the basin of the Colorado. The anatomy of a dwarf or an infant is identical with the anatomy of a giant. The details and relative proportions are the same. Habituated to a common medium standard, it is the size which is marvellous to us. Our senses are bewildered by the novelty ; our judgments wander — but the object seen is a reality. To antiquity — even to the modern day of Columbus — the At- lantic Ocean was a mysterious abyss, an impenetrable Tartarus. THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. 93 By degrees the field of the eye expands, the mind dilates, fact by fact is surmounted, at an acclivity is made easy by a stairway. The mirage is dissolved, the higher standard is reached, grows familiar, is approved, and is firmly embraced. It is to European minds that we owe the aa yet elementary sciences of physical geography and geology. The founders of these sciences have reared them by hiving the slowly-developed details of nature, collected by exhausting patience within the small basins surrounding the cities of their residences. Thus, within the small basins of the Thames, the Seine, the Arno j upon the flanks of the Alps, the Apennines ; in Calabria, and around Fingal's Cave, have heretofore been found the most popu- lar illustrations to nurse the infancy of these sciences. More than sixty years of intense meditation has inspired the cosmopoli- tan genius of Humboldt to scan the terrestrial globe with an expanded vision. He only has spoken worthily of America to her own people. In him we recognise the intrepid pioneer who invites us to understand the gigantic proportions of our own great country, its order, its symmetry, and its grand simplicity of configuration. As Columbus led forth navigation and com- merce, from its lengthened tutelage in the Mediterranean Sea, to expand itself over all the oceans and to every continental and every island shore ; so now, this venerable pioneer of physical science and the arts, marshals us on to penetrate the arcana of the land, to fit society to the broad foundation of the continents, and rear a comity of civilization coequal with the globe. It is in Europe that Columbus and Humboldt have had their nativity and their residence. It is for America that they have lived ; to us they belong ; apostolic citizens of our destiny ! The area of the apartment of the Plateau of the Table Land, embracing the three elevated basins of the Salt Lake, the Colo- rado, and the Rio Bravo del Norte, is equivalent to France, u k M ; ■' *f I ! I 1 . if: m ■ , : ,; w vl n • ' &■ ■ 'M li 94 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. Austria- Switzerland, and Cisalpine Italy combined; its rivers are equal to the Danube, Rhine, Rhone, and Po ; its metallife- rous mountains are pre-eminent in bulk, number, and grandeur. In readiness to receive and ability to sustain in perpetuity a dense population, it is more favored than Europe. Fertility of soil of the highest order, is the dominant and uniform character- istic of this immense region. The mountains are rarely abrupt or rugged. They are surmounted by mcsas^ descending by gigantic terraces called inesillas. The densely crystalline prime- val rocks yield but slightly to atmospheric corrosion in the regu- larity of a continental climate and seclusion from the sea. It is the decay of lava, selenite, and carboniferous limestone that forms the soil. The pastoral fertility is developed by nature, which sustains its aboridnal herds as fish in the rivers and in the sea. The arable fertility needs the care of man, and awaits the econo- mical development of artificial irrigation. For the reception of this system, the whole structure and contour of the surface is fitted, and the natural waters abundant. Reflection wiU recall to memory the magnificent empires of people, possessing a highly-advanced, but imperfectly-organized, civilization, found established along the summit of this Plateau, conquered by Cortes, Alvarado, and PizXrro. On the summit of the Southern Andes, in Chili, Peru, and around Quito, on the Northern Andes in Central America, and Mexico, dwelt twenty millions of population in the aggregate. Three centuries of sub- jugation have dwarfed this aboriginal people to one-half of their original numbers, and radically altered their religion, their lan- guage, and traditional manners. They have touched the lowest point of decadence, from wKich they will again slowly ascend. This people had no fixed science in physics, religion, or politics, to prop and protect their system from the shocks of time ; no navigation, no principle of perpetuity. These have now come to THE SIERIIA SAN JUAN. 95 them with the European column, bringing with it the ark of regeneration. The peculiar agricultural and sonal system of the Mexicans under the Montezuraas, extended up the basin of the Rio Bravo del Norte to the base of the Sierra San Juan. Our people are marching to the same point from an opposite direction, bringing with them the social habits of the isothermal zone and a maritime climate. I have spoken of this remarkable focal culmination of the Sierra Madre, from which two snowy promontories protrude, back to back ; Pike's Peak to the north-cast beetles over and subsides into the Plains ; the Sierra San Juan, to the south, beetles over the Plateau, and subsides into the Sierra Mimbrcs. Kadiant mountains and streams diverge from this point in every direction, and form abundant passes, direct and. practicable, to and fro, between the basin of the Mississippi and the Plateau. The three remarkable pares — the Middle Pare, the Bayou Salado, and the Bayou San Luis — all approach close together the divid- ing crest of the Sierra Madre, over whose summit they imme- diately communicate. I know not how adequately to delineate this knotted group of all the colossal elements of nature. To submit the uncmbellished facts is all that is necessary, were this possible, where the elements in compact contiguity are so many, so varied, and each of such colossal grandeur. To exaggerate is far from my inten- tion ; to enumerate the details of nature, as I have seen them, with austere simplicity, is my aim. Behold, then, to the right, the Mississippi Basin ; to the left, the Plateau of the Table Lands ; beneath, the family of Pares ; around, the radiating backs of the primeval mountains; the primary rivers, starting to the seas; a uniform elevation of 8000 feet ; a translucent atmosphere, a thousand miles removed from the ocean and its influences ; a chequered landscape, in which no 11 m% si- J ffl 'fl h 96 TUB CENTRAL GOLD UEGION. element of sublimity is left out; fertility and food upon the surface ; metals beneath ; uninterrupted facility of transit ! Behold the sublime panorama which crowns the middle region of our Union, fans the fire of patriotism, and beckons on the energetic host of our people. The American people number thirty millions in strength. Two millions change annually their place of residence. The oracular instinct of conquest burns in every heart j this is the continental mission of '70, proclaimed from the traditions of Jamestown and of Plymouth Hock, and thence bequeathed to posterity ! While I write, the news arrives that thT column of pioneers (engaged during three years in planting the State of the Kansas basin) has passed over the rim of the Calcareous Plain, and debouched upon the base of the primeval mountains. Gold is found at the first trial and upon the threshold at Cherry Creek, upon the eastern flank of Pike's Peak. A single season will suffice for them to ascend, by the Arkansas and the Bayou Salado, to the mother crest of the Cordillera, whence the basins and sierras of the Plateau expand beyond : 1 I! «' The clouds above us to the white Alps tend, And we must pierce them ; and survey whate'er May be permitted : as our steps we bend To that most great and growing region, where The earth to her embrace compels the powers of air." Let us here pause to reflect whether the traditional history of our race does not, on its very front, illustrate what prominence awaits this longitudinal Plateau of our continent, descending thus by terraces into the Mississippi Basin on the east, to the Pacific Ocean on the west! The existence of th- empires of Montezuma and the Incas exhibits upon these Table Lands the ocly examples where our aboriginal people rose above an absolute i THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. 97 barbarism, elsewhere upon the lowlands as universal and as level as the waters of the sea. All around the head of the Mediterranean, where it penetrates the Asiatic continent, this basin is encirplcJ by ?> plateau, or amphitheatre of elevated plains extending round from Suez, continuously through Syria, Asia Minor, and into Greece. This descends by terraces to the sea shore. Upon this Plateau have been, among others, the cities of Babylon, Palmyra, and Damas- cus ; upon the slopes to the sea, Alexandria, Tyre, Jerusalem, Tarsus, Byzantium, and Athens ! What cardinal element have we, in the immense mental system of our civilization, which has not come to us and with us from thence? Hence (from the Plateau of Syria) have resounded through all time and into every heart, the direct oral teachings of Jehovah and of Jesus : hence have issued forth the miraculous alphabet and the numerals : hence have come the cereals and animals of our agriculture, wine, and fruits : hence our religion, law, social manners, history, music, poetry, and arts : from hence, as from the cradle of nativity, have issued forth for our inheritance, to abide with us for ever, " the unconquerable mind and freedom's holy flame I" Everybody is acquainted with the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic Ocean. This colossal stream, recoiling round the circular sea of the tropics, and receiving the oozy sediment of the Amazon, the Orinoco, the Magdalena, and the Mississippi, launches out into the middle ocean, li ' silent current rolls the tepid waters and sandy iUhris of two continents a thousand leagues along the bot- tom of the ocean, to bank them up upon the margin of the Northern Sea, to form the submerged continent of Newfoundland, and the telegraphic plateau. Similarly has flowed, for fifty centuries, along the isothermal axis, the human current, which bears with it the immortal fire of civilization revealed to man. This central current has reached the Plateau of America, up f I ^1 1^ 1 .' i Vff h 98 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. which it will ascend to plant the sacred fires over its expanse, and shine upon the world with renewed eflfulgence. Such is the era, the arrival of which is announced to us by the development of the gold production in the interior, domestic region of our con- tinent. CHAPTER VIII. > i' THE SOUTH PASS OF AMERICA. From the previous chapters, it will be perceived that one who travels from Paris to Pekin, by the direct route of New York, Independence, and Astoria, traverses these physical divisions : 1st. The Atlantic Ocean. 2d. The Atlantic Maritime Slope. 3d. The Alleghany Mountains. 4th. The Basin of the Missis- sippi. 5th. The Cordillera of the Sierra Madre. 6th. The Plateau of the Table Lands. 7th. The Cordillera of the Snowy Andes. 8th. The Pacific Maritime Slope. 9th. The Pacific Ocean. This route brings into immediate juxtaposition the great per- manent reservoirs of human population and activity — Wcsfern Europe, America, and Oriental Asia. If it be practicable to accommodate all the international transportation of the tJiree con- tinents by this route, a prodigious condensation of economy in the interchanges of the products and people of the world will be accomplished at a blow. The distance of transit will be reduced from the circumference of the globe to the length of its diameter — the time to one-tenth. Steam by sea and land will form an uninterrupted trip by two ocean ferries, connected by a transit , , f 1 1 1 1 » , . ,„ ■■' , ,...,v,^. ^. ..ft ••• ■. » " J \ • 1 ; 1 t 1 1 I 1 1 1 1 -s «- 1 i ! i 1 i 1 1 .^ ^ 1 • • . , . ^i.^:- :, -^v- : -,:,>^.*t '-f iSVV ,-,* .^,.-'-fi- ,„„.,._.„..„Jy,.. .' ^.,-,,.ie»*»-^j^i»wi'-t^'- - -■' • ,■-' ': *v .. ' t ^ i ;';^ ( '■' ^^ ~'^~" '^ '■ ill; n i l^ >fv' iUli;;, •'I 'I I, ) I ! „" ' ) f > ' ! M 1 ' t 1 i ( m Hudson at VY iHi-^ k — - — THE SOUTH PASS OF AMERICA. 90 railway. Thus will be solved the geographical problem which has agitated the world before and since Columbus. Practical experiment has exhausted all discussion as to the passage of the two oceans by steamers, and of the American continent by railway, so far as the Atlantic Maritime Slope, the Alleghany, the Easin of the Mississippi, up to the wall of the Cordillera of the Sierra Madre, and the Pacific Maritime Slope, are concerned. Serious arguments of any difficulties within these divisions of the whole distance are settled and have ceased. All that remains enigmatical to the public mind, and unresolved, is the interval occupied by the Cordillera of the Sierra Madre, the Plateau of the Table Lands, and the Cordillera of the Sierra Nevada, which conjointly form the " mountain formation of North America," extending continuously from Tchuantepcc to the Arctic Sea. How this complicated barrier of immense mountains, 1000 miles in breadth, is to be surmounted, is now obtaining its illustration by the establishment of the Mormons in Utah, and the military expedition sent against them. It is by the South Pass, which is the gateway of the American people and their commerce to Asia, and the onlj/ one, as exclusively as is the Strait of Gibraltar that of exit out into the Atlantic, to the nations of the Mediterranean, now and in all ages passed. There exists between the Basins of the Mediterranean and of the Mississippi, a perfect identity in position, physical character- istics, historical prestige, and social concord. A comparison of the one with the other will furnish a luminous illustration, to explain the present generation of the American people to itself, and to guide all future generations. The area in square miles of these two basins is the same. Four-fifths of the surface of the former is occupied by the salt-water expanse of the Pontic, Pro- pontic, Adriatic, and Mediterranean Seas, into which flow the Danube, the Nile, the Po, and the Rhone, rivers having narrow 9 Q m m I oil IDS !! I ! ff 100 THE" CENTRAL GOLD REGION. valleys and Imperfect navigation; protruding out between these seas are the peninsulas of Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Fpain, and the African coast, all filled full Avith mountain vortebia3, rugged and poorly adapted to agriculture. The sea surface is stormy and dangerous to navigation, the rivers are short and deficient in channel, the shores are impracticable to land except where har- bors are constructed, and the inhabitable lands arranged in rugged and isolated masses. Yet, from the first pioneer voyage of Hercules down the Mediterranean, to the Pillars which still immortalize his energies, to the present age, there has existed a certain imperfect compact in the political, social, religious, and commercial relations of the people of the Mediterranean. The vestal fire of civilization has never been entirely quenched. It has spread out to illuminate the whole area, both under the political system of the Roman Empire and the religious system of the Roman Church. It has overrun the brim, and is inherited by the modern European nations, who are the dispersed progeny of Rome. The " Basin of the Mississippi" fills more perfectly the tem- perate zone. The counterpart of the salt-water surface is a delicious, undulating plane, everywhere channelled by rivers navigable to their very sources : navigation is everywhere as safe and constant as upon a canal ; the line of accessible shore is in length absolutely infinite ; the soil is uniformly calcareous, arable, of inexhaustible fertility, and sufficiently irrigated from the clouds ; no mountain, no sheet of water, no swau-p is any- where found to break the uniform productiveness of this immense expanse ; no rapids to interrupt the universal navigation jf the rivers. Europe is bi^iocted by a broad mountain chain traversing it continuously from Gibraltar to Siberia, under the names of the Pyrenees, Alps, Carpathians, and called by the Romans " di'cor- i '4' THE SOUTH PASS OF AMERICA. 101 tia aquarum" (the divide of waters). What, therefore, is out- side of the Basin of the jMediterranean is, for the most part, in the inhospitable " Basin of the Baltic," its climate and general features not unlike Labrador. All along the northern front of the " Mississippi Basin," expand beyond an imperceptible barrier, the "Basins of the St. Lawrence and Saskatchewan," similarly calcareous, similarly abounding in navigation, and only moderately inferior to it in fertility, in geniality of climate, and in area. The surface, then, of the European Basin is salt-water and mountainous. That of the American Basin a plain of calcareous, arable soil. The former has a maritime climate, the latter a continental climate, superior in dryness and salubrity. The former has a restricted and dangerous, the latter an abundant and safe navigation. In land-transportation the contrast is still more strikingly diverse and favorable to the Mississippi. The Basin of the Mediterranean, under the rule of the Roman Emperor Trajan, attained a population of 07ie hundred and thirty- one millions. This was then ohiefly congregated in the eastern half; it is now in the western half, in which direction the ^j?'e.s- sure always preponderates. At present the Basin of the Missis- sippi contains twelve millions of inhabitants. It will conveniently sustain tioelve hundred millions. This is noio an immense em- pire. Comparisons drawn from history or existing empires, arc very feeble illustrations of what is to grow up on this already radicated foundation. All the features of nature, all the prin- ciples of progress, social and political, are here original; this undulating plain, uniformly and universally calcareous; this cir- cular conGguratioU; running flush out to the icpelling lines of the Arctic and Torrid Zones; this miraculously-balanced variety of temperature, climate, prairie, forest, land, rivers, rain, and sun- shine, minerals and contiguous expanses, now arable and now ■w i Ur 102 THE cl&NTRAL GOLD REGION. i I; M past„ -^,1 — all these constitute an original order of physical facta, simple and symmetrical, hut sublime. The rising of consecutive States out of the wilderness, erected hy spontaneous industry; the unabating deluge of men daily pouring forth and daily pushed onward by the hand of God; the rushing march of empire; the profound internal order and systematic economy which pervades and guides this mass, more numerous than many armies; the instinct of discipline and self-government everywhere felt and always obeyed ; no central military or religious power anywhere seen — all these array themselves to announce the presence of principles and power intensely original and inteuL;ely potential in social and politi'jal influences. Memory will suggest how slow and narrow, until quite modern times, has been the column of organized civilization on the old continent. The whole African coast of the Mediterranean ia socially semi-barbarous, and has been so uniformly since the deluge. Upon and beyond the Danube its permanence is quite recent and its light still crepuscular. Contrast the ele»"ents of society and their history, filling the face of Europe from viibraltar to Norway, with that of America from Cuba to Hudson's Bay, both fronting to the west ! In the former appear distracting nationalities, domestic force and fraud, no systematic union, no moral harmony, no uniformity of races, no intelligent concord in relip:ions. In the latter is a compact front, where all these elements reversed are blended in civic concord, fiicd by a common hope, inspirdfd by one destiny, and having one God, one heart, one aim, and one supreme ambition. Such are the characteristics of the two basins, contrasted the one with the other. They both slope to the Atlantic Ocean, and are face to face. In the mythological history of Hercules we read the first intelligent record of that struggle for dominance over the Mediterranean, which has been ever since a drama of THE SOUTH PASS OP JWVIERICA. 