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THE GREAT WEST

"There is pleasure in the sight of a glebe which has never been broken.” Walter Savage Landor.

THE New England States have a dialect of their own, by far the most fully developed and the most characteristic of all the varieties of English spoken in America. It represents alike the effect which climate has upon the organs of speech in their favorite sounds the nasal twang and the violent curtailment of words,— and the direction given to the choice of terms and the arrangement of sentences, by their favorite occupations and their leading lines of thought. But the Great West has impressed the stamp of its own life even more forcibly upon the speech of its sons. Everything is on such a gigantic scale there that the vast proportions with which the mind becomes familiar, beget unconsciously a love of hyperbole, which in its turn invites irresistibly to humor. Life is an unceasing fury of activity there, and hence speech also is racy with life and vigor; all is new there to those who come from older countries or crowded cities, and hence new words are continually coined, and old ones receive new meanings; nature is fresh and young there, and hence the poetic feeling is excited, and speech assumes unconsciously the rhythm and the elevation of poetry.

The language of Western men has been called high-flown, overwrought, grandiloquent-it may be so, but it is so only as a fair representation of the Western world, which God created on a large scale, and which in its turn grows faster, works harder, achieves more than any other land on earth has ever done. Nor must it be forgotten that the West has no severe critic to correct abuses, no court and no polite society to taboo equivocal words, no classic writers to impart good taste and train the ear to a love

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of gentle words and flowing verse. Speech, there, is free as the air of heaven, and moves with the impulsive energy of independent youth, conscious of matchless strength, and acknowledging no master in word or deed. It is an intensified, strangely impulsive language, just as the life's blood of the whole West throbs with faster pulse, and courses with fuller vigor through all its veins. There is no greater difference between the stately style of Milton and the dashing, reckless lines of Swinburne, than between the formal, almost pedantic echo of Johnsonian rhythm in Hawthorne's work, and the free and easy verses of Brett Harte. Hence, New England has wit, and what can be more caustic than Lowell's deservedly famous political squibs? But the West has humor, golden humor, full of poetry, dramatizing dry facts into flesh and blood, but abounding in charity and good-will to all men.

So it is with their sounds, that come full and hearty from broad chests, breathing freely the pure air that sweeps down from Rocky Mountains unhampered, across broad prairies, over a whole continent. Words are as abundant as food, and expressions grow in force and extent alike, till they sound extravagant to the more economical son of the East. Speech is bold, rejecting laws and rules, making one and the same word answer many purposes, and utterly scouting the euphemistic shifts of a sickly delicacy. If it becomes vulgar-and it will become so, as the sweetest milk turns sour when the thunder rolls on high-the vulgarism is still what J. R. Lowell so happily calls "poetry in the egg." Its slang, also, is as luxurious as the weeds among the rich grasses, but at least it is home-made, and smells of the breath of the prairie or the blood of the Indian, and is not imported from abroad or made in the bar-room and betting-ring.

Hence the student of English finds in the West a rich harvest of new words, of old words made to answer new purposes, often in the most surprising way, and of phrases full of poetical feeling, such as could only arise amid scenes of great beauty, matchless energy, and sublime danger.

There is a strange perfume about the very term backwoods, which brings up before our mind's eye at a glance the forest of primeval trees, those formidable giants which the pioneer has to encounter at once with his trusty weapon, the axe. For it used

to mean-real backwoods no longer exist-the partially cleared woods on the Western frontiers of the Union, which were considered the back of the new country, as the coast of the Atlantic constituted the front. The East having been first settled, and having furnished, to a large extent, the sinews and brains for the new States, was naturally looked upon as the representative of wealth, intelligence, and progress; and the back country became, from that time onward, synonymous not only with regions lying back, i. e., to the West of the seaboard States, but also with a state of civilization somewhat behindhand. The nearest districts became early known and are still very generally designated as the Up Country, a term, when used as an adjective, peculiar to this continent. It is employed all along the seaboard from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, with varying meaning, but always suggesting a certain inferiority to the seaboard population, because up the rivers, toward the headwaters, population becomes scarce, civilization imperfect, and schools few in number. Of this peculiar belt, J. R. Lowell says: "I imagined to myself such an up country man as I had often seen at anti-Slavery meetings, capable of district-school English, but always instinctively falling back into the national stronghold of his homely dialect, when heated to the point of self-forgetfulness" (Preface to Biglow Papers), and the result of this imagination was one of the most brilliant creations of American genius. In Southern States the inhabitant of the large seaboard city speaks with ineffable contempt of the up country people, and formerly used to rank them with Crackers and mean whites, till they made their political influence felt at elections.

