IV.

THOMAS H. BENTON.

IN one of the public squares of the city of St. Louis there stands a bronze statue of Thomas H. Benton. The right hand points westward, and on the pedestal are inscribed these words:

"There is the East.

There is India.”

It is odd that so little is said by the biographers of Benton about his early, incessant, and active efforts to promote the building of a railway across the continent. He was one of the first statesmen of the country to advocate the building of such a road. He was one of the earliest to direct the adventurous explorations in the far West, and to encourage overland transit by wagon to the Pacific coast. He was engaged in these labors long before the discovery of gold in California. While the right of American possession of the mouth of the Columbia was as yet unsettled, he threw himself into the contest for the acquisition of that territory with tremendous zeal; and as early as 1819 he wrote on all these topics. When he entered Congress, in 1820, he expounded his projects for overland communication, and renewed his attempts to induce the Government to engage in the great enterprises of road-building and ex

ploration. In the prosecution of this work, he sought out hunters, trappers, and voyageurs, and absorbed their information, pumped them dry of all the facts which they had acquired; and as a more correct scientific knowledge of the unknown wilderness became accessible, his views took shape in the proposals that finally culminated in the building of the great Central Pacific Railroad.

Of course, when the plans for building the Pacific Railroad were finally adopted, gold had been discovered in California, and the United States had secured a foothold upon those distant shores; and Benton, with intense pride in his country, and more broad in his nationality than many of the statesmen of that period, did not stop to consider whether there should be a Northern or a Southern trans-continental road, but he argued boldly for the proposed central route which was subsequently adopted. He showed the character of the region through which this line should run, the ease by which the passes through the Rocky Mountains could be utilized, and he prophesied a great and rapid increase of States and communities as one of the results which would certainly follow the building of the road. In the course of one of his speeches, he made an interesting comparison of the courses of trade and commerce at different periods of the history of the world, and argued that, as we had finally reached the Pacific coast we had taken the position where our trade with the kingdoms of the Orient would make us independent of Europe.

Years before, when the Mississippi River seemed to be the most remote western border of our Republic, and when nobody had penetrated the boundless wilderness that stretches to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, and when nobody supposed we could ever people so vast a territory as that which then lay unclaimed far to the westward, Benton had said that the Rocky Mountains should be our natural frontier line on the westward, a barrier beyond which we could not pass; and he had expressed his belief that on the Pacific coast there would grow up a friendly republic. But when the discovery of gold and the acquisition of California changed all this, he, too, changed his view of the situation, and held that we should have, wherever possible, no boundaries but the two oceans. In considering the establishment of the great marine lines across the Pacific Ocean debouching from California, we should never forget the prophetic words of Benton, "There is India."

Benton was pre-eminently a Western man. He possessed all the traits of the aggressive, alert. and self-asserting pioneers of the West. It was in the great community of which he formed so picturesque and towering a figure, that was originated the once familiar phrase, "Manifest Destiny." Benton believed in the future vastness of his country, and with his boastful and sometimes inflated oratory he forever preached the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. In every direction wherever territory was to be acquired, to the southwest, westward, and northwest, there

his voice was ever directed, ringing and inciting to action and to acquisition the cheerful and ready ranks of his fellow-Westerners.

It should be borne in mind that in the earlier years of Benton's time, all the territory lying westward of the Ohio, whether to the south or to the north, was known by the comprehensive title of "The West." At that time the line of demarcation between the East and the West was far more distinct than that which separated the North from the South, and as the latter boundary became sharper and more intense, so did the line betwixt East and West become more vague and more distantly removed from the Eastern States.

Benton not only favored the opening and extension of lines of communication with the wild and trackless Northwest, but also with Mexico and with the territories which we subsequently acquired by the Mexican war. He advocated the establishment of military posts on the Upper Missouri, one of which is now known by his name, Fort Benton; and throughout his career he incessantly pleaded for the cultivation of amicable relations with the Indian tribes, their removal to reservations where they should be amply protected, and the development of the regions from which they had been taken. Inland navigation and great post roads, military roads, and trading trails to the far Southwest, were among his hobbies, of which it must be confessed he had many. The treaty with Spain by which we secured Florida and other acquisi