103 uninterrupted acts. In this drama appear tlic tragic sieges of Troy, Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Alexandria, Byzantium, Home, Rhodes, Gibialtar, Malta, and Sebastopol; among a thousand combats by sea and land the naval victories of Salamis, Actium, Lepanto, Aboukir, and Trafalgar. From history, -which is tht narrative of this struggle of four thousand years, is apparent the perpetual incubation of military brute force always in the majority ; civic virtue and municipal independence as uniformly in the mincrity, checkered by heroic resistance and perpetually- recurring martyrdom. It has been the design of the American continental republic, from its first colonial origin, to reverse this doom J to elevate civic concord to the administration of political power ; to sustain it there ; to dispense with the whole scheme of military despotism without respect to its antiquity, its arro- gance, or the heretofore universal success of its subtle union of hypocrisy and force ; to inaugurate for mankind a code of political practice, which shall bring the science of government into accord with the divine code of morals and religion, cradled 18G0 years ago in the manger of the stable of Bethlehem ! This mission of civic empire has for its oracular principle the physical characteristics and configuration of our continent, wherein the Basin of the Mississippi predominates as supremely as the sun among the planets. The Basin of the Mediterranean is then a surface of barren sea, with mountain masses, imperfectly fitted for population, pro- truding above it; that of the Mississippi is a calcareous plain of haul, everywhere interlaced and ramified with navigable arteries. Both are traversed centrally by the zodiac of empires within which the current of civilization has flowed in all ages from east to west. This current, descending the 3Ieditorrancan, and drawn in by the converging continents of Europe and Asia, pours forth its whole concentrated volume through the supreme pass 9* w 1 -I' '3 m V : : ■ i. 4:) ^4 104 THE CENTUAL GOLD REGION. known now and in all ages as tlio " Pillars of Ilorulcs." What is aceoniplislied by this convergence of the continents of the old world, in reducing all the outlets of navigation, and consequently of all commerce, to the single Pass of Hercules, is still more absolutely accomplished Tor our continent by the "Mountain Formation." This is the South Pass of North America, the exact equivalent single pass, in our ctutinent of /t/JuZ-basins, to the wa/cr-pass of Gibraltar among the wa.er-basins of the African hemisphere. The latitude is 42° 24', the longitude 109° 26'. This is the same latitude as Boston, Bayonne and Marseilles, in France, and of Trieste and Constantinople. To delineate the features of the South Pass, so that the topo- graphy of the plain, the prodigious sierras which surround it, the rivers radiating out of it, and the gorges by which they com- mence their gentle declinations to the seas, may all be grouped in one tjlancCf as a portrait in daguerreotype, is not easy to be done. The plain is elevated 7500 feet above the sea; it is beyond or tvest of the Cordillera ; its surface of clay is so absolutely smooth as to admit of uninterrupted vision, as over water ; it is in shape a triangle, having very acute angles at the northern and southern points, and one very obtuse at the source of Sweetwater, which is the eastern point. The western side, 200 miles in length, corresponds with the bed of the Bio Verde (Green river), run- ning directly from north to south, to which the whole plain slants ; immediately along its western bank rises the Sierra Wa- satch, forming a continuous mountain barrier towards the west; opposite the centre of this hypothenuse is the gorge of Sweet- water enveloping the eastern point of the triangle ; the remaining sides extend hence, the one to the north-west, the other to the south-west. Along the former, in length 109 miles, rises the stupendous mass of the Cordillera, known here locally as the " Wind Biver Mountain j" along the latter a similar mass of the THE SOUTH PASS OF AMEUICA. 105 Cordillera, but of inferior altitude, kuown locally as the ''Table Mountain." The area of the Plain of the South Pass is about equivalent to that of New Jersey. Its surface is of clay, resembling kaoline, of which porcelain is made, and has the a'isolute smoothness of that material filtered through water and compacted by pressure. From the three angles of its rim issue the Sweetwater, flowing east into the Platte and to the Atlantic ; the Snake river, flowing north-west to Walla- Walla, and thence with tlie Columbia to the North Pacific ; and the Rio Verde, south into the Bay of California ; by whose western affluent also, Black Fork, exists the easiest egress into the Basin of the Great Salt Lake. Most probably no spot on the globe hD?> grouped into one view so much of intense grandeur in the variety and number of its physical wonders. From a single ice-crowned summit of the Wind River Mountain are seen the gorges of the Missouri, Yel- lowstone, Platte, Colorado, and Snake rivers, all radiating from its base, and each the equal of the Danube in length and the volume of its waters. Five primary chains of snowy mountains here culminate together to this central apex, from which they radiate out between the rivers ; the dorsal mass of the Cordillera reaching towards the north to the Arctic Sea, and towards the south to the Antarctic ; the Sierra Wasatch, the Snake river chain, the Salmon River Mountains, all crested with snow, and each having an unbroken length of 1000 miles. The South Pass is 1400 miles from Astoria. It is the same distance from St. Louis. It is, then, in the middle region of the continent. It is the only pass through the " Mountain Forma- tion" from hence as far as the Isthmus of Tchuantepec. From this comes the name South Pass, as being the most southern pass to which you may ascend by an affluent of the Atlantic, and step immediately on to a stream descending uninterruptedly out to M m ir- If I > 106 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. the Pacific. This name is as ancient as the Pass itself. Into it concentrate the great trails of the buffalo — geographers and road- makers before the coming of man. The Indian, the Mexican, and the American, successors to one another, have not deflected from the instincts of the buffalo, nor will they, whilst the prime- val mountains last in their present unshattered bulk. This is the continental highway of the people, through which exclusiveli/ millions have already poured to and fro with their- children, their free principles, their cattle — assembled in caravans, on foot, and mounted — with wagons, hand-carts, knapsacks, and bringing with them their household gods, and the tabernacle of civil and religious liberty. The South I*ass is the on/i/ and exclusive continental i>ass. The outlet at the eastern angle is known as the gorge of the Sweet- water river, which descends to the Platte j that at the northern angle as the gorge of Grosventre river, which descends to the Snake river. These are both short and slender mountain streams, accomplishing their descent in beds of the extremest sinuosity, but without abrupt waterfalls. They both flow from chasms in the flanks of the immense mass of the Wind River Mountain, which here forms an arc fronting to the west, and issue out upon the plain. But the plain is traversed by a gentle divide, parallel with the mountain base, and no more distinguish- able than the bevel given by engineers to any ordinary street. Against this these two streams are deflected into opposite courses, the former to burrow its way around the arc of the mountain to the south-east, the other towards the north-west. To one who observes this from the plain, there is presented a similar miracu- lous configuration of the land, such as displays itself to one who, navigating the Propontic Sea, beholds the Dardanelles upon his right hand and the Bosphorus on his left. Moreover, the sky is without clouds and rainless, the atmosphere intensely brilliant^ Mf i .,•■11.' , "1 THE SOUTH PASS OP AMERICA. 107 temperate, and serene, encompassed round by scenery of the austerest sublimity. But we have seen that the elevation of the South Pass is 7500 feet, and that Snake river runs contbiuousli/ out of it by the most direct and favorable course, of 1400 miles, to the Pacific Sea, tunnelling consecutively the Blue or Salmon River range of mountains, the Snowy Andes, and all other trans- verso ranges and obstructions. Here is, then, an uninterrupted water declination through and across the whole "mountain for- mation," descending by a plane, dipping five feet to the mile ! From tlie adjacent eastern rim of the Plain of the South Pass runs out Sweetwater into the Platte, which, tunnelling consecu- tively all the outlying ranges of the Cordillera of the Sierra Madre, forms a similar uninterrupted water declination, in a very straight line of 1400 miles to St. Louis, descending by the same average dip of five feet per mile. Everybody is familiar with the existing railways which, radiating from St. Louis and pursuing coatinuously the plains of the Ohio and St. Lawrence, outflank the Alloghanies between Syracuse and Rome, and descend by the Hudson river to New York. The sciences which delineate and explain to the human under- standing the details of matter, as it fits itself in myriads of mil- lions of variegated forms to fill out the supreme order of the universe, develop nothing so interesting to the heart of civilized man as this single sublime fact of physical geography in the supreme engineering of the Creator. This line of gently-undu- lating river-grades, girdling the middle zone of our Union from sea to sea, in one smooth, continuous and unbroken cord, 3G00 miles in length, fitting the isothermal axis of the temperate climates, crossing one river only at St. Louis, and outflanking all the mountains, presents to us the counteipart of that water-line of the Old World, commencing at the extremity of the Euxine, li^r I'. 'f! ■-•* ^W. >x n '■ p i i 108 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. passing down the Mediterranean, and debouching out into the ocean. From the South Pass to Mexico the primary mountain chains spread out. They, together with the great rivers which divide them, are longitudinal, parallel, and uupcrforated. The rivers grow deeper as they itpproach the sea, increasing the altitude and abruptness of the mountain flanks, which overlap one another, and increase and complicate the mural barriers. No- where, within this interval, are the mountains reduced to a single dividing barrier, nor is there presented anywhere the essentials of a practical pass. Nowhere is to be found a suffi- cient depression in the mountain crest, nor a continuous grada- tion from the summit-cre.st, prolonged to the cast and to the west, down both declinations to the seas. The South Pass is elevated 7500 feet above the seas, from which it is some 1500 miles remote. It has, then, a continental climate, whose atmosphere is tempered by the altitude and by the absence of moisture. Ilencc, an intaise serenity is the pro- minent feature, perpetual sunshine, a tonic and salubrious air, a vernal temperature. Along the continental line the changes from the continental to the maritime climate, and vice versd, graduate themselves with the same delicate scale as the surface slopes. Uniformity of climate, from sea to sea, is then so nearly approached, that it actually exists all along this line in absolute plenitude. Human society, in the current course of ages, vibrates to and fro through periods of barbarism. God and Nature endure constantly eternal and perfect. Manners, reli- gions, policies, change and become barbarous or the opposite, as they harmonize with God and Nature. Science develops how this harmony may bo known and practised. As we recede from it, turbulent force dominates, numbers are dwarfed, civilization ; ■! j.' THE SOUTH PASS OF AMERICA. 109 withers, liberty ia lost : as wc approach it, civilization expands, charity smiles, order and empire rise. Nature here for us, upon our Continent, amidst a stupendous vastness of configuration, preserves an austere simplicity, which guides the instinctive ijlancc of empire with unerring certainty. Hero is that continental line, the discovery of which mankind has awaited with the keenest curiosity, in the ripeness of time the hope of humanity is realized ; it is by this that our people are about to construct the Continental llaiUvay. Like the reful- gent girdle with which antiijuity bound, in one chorus, the sisterhood of the Graces, we will behold united, by one Zone, the three sister Continents, Europe, America, and Asia. Here, through the heart of our territory, our population, our states, our cities, our farms and habitations, will traverse the broad current of commerce, where passengers and cargoes may at any time or place embark upon or leave the vehicles of transpor- tation. Down with the parricidal treason which will banish it from the land, from among the people, to force it into the barren ocean, outside of society, through foreign nations, into the torrid heats, along solitary circuitous routes, imprisoned for months in great ships ! This Continental Railway is an essential domestic institution, more powerful and more permanent than law, or popular consent, or political constitutions, to thoroughly complete the great system of fluvial arteries which fraternize us into one people; to bind the two scahuards to this one continental Union, like ears to the human head j to radicate the foundations of the Union so broad and deep, and establish its structure so solid, that no possible force or stratagem can shake its permanence, and to secure such scope and space to progress, that equality and pros- perity shall never be impaired or chafe for wan of room. The pious veneration spontaneously awarded by the human heart to men, whose lives exhibit exalted devotion and exalted I: < ' t'l H ; 110 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. • ri! Bucccss, inspirinp; and perpetuating in society the " prina'plc of virtue nlwu^x in r.crrcisc," has placed Hercules, the pioneer of the system of the Mediterranean, in the number of the immortal gods of antic^uity : a constellation in the ethereal canopy diur- nally renews his memory, his name, and his actions. Modern times, uoccptinp; the tradition, behold it stamped upon the coin of Spain and the Indies, to obtain a circulation as universal and familiar as the human race. Yet the American people pursue the planting of empire, advancing with intense celerity, moving to the front according to a system understood and self-disciplined, marching with the cadence of an army of innumerable legions, uniting in one homogeneous ordi^r,- with the same energies, a single aim, and rushing to consummate a common destiny. Shining in the front of this marching host, the pioneer and exem- plar, " first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen," appears the form of Washington, whoso oracular wisdom and intrepid constancy inspired the normal councils where its mould was cast, its strategy fixed, and its unalterable mission first inaugurated. Lot this name, then, find a monument around whose base the condensed column of progress shall file to and fro during all future ages ! Whore the summit crest of our continent is found ; the focal source of its rivers and its sierras ; where the cloud-compelling Cordillera culminates over the " Gateway of empires ;" let these commemorate this name im- mortally, while the grass shall grow and the waters run, as firm and enduring as the loftiest mountain. Let the children of the world be taught to say : Behold the Pass and the Pillars of Washington ! The history of the human ra'O arranges and gauges itself by generations. Thirty-three years are estimated to be the period of control exercised by each generation over the long life of a nation. As each succeeds its predecessor, the work of progress li'l' ; ■% u rl i ft H if r I' 11 J. I i)i 18 rcmvigoi The prcsen und iiiuugu The firs tincDtal ll( tho contitu that ocean across the generution onward to round the dhuension> As wc wisdom, 01 surpass th tho lumins day:— The m Mississipp hend its characteri its centre 1 f ( THE ORKAT HASIN OF THE MIHSTSSITPI. Ill is rcinvigoratcd, and frcsli .power and now conquests arcuniulato. Tlio present is the srvvuty-lhtrd year of the Federal (yonatitution, and inauj,'uratc3 the third generation of our united people. The firnt gave to us this sacred Union, and founded our con- tinental Republic. The secuml luis fllled up the Atlantic half of the continent with states, secured the maritime connections with that ocean and with Europe, and hu.'j blazed for us the way across the continent to the Pacific and to Asia. We, the third generation, rccijivc .Vom them the pious task to plant states onward to that cccan; to complete the zouiut ot traturnal mitions round the gli'be, and to set deep and firm to their outward dimensions the foundations they have laid. As wc assume our ta&k, illuminated by the example of their wisdom, energy, and glory, intent to equal them in the first and surpass them in the rest, may we not repeat this invocation to the luminary of the universe, as he departs to usher in another day:— " The weary sun htth made a golden sot, And, by the brighr track of his fiery car, Gives token of a goodly day to-morrow t" it ' \n CHAPTER IX. THE GREAT BASIN OF THE MISSISSIPPI. The most remarkable feature of America is the Basin of the Mississippi. As yet the popular mind does not clearly compre- hend its dimensions, and the understanding of its physical characteristics is indistinct and vague. It is bisected through its centre by a supreme artery, which above St. Louis has received 10 ri! :^ ■I 3 ii I I -'I 112 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. the name of the Missouri, and below, the Mississippi river. This is 5000 miles in length, end its surface is a continuous inclined plane, descending seven inches in the mile. Into this central artery, as into a common trough, descend innumerable rivers, coming from the great mountain chains of the continent. All of the immense area thus drained, forms a single basin, of •which the mountains form the rim. It may also be called an amjMheatre, embracing 1,123,100 miles of surface. This has been, during the antediluvian ages, the bed of a great ocean, such as is now the Gulf of Mexico or the Mediterranean, above the sur- face of which the mountains protrUdcd themselves as islands. Gradually filled up by the filtration of the water during countless ages, it has reached its present altitude above the other basins, over which the oceans now still roll, and into which the waters have retired. The " Basin of the M'ssissippi" is then a pave- ment many thousand feet in depth, formed by the sediment of the superincumbent water, deposited stratum upon stratum, com- pressed by its weight and crystallized into rock by its chemical fermentation and pressure. It is in exact imitation of this sub- lime process of the natural world, that every housewife com- presses the milk of her dairy into solid cheese and butter. It is, therefore, a homogeneous, undulating plain of the secondary or sedimentary formation, surmounted by a covering of soil from which springs the vegetation, as hair from the external skin of an animal. Through this coating of soil, and into the soft surface strata of rock, the descending fresh waters burrow their channels, converging everywhere from the circumferent rim to the lowest level and pass out to the sea. In this system, which is the same as the circulation of the blood in animal life, the Missouri river and the minutest rill that flows from a garden fountain has each its specific and conspicuous place. Hence the corresponding THE GREAT BASIN OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 113 order in the undulations, the variety, and the complexity of con- tour in the surface and in its vesretation. Such is this vast Basin, whose transverse diameter ia 2500 miles, and so simple, homogeneous, and clear is the system of its geology and its waters. The vegetation and climate have the same order of arrangement, and more varied. These vary with the latitude, the distance from the oceans, and with the altitude. The insular site of New York city is upon the bank of the sea, is sixty feet elevated above the sea, and is constantly irrigated by the evaporation coming from the sea ; it is in latitude 41° 80' north. The plain of the South Pass is 2000 miles from the sea, is elevated 7500 feet above the sea, has no vapor from the sea, but an atmosphere rainless rad without dew; it is in latitude 42° 30' north. Such arc the contrasts in the elements affecting climate and vegetation. Through the interval between these two extremes Nature changes, from one to the other, by a graduation so delicate and uniform as to be scarcely sensible to a traveller who goes less than the whole distance. Yet, to one who does so, these changes are as palpable upon the face of Nature, as are the diurnal alternations of light and darkness. The timber, the flora, and the grasses indicate the presence and absence of atmospheric irrigation, as palpably as the sun indicates the day, and the stars the night. All that portion of the Mississippi Basin lying .ootween the Mississippi river and the Atlantic, is densely tim- I >red, excepting only a portion of Indiana, Illinois, and Wiscon- 8'- ; so also are the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, and South Missouri. An irregular line from the head of Lake Erie, run- ning towards the south and west into Texas, defines the cessation of the timber. Between this line and the sea exists a continuous forest region, perpetually moistciied by showers from the ocean. Beyond this line, and deeper into the continent, the upland ceases to nourish timber, which is replaced by luxuriant annual ii:i l|! ni: 114 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. grasses, though narrow lines of forest continue upon the saturated bottoms of the rivers and in the islands. This is the Prairie region of luxuriant, annual grasses, and soft, arable soil, over which the fires annually sweep after the decay of vegetation. The termination of this belt is marked by an irregular line parallel to the first, where the rains cease, and the timber entirely disappears. It is about 450 miles in width, and within it artificial irrigation is not practised, nor necessary, it being everywhere soft, arable, and fertile. To this succeeds the im- mense rainless ;i'^"i onward to the mountains, exclusively pas- toral, of a comp£ c. coated with the dwarf bufi'alo grass, without trees, ant the abode of the aboriginal cattle. That no desert does or can exist within this Basin, is manifest from the abundance and magnitude of the rivers, the uniform calcareous formation, the absence of a tropical sun, its longitudinal position across the temperate zone, and the greatness and altitude of the mountains on its western rim. The river system of the Missis- sippi Basin rosembles a fan of palm leaf. The stem in the State of Louisiana rests in the Gulf; above, the afiiuent rivers con- verge to it from all parts of the ccmpass. From the east come in the Ilomochitta, the Yazoo, the Ohio, the Illinois, and the Upper Blississippi. From the west, the Red river, the Washita, the Arkansas, the White, St. Francis, and Osage rivers, the Kansas, the Triple Platte, the L'eau qui Cours, and the Yellow- stone, all navigable rivers of great length and importance. These rivers present a continuous navigable channel of 22,500 miles, having 45,000 miles of shore, an amount of navigation and coast equal to the Atlantic Ocean. The area of the Mississippi Basin classifies itself into one-and- a-half fifths of compactly-growing forest, the same of prairie, and two-fifths of great plains. Through all of these the river system THE GREAT BASIN OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 115 is ramified as minutely complex, as are the veins and arteries of the, human system. The population is at present 12,000,000. The capacity for population is indefinite. Comparison will illustrate this interest- ing fact. Society erects itself into empires in order to arrive at strength, civilization, and permanence. The most perfect ex- ample is the empire of the Romans, whose history we familiarly possess complete, of its rise, culmination, and slow decline. This empire occupipd and fused into one political and social sys- tem the Basin of the Mediterranean, whoso area is 1,160,000 square miles. From out of this they never passed, except into the corner of Gaul and Britain, but restricted themselves to the Mediterranean and Pontic Seas, to the Nile, to the Danube, and to the Rhone. This empire, embracing the above area, contained under the Antonines 131,000,000 of population, and Rome itself, in the geographical centre, had a diameter of 50 miles and 10,000,000 of inhabitants ! But the area of this Basin is, for the most part, a salt-water waste, into which protrude the penin- sulas of Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and Spain, themselves filled with mountain vertebra;, and also a few islands. Space for habitations and the production of food is, therefore, scarce. The equivalent, with us, of this salt surface and rugged mountains, is, everywhere, an undulating, calcareous plain, uniformly inhabitable and productive. The rivers surpass the sea for the freightage of commerce, and the front of land upon them exceeds the coasts of the oceans in amount and accessibility. The Basin of the Mississippi will then more easily contain and feed ten times the population, or 1,310,000,000 of inhabitants ! If the calcareous plain extending to the Arctic Sea, the two maritime fronts, and the mountain formation, be added, and the whole compared to Europe and Asia, 2,000,000,000 will easily find room — a population double the existing human race ! This 10* H !