How feeble is our grasp upon the future may be seen from the last utterance. The sum of fifteen million dollars seemed "enormous." To-day, less than a century from that time, one American citizen has in his lifetime made from the raw resources of this land a fortune held to be two hundred and sixty-six million dollars.
One Western city, located in that despised territory, during the year just past showed sales of grain alone amounting to one hundred and twenty-three million three hundred thousand dollars; of live stock alone, two hundred and sixty-eight million dollars; of wholesale trade, seven hundred and eighty-six million two hundred and five thousand dollars; of manufactures--where manufactures were once held impossible--the total of seven hundred and forty-one million and ninety-seven thousand dollars.
It was once four weeks from Maine to Washington; it is now four days from Oregon. The total wealth of all the cities, all the lands, all the individuals of that once despised West, runs into figures that surpass all belief and all comprehension. And this has grown up within less than a hundred years. The people have outrun all the wisdom of their leaders. What would Daniel Webster, famous New Englander, doubter and discreditor of the West, say, were he to know the West to-day?
Yet the men of that day were not so much to blame, for they were in the infancy of transportation, and as no army is better than its commissary trains, so is no nation better than its transportation. We were still in the crude, primitive, down-stream days. Steam had not yet come upon the great interior waterways. The west-bound mountain roads across the Alleghanies were still only narrow tracks worn by the feet of pack-horses that carried mostly salt and bullets. The turnpikes fit for wagon traffic were Eastern affairs only. The National Road, from Wheeling to the westward, was restricted in its staging possibilities.
Between the hardy Western population and its earlier home there rose the high barrier of the Appalachians, to ascend whose streams meant a long, grievous and dangerous journey, a Journey commercially impracticable. The first traffic of the old mountain road was in salt and bullets, and it was a traffic that all went one way. The difficulties of even this crude commerce led to the establishment, as the very first manufacture ever begun in the West, of works for the production of salt. Bullitt's Lick, on Salt Creek, was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, manufacturing community west of the Alleghanies, and part of the downstream trade of the day was in carrying kettles from Louisville down the Ohio and up Salt Creek to the lick. This route was in hostile Indian country, and every voyage held its own terrors.