The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1903-05-31

with attention through the weeks of
its duration. Somebody agitates the
establishment of a new industry in
our native town. 1t will raise the
value of our real estate, so we attend
meetings for some months and talk
about it, after which the industry is
assured. Two years later it is in oper-
alton and we congratulate ourselves.
Friends of our younger days marry;
and before we know it their houses are
noisy with the Shoutings of children.
Leisurely we grow older. Our ideas
become fixed, often by the most trivial
OF circumstances. Africa means tan
gled forest; India, a Jungle; Siberia,
broad snow plains; all South America,
dripping stiffness of tropical YER
dure; simply because somewhere, some
time book or paper, the woodcut of
chlld's lesson, has so generalized then
for us. Against these preconceived no.
lions the events we read about are
cast.
In very much this way the constant
facts of the West have been to us the
Indian and the buffalo. Before our
eyes the Master Snowman has held in
sistently this picture. Against the
background of the occidental hills or
the fiat reach of the grass-nodding
prairies has posed in solemn gravity
the naked warrior, leaning from his
pony upon his feather-bedeched lance;
or, in the choking dust of it's own pro-
gression, has numbered heavily the buff
falo myriad. These have seemed per-
manent-the man and the beast
Then, before our protesting con-
servatism, the scene has dissolved in
mist of strange shapes and violent
deeds, only to steady a moment later
into new picture. The mounted fig
ure has disappeared, and in his place.
against the glow of sunset, the sturdy
form of the husbandman grasps the
shaft of his plough. gazing past the
tired horses. and brooding the slow
thoughts of his calling. The last rays
catch the sheen of grain-a sea of it
and simmer lightly until they lose
themselves in contrast with the square
of rudy light that marks the windows
of farm house.
This is the new West. We rub our
eyes and wonder. The diplomats still
squabble; the chess game dawdles its
languid way; the factory is getting
ready to pay it's first dividend our
friends children are about to enter the
high school, Everything has develop
ed along the usual lines of growth, and
yet this greater change has come about
in a night. We turn back the files of
our paper. and find that it has occu-
pied in the worlds history just fifteen
years. In that little space of time the
institutions of untold ages have been
overthrow and new ones substituted
for them
Deadwood was founded in 1876. In
1890 Sitting Bull and his tribe were ut
terly destroyed in the mid-winter fight
at Wounded Knee. Between those
dates, the Dakotas have manufac-
tursd at home an article of quite ade-
| quate civilization.
To be sure, the product is perhaps
a little crude. Although enormous
grain fields attest Individually that the
| farmer has tanned the SOIL equally
| enormous Indian reservations as in
dubitably dispute too sweeping an as
| sertion of it. Electric railways may be
| instanced in some towns. The spright-
| ly SiX-shooter is in others the quickest
road to the longest journey. Hot
! Springs has a modern hotel and an Inn
| proved bar; scant thirty miles north
is the unsheriffed log mining camp
where the bad man" terrorizes in all
| his glory.
These things are true, but they count
for little The great facts remain, and
| they are these: A cowboy named Ten
ney tried to lasso the last buffalo some
| years since and got himself yanked
over several irregular miles of coun-
try; the Sioux are herded nicely on
| their reservations and shoot at nickels
| with bows and arrows for the amuse-
| ment of passing tourists. The old from
l
trouble, you must go out to look for
| it: 1t no longer comes to you unSouRht
| In a word, the broad sea of the will
! derness has shrunken to bayous and
bays surrounded and intersected by
| dried areas fit for the cultivation of
paper collars and tenderfeet. The from
tier still exists, but exists in its iso-
lation only because it is not as COM
| merclally desirable as the rest
This is true of the country at large
1t is also true of Pah-sap-pah. the
Black Hills. Already a railroad has
pushed its way up the main valley.
| The folders show a map with the usual
blood-red artery of mathematical
straightness. passing through myriads
| of small-type towns clinging desper-
| ately by their noses to the blessings Of
commerce, and sundry dignified large
type cities, standing more aloof on their
own merits. 1t all looks imposing
enough on paper; but in reality the
line does little more than keep itself
warm in the narrow valley of its route
On closer inspection the myriads Of
towns disappear. Minnekahta is a sta
| ton in the midst of vast plain, Prin-
giles a saw mill Stony Point just moth
| ing at all For the Black Hills are
great of extent, and one county of the
Dakotas could swallow an Eastern
| state.
All this, from border warfare to COM
parative order-say from Canute to
| Elizabeth-not in a thousand years, but
in the brief age of a man-child grow
ing out from his kindergarten into his
| collegei
To one who has lived with the coun-
| try. the process has been an education
more thorough than that usually
| vouchsafed men. 1t has lacked in the
graces and accomplishments, perhaps,
but II has brought 70 the highest pitch
the two qualities Of self-reliance and
of power of insight into mems charac-
ters. Whatever blunders n frontiers
man may commit when visiting his
neighbor cities I'm the East, they are
never the bashful biunders OF coun-
| tryman. Bunco men can clean him
| out IN a gambling joint. but who ever
| heard Of their selling him gold brick2
He has lived through all this hundreds
OF years ago, when Wild Bill was KILL
ed al Deadwood. or perhaps a century
| or 80 later when. the year lowing,
Alfred took the CaldWells 10 the Hills
! and Was 20 nearly rushed BY the Sioux.