•;-■ u ; !:' ff m w i,l: Ip ■ ! P ii! ''. \M J i; I < i I m w r^ ii 110 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION, Basin is nil within the Temperate Zone ; but upon the shores of the Gulf, at the level of the sea, tropical fruits, flowers, and vege- tation are produced. On the high mountain slopes grows the vegetation of the Arctic Zone. Between these are found every kind of agricultural production, as we descend from the extremes to the central medium. In position it is exactly central to the continent. Not far remote from the west bank of the Missouri river, in the bosom of romantic scenery and fertile prairie, is a spot whore the Smokyhill and llepublican rivers, by their con- fluence, form the Kansas. This is the geographical centre at once of the North American Continent, and of the Basin of the Mississippi. The circle described from this centre with a radius to San Francisco will pass through Vancouver on the Columbia, the port of Severn river on Hudson's Bay, through Quebec, through Boston, through Havana, Vera Cruz, and the city of Mexico. With a radius to the 49th°, a circle will pass through Mobile, New Orleans, and Matagorda. This spot is, therefore, tkc geographical centre of the North American Continent and of the Basin of the Mississi}>pi, both at once. It is also equally the centre of the American Union, as it is now blocked out into existing States and into prospective States, to occupy sites in the now-existing Territories ! Moreover, it is equidistant from, and exactly in, the middle between the two halves of the human family, distinctly concentrated; the one half Christians, occupy- ing Western Europe, to the number of 259,000,000 of popula- tion ; the other half Pagans, occupying Oriental Asia and Poly- nesia, to the number of 650,000,000 ! Europe has all the outlets of its inland seas and rivers towards the west, debouching on to our Atlantic front, towards which its whole surface slopes. Asia similarly presents to our Pacific front, an Oriental slope, contain- ing her great rivers, the densest masses of her population, and detached islands of great area, dense population, and infinite I ny THE GREAT BASIN OP THE MISSISSIPPI. 117 production. The distance from the European to the Asian shores (from Paris to Pekin), travelling straight by the continu- ous river line of the Potomac, Ohio, Missouri, Platte, and Snake rivers, and across the two oceans, is only 10,000 geographic miles. This straight line is the axis of that temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere of the globe, thirty-three degrees in width, which comains four-fifths of the land, nine-tenths of the people, and all the white races, commercial activity, and industry of the civilized world. When, therefore, this interval of North America shall be filled up, the affiliation of mankind will be accomplished, proximity recognised, the distraction of intervening oceans and equatorial heats cease, the remotest nations be grouped together and fused into one universal and convenient system of immediate relationship. Such are some of the extraordinary attractions presented to mankind, as a social mass, by the position and configuration of the Mississippi Basin. There is another and superlative pros- pective view. This presents itself in contrasting the physical configuration of North America with the other continents. Europe, the smallest in area of the continents, culminates in its centre into the icy masses of the Alps. From the glaciers, where all the great rivers have their sources, they descend the declivities and radiate to the difi"erent seas. The Danube flows directly east to the Pontic Sea ; the Po, to the Adriatic ; the Rhone, to the Sea of Lyons ; the Rhine, north to the German Sea. Walled off by the Pyrenean and Carpathian Mountains, divergent and isolated, are the Tagus, the Elbe, and other single rivers, affluents of the Baltic, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Pontic Sea. Descending from common radiant points and diverging every way from one another, no intercommunica- tion exists among the rivers of Europe towards their sources ; navigation is petty and feeble; art and commerce have never, m • .1 ' I I I i]im 118 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. \ ' I during thirty centuries, united so many small valleys, remotely isolated by impenetrable barriers. Hence upon each river dwells a distinct people, differing from all the rest in race, language, religion, interests, and habits. Though often politically amalga- mated by conquest, they again relapse into fragments, from innate geographical incoherence. Religious creeds and diplomacy form no more enduring bond. The history of these nations is a story of perpetual war, of mutual extermination : an appalling dramatic catalogue of a few splendid tyrannies crushing multitu- dinous millions of submissive and unchrouicled serfs. Exactly similar to Europe, though grander in size and popula- tion, is Asia. From the stupendous central barrier of the Hima- layas run the four great rivers of China, due cast, to discharge themselves under the rising sun : towards the south run the rivers of Cochin China, the Ganges, and the Indus : towards the west, the rivers of the Caspian : and north, through Siberia to the Arctic Sea, many rivers of the first magnitude. During fifty centuries, as now, the Alps and Himalaya Mountains have proved insuperable barriers to the amalgamation of the nations around their bases and dwelling in the valleys that radiate from their slopes. The continents of Africa and South America, as far as we are familiar with the details of their surfaces, are even more than these perplexed into dislocated fragments. In contrast, the interior of North America presents towards heaven an expanded bowl, to receive and fuse into harmony whatsoever enters within its rim. So, each of the other con- tinents presenting a bowl reversed, scatter everything from a central apex into radiant distraction. Political societies and empires have in all ages conformed themselves to these emphatic geographical facts. This Democratic Republican empire of North America is then predestined to expand and fit itself to the con- tinent ; to control the oceans on either hand, and eventually the ; THE GREAT BASIN OF THE MlSSISSim. 119 continents beyon'.l them. Much is uncertain, yet through all the vicissitudes of the future, this much of eternal truth is discern- ible. In geography the antithesis of the old world, in society wo are and will bo the reverse. Our North America will rapidly accumulate a population equalling that of the rest of the world combined : a people one and indivisible, identical in manners, language, customs, and impulses : preserving the same civiliza- tion, the same religion; imbued with the same opinions, and having the same political liberties. Of this we have two illustra- tions now under our eye, the one passing away, the other advanc- ing. The aboriginal Indian race, amongst whom, from Darien to the Esquimaux, and from Florida to Vancouver's Island, exists a perfect identity in hair, complexion, features, religion;, stature, and language : and, second, in the instinctive fusion into one language and into one new race, immigrant Germans, English, Norwegians, Celts, and Italians, whose individualities are obliterated in a single generation. Thus, the perpetuity and destiny of our sacred Union find their conclusive proof and illustration in the bosom of nature. The political storms that periodically rage are but the clouds and sunshine that give variety to the atmosphere and checker our history as we march. The possession of the Basin of the Missis- sippi, thus held in unity by the American people, is a supreme, a crowning mercy. Viewed alone in its wondert'ul position and capacity among the continents and the nations ; viewed, also, as the dominating part of the great calcareous plain formed of the conterminous Basins of the Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Hudson's Bay, and Mackenzie, the amphitheatre of the world — here is supremely, indeed, the most magnificent dwelling-place marked out by God for man's abode. Behold, then, rising now and in the future, the empire which industry and self-government create. The growth of half a cen- ! ft; 1'^ l;>l ^•P h. '. T !i, * 'i'ti i 120 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. ;'i);i 'f if \0 t ': ■■m ■: ^ tury, hewed out of tlio wilderness — its weapons, the axe and plow J its tacties, labor and energy ; its soldiers, free and equal citizens. Behold the oracular goal to which our eagles march, and whither the phalanx of our States and people moves harmo- niously on, to plant a hundred States and consummate their civic greatness. CHAPTER X. PASTORAL REGION. There is a radical misapprehension in the popular mind as to the true character of the " Great Plains of America," as com- plete as that which pervaded Europe respecting the Atlantic Ocean during the whole historic period prior to Columbus. These Plains are not deserts, but the opposite, and are the cardinal basis of the future empire of commerce and industry now erecting itself upon the North American Continent. They are calcareous, and form the Pasto lAL Garden of the world. Their position and area may be easily understood. The meridian line which terminates the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa on the west, forms their eastern limit, and the Rocky Mountain crest their western limit. Between these limits they occupy a longitudinal parallelogram of less than 1000 miles in width, extending from the Texan to the Arctic coast. There is no timber upon them, and single trees are scarce. They have a gentle slope from the west to the east, and abound in rivers. They are clad thick with nutritious grasses, and swarm with animal life. The soil is not silicious or sandy, but is PASTORAL REGION. 121 a fine calcareous mould. They run smoothly out to the navigublo rivers, tlio 3Iissouri, Missi.ssippi, and St. Lawrence, and to tlio Texan coast. The mountain masses towards the Pucifio form no serious barrier between them and that ocean. No portion of their whole sweep of surface is more than 1000 miles from the best navigation. The prospect is everywhere gently undulating and graceful, being bounded, as on the ocean, by the horizon. Storms arc rare, except during the melting of the snows upon the crest of the Rocky Mountains. The climate is comparatively rainless; the rivers serve, like the Nile, to irrigate rather than drain the neighboring surface, and have few affluents. They all run from west to er .st, having beds shallow and broad, and the basins through which tliey flow are flat, long, and narrow. The area of the " Great Plains" is equivalent to the surface of the twenty-four States between the Mississippi and the Atlantic Sea, but they are one homogeneous formation, smooth, uniform, and continuous, without a single abiiipt mountain, timbered space, desert, or lake. From their ample dimensions and position they define themselves to be the imsturc-ficJds of the world. Upon them PASTORAL agriculture will become a separate grand department of national industry The pastoral characteristic, being novel to our people, needs a minute explanation. In traversing the continent from the Atlantic Beach to the South Pass, the point of greatest altitude and remoteness from the sea, we cross successively the timbered region, the prairie region of soft soil and long annual grasses, and finally the Great Plains. The two first are irrigated by the rains coming from the sea, and are arable. The last is rainless, of a compact sojil, resisting the plow, and xa, therefore, j^nstoral. The herbage is peculiarly adapted to the climate and the dryness of the soil and atmosphere, and is perennial. It is edible and nutritious throughout the year. This is the "gramma" or ' <1 i I- I 12: THE CENTllAL GOLD IlEGION. "buffalo grass." It covers the ground ouc inch in height, has the appearance of a delicate moss, and its leaf has the fiiieiiesa and spiral texture of a uegru's hair. During the melting of the snows in the immcn.se mountain masses at the back of tlio Great Plains, the rivers swell like the Nile, and yield a copious evapo- ration in their long sinuous courses across the Plains : storm clouds gather on the summits, roll down the mountain flanks, and discharge themselves in vernal showers. During this temporary prevalence of moist atmosphere these delicate grasses grow, seed in the root, and arc cured into hai/ upon the (/round by the gra- dually returning drouth. It is in this longitudinal belt of peren- •uial pasture upon which the buffalo finds his winter food, dwell- ing upon it without regard to latitude, and here are the infinite herds of aborijinal cattle peculiar to North America — buffalo, wild horses, elk, antelope, white and black-tailed deer, mountain sheep, the grisly bear, wolves, the hare, badger, porcupine and smaller animals innumerable. The aggregate number is cattle, by ciJculation from sound data, exceeds one hundrcu mil- lion. No annual fires ever sweep over the Great Plains ; these are confined to the Prairie region. The Great Plains also swarm with poultry — the turkey, the mountain cock, the prairie cock, the sand-hill crane, the curlew; water-fowl of every variety, the swan, goose, brant, ducks ; mar- mots, the armadillo, the pccary, reptiles, the horned frog; birds of prey, eagles, vultures, the raven, and the small birds of game and song. The streams abound in fish. Dogs and dcmi-wolves abound. The immense population of nomadic Indians, lately a million in number, have, from immemorial antiquity, subsisted exclusively upon these aboriginal herds, being unacquainted with any kind of agriculture or the habitual use of vegetable food or fruits. From this source the Indian draws exclusively his food, his lodge, his fuel, harness, clothing, bed, his ornaments, weapous, T PASTORAL REOION. 123 and utensils. Hero is his solo dependence from the boginninj^ to the end of his existence. The iiinumcniblc carnivorous animals also subsist upon them. The buffalo alone have appeared to uio as numerous as the American people, and to inhabit as uniformly as largo a space of country. The buffalo robe at once suggests his adaptability to a winter climate. The Great Plains embrace a very ample proportion of arable soil for farms. The " bottoms" of the rivers aro very broad and level, having only a few inches of elevation above the waters, which descond by a rapid and even current. They may be easily and cheaply saturated by all the various systems of artifi- cial irrigation, azeouieas, artesian wells, or flooding by machinery. Under this treatment the soils, being alluvial and calcareous, both from the sulphate and carbonate formations, return a pro- digious yield, and are independent of the seasons. Every variety of grain, grass, v- gctable, the grape and fruits, flax, hemp, cotton, and the flora, under a perpetual sun, and irrigated at the root, attain extraordinary vigor, flavor, and beauty. The Great Plains abound in fuel, and the materials for dwell- ings and fencing. Bituminous coal is everywhere interstratified with the calcareous and sandstone formation ; it is also abundant in the flanks of the mountains, and is everywhere conveniently accessible. The dung of the buffalo is scattorod everywhere. The order of vegetable growth being reversed by the aridity of the atmosphere, what show above as the merest bushes, radiate themselves deep into the earth, and form below an immense arborescent growth. Fuel of wood is found by digging. Plaster and lime, limestone, freestone, clay, and sand, exist beneath almost every acre. The large and economical adobe brick, hardened in the sun and without fire, supersedes other materials for walls and fences in this dry atmosphere, and, as in Syria and Egypt, resists decay for centuries. The dwellings thus con- 11 M li ■'A i 124 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGIOX. structed are most healthy, being impervious to heat, cold, damp, and wind. The climate of the Great Plains is favorable to health, longe- vity, intellectual and physical development, and stimulative of an exalted tone of social civilization and n^finement. The American people and their ancestral European people having dwelt for many thousand years exclusively in countries of timber and within the region of the maritime atmosphere; where winter annihilates all vegetation annually for half the year; where all animal food must be sustained, fed, and fattened by tillage with the plow; where the essential necessities of existence, food, ciothiug, fuel, and dwellings, are secured only by constant and intcisc manual toil; why, to this people heretofore, the immense empire of pastoral agriculture, at the threshold of which we have arrived, has been as completely a blank, as was the present condition of social development on the Atlantic Ocean and the American Continent to the ordinary thoughts of the antique Greeks and Romans ! Hence this immense world of plains and mountains, occupying three-fifths of our continent, so novel to them and so exactly contradictory in every feature to the existing prejudices, routine, and economy of society, is unanimously pro- nounced an uninhabitable desert. To any reversal of sucli a judgment, the unanimous public opinion, the rich and poor, the wise and ignorant, the famous and obscure, agree to oppose unanimously a dogmatic and universal deafness. To them, the delineations of trwcllers, elsewhere intelligent, are here tinged with lunacy ; the science of geography is befogged ; the sublime order of Creation no longer holds, and the supreme engineering of God is at fault and a chaos of blunders ! The I*ASTORAL Region is longitudinal. The bulk of it is under the Temperate Zone, out of which it runs into the Arctic Zone on the north, and into the Tropical Zone ou the south. PASTORAL REGION. 