Loading ...THERE is one fact concerning this country of ours, at which every travelling foreigner is amazed, in which every native takes pride as though it were a special personal virtue ; and that is the extent of it all.
New England’s hills and valleys, rich in beauty, poor in soil, abounding in human thrift and human ingenuity. The Middle States with their crowded towns and cities, their marks of tireless energy and exhaust less enterprise ; their mines and furnaces, black foundations to magnificent superstructures. The South, generous in sun and climate, green with tobacco-leaves and waving corn, white with endless stretches of cotton-fields, and decked with flowers. The great West, homely of visage, flat and plain, yet with all possibilities of growth and -wealth before it, and with a civilization as yet rough hewn, many angled, often ungainly, but with the lines that mark strength and proportion, that, rilled out and covered by the sure gatherings of generations, will as well mark perfect beauty.
And away beyond all this, beyond the Missouri, hundreds of miles of level plain. Hundreds of miles of open rolling prairie-land, the swells of surface like the endless billows of a peaceful sea. Hundreds of miles of mountains, mountains broken, ragged, like storms petrified and fixed forever; mountains stretching away range beyond range, stately, majestic, to seeming infinity. Hundreds of miles of desert region, filled with the solemnity of silence and desolation. Hundreds of miles, some level, some billowy, some upheaved, under whose scarred and dreary face lies gathered the wealth of India and Peru, a mineral wealth to supply the world ; and then the majestic lift of Sierras, bearing their garmenture of firs and cedars and pines, trees that have withstood the tempests of a thousand years, stately and beautiful as the cedars of Lebanon when these were worthy to adorn the temple of God. And. shooting down from these, a land of splendors opens, a land wherein the earth rivals the waters, and the waters wash down sands of gold.
Stupendous in size, a size matched by the grasping spirit of this generation of its inhabitants. ” We must possess it all,” say they, and proceed to act accordingly. It must all be ” fenced in,” to use an expressive California phrase. The mines must all be opened, though but the top crust be scraped. The timber must all be blazed, though but a tree here and there be felled. The land must all be surveyed, though there be not a body nor a soul to occupy it. The town-lots must be laid out, and held at a most unrighteous figure, though the town or the city itself can only be seen in perspective five hundred years away.
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