Far Western Man

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part five of the American Far West seven mid nineteenth
century views from Abroad by anonymous This LibriVox recording is
in the public domain. Part five Far Western Man. The
Far Western American settlements of Great Britain and the United
States yield us in odd freedom from conventionalities of life,

(00:24):
an off hand settlement of difficulties. Much matter for laughter,
but none for ridicule. There is a grandeur of its
own in human energy, that not only conquers land and
wealth to the use of mankind, but proves the inner
soundness of the stuff men are made of. By conquering
also the bad passions of life in regions to which

(00:47):
lawless men are tempted, by the absence of all civilized
machinery of law, the rascals are at last compelled to
stand in awe of honest men. Throughout the Far West,
tracts of travel have been cleared of the white robber
and assassin, and are safe, except here and there from
the hostility of native tribes. Property lying exposed to theft

(01:10):
is in many a new Western settlement safer than in
one of the towns of the Old Country. Public opinion
has condemned the gambler and condemns the idler. The foundations
of a new society laid thus in the far West,
however rough they may appear, are strong and sound, and
it is wonderful to see how fast the well proportioned

(01:32):
building rises from them. Races of North and South join
in the West and do their pioneer work in a practical,
hard headed way, parted, no doubt from some of the advantages,
but also from all the overgrown hypocrisies of civilization. I
look with respect even upon whittling as a symptom of

(01:53):
the restless desire to be doing as well as talking.
In the North Pacific, where there are such extents of
forests and odd pieces of wood are lying handy, whittling
seems to be the regular occupation of men's idle hours.
The municipality of San Francisco put up wooden posts to
protect the sidewalks from fiery charioteers. Over these hung knots

(02:17):
of eager disputants, and as mining stalks and swamp lands
were being discussed, they whittled at the post until they
became so thin that the wind blew them over. I
have seen a man in a backwood church began whittling
the wood of the pew. At a trial and grass valley,
each juryman began whittling at a piece of wood he

(02:37):
had brought in his pocket for the purpose regulating the
energy of the action by the clearness of the evidence.
The trial lasted through a second day, but as they
had not expected a long sitting, nobody had brought enough
wood with him, and accordingly the benches suffered. First. The
gentlemen of the jury attacked that portion of the seat

(02:58):
which showed between their life leg until it had assumed
a Van Dyke collar like form, and the assault on
the other portion had proceeded so far when the judge
finished his charge that he made a calculation that if
the ends of justice had required the jury to sit
for a third day, there would have been nothing left
for them to sit on. Old skippers hang about the wharf,

(03:21):
also whittling. At Coose Bay, there are only two marriageable girls,
and these being run after by all the young men
of the district value themselves. Accordingly, half a dozen Oregonian
youth sit on the veranda in front of their respective
houses during the whole of Sunday, while each lady looks
out at her followers through the half opened window. The lovers,

(03:44):
all the while are whittling bits of white pine, which
is an easy wood to work and valued for that purpose.
At dark they move home, But the damsels find these
visits profitable, for there is generally left behind a pile
of shavings big enough to light fires for the rest
of the week. The Western man is a being of

(04:05):
versatile genius. If he cannot succeed in one profession, he
will turn to another. There are plenty of lawyers who
are miners, and merchants who are doctors. All over the Northwest.
The head of the largest mercantile firm on the Pacific
coast is one who was educated for and practiced many
years in the medical profession, and some of the most

(04:26):
adroit politicians and wire pullers are styled doctor from having
at one time been in the same way in life.
If one trade does not pay, he commences in another.
And if there is not an opening in bullet city,
he vamouses the ranch, makes tracks, or gets up and
gets for the groundhog's glory. Where there is said to

(04:48):
be an excellent opening for either a butcher or a lawyer,
or a tavern keeper, he will establish himself in one
or other of these callings, probably to bust up or
to make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He is
always going to make just that particular sum. He knows
thoroughly that art without which no new country can grow great,

(05:12):
the noble art of coming down. Generals and brigadier generals
of the Great Civil War are earning honest bread by industry.
The dashing cavalry leader to whom the young ladies wrote
poems is in the grocery trade at Chicago. One famous
officer has gone back to the plow. Another is a
newspaper reporter. Another is writing a history of Texas while

(05:35):
practicing law and photography. The photography pays best, for he
has a contrivance of his own for giving the Mexicans
a very pale picture, which is said to suit them
exactly as they have a desire to appear as white
as possible. Of such stock comes the true Western pioneer.

(05:56):
Notwithstanding the banter about his being so long in the
legs and short in the body that a hat and
a pair of trousers make a good suit of clothes
for him, he is a stalwart, sinewy fellow, infinite of resource,
rough in his talk, with little learning and no formal piety,
ready to work no matter how often fortune defeats him,

(06:18):
he is ever hopeful of wrestling through somehow. A peculiar
character has grown up in the valley of the Mississippi,
which may be called the Western character. From the Mississippi.
It has spread and is daily spreading more and more
to Columbia. It is the outgrowth of all circumstances surrounding it,
including climate and soil, and the mingling of bloods. It

(06:41):
tends to individualism, freedom, self reliance, and large views. There
is little of narrow sectarianism in its secular life or religion,
little provincialism, that is to say little of the prejudice
that lives on for generations in an untraveled community. The
Western character develops freedom and takes in large calculations. This

