The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1900-08-21

! upon the great west, and in industrial
progress, commercial DEVELOPMENT and
social conditions its communities are in
most respects but Implications of those
toward the setting sun which mark as
mllestones the westward course of en-
nire.
The west is blessed with great pros
perlty now and has got far enough be-
yond the boom stage to focus a con-
sentative eye on about any project, sit
uatlOn or condition. The western peo-
pie have as fertile land, great manu-
featuring advantages and more mines
than King Solomon could cOnjure out
or an entire edition of Egyptian and
Assyriaa papyrus dream books, and
they believe that the present prosperity
has located in their midst for perma >
nent habitation. Confidence is the
watchw0rd of the hour, and the repre-
sentatives of the Great Eastern News
paper league have been impressed with
the fact that the people of the west
want the east to know that the frontier
period is so far removed that they have
every inducement to offer the home
seeker, the investor, the merchant and
the manufacturer
Books and yellOW-back novels and
special editions of newspapers have
been printed without number for the
edihcation of eastern people, but all the
presses now running would be required
to delineate every fact of interest and
Importance which could be chrOnicled
about a region where, to quote an En-
glish actor, You travel all day and all
night and then don't get there" West
ern people have explicit faith in the
value of ink, paper and a printing press
as exploitation adjuncts, and haze
spared neither IN making the habitants
of their neighbOrhood town or state
acquainted with what inducements
they nave 10 offer to the stranger, but
they still feel that their story is not
half told, and that, as one western
writer puts it, I'VE know mostly all
there is to know about the east, but
the east has lots to learn about the
west"
The west has been pictured and
painted by fiorid artists and writer's.
until the average eastern man imagines
that beyond the Mississippi there is a
chaotic wilderness Of all that is wild
and woody. The romancer who intro
duced the yellow backed novel wrote
his fiction and peOpied it with charac-
ters whom he claimed to find in the
west; Emerson Bennett bathed the
plains in blood and Bret Harte broke
up the society upon the Stanislau, While
Yuba Bill and Bill Monk always took
passengers through and never allowed
them to settle anywhere this side of
Frisco. These characters. together
with the James boys terrorizing people
by rObbing trains, and Canada Bill ret
lieYing passengers of their spare cash
on his three-card game, somehow or
other peopled the west in the minds of
many persons. and they have never
had the truth brought home to them
that all those desperate characters who
lived outside of history have long since
been killed, or acknowledged to them
selves the story-teller's heroes were
mythical persOnages who lived alone in
books
It is to brush away the curtain Of
fiction that this extensive tour of the
West has been inaugurated. 1t is the
intention Of the manager of the
League to leave out of his stories the
weird, the grotesque and the fantas-
tic, and to rest awhile among the fac
tories, mines, ranches and the COM
mercia1 enterprises and to show to
the East that there is ample room in
the West for the boarded wealth that
can find no investment except upon