125 The parallel Atlantic arable and commercial region flanks it on the east ; that of the Pacific on the west. The Great Plains, then, at once separate and bind together these flanks, rounding out both the variety and compactness of arrangement in the ele- mentary details of society, which enables a continent to govern itself with the same ease as a single city. Assuming, then, that the advancing column of progress having reached and established itself in force all along the eastern front of the Great Plains, from Louisiana to Minnesota ; having, also, jumped over and flanked them to occupy California and Oregon ; assuming th'ai Ihis column is about to debouch upon them to the front and occupy them with the embodied impulse of our thirty millions of population, heretofore scattered upon the flanks, but now conveiging into phalanx upon the centre : some reflections, legitimately made, may cheer the timid, and confirm those who hesitate from old opinion and the prejudices of adverse education. It is well established that six-tenths of the food of the human family is, or ought to be, animal food, the result of pastoral agriculture. The cattle of the world consume eight times the food per head, as compared with the human family. 3Ieat, milk, butter, cheese, poultry, eggs, wool, leatl'er, honey, are the pro- ductions of pastoral agriculture. Fish is the spontaneous pro- duction of the water. Nine-tenths of the labor of arable culture is expended to produce the grain and grasses that sustain the present supplies to the world of the above enumerated articles of the pastoral order. If, then, a country can be found where pas- toral produce is spontaneously sustained by nature, as fish in the ocean, it is manifest that arable labor, being reduced to the pro- duction of broad food only, may condcur • itbclf to a very small per centage of its present volume, and the cultivated ground be greatly reduced in acres. ■!'J.° k 4 126 THE CENi'RAL GOLD REGION. At present the pastoral culture of the American people results exclusively from the plow, and this is its amount : Cattlo of all kinds Horses and mules Sheep Swine Value 18,378,907 4,890,050 21,722,220 30,334,213 $055,883,058 It is probable that the aggregate ahorijinal stock of the Great Plains still exceeds in amount the above table. It is all sponta- neously supported by nature, as is the fish of the sea. Every kind of our domestic animals flourishes upon the Great Plains equally well with the wild ones. Three tame animals may be substituted for every wild one, and vast territories re-occupied, from which the wild stock has been exterminated by indiscrimi- nate slaughter and the increase of the wolves. The American people are about, then, to inaugurate a new and immense order of industrial production : Pastoral Agri- culture. — Its fields will be the Great Plains intermediate between the oceans. Once commenced, it will develop very rapidly. We trace in their history the successive inauguration and systematic growth of several of these distinct orders : The tobacco culture, the rice culture, the cotton culture, the immense provision culture of cereals and meats, leather and wool, the gold culture, navigation external and internal, commerce external and internal, transportation by land and water, the hemp culture, the fisheries, manufactures. Each of these has arisen as time has ripened the necessity for each, and noiselessly taken and filled its appropriate place in the general economy of our industrial empire. This pastoral property transports itself on the hoof, and finds its food ready furnished by nature. In these elevated countries fresh meats become the preferable food for man, to the exclusioa 1 PASTORAL RLGION. 127 of bread, vegetables, and salted articles. The atmosphere of the Great Plains is perpetually brilliant with sunshine, tonic, healthy and inspiring to the temper. It corresponds with and surpasses the historic climate of Syria and Arabia, from whence we inherit all that is ethereal and refined in our system of civilization, our religion, our sciences, our alphabet, our numerals, our written languages, our articles of food, our learning, and our system of social manners. As the site for the great central city of the " Basin of the Mississippi" to arise prospectively upon the developments now maturing, this city* has the start, the geographical position, and the existing elements with which any rival will contend in vain. It is the focal point where three developments, now near ripeness, mW&ndthch river port. 1. The pastoral development. 2. The gold, silver, and salt production of the Sierra San Juan. 3. The continental railroad from the Pacific. These great fields of enter- prise will all be recognised and understood by the popular mind within the coming six years, and will be under vigorous headway in ten. There must be a great city here, such us antiquity built at the head of the Mediterranean and named Jerusalem, lyre, Alexandria, and Constantinople j such .ur own people name New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, St Louis. m ■:•. t f i] * Kansas City, at the mouth of the Kansas. 11* mi tav. mi V I 128 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. CHAPTER XI. EX'^ENT AND CHAHACTERISTICS OP THE HEMP-GROWING REGION OF THE UNITED STATES. There is a region of Missouri and Kansas of rapidly rising fame and importance, gaining for itself a State and a National reputation, which we will define as the " Region of the Hemp Culture." Specially Aivored by nature in its geographical locality, climate, navigation, and superlative fertility, this region has become the seat of a hemp culture which has a strong, organized, and national foundation. The hemp culture receives special attention in twenty counties bisected by the Missouri river, and all adjacent to its two shores. They form a belt of land east and west, enclosed between the thirty-eighth and fortieth degrees of latitude. Here is the production of these :ou"ities in hemp, flax, and tobacco, in order as they lie along the river — census of 1850 : Ilcmp, tons. Jackson .... 3G1 Lafayette .... 2,4G2 Saline .... 1,559 Cooper .... 39 Moniteau . . . . 11 Cole .... 11 Cass .... 1 Johnson .... 65 Pettis .... 52 Miller .... 3 Platte . . . . 4,355 Clay .... 1,288 Ray .... 431 Flax, lbs. Tobacco, iba 1,443 38,920 6,807 75,035 IGO 287,533 9,835 137,800 7,621 39,550 6,129 43,150 i:,048 5,353 7.070 900 2,784 1,300 5,600 12,900 420 66,000 88,197 20,060 6,802 516.906 HEMP-GROWINO REGION OF THE UNITED STATES. 129 Carroll 300 1,779 289,869 Charlton . 170 3,213 2,607,908 Howard 904 1G,948 3,188,122 Boone 51 20,695 584,949 Clinton 193 5,376 6,850 Randolph 23 17,368 2,202,796 Buchanan , 1,894 620 7,850 14,173 tons, or 28,340,000 pounds. T ill Since 1850, the hemp culture has doubicd in vigor, boJi in the land assigned to its culture and in the application of machinery to its production and manufacture. The production of that year, within the above region, was 28,346,000 pounds, estimating the ton at 2000 pounds ; and that of the whole State 16,119 tons, or 32,238,000 pounds. The course of the Missouri river through this region of super- lative fertility may be compared to the l^ile flowing through lower Egypt to the Mediterranean. It is in the ability of au abundant and bounteous production that this comparison holds, but not in temperature, climate, or physical features. In Egypt, the arable and inhabitable district is limited to the ravine of the Nile, which is overflowed and irrigated by its waters ; beyond this the primeval deser£ reigns everywhere supreme. With us, the same fertility characterizes the borders of the stream, which has the same abundance of fertilizing waters, the same splendid navigation, the same solemnity in its ever-flowing channel, and the same redundancy of benignant attributes which have deified the Nile. But, on every side, from the gently elevated crest that bounds the ravine of the Missouri, expands, with a radius of 1000 miles, that variegated, calcareous plain, which we define as the " Uasin of the Jlississippi." This undulating plain has an area equal in capacity to all the other river basins of the world, and combines all their varieties. So much does the mind I .. . 'll'll it ;i; m *:'l: ml if /!' A! 130 THE TENTRAL GOLD REGION. revert to the ocean to explain by comparison its exquisite romantic beauty, at once immense and regular, that this hymn to the sea may with propriety describe it : " Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Glasses itself in tempests ; in all time Calm ov convulsed — in breeze, or gale, or storm. Dark heaving ; — boundless, endless, and sublime — The image of eternity — the throne Of the Invisible—* * * each zone Obeys thee ; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone !" The current course of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers is from north to south. The latter is so through its whole length. The Missouri, after a southern course of 3000 miles, receives the Kansas river in latitude 39°, turns abruptly to the cast, penetrates the State of Missouri, and bisects it from west to cast, with a channel 400 miles in length. Into the eastern mouth of this channel all the great natural lines of travel coming from the Atlantic by the St. Lawrence, Ohio, and South Mississippi rivers concentrate as rays to a focal point. They are altogether carried forward to the central west at the mouth of the Kansas, where the unbroken prairie formation meets the river, and to which the radiant land routcb over their expanse, coming from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, similarly concentrate. This channel is now, and is destined prospectively to remain, the most thronged and wonderful in the world. It is central, east and wast, to the American Continent, to the Basin of the Mississippi, and to the American Union ; it lies along the axis of that isothermal temperate zone, within which is the zodiac of nations, and is also the axis of the population, progress, travel, production, consumption, commerce, transportation, and habita- tion of the human race. It is the highway from Western Europe to Oriental Asia. It is under that line of latitude where u HEMP-GROWINQ REGION OP THE UNITED STATES. 131 all things northern and southern meet and blend together — where the day and night, the seasons of the year, labor, the growth of nature, and all the elements of human society and of the vegetable and animal world, have the wid' t range, the greatest variety, and the highest developraeut. Having a double shore, this channel has 800 miles of coast. It has the familiar accommodation and safety of a canal, a railroad, or a street. Its depth of water and capacity for commerce will receive and carry forward the freightage of all the oceans and all the continents. Similar channels have been known and used in both ancient and modern times — such are the Lower Nile, the Bosphorus and Dar- danelles, the Strait of Hercules, the English Channel, the Baltic's mouth, the Hudson from New York to Albany — only this has greater length, divides more fertile shores, and connects more numerous hosts of nations. Such is the Hemp Region. It has an altitude 1000 feet above the sea, a salubrity equal to the Table Lands, a fertility superior to the Delta of Louisiana, an unlimited area, a navigation better than the sea, a climate exactly congenial to the white man, a rural beauty for ever graceful, fresh, and fascinating. It is, on a vastly magnified scale, the counterpart of that delicious and classic Italy, traversed by the Po, dotted with cities, Venice, Verona, Mantua, Milan, of which Siiakspeahe has written, and where Virgil and Tasso sung. If an ellipse be described extending from the Osage mouth to Fort Riley, some 500 miles, and in breadth 300, it will contain that district of fat, lustrous soil, exuberant vegetation, graceful beauty, and abundant streams, where naiiure has bountifully blended all her choicest gifts to locate the rural quintessence of America and of the world ! Stimalated by the inspiring splendor of their natural position, the vigorous population of this region have pursued agriculture, commerce, and manufactures with an ambition and success which < 1 i . 132 THE CENTRAL GOLD REGION. 1:5 n, indicate a j^rowing empire ia nothing unworthy of their pros- pective destiny. Every department of production and industry haa been tried, and all thrive. Hemp, tobacco, flax, the grape and wine, silk, sugar, the cereals and grasses ; cattle of the first breeds ; agricultural machinery, flowers, steam, and mining. Society exalts its tone by a taste for religious edifices and elo- quence ; education receives great and universal care ; music and refinement are zealously cultivated. Apart from these fascinating gifts of nature and the promise which germinates beneath their warmth, a prestige entwines itself with and illuminates the history of this region. This runs back to the golden time of the patriarchal founders of our con- tinental empire j it stretches over the dark chasm of seaboard monarchy, and has its fountain in the luminous Aurora and among the immortal patriots who limned out the profile of our continental empire, and inaugurated the march of our destinies. We have here amongst us the graves of Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clarke, Laclede, and the names of John Jacob AsTOR, Louis XVI., of France, Lasalle, and De Soto, great and intrepid men who led or befriended the pioneers, those stars which shone in the first twilight of empire. To Jefferson and Jackson we were known, and they have been known to us as our friends. To understand this prestige and its strength, it is necessary briefly to select out and set apart to themselves a few facts in the history of progress which stand along its path, and, like pyramids in the solitude, fix its remarkable epochs. This system of civilized society, of which we Americans form a part, is very ancient and is inherited. History is the journal of its geographical progress, its vicissitudes, its struggles, and its energies. Where society has assumed its largest form and attained the highest level of civilization and longest endurance. HEMP-GROWING REG TON OF THE UNITED STATES. 133 it is defined to be an empirt. History chiefly occupies itself with the biography of these enipires, their rise, culmination, and deca- dence. They have appeared, lived, and departed, like generations of men. They lie along a serpentine zone of the north hemi- sphere of the globe, within an isothermal belt, and form a zodiac thirty-five degrees in width. The axis of this zodiac alternates above and below the -lOth degree of latitude, as the neighborhood or remoteness of the oceans modifies the climates of the continents. These empires are the Chinese, the Indian, the Persian, the Grecian, the Roman, the Spanish, the British, and, last, the Re- publican Empire of North America. These are the essential ones in the regular order of time and upon the hereditary line of progress. It is here that the mass of land is the greatest, and where the continents most nearly approach one another. This zodiac of nations contains nine -tenths of the white population of the globe, and all its civilization. The territory of the American people, extending across this continent, exactly fills this isother- mal zone from edge to edge, occupying the whole connecting space between Western Europe and Oriental Asia. It is on these two fronts of the old continents that the two halves of the human race are separately congregated, both fronting America and fronting one another, face to face, across America. The straight line of intercourse between them, only 10,000 miles in length, pursues the axis of the isothermal zone, out of which it never deflects either into the torrid heats or the frozen north. Here, then, is the tenacious, the divine instinct of progress and liberty, which fired the soul of Columbus, of Washington, of Jefferson, and of Jackson. In this faith they lived; this faith they vindicated and never betrayed ; and in this faith they died, to inherit among posterity a supreme, untainted immortality. This faith forms the inspiration of the Declaration of 1770, animated the patriarchal generation, and was renewed and codified h ? W, ,11) /' ■i% il: !' «!(■• ml 1';# ■ 134 TUE CKNTRAT. OOLD REGION. in the Constitution of '87. It selected Jefferson in 1798 and Jackson in 1828. Its caglo.s arc now erected among the pioneers out in the wilderness, in Kansas, in Utah, and in Oregon. Upon them are embossed the ancient rights of man, the continental union, the continental railroad, the continental cause ! During the administration of Jefferson, central extension, pursuing the isothermal line through the continent, was prose- cuted with great vigor as the favorite policy of the Government. Lewis and Cl.\rke rcconnoitcred and made known the character of the rivers, the mountains, and the connections of the basins of the Mississippi and Columbia by direct passes. John Jacob AsTOR planted trading colonies and paths through the wilderness, and upon the bank of the other sea opposite to China. The rapid creation of the States of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, carried forward the Union in a salient column, em- bracing the water-line of the great rivers and reaching here to the geographical centre in 1820 ! Up to that date the flanks had remained stationary in New York and Georgia. The design then was to go through with the parallelogram of central States from sea to sea, and from this base to advance outward, planting States simultaneously towards the south and towards the north. This policy was crippled during the time of Mr. Madison by the vicissitudes of foreign war. ' It was abandoned and loversed by Messrs. Monroe and Adams. In their time grc v up the political divisicJns of North and South, and a maritime policy inaugurated itself. Since that date, central progress has abruptly stopped, and great activity upon the flanks has brought them up to an even front iu Iowa, and a greatly advanced position in Texas. The central force has, however, Jumped the continent straight to the front, occupied the sea-coasts of Oregon and 5! IIEMP-GROWINO REGION OP THE UNITED STATES. 135 ii California, and fuundcd the new maritime power upon the Pacific and opposite to Asia. Since the selection of the site of the city of Indopondoncc in 1824 to 1854, a chasm in time of thirty years, , central ixtnision has rested as stagnant as though our great river had been frozoi. at this point into solid and perpetual ice. Tt has been stopped by an artificial cordon of Indian tribes and federal law as effectu- ally as by a continuous wall of brass extending from Louisiana to the 49th degroo, and rising in altitude from the prairie founda- tion to the clouds. Ilcnce is seen the unique and novel sight of a great continental empire, formed of a circular shell of States traced round the circumferent seaboard, and surrounding a hollow and vacant disk of desert continent. Such is at present the theoretical principles upon which maritime policy legislates for the great region of our country connecting the States of Missouri and California straight across. The antagonistic struggle ia between the instinct of progress plowing out its highway through the continent, along the isothermal axis hi/ luml, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the external shell of maritime power to hold the continent in a maritime hoop, and subjc.,i its industrial greatness to a permanent supremacy. In the great city of New York the active instinct of progress has always had a working vitality. Like Rome, she has pursued an elastic policy, and has planted her commercial colonics at the right time, and in the right spots. These colonies, of the first class, are New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco. "With all of these she maintains or needs direct connections by steamers, railroads, and telegraphs, as also with Europe in the rear. The time is rife for another selection, which offers itself in the centre of the Mississippi Basin ! A key-point of centrality and radiance, and of unrivalled excellence. This is Independence, the metro- polis of the Hemp Region. 12 r I, ■ I t 'I ft. *■ i ?■ ^. ;; i'-^" \ yiiikii ■1' pi II 1 H. l;}G THE CENTRAL OOLD UEOIOW. This young and vigorous city, crowning the southern bank of tho IMissouri river iit (ho point of the anglo where it deflocta to the north, bcetlea over the avenues to tho priiirics of tho south and west, like Gibraltar at the Strait of Hercules. It covers tho rear of St, Luuis, and conflnes her to the narrow field of tho State of Arkansas. Uy the through railroad, 'loniing by way of Chicago and Keokuk, crossing the IMLssouri river at l>rur!;'s Straits. On 'ho loft, the Andks follows the coast of the PaciGc, warps around tho (lulf uf California, and passing alonji; the coast of California and Oroiron (under tho name of Sierra Nevada) terminates also near IJohrin^^'s Straits. Tho immense interval between these chains, is a succession of intra- inontuDc basins, urmi in number, and ranging from south to north. The whole forms tho (iroat I'latcau of the Tahle Lands. First, is the "Basin of the City of Mexico," receiving tho in- terior drainage of both Cordilleras, which waters, having no outlet to either ocoaji, are dispersed again by evaporation. Snund, tho " liaison dc Mapimi," collocting int-:^ the Laguna tho streams draining many States, from San Ijuis I'otosi to Coahuila, also without any outflow to either ocean. Tlilnl, tho " IJasin of the Del Norte," whoso vast area feeds the Kio del Norte, the Conchos and Peeos. These, concentrated into the llio Grande del Norte behind the Sierra Madre, have, by thoir united volume, burst through its wall and found an outlet towards the Atlantic. The geological character of this basin, its altitude, its configura- tion and locality, all assign it this position, as distingu:.