The back country seems to have receded back from the Eastern States as civilization advanced Westward, but it still retains the character of a region, where lands and living are cheap, and people simple and unsophisticated. An opulent family, reduced in circumstances, and compelled to remove to a place where social claims were unknown and wants few and easily supplied, is thus alluded to in the Letters from the South: "The family were in great distress, though we helped them on a little to get to the back country, where I hear they are doing pretty well again" (p. 127); and even in more recent days a traveller in the West says: "The hotel was a roomy log-house, commanding a view of the back

country, a prairie stretching off into the western horizon." (Put nam's Magazine, November, 1868.)

In common language the one is the East, the other the West The former, now more generally known as the Eastern or the New England States, still maintains its strong hold on the minds of men by many a familiar phrase. Down East, in the American's mind, is instinctively placed near the low coast of the Atlantic, as it were down toward the sea, and at the same time toward the East, i. e, in Yankeedom. The emigrant, who has gone to the West, still remembers with delight how they spoke and how they did Down East, and looks forward, after years of hard labor and painful longing, to his visit to the East, while the Virginian, to the second and third generation even, speaks only of going home, and still more frequently of coming in, when he proposes to visit his relatives in the Old Dominion. The Down Easter is well known by his language, his costume, and his peculiar habits, smiled at for many an odd trick he has, but respected for his many solid virtues. With him all that is done in his native land is right, and hence what he admires, he simply calls about East. "There was not a Yankee," says J. R. Lowell, when Horace Mann regretted we had not the French word "s'orienter" in our speech, "whose problem has not always been to find out what is about East." The enthusiastic (though quaintly exaggerated) love borne the East by its sons is, perhaps, most strikingly illustrated in Major Jack Downing's oft-repeated phrase: "I'd go East of sunrise any day to see sich a place." (Letters, p. 21.)

The West, on the other hand, is as vast and undefined as the East is limited in extent, and sharply marked in character. First, it meant all the gigantic states, which were the generous gift of Old Virginia, lying between the Mother of States, as she was hence called, and the great river. Thus Edward Everett could say in his great speech: "The enterprising, ingenious and indomitable North, the substantial and magnificent Central States, the great balancewheel of the system; the youthful, rapidly expanding, and almost boundless West, the ardent, genial, and hospitable South-I have traversed them all." (Speech, July 5, 1858.) At that time, the regions on the other side of the Mississippi were the Far West of America, and beyond it rose the impassable barrier of the Rocky Mountains. Since the snow-capped range has been traversed by

a railway, and new, powerful States have arisen on its Western side, facing the ocean, there is no longer a West to the Union, the great Pacific itself bounding it toward the setting sun. Still, the States west of the Mississippi continue to be called the West, and what is done Out West is as frequently mentioned as what happens Down East or Down South.

It is to this West that annually thousands and thousands of brave young men, daring families, and numerous whole companies carry the banner of civilization and the power of the great republic. For the American worships the Almighty Dollar, but, with few exceptions, only in order to gratify his first and greatest of all desires to live in independence on his own land, and to enjoy in freedom the fruit of his labor under his own vine and his own figtree. The millionaire and the porter, the proud descendant of the grim Puritan or the rollicking Cavalier and the immigrant fresh from the Emerald Isle or Imperial Germany, all share this desire. A Stewart buys half a county in the neighborhood of New York and lays out a city, a Greeley purchases vast tracts in the purified South, and almost every capitalist invests a part of his fortune in real estate, hoping, from the steadily rising value of all lands in the republic, a large and certain return for his capital. The poor man drifts almost instinctively to the West to seek a home, where land can be had for the asking. The skillful mechanic and the frugal servant, the bankrupt merchant and the adventurous youth, all press in one unceasing current Westward, to build up their own fortunes and with them the power and prosperity of new States.

The government of the United States has ever been blameably lavish in the disposal of the matchless domain which Providence has placed in its hands. First offering the rich lands of the Continent, without respect for the rightful owner, to all who would take it-for cultivation or speculation alike-they now squander them recklessly in so-called grants to railroad companies and rings of every kind. This is a continuation of the original process, by which the British Crown granted lands to all who were willing to plant colonies in the New World. Hence the latter were called plantations in the North as well as in the South; in New England the first settlers were known as planters, and distinguished select families as Old Planters, while the oldest and most dignified

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