(07:06):
is more true of the man of western cities than
of the farmer and the frontier man. But still the
character applies to all. A Western man thinks nothing of
going one thousand or one thousand, five hundred miles, and
has no traditional feud with any class of Jew or gentile.
The elements of various nationalities flowing together westward form a

(07:27):
strong and tolerant community. If a man out west has
his horse stolen, he mounts another and traces the thief,
shoots him if he can. The extending prairies, immense lakes,
grand rivers, seem to enlarge the whole conception of things.
The big farm yields thousands of bushels of grain. The
western man may have twenty horses, a hundred mules, and

(07:50):
a thousand head of cattle grazing in his pastures, and
five hundred pigs fattening in his fields. He reads the
price currents, knows all that is gold going on, forms
his own opinions, and is loud and bold in the
expression of them. He is a man of patient courage,
who will loose thousands of dollars by the fall of
the market and make less account of it than he

(08:13):
would of the laming of a favorite horse or the
loss of a faithful dog. If he doesn't turn his
loss off with a laugh, and is pushed to speak
of it, you may see the gleam of stern grit
flashing from his eyes as he tells you he will
do better next time. He is full of reckless and
mercurial daring, as impulsive as the southerner, and yet practical

(08:37):
in all things he sees and takes always the shortest
cut to his end. Feeling about the sacred character of
ancestral acres never disturbs the mind of a man whose
possessions were reclaimed from the wiles but yesterday and may
be left tomorrow. Whatever he has he will sell, and
whatever you own he is willing to buy, providing he

(09:00):
can make some boot on it with him. All things
were made to buy and sell. A frontier man once
described to me, without the least idea of the strange
character of the transaction, how he had traded off a
bible for a plaguey good fiddle. If anything you have
on you or about you strike his fancy, he will

(09:21):
at once offer to buy it, and has no notion
that certain pieces of property mayn't be for sale. My
own experience has lain chiefly among the vanguard of these pioneers,
the frontier man who paves the way for others less
able or willing to cope with fortune less traitors than
laborers upon the land. These are the people who are

(09:43):
fast filling up with stern prose of the plow and
the reaping machine. And the whistle of steam what was
once claimed by the pleasant poetry of the songs of
the voyageur, the Couruur des bois, and the hunters and
trappers of the great fur companies. But perhaps it is better.
After all. Much as I have lived with the frontier man,

(10:05):
I have grown in liking for the pioneer who is
always moving west, hailing generally from some border state. Early
in life he has settled down on some donation, claim
making it his boast that he is half horse half alligator,
would a touch a knapin turtle. He soon has a
good farm about him and remains until, by the miserable

(10:28):
style of agriculture learned in the cotton lands of the Mississippi,
he exhausts the soil, or until he considers himself inconveniently crowded.
Upon hearing that he has got a neighbor eight miles
off and more a common then ecalculates he'll move west,
and is not long before he guess he'll locate still

(10:48):
on the frontier, in some little big snipe swamp or
dead Indian prairie. And there he does locate until the
old causes operating or his land becoming valuable, he sells
out to some less enterprising settler, hitches up his old
bullock team once more, and with his loose cattle, his horses,
his long Kentucky rifle, his Douglas axe is a copper

(11:12):
camp kettle, and his long handled frying pan. Off he goes,
not forgetting his bouncing gals, who rightly boast that they
can lick their weight in wildcats, his four stalwart sons,
each of whom can shoot the bristles off a wolf
and drive a furrow so straight that, as they tell you,
if followed up, it would knock the center out at

(11:33):
a north Star Colonel, he moves and moves still west,
rumbling every summer over the Great Plains go hundreds of
such teams and many such men, each fighting his way
among Sioux and blackfoot and snake, until we find him
in Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, or Washington Territory. And possibly he

(11:56):
even roams down, open mouthed in his wonder to Californiorny.
But this part of the world is generally too civilized
for him, and the polished Californians are not kindly affected
to the individual in buckskin or unspun whom they profanely
call the yaler bellied Mesurian. The pioneer of pioneers must

(12:16):
have been one Jedediah S. Smith, called Jed for shortness,
who on the twentieth of December eighteen twenty six, strayed
too far into the great desert, and from want of
provision and water to get home with, was compelled to
push forward. It therefore stands upon record as one of
the many triumphs of the Smith family, that one of

(12:38):
them was the first to make the overland trip from
the States to California. Fortunately, Jedediah found American shipmasters from
Boston and Nantucket, who vouched for his honest intentions and
perfect harmlessness. He had attempted during the latter part of
the preceding winter to make his way up the Columbia River,

(12:59):
but the no was so deep on the mountains that
he was obliged to return. Being informed by one of
the Christian Indians that the Father would like to know
who he was, Jedediah wrote a letter to Father Durhan,
who lived at San Jose, in which he honestly confessed
that he was destitute of clothing and most of the
necessaries of life, that his horses had perished for want

(13:22):
of food and water, that his object was to trap
for beavers and furs. And in conclusion he signed himself
your strange but real friend and Christian brother. Jed has
been followed since then by many thousands, scattered now along
the frontier. Among them, it was my pleasant lot to
wander many a day. And if they were queer fellows,

(13:44):
they were good fellows, of more use to the world,
I think than many a fine gentleman who has never
lifted heavier tool than an opera glass, or served his
country with a stroke of thought. End of Part five