^lling it from all others contributing their waters to the Atlantic. Fourth, the *' Basin of the Great Colorado of the West." This immense basin embraces ahove, tho great rivers Kio Verde and Itio Grande, whose confluent waters, penetrating tho mighty Cordillera of the Andes, athwart from base to base, discharge themselves into the Gulf of California. Into this sublime gorge (tho Caiion ef the Colorado), tho human eye has never swept, for an interval of 375 miles ; so stern a character does nature assume where such stupendous mountains resist the passage of such mighty rivers. Fifth, the "Basin of the groat Salt Jiakc," like tho Caspian of Asia, containing many small basins within one great rim, and losing its scattered waters by evaporation, has no outflow to :i^ % ATl'KNDIX. 151 cither ocean. Sixth, " The IJasln of the Columbia," lyinj; acroHs tho nortliorn flanks of the two last, and '^riu\d above them all in position and conliiruration. IMiuiy great rivers, besides the Snako and Upper (^dunihia, deseending from the f^reat arc of the Sicrru Madre, where it circles towards the nor*I»-west from the 4;>° tc tJli*^, flowing from east to west, and conce itralinii,- above tho (^\is- cadfs into a single trunk, which hero strikes the mighty Cordillera of tho Andes (narrowed to ono ridge), and t isgorges itself through this sublime pass at onco into the open IV'-ilie. It is htrr, de- scending by the grade of this river tho whole dista;>ce from the rim of the Valley of the ^lississippi and through the Andef to the Pacific, that the great (hbuinh of the American continent towards the West is found — and hero will be the pathway of future generations, as the people of t.o old world pass down tho Mediterranean and out by (libraltar. Above, the ''Basin of Frazer Ikiver" forms a s> roil/i of the Taiu.k Lands. This has burst a canon through tho Andes, and, like the fourth and sixth basins, sends its winters to the Pacific. With the geography of the more northern region wo arc imperfectly acquainted, knowing however that from Pugett's Sound to ]>ehring's Straits, tho wall of the Andes forms the beach itself of the PaciOc, whilst the Sierra ^ladrc forms the wcstcvn rim of the basins of the Sas- katchewan of Hudson's Bay and ihe McKenzio of tho Arctic Seas. Thus then briefly wo arrive at this great cardinal department of the geography of the continent, viz. : TiiK Taijle Lands — being a longitudinal section (about two-sevenths of its whole area) — intermediate between tho two oceans, but walled off from both, and having but three outlets ibr its waters, viz., the canons of the Rio Grande, the Colorado, and the Columbia. Columnar basalt forms the basement of this whole region, and volcanic action is everywhere prominent. Its general level, ascertained upon the lakes of the diflerent basins, is about GOOO feet above the sea. Ilain seldom falls, and timber is rare. The ranges of mountains which separate the basins arc often rugged and capped with perpetual snow, whilst isolated masses of great height elevate them.sclvcs from the plains. This whole formation abounds in ]3» ,. 'i II i,l i" I S 152 APPENDIX. the precious metals. Sucli is the region of the Table Lands. Beyond these is the maritime region, for the trreat wall of the Andes, receding from the beach of the Pacitic, leaves between itself and the sea a half valley, as it were, forming the seaboard slope from San Diego to the Straits of Juan di Fuca. This is 1200 miles in length and 2")0 broad. Across it descends to the sea a series of fine rivers, ranging from south to north, like the little streams descending from the Allcghanies to the Atlantic. These are the San Gabriel, the Buenaventura, the San Joakim and Sacramento, the Rogue, Tlamoth, and Umqua rivers, the Wallamette and Columbia, the Cowlitz, Chekalis, and Nasqually of Pugett's Sound. This resembles and balances the maritime slope of the Atlantic side of the continent j but it is vastly larger superficially ; of the highest agricultural excellence j basaltic in formation ; grand beyond the powers of description, the snowy points and vulcanoes of the Andes being everywhere visible from the sea, whilst its climate is entirely exempt from the frosts of winter. Such, and so grand, is our continent towards the Pacific. Let us turn our glance towards the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, and scan the geography in our front. Four great valleys appear, each one drained by a river of the first magnitude : 1 .^t. The Mississippi Valley, greatest in magnitude, and crabrpcing the heart and splendor of the continent, gathers tho waters of 1,500,000 square miles and sheds them into the Gv.lf of Mexico; 2d. The St. La ■ rence, whoso river flows into the North Atlantic; 3d. The Nelson and Severn rivers, into Hudson's Bay ; and 4th, the ^reat valley of the McKcnzic river, rushing north into the Hyperborean Sea. These valley., everywhere calcareous, have a unifort.2 surface, gently rolling, but destitute of mountains, and pass into one another by dlviihng ridges, which distribute its own waters iLto each, but whose superior elevation is only distinguish- able amongst the general undulations, by the water-sheds which they form. Around the whole continent, following the coasts of the oceans, runs u rim of mountains, giving the idea of a va'^t amphitheatre. Through this rim penetrate towards the south, east, and north, the above great rivers o?i(y, forming at their ^(|if;i! APPENDIX. 153 debouches the natural doors of the interior ; but no stream pene- trates urst through the Sierra Madre, which forms an unbroken ■water-shed from Magellan's to IJohring's Straits. Thus we find more than three-fifths of our continent to consist of a limitless plain, intersected by countless navigable streams, flowing everywhere from the circumference towards common centres, grouped in close proximity, and only divided by what connects them into one homogeneous plan. To the American people, then, belongs this vast interior space, covered over its uniform surface of 2,800,000 square miles, with the richest calcareous soil, touching th- .-uows towards the north, and the torrid heats towards the south, bound together by an infinite internal navigation, of a temperate climate, and consti- tuting, in the whole, the most magnificent dwelling-place marked out by God for aian's abode. As the complete beneficence of the Almighty has thus given to us, the owners of the continent, the great natural outlets of the Mississippi to the Gulf, and the St. Lawrence to the North Atlantic, so '.- it left to a pious and grate- ful people, appreciating this goodness, to construct through the gorge of the Sierra Madre, a great artificial monument, an iron path, a National Fiuilway to the Wesieni Sea. Here we perceive, in the formation of the American continent, a sublime simplicity, a complete economy of arrangement, singular to itself, and the reverse of what distinguishes the ancient world. To understand this, let ui' compare them. Europe, the smallest of the grand divisions of the land, con- taius in its centre, the icy m sses of the Alps; from around their declivities radiate the large rivers of that continent. The Danube directly east to the Euxinej the Po and Rhone, south to the Mediterranean; the Rhine to the Northern Ocean. Walled oif by the Pyrenees and Carpathians, divergent and isolated, are the Tagus, the Elbe, and other single rivers, affluents of the Baltic, the Atlanti'!, the Mediterranean, and the Euxine. Uuncendiug from common radiant points, and diverging every way lii ni - policy, invented by sophistry, and sustained by meta- physics. 3Ir. JotVersou having, with consummate prescience, added to our domain the Louisiana purchase, the most splendid portion of the habitable globe, hastened to give it population and a mari- time wing to the Pacific. Explorations under Clarke and Lewis, and others, followed by Aster's enterprise, opened, yo/Vy ijcars ago, the great commercial route between the oceans, since shut up by the maritime policy, but now reopened. These were checked and overthrown by the exigencies of foreign war. That over, (lie discus.sion of a route to Asia was revived by the press and in Congress ; Astor sought to renew his enterprises, and aid was demanded from the Government by the people of the west, and by patriotic individuals i/i the cast. Tliis was refused by ttie policy of IVesidcnt Monroe's administration, in whose cabinet were conjoined Messrs. J. Q. Adama, of Massachusetts, and J. C. Calhoiii), of South Carolina, — subtle statesmen of the most penetrating foresight and the loftiest ambition. Power emigrates as time rolls on. The pride and fascination 156 APPENDIX. of its possession lingers supremely potent in the human heart. From this profound source has sprung the unequitable viaritime jmUci/, arrayed against the march of progress and the westward migration of power. The former State, Massachusetts, had pro- claimed a national war unconstitutional, and initiated at Hartford the preparatory plans to secede from and dissolve the Union. The latter, South Carolina, has done the same, pronouncing the general power of taxation unconstitutional in a particular form — and now again appear the same dreadful threats of " force and terror," pronouncing unconstitutional a spscific legislation for the territories. Behind this gorgpn of alarm (^Nullljicatioii), and unpercoived by the general mind, lashed into dismay and dis- tracted by " terror and force," threatening the Union, the subtle maritime, iwlicy has been riveted down. Within the young States, the public glebe has been held by t'lC central government and withheld from taxation. Thus is State revenue cut off. These public lands are held at a tyrannical price, the sales made cash, donations of homestead rights, pre-emption, and graduation refused. Savages, ejected from the older States, have been bought up and planted as a wall along the western frontier and across the line of progress. These are metaphysically called foreign nations. Recently there has been given to the soldiers of the nation a bounty of $100 in money or §200 in land. .This is legislative declaration that the price is 100 per cent. above their highest value. The revenue raised from the customs is collected at the seaports, where the expenses of collection are disbursed. The heavy part of this revenue is paid by the agriculturists of the west, who are the consumers. $3,000,000 annually of direct land revenue is exclusively paid by these latter. But where is this splendid income of §40,000,000, thus levied for the most part from western industry, expended ? To the navy is devoted $9,000,000 (all upon the tide-waters of the sea- board). To the civil list $5,000,000— all there also. To sea- hoard improvements, viz. : custom-houses, mints, harbors, break- waters, fortifications, navy-yards, light-houses, coast survey, post-tjffices, armories, &c., $2,500,000. All this too is upon the tide-water. To the army fo, 000, 000 — i. .^ is expended on a '*^ j APPENDIX. 157 military academj', ordnance foundries, four artillery regiments, engineers — all upon the seaboard. True it is that a few stingy details of cavalry and infantry are posted in shanties upon the western frontier, and a largess of half a million sowed among the Indians. But the single fortress of " Old Point Comfort," has cost more than the sum total of western military structures. Thus do we come at one cardinal item of maritime power — $40,000,000 collected annually from thirty States, of which $39,000,000 is annually paid out to thirteen only! Such is the income which maritime policj/ secures to itself by taxation. Farther, the foreign exports and imports amount to $350,000,000 per annum — every pound of this leaves our shores, or comes to us in the ships of these maritime States, and is stored at their seaports. To them, then, belongs the complete and prodigious monopoly of the carrying trade of America ! Is it wonderful, then, that a policy should have been projected with foresight and pursued with obstinate will, to preserve to its possessors an income so splendid, and a monopoly of such infinite profit ? With these maritime States, too, rests the political mastery of the continent, because they have as yet always had the majority of the Houses of Congress, and still retain that in th? House of llepresentatives, in spite of the accession of Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin, which have changed the Senate. It is the decennial ci nsus of 1850 which will give in the thirty-third Congress a majority to this great indigenous American people, residing within the mountains in the great basins of the continent. To them will belong the glorious task to give to the public donuiiu its true, patriotic use, and root out the scorching tyranny, of which it is now the engine. To make taxation and the expenditures of revenue national, and equal among the States and people. To pay, not grind, the pioneers. To reverse the uses of the national wilder- ness, so that its glebe shall be the beneficent fountain of great roads, unlimited agriculture, population, commerce, and rich States. To give us maritime rivalry and a new seaboard. To reconcile the white man and the Indian, now kept by infamous laws in a state of implacable feuds and mutual piracy. It is very wicked that our Government, being llepublican, has m 158 APPENDIX. ravished republican liberty and riij;hts from tlio Indian, and re-enacted for his race all the odious inequalities and oppressions of f(}((J«' .0, to pay S7,000,000 of debts ! ! Is it, then, by chatK-c or by design that the great domain is to one State the source of imperi:il revenues and advancement, to auuther of poverty and repression ? Ex- ' >s ! il APPENDIX. 159 press laws of Congress produce these extremes. To undovstand this riglitly, let us examine it. The soil of Missouri is held until sold at 81.25 per acre Ly the central government. At present $G00,000 per annum is extracted in specie through the land offices. Thus are we impoverished. Two-thirds of our soil is withheld from State taxation. As real estate is the suhstantiul source of State revenue, no public enterprises, no geological sur- veys, no internal improvements, not even highways and bridges, arc possible in iMissouri. Our insignificant State and county revenues fall with onerous weight upon less than one-third of the glebe lands, upon personal property, and licenses. The disas- trous wreck sufl'ered by 3Iississippi, Illinois, and other new States, is proof enough of this. How is this reversed in ToxTis? An immense domain fills her treasury — .'^he taxes and sells for taxes at will — unlimited credit and resources invite her to construct the greatest works, without danger. By reducing and graduating the price of lands, she invites forth the agriculturists of our States, and warps progress towards the Gulf. On the pledge of her public lands she may herself alone procure means to construct a railroad to the Pacific I Across the western frontier is unobstructed access to the 8,000,000 of jMexicans ! Western commerce, then, walled in and made piracy in Missouri, cruslied and persecuted, must migi'ate hence to Texas. Again, war with Mexico arose. This was a land war of armies, between nation:- having a conniion frontier of many thousand miles. A single American army of 30,000 cavalry and flying artillery, marching by the magnificent road from Fort Leavenworth, passing by the great table lands to the city of 3Iexico, and sub.sisting their animals of food and transportation upon the pastures, would have concjuored and held all the Mexican States in eighteen months. Forty millions of expenditure \v,)uld have brought peace on our own dictation — great roatis for commerce would have been established for ever, and the disbursements returned to us iu the ceded territory. A war thus economically conducted, however, would have opened the avenue and planted central States to the new seaboard. IJut fleets of transports must plow the Gulf, and the maritime States hi I til ii 14 IGO APPENDIX. of Jacinto and Sierra Maciro extend to embrace Tampico. One hundred thousand soldiers were sent to the impracticable entrance by Saltillo and Potosi — one hundred millions expended upon this army, which, !sta>z;natin<^ upon the waters of the Rio Grande, never passed beyond them; for Saltillo is upon an affluent of the Rio Grande, and only 250 miles from its main bank. Thus was profliii;ately re-enacted the drama of the State of Florida. The maritime ■policy blends the double object of blocking up the interior, and extending the seaboard in a shell around the continent. For this the navy is enormously increased and the army emasculated. Enterprises in the central States are marred, but those of the seaboard sustained directly from the National Trcc-sury. Of this let us take a reccut illustration. A proposition was submitted to the Twenty-ninth Congress, early in its first session (1845-'46) to carry onward to the coast of (California and Oregon, and to Santa Fc, monthly, the mail which comes tri-weekly to our city of Independence. A law authorizing the I'ostmaster-Goncral to let the contract for such an extended mail route to the lowest bidder, in the ordinary way, was alone required. Contractors were ready to execute the whole undertaking for $50,000 per annum, carrying the mails in fifteen days, making the time from ocean to ocean twenty-five days. This proposition, admirable for its practicability, its economy in time and cost, was belabored by orators and suppressed. To this hour all overland mails are prohibited by statute. At this same session of this same Corgiess, and vnder the promptings of these orators, the Governmei t ^'as by statute, made the partner with ship- building companies of New York city. To construct four mail steamers, the sun of $1,250,000 was advanced to these compa- nies, to whom was ,!so given the monopoly of future government transportation for ttn ye.irs. The transportation of our mails through the Isthmus is confided to the Spaniards of New Granada ! All this enormous expenditure has produced at the end of four years, an uncertain monthly mail, outside of our country, and exposed to the hostilities of the whole world, which traverses 9000 miles of sterile ocean in fifty days ! In the interval the contracts have been doubled in amount by doubling APPENDIX. 161 the size and cost of the ships. It is a condition of these con- tracts that these " mail steamers" may bo appraised and pur- chased by Government for the Navy. Thus is tlie Navy chaules- tiiicli/ increased by eij^ht or a dozen war stciimers. Thus, whilst we may transport the domestic mails between our distant people and seaboards through the heart of our territories, every inch upon our own soil, and 1000 miles from any foreign foe or frontier — whilst this can bo done and is offered to be done, by our citizens, for prices at which the mails will yield remune- rating revenues — whilst this admits of an increase to daily mails at any time, and a reduction of time to one-half — whilst this allows of innumerable way mails, telegraphs, and the most inti- mate domestic intercourse — involves neither increase of miliiary force nor expenditures by sea or land, and avoids the possibility of foreign interference or molestation — opening roads and crowd- ing thera with population and settlements — concentrating to the seaport where it reaches the Pacific, the American shipping and business on that ocean, at once creating a great American empo- rium. Instead of all this, which is sensible and natural, and understood by our people, whoso cardinal rljht it is to have the circulation of their domestic thoughts and business through home channels which are short, safe, and expeditious ! Yes, instead of this, we are taxed millions, to have our letters sent 9000 miles in fifty days, under the equator, by sea, through foreign nations, exposed to delay, dangers, and destruction in every form, ruffling the jealousies of rival nations, and exposed to their cannon — and all this to fill the maws of maritime speculators and political ambition. Such are a few examples of a policy hourly influencing our glorious State for weal or woe, whose effect upon you, my fellow- citizens, fills me with the most puzzling astonishment. You drop your own interests with facility when told they are diflScult and inexpedient, and stand at ease, whilst rival enterprises, planned to destroy you, and a thousand times more diflBcult, costly, and fanciful, are finished completely ! Mr. Chairman, eloquence is not nurtured in the depths of the silent wilderness, and there have I passed my youth. D;d I I } 1 1- • 1G2 AITENDIX. J > possess those pracos of lanf^uago and [lolishod elocution, which many youths, uiy ootcinporarifs, traiuoil in the courts and lialLs of K'ij;isl;itioa, ouj^ht to do, tlion hliould my voice .sound lil<(! the ra/ipd bout on John dc Zitzka'.s .skin, into every cabin of our glorious State, to call forth her citizens, and, rou.sed from their isirioble apathy, animate tlieiu to resunie their .stolen rii^hts, and vindicate their crippled honor. For this apathy is towards this our State and our nation, the crime of the sentiuel slumbering on his post. The configuration of the Sierra iMadro (the Mother Mountain of the world) is transcondently massive and sublime. Rising from a basement whuse roots spread out two thousand miles and more, its crest splits almost centrally the Northern cuntiiumt, and divides its waters to the two oceans. Novel terms have been introduced to define its characteristics. J/c.w, expresses the level plateaux of its summits, ('anon, the gorges rent in its slopes by the de.'^cending rivers, luifr, the conical mountains isolated and trimmed into .'