new country. When their roads are once built and they have the forces of nature around them fairly in harness, their spirit will rise to a realizing sense of the part in the drama of human history that is assigned to them. "Time's noblest off"Time's noblest offspring" will then have attained the glory of its maturity.

The spirit of a people emanates from its antecedents or racial traits, from its traditions and from the land in which it dwells. Tested by these standards, who is the Westerner among the peoples of the earth? What may be expected from him? Clearly, he is the last result of the toning up and energizing process of selection as it has worked itself out through almost infinitely repeated migrations. In the partings of the Abrahams and the Lots, the Westerner represents the strain that has always taken the part of Abraham. He has ever pitched his tent over against Hebron rather than "dwell in the cities of the plain." He has been inclined to avoid strife with his brothers in the old, crowded home, and he has been drawn onward by his faith in the unknown. The Westerners of each of the

centuries of the past have been the men minded to rise through the conquest of nature in the wilderness rather than through the coercion of their fellowman. The sublimated essence of this spirit animates the Westerner of today.

Each Westerner in his sphere is a Columbus. The lines of descent that terminate in the individual Westerners represent the capitalized push, energy, vigor, resolution, restless daring and intrepidity of the centuries. Let me say again,-the process of selection in the repeated westward migrations through which we have the West of today has taken men and has made men, and withal it has been ennobling in its effects in that it has meant mainly the conquest of the wilderness rather than the coercion of men.

There is, of course, open among the haunts of men an even higher line of service than that of pioneering. This is espoused by the noble and self-sacrificing. So the brainiest, the noblest or the highest bred may not go to the wilderness, but certainly the strongest and the most enterprising will. The Westerner with his finely-tempered fibre of will must be

supplemented in the task of developing the new country. He is too high-strung for the more humdrum and tedious activities that cannot be wholly eliminated through the introduction of machine processes. Let us frankly recognize these limitations in the inherited personal traits of the Westerner. His is still the generous, self-reliant and triumphant spirit of the man who does things, and who will not be satisfied with less than the best-and that he must have right quickly.

The traditions of a people may vitalize its spirit. It need hardly be mentioned that the pioneers of the West were in facile command of the best political traditions that man has yet developed. As new commonwealths were organized, incipient excrescences that had developed in the systems of the older states were sloughed off, and the ripe suggestions approved by experience were incorporated. All was plastic in their hands. They could easily approximate their ideals. There were no military necessities to distort the lineaments of the civil organization. The social body was alive from rind to core. One man was as good as another if he

There have been some marked special types among the makers of the West, whose achievements and lives enrich its traditions and have enkindled its spirit to a brighter intensity. In the fur-trapping mountain men of the Rockies, in the Oregon Pioneers, in the Argonauts of '49, and the later gold-mining excitements, in the best of the cow boys of the plains, in the railway kings that spanned the continent with steel, in the empirebuilders of the several sections of this West, we have types as marked and as worthy of world homage as any that the various turns of human affairs have brought to the world's view.

It was through the co-operative contributions of these that within a single lifetime the grand imperial community between the Missouri and the Pacific was created. This region, condemned almost in toto as a desert, they have with "prodigies of labor" and "miracles of enterprise" bedecked with spots that suggest paradise, and have laid plans for the largest devel

opment of the resources of the whole. It is true not all who have come to the West have been helpers. The weaklings and laggards have not encumbered. Those who did come quickly went under or went back. Shelter and grounds to batten on were sought here by the desperado, and the conditions of the frontier brought the outlawry of the unbalanced to the surface, but these the vigilance committees and the Draconian codes of the mining and the cow-boy camps soon weeded The undue isolation and other trying strains upon human nature, under which the occupation of the West largely took place, developed and fixed not a little of the abnormal in the spirit, here and there, of its people.

out.

