m of navigating
the river, in return for commercial advantages to New England, nearly
led to the withdrawal of the West from the Union. It was the Western
demands that brought about the purchase of Louisiana, and turned the
scale in favor of declaring the War of 1812. Militant qualities were
favored by the annual expansion of the settled area in the face of
hostile Indians and the stubborn wilderness. The West caught the vision
of the nation's continental destiny. Henry Adams, in his History of the
United States, makes the American of 1800 exclaim to the foreign
visitor, "Look at my wealth! See these solid mountains of salt and
iron, of lead, copper, silver, and gold. See these magnificent cities
scattered broadcast to the Pacific! See my cornfields rustling and
waving in the summer breeze from ocean to ocean, so far that the sun
itself is not high enough to mark where the distant mountains bound my
golden seas. Look at this continent of mine, fairest of created worlds,
as she lies turning up to the sun's never failing caress her broad and
exuberant breasts, overflowing with milk for her hundred million
children." And the foreigner saw only dreary deserts, tenanted by
sparse, ague-stricken pioneers and savages. The cities were log huts and
gambling dens. But the frontiersman's dream was prophetic. In spite of
his rude, gross nature, this early Western man was an idealist withal.
He dreamed dreams and beheld visions. He had faith in man, hope for
democracy, belief in America's destiny, unbounded confidence in his
ability to make his dreams come true. Said Harriet Martineau in 1834, "I
regard the American people as a great embryo poet, now moody, now wild,
but bringing out results of absolute good sense: restless and wayward in
action, but with deep peace at his heart; exulting that he has caught
the true aspect of things past, and the depth of futurity which lies
before him, wherein to create something so magnificent as the world has
scarcely begun to dream of. There is the strongest hope of a nation that
is capable of being possessed with an idea."

It is important to bear this idealism of the West in mind. The very
materialism that has been urged against the West was accompanied by
ideals of equality, of the exaltation of the common man, of national
expansion, that makes it a profound mistake to write of the West as
though it were engrossed in mere material ends. It has been, and is,
preeminently a region of ideals, mi