^ymmetriual peaks by atmospheric corrosion. Everybody has seen the card houses built by children in the nursery. Suppose three of these in a row, having a second story over the centre : this toy familiarly delineates a transverse section of the Sierra jNIadre. This upper story represents the central, primary me.^i, of the Cordillera — it'^ summit a great plain, de- scending on both flanks by a perpendicular wall of OOOU feet to the level of the second 7)ii'sa or steppe. Towards the west the second mesa lills the whole space to the Andes, whose farther side descends abruptly to the tide level of the I'acific. This is agjiin wliat has been before described at length as the Gukat Taislk Lands. l]ut towards the last, the second mesa forms a l'ie(huont, rent into peaks by the fissures of innumerable streams. 1'his Piedmont, called by us the Black Hills, masks the front of the Sierra Madre, from end to end. So completely is it torn and rent by the perplexity of watercourses, that patches alone are left to define the original plateau. These arc the eastern envelope of the basin of the Yellowstone, the Laramie plain (between the IMattos), the ilatone and the Llano Estacado of Texas. iJeneath tills the third mesa (or steppe), is that superlative region, the I l'' APPENDIX. 168 to IC is a It GuKAT PnAiaiE PriAiNH, wlioso gontlo slopo forms a ^laois to the Gulf through Tttxus, and in front to the trough funned by the IMisHissippi river from Itiisca Jiuko to the liali/.o. Noithoi arc the other three basins of the St. liawreiieo, Hudson's Hay, and iMc'K(!nzic anytliing else but prulutigutiuns of tliis same glacis, sloping towards the cast and north. It is this vastucss of geographical conliguratioii which leads tho fflaiirc of the cngiuc(!r with unerring certainty to that line of natural grades from ocean to ocean, tho discovery of which mankind now awaits with the keenest (Miriosity, and alon'^ which the American nation is resolved to construct the consumnialc work of art — the Asiatic and European Railway. Advancing north along the conib of tho Sierra IMadrc from below 3Iesico, you fiiul at the sources of the Platte (Sweetwater) a wide gap, where, the high mesa suddenly giving out for the space of forty miles, the second mesa passes through from east to west, the continued watcr-ridgo being scarcely perceptible amongst its gentle undulations. This is the South Pass. It is so named as being the inost southern pass, to which you may ascend by an affluent of tho Atlantic and step immediately over on to a stream descending directly to the Pacitic. This name is as ancient as the pass itself. Into it concentrate the groat trails of the buffalo, geographers and road makers by instinct, before tho coming of man. The Indian, the Mexican, and the American, successors of one another, have not improved or deflected from the instincts of the buffalo, nor will they whilst the mountains last in their present unshattercd bulk. The South Pass has a towering grandeur, in keeping with the rivers between which it is the avenue (the Mis.souri, tho Colorado, and the Columbia), all of which issuing from the wall of the Wind River Mountain, come out of it on to the Second Mesa, at the udme level, and into which they immediately commence burrowing their canons of descent to the seas. Here then is the route, the Southern route, of tho National Railroad, ascending by the water-grade of the Platte on to the the second mesa, where it forms the summit, following the top h vol this mesa alonj:' the base of the high mesa, to the Colum- i'ij w L ! l- IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) ^<^ 2(i Q C 1.0 I.I IA£|Z8 |2.5 |5o *^~ R^H S IS 112.0 1.25 1.8 U 11.6 I m t now manufactures a similarly ridiculous misdirection for the energy of the pioneers, by sett.ng up what the geologist would call i "pot hole of the Andes," against the grand Columbia. Comni rce, provident like every other department of industry, makes herself harbors with charts, pilots, buoys, and beacons. The shallowest channel of the Columbia has thirty-five feet water — the deepest of New York, twenty-nine. I;i I. ■|: I M U 166 APPENDIX. Climate distinctly controls the mi;;;rations of the human race, which hus steadily adhered to an isothermal line around the world. The extremely mild climate of our western seahoard is only the consequence of the same great laws of nature which operate in Western Europe. These arc the regular and fixed ordinances of the code of nature, to which the njigrations of man, in common with the animal, yield an instinctive obedience. Within the torrid zone and up to 30° of the northern hemisphere, blow the trade winds and variahlcx, constantly from the east and north- east all around the world, but the upper halves of elliptical orbits followed by the winds lie in the temperate zone, from 35° to 60°, within which the winds flow constantly from the west and south- west all around the world. These winds reach the western goasis of America and Europe after traversing the expanse of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Warmed to the same temperature as these oceans, they impart again this same mild atmosphere to the maritime fronts of the continents which receive them. These same winds, passing onward over great extensions of continent of low tempeniture, covered with snow, or frozen during winter, often warped upward by mountain ranges, becoming exhausted of their warmth, have upon the eastern portijiis of both hemis- pheres an exactly opposite effect upon the climate. Hence the variant temperature of New York and Li.sbon, which face one another on the ojipositc coasts of the Atlantic — of Pekin and San Francisco, similarly opposite upon the I'acific. At San Francisco and Lisbon the seasons are but modulations of one continuous sumviiei'. At New York and Pekin, winter suspends vegetation during seven months, whilst ice and snow bridge the land and waters. These four cities are all close upon the same parallel of latitude, the 40th degree. It is here manifest how in Asia, the masses of population lie below the 40lh°, in Europe above and again (so far) in America, curving downward on the eastern fane of our continent, to rise again to the north upon the warm coast of the Pacific. Thua has the zodiac of nations, our own nation similarly with the rest, pursued a serpentine line of equal temperature, retaining all around the world similar employments, similar industrial pursuits, APPENDIX. 167 ' Mi similar food and clothing, requiring similarity of cliniato, and recoiling alike from the torrid and the arctic zones. The scientific men of the nation oppose the National Railroad — so did those of Europe persecute Galileo and Columbus. Science, like the army and navy, is fed from the national reve- nues, which maritime policy distributes to all that serve its ends. Science is rare ; the spurious (juackcry of science redundant. It is not the scientific doctors of the schools, the bureaux and mili- tary wings of government, that have hewed out this republican empire from the wilderness. This has been reared by the gonuiLO heroism and sublime instincts of the pioneer army, unpaid, un- blessed, nay scoffed and loaded with burdens by government and its swarm of dependants. To bridle progrkss has been the policy of thirty years. To keep the people out of the wilderness. To refuse Territorial governments, and prevent Territories from becoming States. At this moment scientific men are especially busy distracting us with multitudinious routes and invented diffi- culties, devised to perplex and scatter the energies of the citizens, whose unanimous resolve it is to plough open a great central trail to the Pacific. Science cannot unmake the eternal ordinances of nature, and reset the universe to suit local fancies and idle fashion. It is the humble duty of science to investigate nt iure as she is, and promulgate the truths discoverable for the guidance of governments and men. Tbc experienno gained from the grct works constructed by the last generation, in digging through the Alleghanics routes for commerce to the Atlantic, settles for us the rules that shall guide M.S across the Sierra Madre to the Pacific. In 1818 the State of New York cut through the low and narrow ridge between Rome and Syracuse, the former on an affluent of the Hudson, the latter of Lake Ontario. Thus the first expenditures, perforating the d'viding mountain, let through that infant commerce, which in thirty years has grown to such a grandeur of quantity and profit, that this great thoroughfare is itself quadrupled in capacity and lengthened out to Montreal, to Boston, to New York city and into Pennsylvania, towards the east. Westward, it reaches through Ohio and Indiana to the Ohio river, and by the Illinois • i ]••. 170 APPENDIX. Zoroaster i;pon the Cangcs and the Indus. The Chaldeans of the Pornian Sea folhnvcd. Fleets canio from the extreme Orient into the lieiigal Sea, the Persian (lulf, and the lied Seaj — and caravans overland by the O.xus and the Ca.«ipian brought the camel, t Jo horse, cattle, manufactured wool, silks, cotton, and metals, agriculture, commerce, and coin. Empires expanding westward along the Canges, the Euphrates, and the Nile, reached to the Mediterranean and Enxine. From Egypt, Phenioia, and Colchis (Trebisond), sprung European Greece. Such as Progress is to-day, the same has it been for ten thousand years. It is the stream of the human race flowing from the east to the west, impelled by the same divine instinct that pervades creation. By this track comes the sun diurnally to cheer the world. Thus come the tides of men and of the waters, learning, law, religion, the plague, the small-pox, and the cholera. The sources of life and happiness — the pestilence that .saddens both. These empires of which wo have spoken have left upon the ground they occu- pied their names, political society, their organized systems of government and religion. Does not society then, once founded become perennial ? It is within a belt of the earth straddling the 40th° of north latitude that the greatest mass of land sur- rounds the world, and where the continents most nearly approach. Within this belt (from 30° to 50°) four-fifths of the human race is assembled, and here the civilized nations, of whom wo possess any history, have succeeded one another, commencing at the far- thest extremity of Asia, and forming a zodiac towards the setting sun. This succession has flowed onward in an even course, undulating along an isothermal line, until in our time the ring is about to clise around the earth's circumference, by the arrival of the American Nation on the coast of the Pacific, which looks over on to Asia. In this age and in this march of human race, as elsewhere, the bold, energetic, and indomitable, the picked spirits of the world lead the van, and such is the pioneer army. What means that expression in the Declaration of Indepen- dence, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happmess ?" What brought the Cavaliers to Virginia in 1608 ? It was " the pursuit of happiness." What animated the Pilgrims to endure the rigors AI'I'F.iNDIX. 171 of Plymouth Uook ? AVliy, "the pursviit of hnpplncss." What sought IJooiio aiul his couipanion.s plunging a tliousarul mlloH into tho wilderness? This same " pursuit of happiness." What secret motive now brings foreigners to our shores, and impels our own citizens onward to the Pacitic? Again, it is "the pursuit of hap- piness." Proyiraa, then, is one of the inimortal lUOiiTS sanctified in the Charter of human Liberty. Why, then, is advent into the wilderness, the field for the discontented, the oppressed, tho needy, the restless, the ambitious, and tho virtuous, thus closed by Ji policy at once sinister, nefarious, and unconstitutional? Unquiet for our sacred Union is this present time, when political power, about to cross the Alleghanies, see-saws on their crests, counting tho days that precede her eternal transit over them ! It is by tho rapid propagation of new States, the immediate occupation of the broad platform of the continent, the aggregation of the Pacific Ocean and Asiatic commerce, that inquietude will be swallowed up, and the murmurs of discontent lost in the onward sound of advancement. Discontent, distanced, will die out. The immense wants of the Pacific will draw off, over the Western outlets, the ovcrteeming crops of the Mississippi Valley. Thus will the present seaboard States resume again their once profitable monopoly of the European market, relieved from tho competition of the interior States. The cotton and rice culture of Georgia and tho Carolinas will revive. The tobacco of Vir- ginia and Maryland will again alone reach Europe. Ships with- drawn from tho Northern States to tho Pacific, will regenerate the noble business of nautical construction in New England and New York. The established domestic manufactures of clothing and metals will find, in our great home extension, that protection which they in vain seek to create by unequal legislation, nocuous and impracticable in our present incomplete and unbalanced geographical form. Thus calmly weighed and liberally appre- ciated, does this great Central Railroad minister to the interests, and invito the advocacy and co-operation of every section of our territory, and every citizen of our common country. Tho exclusion of foreigners from Japan, China, and Cochin China is not then an institution of barbarism, but a domestic 16 \:l ' I ■i\\ m 172 APPENDIX. tariff of protection. It is designed, like tho combination of Christian nations against piracy, to protect their nationality and freedom against those fierce military nations of Nouthmkn, who for twenty centuries have rent Europe and Western Asia with perpetual massacre ; who ransack all tho seas in their war ships : store tho rocks of tho ocean with munitions of war, crush tho millions of India with cannon and the bayonet : plunder Africa of a million annually of her swarthy children to rot in foreign slavery : and even exterminate one another in deadly strife when they meet amongst the antipodes, in the solitudes of the Southern Ocean. When, however, oiw diplomacy shall receive a wise direction — when our foolish nepotism to Europe shall be run out — when men of sense, such as Franklin was of old, shall sail over from Astoria to Pekin, and there converse, with the Oriental Court, of llepublican America as she is — when her civic growth and pacific policy shall be there understood — when the central position of our continent shall be known, forming tho avenue for trade and barrier against war with the Northmen of Europe — then will mutual confidence between these, the oldest and youngest of the human family, the extremes mot, show itself in the graces of a free commerce, and tho ties of an harmonious fraternity. It is for you especially, people of Missouri, to seek these new relations with the Oriental people, with the zeal of faith and the fixed will of conviction. It is arch mockery for us to be duped by the flippant caricatures of these ancient and polished Asiatics, invented by British envy to mislead us, and fed out to us by the British press to cloak sinister designs of subjugation and world-wide plunder. Kather let us take alarm at the tone and source of this monstrous flood of calumny, and know that a direct inspection for ourselves will reveal to us in Asia empires of people illustrious for their antique civilization, rendered enduring and perfect by political equality, and wise civic institutions, winnowed and renovated during fifty centuries of uninterrupted experience — amongst whom the science and art of war, indeed, are decayed from long disuse, but all useful sciences highly perfected — with whom government has reached the mildest form of patriarchal despotism, eliminating political APPilNDIX. 173 priestcraft and the dissciiiiii.ntcd tyranny of a patrician order — who have so admirably refined and perfected nmnioipal govern- ment and police, that 400,000,000 of population (double that of all Europe) are united under one harmonious political .system in concord and trancjuillity. It is among these swarming hives of ingenious people that we will find markets on a scale commensurate with our own prolific industry. This is not now the ease in Europe. The Europeans are in all things our rivals and competitors. Are we agricultu- rists ? So are they, and wall ofi" our competition with corn-law tariffs. Are we miners and manufacturers? So are they, and overtop us by abundance of labor and capital. Arc we ship- owners ? So are they, having an immense marine cheaply navigated. They conquer and colonize foreign countries, of whose trade they make monopolies ! They are northern nations, whose clothing is of wool and flax, consuming a very limited amount of cotton. What they take from us is to manufacture for exportation. Tobacco is prohibited — hemp and metals they export. The population of Europe is 205,000,000 — of the At- lantic all round, 253,000,000. On the Pacific, in front of us, are 400,000,000 people of the tropics — Polynesians, South Americans, Soutliern Asiatics — amongst whom wheat is not cul- tivated, and animal food, other than fish and poultry, very scarce. Their clothing is exclu.sively cloth of cotton, grass, and silk. Opium is excessively used amongst them, llice, the plantain, banana, and fruits arc their uusi.^stantial diet. Here, then, will be the market for raw and manufactured cotton. Here our rank manufactured tobacco will substitute itself for opium. Here our substantial articles of food — flour, meats, and fish — will find pur- chasers in all who eat. Lead and hemp will be sold. In return will come to us groceries, spices, teas, cofi"ee, sugar — porcelain, Japan ware, furniture^ works in ivory — drugs, paints, dyes, medicines — beautiful fabrics of silk, satin, velvet, crapes; nan- keens, the delicate shawls of Cashmere, the carpets of Persia — jewelry, trinkets, and to3's — the hemp of Manilla — luscious fruits dried and preserved. The people of the Pacific have no marine adapted to cross the great ocean — the carrying to and fro !'4 ii ' Jii |>1 .j»,« 174 API'KNUIX. will bo in our sliips, nnd a monopoly to us — sli'p-buIlJin'; nnd navi^iitioii will occiipy our pcoplo of tlio now Koabourl, nnd the niotals, liiiiilicr, and lioinp of the interior find a prodij^ious dctnand. Tlio jjopulatiun of the Panillo ull round exceeds 64r),0(»0,0()0 ! Will not (ben o\ir people find in tbis, tbut certain panacea of all tbeir wants and wisbes, namely, an infinite market of eonsuniption ? Surely tbis people, wbicb lias submitted to the nostrums of political quackery, tariffs of protectio'i. banks to make money plenty, liomc manufactures and systems of internal improvement, all invented to create markets at borne, by ebang- ing our producing; a;:;riculturists into eonsumint^ operatives, but all of wbicb little experiments bave produced industrial anarcby and eominereial bankruptcy; surely tbis people will not bcsitate to construct for tbemselves tbis ^reat " National Ilij^bway," at pinall comparative cost, and leadinjz; as level as a cannon to its blank, to a new ocean, teeminj^ witb 045,000,000 of people, of wants unlimited, and liaving a geniuK active, inudligcnt, and commercial ! To effect tbis, it is oidy necessary to untrammel progress from tbc snares and dead-falls of inaritimo policy. To re-open tbe legitimate onward trail of tbe pioneer army, and rein- vigorate its marcb. Tbe cause of tbe pioneers at tbis bour pre- eminently ik'nuiHiIii tbe undivided energies of ^Missouri. It is for us tbat tbc pioneer army is now coufiuering tbe vast wilder- ness tbat bems in our commerce and blocks tbo frontier: for us it throws down tbe perfidious Indian wall : reopens tbe central trail of advancement so long insidiously closed — and to us, for us, it re•e^stablisbes tbat crowning excellence of position of which hostile policy has for thirty years bereft us. It is no^ ambition tbat impels vx, citizens of Missouri, to advance to tbe advocacy of tbis great work with our whole unshackled energies — it is high religious duty. Central to the continent, to its internal navigation, to its States, to its com- merce, and to its variety of agriculture, neutral to all sectional antipathies, and the converging heart of all interests : we must occupy tbis central position with a power and dignity equal to its importance, with a strength of grasp and intensity of enterprise to cope with the tallest exigencies. Let us appreciate this, and ArrioNDix. 176 stand up to thn work with hc:irt.s of controversy nnd situ-wH of omiiiraiici', that the faiuo of our glorious State, sallying; forth from her seat in th(( centre, may resuund in and outward all round from tho centre to the cireumiluent oceans ! Observe tho forci{j;n comnicrco of America, and the splendid murine which it sustains I This has grown up in liOU years. Hut compare with it tlu; commerce and navii^ation of the inte- rior, grown up in less than forty years, fur nuch is the age of steam navigation on the rivers and lakes. The latter already equals tho former, for it tran.sports internally what is consumed at homo, as well as what is eullectcd at the seaports for exporta- tion. Thus St. Louis, in the amount of tonnage arriving and departing annually, is the fourth city of tho Union, ranking next to Boston. Indelinitely grand is this domestic, internal coni- mcrco. Let us compare the two. Tho commerce between New York and Liverpool, 3500 miles a.