VII

In 1900, America presented to the eye the picture of a country that was still mostly frontier of one sort or another, the torn edges of civilization's first contact with nature, man in his invasion of the primeval. There were some areas that retained the beauty of nature untouched: the Rocky Mountains, parts of the Western plains where the railroads had not yet reached, and some bits of New England. There were other spots, comparatively few, chiefly the farming regions of eastern Pennsylvania, New York State, and New England, where beauty had come with the work of man- old farms with solid well-kept barns, many of heavy stone or brick; substantial houses with lawns shaded by evergreen trees that had been growing for more than a generation, fields kept clean to the fence corners areas that to the eye and spirit gave satisfying suggestions of a settled order, traditions, crystallized ways of life, comfort, serenity, hereditary attachment to the local soil.

Only the Eastern seaboard had the appearance of civilization having really established itself and attained permanence. From the Alleghanies to the Pacific Coast, the picture was mainly of a country still frontier and of a people still in flux: the Alleghany mountainsides scarred by the axe, cluttered with the rubbish of improvident lumbering, blackened with fire; mountain valleys disfigured with ugly coal-breakers, furnaces, and smokestacks; western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio an eruption of ungainly wooden oil-derricks; rivers muddied by the erosion from lands cleared of trees but not yet brought to grass, soiled with the sewage of raw new towns and factories; prairies furrowed with the first breaking of sod. Nineteen hundred was in the flood-tide of railroadbuilding: long fingers of fresh dirt pushing up and down

TRACES OF FRONTIER REMAINED

29

the prairies, steam-shovels digging into virgin land, rockblasting on the mountainsides. On the prairie farms, sod houses were not unusual. Frequently there were no barns, or, if any, mere sheds. Straw was not even stacked, but rotted in sodden piles. Villages were just past the early

Group photograph taken at Omaha Exposition, 1897.

The older type of American Indian could still be seen in 1900. Geronimo was the last of the fighting Indian leaders.

picturesqueness of two long lines of saloons and stores, but not yet arrived at the orderliness of established communities; houses were almost wholly frame, usually of one story, with a false top, and generally of a flimsy construction that suggested transiency; larger towns with a marble Carnegie Library at Second Street, and Indian tepees at Tenth. Even as to most of the cities, including the Eastern ones, their outer edges were a kind of frontier, unfinished streets pushing out to the fields; sidewalks,

where there were any, either of brick that loosened with the first thaw, or wood that rotted quickly; rapid growth leading to rapid change. At the gates of the country, great masses of human raw materials were being dumped from immigrant ships. Slovenly immigrant trains1 tracked westward. Bands of unattached men, floating labor, moved about from the logging-camps of the winter woods to harvest in the fields, or to railroad-construction camps. Restless "sooners" wandered hungrily about to grab the last opportunities for free land.

One whole quarter of the country, which had been the seat of its most ornate civilization, the South, though it had spots of melancholy beauty, presented chiefly the impression of the weedy ruins of thirty-five years after the Civil War, and comparatively few years after Reconstruction - ironic word.

1 "From the four quarters of the earth the people came, the broken and the unbroken, the tame and the wild-Germans, Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Scotch, Welsh, English, French, Swiss, Swedes, Norwegians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, Jews, Dalmatians, Armenians, Roumanians, Bulgarians, Servians, Persians, Syrians, Japanese, Chinese, Turks, and every hybrid that these could propagate. And if there were no Eskimos nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth might furnish failed to swim and bubble in this crucible?"-Booth Tarkington, in "The Turmoil."

AMERICA IN 1900

The Background, the Stage, and the Characters. Some
Characteristics That Distinguished the United States from
Other Nations. America's Equipment for Producing Its
Leaders. Some Men Destined for Leadership and Where
They Were in 1900. The Origins of the People and of Their
Language, Laws, Literature, Music, and Other Institutions.

IN 1900 the United States was a nation of just under 76,000,000 people, with dependencies in the West Indies, off the coast of Asia, near the Arctic Ocean, and in the mid-Pacific, all acquired recently, except Alaska. The area of the mainland was 3,026,789 square miles. This expanse of territory reached from 25° north latitude to 49°. Its temperature varied from a winter extreme of 45° below zero in Bismarck, N. D., to a summer extreme of 117° in Phoenix, Ariz., its elevation from the 14,501 feet of Mount Whitney to the sea-level savannas of the Gulf Coast; its climate from the four months of immunity from frost that was good for hard wheat in North Dakota, to the practically frostless lands that would raise oranges in Florida and California.

Within this scope of land and climate there was such an abundance and variety of food and other natural resources as made it the most nearly self-sustaining compact nation that then was or ever had been. Within its own borders it reaped every variety of edible grain; raised every kind of vegetable food in common use, except bananas and a few condiments and stimulants, such as cocoa, coffee, tea, and pepper and even some of these were raised to some extent, and practically all

could be raised in any emergency. It produced every kind of meat for common use. From its streams, lakes, and shores it was supplied with nearly every kind of fish or fish product except a few epicurean delicacies, such as caviar from Russia and sardines from the Mediterranean. Of material for clothing, it had five times as much

BISMARCK, N. DAK.

45° BELOW ZERO

EXTREME TEMPERATURE RANGE

OF THE UNITED STATES

PHOENIX, ARIZ.

117 ABOYE ZERO

cotton as all the rest of the world, as much wool as the people desired to raise, and while it imported silk and some linen, it could produce these in any quantity necessary for its own use. Of the raw materials for shelter and for the most exacting and complex needs of modern manufacture of every kind, it had teeming stores. Of woods it had an abundance of all, except a few minor and dispensable ones like mahogany, teak, and balsa. Of minerals1 it had an abundance of all the more important ones, and also some supplies of tin, manganese, vanadium, and platinum, though it imported most of these. Of vegetable products needed on any large or essential scale for manufacture, it had all except rubber; and it had the soil and climate to produce this if desired.

1 The one conspicuous lack in the natural resources of the United States was nitrate deposits sufficient for fertilizer and explosives. This mineral had to be imported, chiefly from Chile. During the period 1900-25 processes were devised, chiefly under the urgency of war need, for extracting nitrogen from the air.