Resisting the temptation to indulge in dissertation concerning the
beneficial effects of the dime-novel on the morale of successive
younger generations, we return to the men who said that they went
beyond the Mississippi to gain money. Like the schoolboy they were hot
with the lust for adventure. The men of action wanted to risk their
lives, and the men of wealth wanted to risk their dollars.

Which does not imply that the latter element were anxious to lose
those dollars any more than it implies that the former expected to
lose their lives. But both were eager for the hazard.

Like the schoolboy all of them dreamed dreams and saw visions. And the
dreams were realized; the visions became actualities. Few of them
justified their excuse of money-making; many came out of the adventure
poorer in this world's goods than when they went into it. But every
man of them had the time of his life and lived out his days with a
wealth of memories more precious than gold; memories of a man's part
in a great rough drama.

The Winning of the West, that drama has been called. Perhaps no act in
the play attained the heights which were reached by the last one
before the coming of the railroad, the one with which this story has
to deal, wherein bold men allied themselves on different sides to get
the contract of carrying the mails by stage-coaches on schedule time
across the wilderness.

And in the tale of this great struggle there is another motive in
addition to the love of adventure--and like that love, unacknowledged
by those whom it stirred,--the strong instinctive desire for a closer
union which exists among all Americans.

In the beginning there was a frontier two hundred miles or so west of
the Mississippi River. Behind that frontier wide-stacked wood-burning
locomotives were drawing long trains on tracks of steel; steamers came
sighing up and down the muddy rivers; cities smeared the sky with
clouds of coal smoke; under those sooty palls men in high hats and
women in enormous hoop-skirts passed in afternoon promenade down the
sidewalks; newspapers displayed the day's tidings in black
head-lines; the telegraph flashed messages from one end of that land
to the other; and where the sharp church steeple of the most remote
village cut the sky, the people read and thought and talked the same
things which were being discussed in Delmonico's at the same hour.

Beyond the Sierra Nevadas there was another civilization. In San
Francisc