*under, rcrjuircs powerful vessels of great size and strength to carry mu'di and resist the storms of tii ocean. The intervening space is a desert waste of salt water. A vessel of OOO tuns must be filled with cargo before lier departure, to make so long a voyage profitable. She goes to Liverpool and back — sails 3500 miles, touches only two points of land, and carries two loads — four months of time at least, is con- sumed in this. Such arc the voyages of ocean connnercc — expen- sive, dilatory, and fidl of dangers. Compare with this the river voyage. From Pittsburg (or New Orleans) to Fort Union, the distance is 3500 miles, by the Ohio and Missouri rivcr.s— a steamer of GOO tons, cheaply constructed and navigated, per- forms tho voyage to and fro, with perfect safety, in two and a half months, and absolutely without danger, along a continuous river channel. This channel has a double bank, so that this vessel coasts along a shore of 14,000 miles, at any .square rod of which she may take iu and discharge passengers and cargo. Thus it is possible that no single passenger or cargo remains on board over 100 miles, and yet the vessel is full througliout tho voyage. These same advantages belong' to railroads traversing populous countries. Such is our internal navigation — cheap, expeditious, and abso- lutely without danger. 15* ii/' W!\ IIBiailin^^wvpiBlp^lfp^Jf-^^pim^llllJII J|J|.|.^J|.llW|HI|Mll ■■ 176 APPENDIX. Now the circuitous seaboard surrounding the Atlantic may be estimated at 09,000 miles, with harbors indenting it — but small vessels cannot navigate the broad sea, nor largo vessels enter all the harbors. On the other hand, within the united basins of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, is a continuous 'iver navigation for 45,000 miles, having a double bunk or 90,000 miles of coast, the whole extent of which may be visited by the same steamer, which can land anywhere ! Such is one illustration of the supremely beneficent formation of this great interior basin, of which our own State occupies the centre and focus. Let a railroad from the Missouri elongate this to the Pacific, carrying population clear up all the rivers to their sources and down those beyond the Sierras, and behold the greatness of an internal commerce ! Everybody is acquainted with the commercial intercourse be- tween the continents which fringe the Atlantic. The life, the vivacity, the grand energies which resound upon its buoyant waves. All this is the result of the discovery of yVmerica and its population with European stock — hence all this has its growth ! Antiquity had for its field the Mediterranean, and gallics sufficed. This was commerce in its infancy, confined to the nursery and content with toys. Since Columbus, America has become greater than the Europe of Columbus — and as this period has expanded the field of human activity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, from Western Europe to America and Europe, blending all this vast space under one international relationship. So now we advance to consummate the blending of the Pacific with these other seas : — Asia with these other con- tinents — and urge to its goal that expanding progression, which marches on to complete the zodiac of the globe, and blend into bonds of confraternity all the continents, all the seas, and all the nations ! In the vast region of North-Western Texas, traversed by the rivers Brazos, Trinity, Rio lloxo, Canadian, Arkansas, and Del Norte, exists a fertile region much larger than France, the dry- ness of whose climate, whose red soils, impregnated with the sul- phate of lime (plaster), and whose dtitude, present in perfect combination the qualities for the cultivation of the grape and the APPENDIX. 177 production of wines. These rivers all have their sources in pro- digious mountains of plaster, from winch the red tinge and the fertility of their valleys below is derived. Natural vineyards, covering millions of acres, and annually pruned down by the nib- bling herds of buffalo and antelope, here now yearly waste an inflnite vintage. This has already become known to the German pioneers of Texas, and soon will be seen rising a vine culture, rivalling in national importance the cotton culture, the tobacco crop, and even the production of provisions. Then too will be seen the universal consumption of mild and healthy wines by our people, and the gay and exhilarating spirits which generous wines inspire, will transpose the fell passions and fiery madness of alcohol. Again, the region of gold and precious metals and stones is not limited, but is absolutely infinite. It is over the whole extent of that primary and volcanic formation extending from the antarctic to the arctic extremities of America, including in its expanse the Andes of South and North America, the Sierra Madre and the Table Lands. This abundance of the material of coin, wrought and developed by sober American industry, is to the human race the .supremest gift of Divine Beneficence. Has not the American cotton culture obliterated harsh aristocratic distinctions in dress, and thus democratized the costume of society over the world ? What cotton has done for equality in dress, the same will gold effect for individual equality in property and physical comforts. Study how the stiff, icy servitude of European feudal times has melted, since the conquests of Cortcz and Pizarro opened the sources from which portable personal property has exalted itself above fixed and immutable glebe land ! Beyond the Sierra Madre, upon the Great Table Lands, '" ". parallel vein of thin moimtains, whose masses consist of rock-salt. As streams elsewhere bring down gravel and soil, so here they liquefy the rocks dcwi which they descend, and reaching the small inland seas nnd l-kes, yield it again in the crystalline cover- ings which pave their bowls. In another parallel vein is a con- tinuous line of plaster mountains. In another, a continuous line of thermal and medicinal springs, some of which are the first Ml III 178 APPENDIX. appearance above ground of subterranean rivers, having flowed hundreds of miles under phiins of lava. Secondary basins of great size abound, having freestone, marble, and coal formations — iron, load, and the metals of the arts. All forms, indeed, into which geology classifies matter, here follow one another in appro- priate positions and proportions, with the regularity uf the stripes of the rainbow, the whole deriving prominence and distinctness of detail from the immensity of the general scale. Thus, instead of inferiority in abundance and variety of things used by and useful to man, it is here that they especially abound in variety, good quality, and vastnoss. Across all these must pass any highway connecting the two oceans, distributing outward the infinite natural resources of this iutra-montane world. No other portion of the world will better accommodate a dense popu- lation than these Table Lands, on which further south, is the chief population of Mexico. In the dryness and salubrity of its climate, its extraordinary pastoral e.^ccUcnce, and its mineral wealth, arc the e(iuivalcnts of the richer lands, but uncertain seasons and health of countries of less altitude. Its intermediate position will secure perpetual communication with the seaboards. An admirable economy of arrangement given by nature to the industry of our people, points with great power to this central route, which also corresponds to the positions and courses of the great navigable rivers. In New England and at the extreme north, where winter dwarfs agriculture, there are no planters, but ships are built, owned, and navigated. Here are the marine of zVmcrica, her stulors. On the shores of the Gulf, and where southern warmth invites man to agriculture, no ships are built, owned, or navigated — the people here plant and produce cargoes for the ships of the north — not a native sailor is found in these countries. Jjetwcen these, occupying a broad central belt, are the farmers, producers of food. These latter ecjuul in number the other two combined. The farmer recoils from a southern sun, where heat forbids labor, and where the culture of wheat and swine languis'.ics — in like manner, ho recoils from the long winter of the north, wbcre cattle and Indian corn cease to yield abundantly. It is this central farming population which feed APPENDIX. 179 the commercial people of the North and the planting people of the South, and support themselves and furnish for export. They precede all other occupants, and head the movement into the wilderness, where the first requisites are food and transportation. Yet it is amongst the farming population that domestic commerce finds its great volume of employments — and amongst them are required, first and chiefly, the great channels of trade which find their termini amongst the other two. It is this mass, which, stopped by the artificial network of maritime polici/, is now rushing through and tearing its meshes from their fastenings. In resuming their ancient vigor, concentrated by long restraint, they now demand a National Ilailway to the ocean which they seek. What I have here stated, Mr. Chairman and fellow-citizens, of geographical facts, are of my own knowledge; for with the works of Lewis and Clarke, Fremont, Emory, and Humboldt, I have during six toilsome years of war and exploration, traversed the countries they describe and the vast intervals between, irhich they have never visited. In these wanderings, undertaken of my own will, I have descended the Andes to the Pacific and returned; crossed and recrossed by many routes all the basins of the Table Lands, excepting only that of the City of Mexico, and coasted along the base of the Sierra Madre from 45° to 25°. This "mother range" I have crossed and recrossed at six different passes in this long interval, and its supreme grandeur is stamped indelibly in my memory. What I have said of •policy is from the mouths of those eminent statesmen who have con- trived it, and those equally eminent who have unsuccessfully opposed it. I have expressed my convictions very positively, but not im- modestly ; for in the terrible vastness of these solitudes, nature speaks her iron will from summits of eternal ice, and where she frowns upon our advances, our foolish efforts shrivel into ashes. It is, then, this stern and certain language of nature that I have sought to penetrate, and here struggle to repeat. Many routes for a National Highway, cunningly contrived and speciously reasoned out, are before the people — all these will vanish beneath exact geographical scrutiny, for they violate nature at hap-hazard, M A\ 180 APPENDIX. with whom human skill must act in unison. This unison is hap- pily attainable, and discussion will reveal it. Let us, then, understand nature rightly — let us cense from conflict, and further our onward march in unison with her bene- ficent aid and guidance. This great work must come and come now, to this generation. No difficulty lie8 in the enterprise itself — but such as will instantly vanish before the concentrated will and energies of the people. II. PROCEEDINGS OF A MASS MEETING OP THE CITIZENS OP JACKSON COUNTY, AT INDEPENDENCE, ON THE 5th op NOVEMBER, 1849, TO RESPOND TO THE ACTION OP THE GREAT NATIONAL RAILROAD CONVENTION, HELD IN ST. LOUIS ON THE loTH DAY OP OCTOBER, 1849. On motion of Mr. J. W. Modie, Col. James Chiles was appointed Chairman, and on motion of R. G. Smart, Esq., J. R. Palmer was appointed Secretary. Col. Wm. Gilpin was then called upon to address the meet- ing, and explain its object: He responded to the call in a speech which interested and occupied the attention of the meeting for about one hour and a half; in conclusion he movod the appoint- ment of a committee of twelve to write and report to the meeting resolutions responsive to the action of the great Convention at St. Louis. The motion having been adopted, the Chairman appointed as the Committee : Col. William Gilpin, A. Brooking, Gen. S. D, Lucas, Samuel Ralston, Maj. Robert Rickman, Col. James M. Cogswell, James P^-ttou, Esq., Col. Oliver Caldwell, R. G. Smart, Esq., William R. Singleton, Alexander Collins, and S. H. Woodson, Esq. The Committee, after consultation, reported the following reso- lutions, which were unanimously adopted : — ^JP^tRI^'IVPIW I !>' '(■! II >l xap^m APPENDIX. 181 1. Resolved, That we heartily and zealously approve of, ar.i concur in the proceeding of the " National Railroad Convention," held at St. Louis on the 15th ultimo. 2. Resolved, That in the great national work, that shall con- nect the two seaboards of our country, and the interior with the seaboards, we behold an enterprise as universal to the inhabitants of our Union as their language, their politics, and their com- merce — a bond of unanimous action, and not a bone of contention and strife. 3. Resolvrd, That to the people of the " Valley of the Missis- eippi," intimate and direct connection with the seaboards and people of the Pacific, is as essential and as interesting as with those of the Atlantic. 4. Resolved, That, inasmuch as our people in their natural progressive growth have extended their habitations across the continent, and along the western seaboard, it is our duty, and the duty of our Government, to give to this new seaboard, fleets, for- tifications, and arms for defence — harbors, light-houses, and murine police, for the encouragement and protection of commerce and highways — and a military police to confirm and make safe the connection with the interior. 5. Resolved, further, That a NATIONAL Railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific is the most direct, economical, and con- stitutional means of efiecting the above objects. 5, Resolved, That, whereas the Almighty has placed the terri- tories of the American Union in the centre, between Asia and Europe, and the route of the " Asiatic and European Railway" through the heart of our national domain, it is our duty to the human family to prosecute, vigorously, through its new channel, that supreme commerce between the Oriental Nations and the Nations o. ^.e Atlantic, which history proves to have existed in all ages, and to be necessary to keep alive comity, science, and civilization among mankind. 6. Resolved, That, whcreaf! the people of China, Japan, Poly- nesia, and Southern America now receive from British India aijricultural jiroduce (raw and manufactured cotton, indigo, opium, rice, wool, &c.), to the amount of 3150,000,000, annually; M \^f^fl r i>ii vfiuiimuui vjum.ipi^vTTimvv'vn^wiiiw i unpjiumi 182 APPENDIX. we bolieve these same people will take from the Americans in 2>rr/crence, moro than twice this amount of agricultural produce (substituting tobacco for opium, and flour and meats for rice) so soon as the barrier of the Rocky Mountains be removed by a National Railway. 7. Resolved, That apart from the great benefits which shall accrue to us and the other nations of the Atlantic from this National Railway, wc regard it as a beneficent domestic work, to open to our people access to the immense and glorious domain of the Plains, the Sierra Madre, the great Table Lands, and the Andes, known to abound in metals, mountains and lakos of salt, mountalr.s of plaster and marble, thermal and medicinal springs, wild cattle, salubrious climates, sulphur, coal, lumber, arable and pastoral lands of the finest quality, and staple productions uullmlted in variety and abundance. 8. Resolved, That, whereas, during the last thirty years, the generation of our fathers has covered the eastern half of our con- tinent with States, and, commencing with the New York Canal in 1818, has everywhere rendered the connection between the " "V'alloy of the Mississippi" and the Atlantic seaboard complete, and carried the commerce of the Atlantic to the grandest devel- opment — It is the high and glorious mission and duty of us their sons and heirs, of the growing generation, in lUce manner, to cover the western half of the continent with States, to render complete with great works the connection of the " Valley of the Mississippi" with the Pacific seaboard, and expand upon the Pacific Ocean a similarly magnificent commerce. 9. Resolved, That we earnestly entreat dur fellow-citizens, in all sections of our Union, to unite with us in this central domestic work in preference to dissipating the national energies upon cir- cuitous routes, running near the equator, through foreign coun- tries beyond our control, and certain to Involve us in the com- petitions, the jealousies, and the hostile interests of foreigners and rivals. 10. Renohcd, That we invite our fellow-citizens throughout the State to assemble in their counties and cities, and join in a general and unanimous response to the St. Louis Convention, and APPENDIX. 183 unite with us in respectfully instructing our Representatives and Senators in Congress to vote for such measures as may be intro- duced at the coming session of our National Legislature to carry out the views embodied in the foregoing resolutions. 11. Resolved^ That the Secretary of this Mass Meeting forward to each of our Representatives and Senators in Congress a copy of these resolutions. Mr. George W. Rhoadcs offered the following resolutions : — 1. Resolved, That Col. Gilpin bo requested to write out for publication the speech made by him to this meeting on to-day. 2. Resolved, That the " Missouri Commonwealth," and all other papers in this State friendly to a project of constructing a National Railroad to the Pacific from the " Valley of the Missis- sippi," be requested to publish the proceedings of this meeting. III. PIKE'S PEAK AND THE SIERRA SAN JUAN. EXTRACTS FROM AN ADDRESS BY COL. WILLIAM GILPIN, DELIVERED AT KANSAS CITY, NOVEMBER 15tH, 1858; ON THE GOLD PRODUCTION OF AMERICA AND TUE SIERRA SAN JUAN. I SUBMIT to your inspection three maps. The first is an " Hydrographic Map of North America," exhibiting in daguerreo- type the physical divisions of our continent ; the second is a map of the world, exhibiting America in the centre between Asia and Europe, and having delineated upon it the Isothermal Zodiac of Nations, filling the north temperate zone of the globe ; the third is a map of the " Basin of the Mississippi." 16 184 APPENDIX. Physical geography arranges the surface of tlic continents into basins and the mountain crests whicli divide them. Thus the basin of the Mississippi is that surface which, being drained by all the confluent branches of this river, discharges its fro.^h waters into the Gulf of Mexico. This surface is an undulating, calcare- ous plain of one million two hundred thousand sfjuare miles of area ; it is embraced entirely within the temperate zone; occupies the heart and splendors of our continent, and is the most magnificent dwelling-place marked out by God for man's abode. Three more similar calcareous basins, each drained by a single system of rivers : the basin of the St. Lawrence ; the basin of the Saskatchewan of Hudson's Bay; and the arctic basin of the McKenzie, resting upon one another and upon the basin of the Mississippi, form together one continuous expanse, geologically UL-f'orm and identical. This immense expanse defines it.self as the Calcareous Plain of North America. Limestone horizontally stratified, underlies this whole expanse, being formed, like cheese from milk, from the sediment and pressure of the ocean which once rolled over it, but has now retired. This calcareous plain, thus forming a unit in physical goographyj embraces four-sevenths of the area of our continent. It is en- compassed all round by a circuit of primary mountiiins, within which it forms an amphitheatre. These mountains are the Allegha- nies, towards the Atlantic; the Cordilleras of the Sierra Madre and the Andes, towards the Pacific. The mouths of the great rivers form the doors or outlets through them to the oceans. This circumferent wall of mountains is of immense breadth toward the Pacific. It is the second unit in physical geography, and covers two-sevenths of the area of our c(tntinent. External to the moun- tain formation Is the Maritime Slope, washed by the oceans, and penetrated by the tides. This external division is the third unit in physical geography, and forms all round one-seventh of the area of our continent. Behold, then, the physical arrangement of our continent; at once simple, complete, and sublime : — the Calcareous Plain, four- sevenths ; the Mountain Formation, two-sevenths ; the Maritime Slope, one-seventh. APPENDIX. 185 Tho geological structure of our continent has tlic same order, a like magnitude of dimensions and arrangements, a parallel simplicity. The Calcareous Plain is a uniform secondary forma- tion of limestone, horizontally deposited and stratified. The Mountain Formation is of granite, presenting the primeval crust of the globe rent by volcanic forces, and elevated vertically. The Maritime Slope presents tho external mountain base partly revealed, and partly covered by the washings of the sea. Everybody is familiar with the manufacture of siiot. This is accomplished by pouring licjuid lead at a high elevation, through perforated moulds. Each pellet of lead descending through the air, is formed, as it cools, into a sphere, by the invisible force of gravity. The globe of the earth has had a similar origin — once a liquid mass, now a solid, gravitating sphere, such as we inhabit it. Geology explains how the material mass of this great sphere has arranged itself, in cooling, into layers enveloping one another, like the successive coatings of an onion. Specific gravity accounts for the relative position of these layers, one upon the other, and explains to us when and how to penetrate to their metalliferous contents. It is in the primeval rocks exclusively, that the precious metals and precious stones are found. The base metals are contained in the calcareous or secondary rocks. The same stupendous scale holds in the abundance of the metals, their purity, and their widely extended distribution. It is your request that I speak, specially, on this evening, of the gold production of our country, and specifically of the region surrounding Pike's Peak and the Sierra San Juan. Specific gravity guides us to discover the rocks in which the precious metals may be found and where they are totally absent. If into a hollow pillar of glass there be poured a quart of quicksilver, one of water, one of oil, and one of alcohol, these li(iuids will rest one upon the other, in this order : if a piece of gold, of iron, of wood, and a feather, be thrown in, they will sink; the gold to the bottom, the iron to the quicksilver, the wood to the water, the feather to the oil. If this mass be congealed to ice, this arrangement will remain solid and permanent ; the gold must be sought for sedimentary to the quicksilver; the iron above it, but ISO APPENDIX. scilimontary to the water ; the wood fcJiinontary to the oil. In the groat order of nuturo, a similar nrraiigemcut hoUls in the rockt< which coiuposo the tilche of the earth, and in their contents, once all linuid, but now jtornianently .'