This is the new West. We rub our eyes and wonder. The diplomats still squabble; the chess game dawdles its languid way; the factory is getting ready to pay its first dividend; our friends' children are about to enter the high school. Everything has developed along the usual lines of growth, and yet this greater change has come about in a night. We turn back the files of our paper, and find that it has occupied in the world's history just fifteen years! In that little space of time the institutions of untold ages have been overthrown and new ones substituted for them.
Deadwood was founded in 1876. In 1890 Sitting Bull and his tribe were utterly destroyed in the mid-winter fight at Wounded Knee. Between those dates, the Dakotas have manufactured at home an article of quite adequate civilization.
To be sure, the product is perhaps a little crude. Although enormous grain fields attest indubitably that the farmer has tamed the soil, equally enormous Indian reservations as indubitably dispute too sweeping an assertion of it. Electric railways may be instanced in some towns. The sprightly six-shooter is in others the quickest road to the longest journey. Hot Springs has a modern hotel and an improved bar; a scant thirty miles north is the unsheriffed log-mining camp where the "bad man" terrorizes in all his glory.
These things are true, but they count for little. The great facts remain, and they are these: a cowboy named Tenney tried to lasso the last buffalo some years since and got himself yanked over several irregular miles of country; the Sioux are herded nicely on their reservations and shoot at nickels with bows and arrows for the amusement of passing tourists. The old frontier conditions have gone. If you want trouble, you must go out to look for it; it no longer comes to you unsought. In a word the broad sea of the wilderness has shrunken to bayous and bays surrounded and intersected by dried areas fit for the cultivation of paper collars and tenderfeet. The frontier still exists, but exists in its isolation only because it is not as commercially desirable as the rest.
This is true of the country at large. It is also true of Pah-sap-pah, the Black Hills. Already a railroad has pushed its way up the main valley. The folders show a map with the usual blood-red artery of mathematical straightness, passing through myriads of small-type towns, clinging desperately by their noses to the blessings of commerce, and sundry dignified, large-type cities, standing more aloof on their own merits. It all looks imposing enough on paper; but in reality the line does little more than keep itself warm in the narrow valley of its route. On closer inspection the myriads of towns disappear. Minnekahta is a station in the midst of a vast plain, Pringles a sawmill, Stony Point just nothing at all. For the Black Hills are great of extent, and one county of the Dakotas could swallow an eastern State.