The first Westerners of the white race deserve a more prominent place in the annals of this section than has been accorded them. These free trappers found their heart's delight in the hardships of roaming over endless stretches of parched and treeless plains, in living alone, a year at a time, in the mountain fastnesses and in a keen, sleepless and tireless strategy against a treacherous foe. In reckless and restless self-reliance, the mountain

men have no peers in history. The face of this planet offers no opportunity for an emulation of their exploits. Their day and glory is of the past, even more than that of the beaver, the buffalo and the bear they pursued. Intrepid knighterrants, they were the pathfinders of the West, and spied out the seats of future empire. They were the indispensable forerunners of the mighty movement to follow. Can we not hope that some day the nation will employ an artist whose imagination has caught the spirit and import of their service and the heroic in their mold to design a monument of proportions commensurate to commemorate appropriately their work and place it in the most commanding position in the Yellowstone National Park? Much as the knighterrants of the Middle Ages enriched the spirit of the world with romantic love, gentleness and honor, so these knighterrants of the West in addition to disclosing the natural features and the natural trails of the land for the oncoming hosts, they have permanently enriched the spirit of the West with models of intrepidity and daring and self-reliance that can never again be quite paralleled.

Among the richest legacies to the traditions of the West was the role of the pioneers to the Oregon country. In the pilgrimages of the pioneer families across the continent there is exhibited a confidence in the primacy of the American institutions on the Pacific and the spirit and impulse to realize this. The traits of the mountain men were transcendant in the degree to which they were developed, but the pioneers who followed in this procession to the West, with the palladium of all civilization in their households, had a more fundamental and a more integral part in the future of this realm. As calmly and determinedly they came as if consciously chosen of God to possess the land for resolute, independent and democratic manhood and womanhood. Through them the civilization of the West was anchored to the bed-rock of the virtues of quiet home life and steady industry.

The home-cherishing proprietors and tillers of the soil gave solidity to the West. Its forced-draft pace of progress was first struck with the discovery of gold. Gold and the natural ozone of the land has put a delirium into the spirit of the

West which it promises to retain to the end of time. All parts of the West had centers of this infection. First and most famously and largely did the American river and the whole eastern slope of the Sacramento Valley contribute to this influence; then a region far to the eastthe site of the future Denver was stirred; Helena and Alder's Gulch, in the north, was the next attraction; Virginia City and Gold Hill and the Seven Devils country of the interior, with their finds, made the spirit of the mining camp universal throughout the West. Gold has ever been the talisman of the strong. It affords him power, pleasure and the largest life-at least in anticipation. Wealth was accumulated at fabulous and unheard-of rates. It keyed higher the standards of enterprise, made possible operations on a larger scale, and fixed new measures of the attainable. Audacity before unwarranted and undreamed of had its home in the West. The memories of these days of excitement, the evidences of these successes yet tingle and thrill in the heart and brain of the West, and will ever act as an elixir of youth and aspiration in its spirit.

To get the gold, concentrated in the gravel bed and the quartz vein, called for daring and the willingness to bear isolation, exposure and hardship; but the utilization by man of the vast arid expanse extending from Texas on the South to the British possessions on the north was a problem that challenged the most resourceful. Nature nowhere seemed more niggardly obdurate to the purposes of man than in this native realm of the sage brush, sage hen, coyote, jackrabbit, prairie dog and rattlesnake. In delivering In delivering from this vast area of waste a finest form of wealth, the cowboy proved himself an indispensable factor in producing the greatness of the West. Pastoral life has always suggested virility. But the conditions of success with cattle on the plains of the West try the mettle of the best. He as the man on horseback, facing an enraged army maddened by thirst or hunger, must be a centaur in agility and a Napoleon in force of will.

The cowboy, with his rule over vast stretches of country and great herds of wild cattle, heralded a still higher order of mastery of nature in the projection and

construction of great railway and irrigation systems. The great interior empire of the West inaugurated the method of moving forward its frontier on the railway train. That mode of procedure has been characteristic of it throughout. Nature is more suppliantly its servant than she is that of any other people.

Water is the one element essential to the support of civilized life in which the West is narrowly limited. The conservation of this precious resource for irrigation and power supplies is testing its spirit in quite a new way. The many communities developing strength and riches with irrigation are the finest omen for the future. In these are fostered the higher civic traits in which the independent and individualistic Westerners might be expected to be lacking. cess under this highest test seems assured. It will bring everything else with it. All the socializing, cultural and humanizing forces of the best urban conditions are in play in the American community dependent on irrigation. In this new West there is not only the hope, but already even the consummation of democracy..

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