^olid in the order of their relative specific gravities. It is the primeval muss, then, of the Mountain Formation, which alone is auriferous, and within it only can the precious metals, and especially gold, be sought for with success. The Mountain Formation, which occupies the western portion of our continent to the extent of two-sevenths of its whole area, consists of the Cordillera of the Sierra IMadrc on the cast, the Cordillera of the Andes on the west, and the Plateau of the Table Lands embraced between them. It is uniformly primeval and everywhere auriferous. The Plateau of the Table Lands coramencos above Tehuantcpec, where the Cordilleras begin to open from one another. It runs through the continent to Behr- ing's Straits, and is one thousand miles in width, in our latitude, (30°). , The general elevation of its surface is GOOO feet above the sea ; that of the Cordilleras is 12,000 feet. The Plateau is traversed across by great mountain chains, which subdivide it into basins. Three of the.se basins contain, respectively, the great rivers, the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Rio del Norte, which gorge the Cordilleras, and escape to the seas. Three other basins contain the stagnant lakes, the Great Salt Lake, the Logana, and the Lake of the City of Mexico ; these have no outlets or drainage to the seas. Of these mountain chains the most interesting to us is the Sierra Mimbres. This divides asunder the basins of the Colorado and the Del Norto, which rest against it as a backbone. It leaves the western flank of the Cordillera of the Sierra Madre, in lati- tude 39°, and, traversing the Plateau by a due southern course for 1400 miles, joins the Cordillera of the Andes in the Mexican State of Durango, in latitude 23°. This mountain chain is volcanic, containiiig craters and the overflow of lava. The Cordillera of the Andes is also volcanic. These mountain chains consist of the primeval rocks, broken from their original positions, heaved up edgewise by the expansive power of the internal fires API'KNDIX. 187 of the globe, nnJ rcvcalcJ to sit^^lit and search. iMurcovor, the Ciilondo rivor, in cscapint^ to the sea, gorges the Cordillera of the Andes diagonally, having rent its way by a chasm bored through the very bowels of the Cordillera, athwart from base to base. This chasm, four hundred miles in length, is known as the Cafion of the Colorado. This canon proHents the unique and novel fact to mankind, that a primary mountain chain whose Bummit is of the auriferous rocks, is thus gorged to its foundations, many thousand feet in depth 1 It is here, upon the plateau, in the arcane of the mountain formation, and the activity of the stupendous forges of nature, that the precious metals may bo sought in mass and in position. Moreover, the Sierra Mimbres, where its southern half bisects the Mexican States of Durango and Chihuahua, contains twenty-one mines of silver, which, wrought for three centuries by the Spaniard.s, have furni.shed the world with its silver coin and bullion. Moreover, where the Sierra IMimbrcs, in its course to the north, approaches to its junction with the Sierra Madro, it increases to a prodigious bulk. It rises to the altitude of perpetual snow, and assumes for two hundred miles the local name of Sierra San Juan. Here it is that the dislocation of nature by volcanic forces, and the conseriuent metalliferous development, attain their highest culmi- nation. What is about to follow the arrival of our pioneer people within this region, may be exactly illustrated by what is already done within the region of the great Calcareous Plain. We have seen that the calcareous plain, being formed beneath a great ocean, condensed from its filtration and by its pressure, contains only the base metals, copper, iron, lead, zinc. A metal- liferous band of these metals is traced diagonally across it, tra- versing from south-western Texas, through that State, through Arkansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, brushing the shores of Lake Superior and of Hudson's Bay, to the ocean shore opposite Green- land. Points of culmination of these various metals are found, where they reveal themselves above the general surface in mass and in position. Thus iron appears in Missouri in native purity, protruding in mountain masses over many hundred square miles 16* 188 APPENDIX. of surfuco ; the .same isi the form of coppor adjacent to Lako Superior; so also with lead in Missouri and in Wisconsin. Now the sanjo arrangement characterizes tho iuinienso prime- val formation which occupies our continent from Capo Horn to Jlohrinii's Strait, and which is throughout impregnated with tho precious metals ! iVs j^old is everywhere else found within it in the form of grains or scales, or minute lumps, so is it possible for it to culminate in mass and in position, where the auriferous rock.s are upheaved to form the vertical masses of tho Sierra San Juan and the Andes, and arc then gorged into their bowels by the caiion of tho Colorado. The search for gold has heretofore conGncd itself to tho exter- nal i'links of the primeval mountains, where they front the sea, and where the rivers descend from their backs. Why it has here been found only in grain.s, scales, and small lumps may be thus illustnitod : I suppose myself at my camp-fire in the wilder- ness engaged in boiling rice ; into a camp kettle of boiling water I throw a cup of rice. This rice, after a time, settles by its specific gravity into a sedimentary mass beneath the water — tho water above retains a milky whiteness. This whiteness is due to the presence of minute particles of rice remaining suspended through the body of the lluid. IJcing frozen into ice, this con- dition remains fixed in solid form. Tho presence of the gold ia the auriferous r(jcks has had a similar origin, and presents iden- tical conditions. It is the attrition of the elements upon tho surface rocks and veins only that have as yet attracted attention. It is hrnriUh that we must search for the sedimentary mass ; tho possibility to do which now first presents itself as wo advance within the labyrinth of tho volcanic masses and cafions of tho plateau. My own personal experience, earned during three military expeditions, made between the years lS44-'4(), rendered despe- rate from tlic then unknown complication of the country added to the numerical strength and savage character of the Indians, is not without value. The facts then and since collected by me aro 80 numerous and so positive, that I entertain an absolute convic- tion, derived from them, that gold in mass and in position and APPENDIX. 189 infinlto in quantity will, within the coming three yours, rovoal itself to the cncrj^y of our pioncorH. All the precious nietuls iinil precious utonos, will also reveal themselves in e(|ual uhunduneo in this roi^ion so propitious to their production. Such a develop- ment has nothing in it speculative or theoretical. It comes of necessity in the order of time, and as an inevitable se(|ucnco to tho planting; of empire in Texas, in C'alifurnia, in ()rej,'on, in Kansas, and in Utah. As these other developments have pre- ceded it in tho order of time, and encompass it all round, this now comes to unite, to complete, to consummate the rest, aud to give form and power and s[)lendor to the whole. The intjuiry which ae((uaints us with tho climate, tho aj;ricul- ture, and the dumcstic fjeography of this immense rofjion, is still equally interesting and important as its metals. It was upon tho summit of this plateau, where it traverses 3IcxIco and I'cru, that tho semi-civilized empires of Montezuma and the Incas were found, when a sterile barbarism pervaded every other portion of the continent of America. The distance hence to Pike's Teak is less than 700 miles. It is reached by the great road of the Arkansas river, traversing straight to the west, and ascending the imperceptible grade of tho Great Plains clear to the mountain base. Gold is here discovered so soon as the primeval rocks rise from beneath the calcareous plain. Pike's Peak, which rises to the altitude of 14,500 feet above tho sea, is the abrupt colossal termination of tho mountain promontory, which, protruding eastward from the Cordillera 100 miles, sunders from one another the sources of tho South Platto and the Arkansas rivers. Where this promontory connects with the Cordillera is a supremely grand focal point of primary moun- tain chains, primary rivers, and pares. This/oa/^ point is in the same latitude as San Francisco aud St. Louis (39°), is about 1000 miles from each, and in the centre between them. The direction of the Cordillera is from north-west to south-east. From its western flank protrudes a promontory, balancing and similar to Pike's Peak, known as Elk Mountain ; it sunders from ono another the Grand river of the Colorado and the Kagle, termina- ting abruptly within the angle of their junction. Radiating duo 190 APPENDIX. If I'lCM south is the Sierra Miiubrcs, known for 200 miles by the snowy peaks of San Juan; this chnin sunJora the waters of Eagle river from the llio del Norte. The southern arm of the Cordil- lera sunders the waters of the Rio del Norte from the Arkansas river : the northern arm, the waters of the Platie river from tho Rio Grande of the Colorado. Such is this focal summit, from which live primary mountains and five rivers simultaneously depart. Upon the Platte is the pare known as the Bayou Salado ; upon the Rio G rande of the Colorado, the pare known as the Middle Pare j upon the Rio del Norte, the pare called the Bayou of San Luis. The Arkansas and Eagle rivers have no pares, they dolilo outward through stupenduus canons. The pares, scooped out of the main dorsal mass of the Cordillera by the rivers which bisect them, are, each one of them, an immense amphitheatre of singular beauty, fertility, and temperate atmo- sphere ; they approach one another where they rest against the Cordillera at the extreme sources of the rivers. Behold, then, the panorama which salutes the vision of one who has surmounted this supremo focal summit of the Cordillera ! Infinite in variety of features ; each feature intense in the mag- nitude and the grandeur of its mould ; in front, in rear, and on either hand, nature ascending in all her elements to the standard of superlative sublimity ! Beneath, the family of Pares ; around, the radiating banks of the primeval mountains; the primary rivers starting to the seas ; above, tho ethereal canopy intensely blue, effulgent with the unclouded sun by day, and stars by night; to the east, the undulatirg plains, expanding one hundred blagues, to dip, like the ocean, beneath the encircling horizon; to the west, the sublime Plateau, chequered by volcanic peaks and mesas, challenged as a labyrinth, by the profound gorges of the streams ! It is manifest with what ease the pioneers, already engaged in mining at the entrance of the Bayou Sahdo, will in another season ascend through it to the Ccrdillo"'a, surmount its crests, and descend into the Bayou San Luis. They will develop at every step gold in new and increasing abundance. Besides, access is equally facile by the Huerfano, an affluent of the Ar- APPENDIX. 191 kansas coming down from the Spanish Pc;ik, 100 miles farther to the south. From New Mexico, the approach is by ascending the llio IJravo del Norte. The snowy battlement of the Sierra Sau Juan form the western wall of the Bayou San Luis. From its middle flank the Sierra San Juan projects to the south-west a chain of remarkable volcanic mountains, known as the Sierra La Plata (silver mountain). This chain divides asunder the waters of the Great Colorado from the Rio San Juan, and, filling the angle of their junction, forms the perpendicular wall of the Great Caiion. It is to this remarkable mountain chain, and its surrounding region, that I have desired to conduct you, and here stop, in the midst of the veritable arcana of the Mountain Formation and its metalliferous elements. The Sierra l,i Plata is 400 miles in length, having its course wc^t-south-wcst. Along its dorsal crest are volcanic masses penetrating to perpetual snow; its flanks descend by immense terraces of carboniferous and sulphurous limestone. All forma- tions of the globe here come together, mingle with one another, acquire harmony, and arrange themselves side by side in gigantic proportions. Lava, porphyritic granite, sandstone, limestone, the precious and base metals, precious stones, salt, mnvble, coal, thermal and medicinal streams, fantastic mountains called cri- stones, or abrupt peaks, level mesas of great fertility, cailons, delicious valleys, rivers, and great forests; all these, and a thou- sand other varieties, find room, apjioar in succession, in perfect order, and in perfectly graceful pronortioas. llemoteness from the sea, and altitude, secure to this region a tonic atmosphere, warm, cloudless, brilliant, and serene. The aboriginal people are numerous, robust, and intciiigeufc. They are the N-'vajos and Zuta Indians. They have skill in agriculture and weaving, rear great herds of horses, cattle, and sheep, but construct neither permanent nor temporaiy houses, so dry and favorable is the atmosphere ! Here, also, occurs a remarkable, isolated moun- tain, known to rumor for half a century, but only now locally identified. This is Cerro di Sal (Salt Mountain). This rises among the western spurs of the Sierra la Plata, to an altitude of 9000 feet, appearing as an irregular cone of great bulk. A pure, 192 APPENDIX. stratified mass of rock-salt, its flanks are channelled by the little river Dolores, whose wat^^s, saturated with liquid salt, yield it again in its lower course, in granulated beds of snowy whiteness, tinted witli vcrmillion streaks from the beds of seleuite with which the salt formation alternates. Such, my fellow-citizens, arc the facts and reflections which I have selected for your attention, in speaking vipon the gold region of Pike's Peak and the Sierra San Juan. The superlative cha- racter of this region engaged the enthusiastic pen and patriotic instincts of President Jeff'erson, more than half a century ago. Overshauowed during this long interval by political and military excitements, which have deflected elsewhere the progressive columns of our pioneer people, it now recurs to restore the pre- eminent continental character which inspired the goueration who founded our republican Union. Who, and what, are these people that I now address ? AVe arc not the people of the North ; we are not the people of the South ; nor of the East; nor of the West. We arc emphatically, and par excellence, the people of the Centre ! Inspirations, oracular by their source and their auticjuity, admonish us to resume our distributive position, and develope the energies which assume and keep the load. Look upon this map of the world, upon which science delineates the zodiac of empires and the isoti.orraal axis of progress ! We have our homes around the centre of iliis our northern continent the centre of our continental Union, the centre of the Mississippi basin. Behold, upon the right hand, the European continent with its 2(50,000,000 of people ; it slopes toward our eastern sea board and faces toward the west ! Behold, upon the left hand the continent of Oriental Asia and its islands, with its population of 650,000,000; it slopes toward our western seaboard, and faces to the east ! These external continents, dividing between them the population of the world, both face America and face one another across America. We occupy thfi middle space between them, and at once separate them asunder, and connect them together. From Paris to Pekin, travelling by our threshold, is but a journey of 10,000 miles. It bisects the temnerate zone — it is the line of land and way travel of mankind. Al'l'KNDIX. 193 But a fuct of profound significance to us, revealed by physical geography, remains to be considered. It is along the axis of the isothermal zone of the Northern Ilemiephcre, that the principles of revealed civilization make the circuit of the globe. This isothermal zone deflects from the geographical zone (which is a flat section of the globe), undulating to the north and to the south, to preserve a constant identity of temperature. Under the influence of the warm maritime climates, it ri.ses high above the 40th degree of latitude; under the influence of the conti- nental climates, it is depressed to the south of the 40th degree. With what the history of six thousand years practically demon- strates, the proofs of physical geography agree. Along this axis hrve arisen successively the great cities of China and of India, of Babylon, Jerusalem, Athens, Kome, Paris, London, in the older continents — upon our continent, the seaboard cities. New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore; Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. The channel of the Missouri is its onward track to us : whence it passes by the Kansas basins, the Sweetwater, Snake river, and the Columbia, to Vancouver's Island, upon the South Pacific shore. We, then, the people of the centre, are upon the lines of in- tense and intelligent energy, where civilization has its largest field, its highest developments, its inspired form. lilong this line have come, from the plateau of Syria, our religion, our sciences, our civilization, our social manners, our arts and agri- culture, the hor.se, our articles of food and raiment ; and here is the eternal fire from which is rekindled, when it has expired, the spirit of the "unconquerable mind, and freedom's holy flame." We have seen depart a perverse generation, distinguished by civic discord. An unscrupulous, seaboard power has aspired to found a republic of the North; a republic of the South; a republic of the Pacific shores. A nefarious federal policy, operating for forty years, has occluded with savages and deserts, the delicious central region of the prairies, the great plains, the plateau, and the mountains. The physical geography of our country has been officially caricatured, concealed, and maligned. The solid conti- nental republic, founded in 177G, and completed in 1787, has 194 Ari'ENDIX. i. II t« been nullified by interpolated monarchies. The Land systcui has crushed and plundered the continental people with the brutalizinp; pressure of mediicval feudalism. The Indian system has walled up, as in a Bastile, the whole central meridian of our continent. Forced out artificially upon the flanks, wo have seen our pioneer energies driven iu fra<;^nients into ^''' jrida, into Texas, into California, into Orcj;on, into Minnesota. "We behold on tho one hand a tier of artificial seaboard States, isolated upon the maritime slope; on the other hand, the continental centre, cU immense disc of howling wilderness. Foreign wars have been waged, federal revenues and patronage exhausted, federal law and power stretched out to every device of tyranny, tho federal constitution violated in every sacred prin- ciple, to erect this monarchical seaboard power, and establi.'ih it in perpetual dominance over the continent. For the centre, civil wars, civil discords, false geography, calumnies, every form of meretricious and deceptive political agitation, have been suici- dally fomented. The foundations of the Union, lost in the centre and scattered around an invisible circumference; the Union itself, incessantly assailed and perpetually menaced, has seemed to approach the twilight of its existence, and, lost to the guardian care of tho people, has been in suspense between the infuriated passions of extreme sectional fanatics. Our great country demands a period of stem virtue, of holy zeal, of regenerating patriotism, of devoted citizens. It is to the people of the great central State of Missouri that I speak. To exalt their intrepid enthusiasm is my aim. Open the track across the plateau to the other sea, and we are abso- lutely the leaders of the world, heading the column to the oriental shores. With us are the continental eagles and the continental cause, immortalized by- the purity of Washington, illuminated by the wisdovn of Jefi'erson, vindicated and restored by the illustrious Jackson. Let us condense around these eagles and advance. It is the predestiied mission of mankind, confided to America to fulfil, to our generation, to complete. Day dawns, the vapors round the mountains curled Burst into morn, and light awakes the world ! wmmw