Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

to dust, looking for the general resurrection, and the life of the world to come, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

"They that be wise, shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars forever and ever."

COMMUNICATIONS.

[FOR articles falling under this head, and which appear under the name of the writers, the Editors are not responsible.]

THE MISSOURI VALLEY, AND HOW TO
CHRISTIANIZE IT.

BY FRANCIS WHARTON.

THE Missouri valley is in many respects the most important missionary field to which American Christians can now turn. Its rivers, its towns, and its prairies have each a population at once marked with strongly distinguished peculiarities, and impressed with elements of specific activity and influence. It is the diversity of these peculiarities which leads to the great variety in the reports of travellers by whom that valley has been visited. The mere excursionist views and judges from the steamboat and its passengers, and from the trains of emigrants by whom the ferries are crossed. The business man, and perhaps the more pertinacious tourist, visits and speaks of the towns. The pioneer farmer, the hunter, the itinerant minister, and the rural colporteur, draw their opinion from the prairies. These several classes I now propose to consider, first in reference to their social relations, and then to their religious.

wants.

Steamboating, on the Missouri as well as on the Mississippi, creates its own population; what this is, numerically, it is difficult to estimate, though from the number of craft employed on the Missouri, I have no hesitation in saying that the waterpopulation which floats up and down by Nebraska and Kansas is nearly as numerous as that of the land. First comes the steamboat with its hundred hands, and sometimes its two hundred passengers. In July, 1857, twenty-three regular packet-boats were employed, with an aggregate tonnage of twenty-nine thousand three hundred tons, valued at $1,269,000. Besides this, there are a number of transient boats which are engaged during the season. In one issue of the St. Louis Republi can I find no less than eight first-class steamboats advertised as having arrived in the space of two days. Their trips average ten days, and this would make forty packet-boats on the river.

Next to these come the ferry-boats. A ferry may be met with almost once in every ten miles, in the eight hundred between St. Louis and Council Bluffs. Then come the rafts with their immediate and subsidiary population, which, in the Mississippi, particularly, is immense. To these may be added that portion of the inhabitants of the river-banks which is employed in cutting wood for the boats.

The traveller who contents himself with looking around among the crews and officers as well as among the passengers of the steamboats on these rivers, may be well excused if he take an exaggerated view of the recklessness of western life. Profanity is the steamboat patois; card-playing, sandwiched in between layers of eating and sleeping, its occupation. There are, it is true, exceptions which vary in number with the character and destination of the boat. At one time you may find yourselves among a body of passengers as respectable as any on the Eastern waters. Take, however, another scene. The officers and sub-officers who are to be found in almost every point about the boat, know not how to make up a sentence without a parenthesis of profanity. Speculators and adventurers come next, and with them a party of French Canadians, partially engaged in trading, partially in lumbering.

By the great body of them, the day passage up the river, is occupied in the following fashion: At seven in the morning they breakfast, and at eight sit down at cards. At ten, cards having by that time ceased to interest them, they will be seen packed away in layers in the berths with which the state. rooms are lined. At twelve, they are at dinner; after dinner they are again at cards, and then again are laid up in their berths to sleep. Tea is followed in the same way, except that, in the evening, the card-playing is longer and more animaed, and is extended deep into the night. To each change of occupation, from cards to sleep, from sleep to eating, and from eating to cards, a drink at the bar is a necessary preliminary. Now, there are one or two circumstances which may serve to explain so peculiar a social condition as that which I have described. In the first place steamboating on the Missouri is eminently adapted to stimulate habits of reckless extravagance and excitability. The season lasts from May to November, during which it is no uncommon thing for a boat, costing twenty-six thousand dollars, to net from thirty to forty thousand. Large profits and great risk produce large salaries. is not unusual for the two pilots to receive eight hundred dollars a month. The wages of the subordinate officers and of the deck-hands are proportionally high; the consequence is, that those engaged in boating on the Missouri are exposed to one of the most demoralizing of all business influences-extravagant gains during one part of the year and entire idleness in the other. We need not wonder that those thus tempted should become reckless and extravagant, if not desperate. Still more deleterious is the effect of the lumbertraffic on those engaged in it. Prior to the rafting season, all is industry and life. The woods resound with the click of the axe. The banks of the river, and sometimes, in the case of the Mississippi, of its remotest tributaries, are crowded with rafts. Then, when the spring floods come, raft after raft dashes down the stream. Immense profits are made. Terrible risks are encountered. The humblest hands receive wages running to ten dollars a day. Then, when the excitement and the labor are alike over, the raftsman finds himself suddenly

It

at liberty. He plunges, in too many cases, into the wildest dissipation. The taverns he frequents are the vilest of haunts, capable of generating as a malaria that which he may impart to them as a sporadic disease. It has been my lot more than once to accompany parties of returning raftsmen on their way up the river. I do not wonder that foreigners who find them forming a frequent ingredient in our steamboat population, should declaim on the frantic profligacy Western life produces. How unjust this declaration is, I shall presently show more fully.

There is, however, another dangerous influence which is here at work, on which I must be permitted to dwell before proceed. ing to consider what is really the great security of the country and the main body on whom the Church can operate. I refer now, to the land speculators who form so prominent a portion of those whom the superficial observer meets in the hotels and places of public resort in the large towns. I trust that what I have now to say will not be considered as applying to the legitimate real-estate agent. Few callings are more respectable than this-none more essential to the development of a new and only partially settled country. Far different, however, is the character of the speculator, whom I now pause to notice.

Observe for a moment the way in which paper towns are manufactured throughout Kansas and Nebraska. Even in the inland the traveller is surprised at seeing a series of wooden stakes driven in on a prairie height, or on a rivulet bottom, with a sign up, calling the place a "City." It is still worse on the Missouri river. The immense fortunes which have been made by the original proprietors at Leavenworth, at St. Joseph's, and at Council Bluffs, have led to the purchase and laying out of town sites on almost every available spot on the banks of the river from the Kansas line to Sioux City, embracing a front, taking both sides together, of one thousand miles. It is true that the prizes which are offered are great. Of this, Leavenworth City, situated on the Kansas side of the river, nearly five hundred miles above its confluence with the Mississippi, is a striking illustration. The first public sale of

lots in that town took place in October, 1854, shortly after the passage of the Nebraska-Kansas bill, prior to which not even a squatter's title could be made. In the following April the population ran up to 500. In the succeeding October it amounted to 1200. Now, it can hardly be estimated at under 10,000. Property which was bought at two, three, or five dollars an acre is cut up into lots of 24 feet by 150, and sold at prices running from four hundred to four thousand dollars a lot. The hour-hand which may indicate the growth in Eastern cities, the movement of which, though sure, can not be detected by the momentary observer, here gives place to the minutehand, each of whose throbs may be noted as it pursues its rapid round. Buildings can actually be seen to grow. It is true that a great part of this is due to the flimsiness with which they are put together. But this is only an additional proof of that extraordinary development which sacrifices durability, as well as comfort, to the necessity which requires something that may be called a residence at once. It is through the wonderful emigrations by which this necessity is produced that town lots here compete in price with those of our great Atlantic cities, and that the first, and even the second purchasers, have made fortunes in a few months.

All this, with the corresponding growth of the towns which have so wonderfully marked the Iowa bank of the Mississippi River, has excited the speculative fever to its highest point. Men have rushed to the Missouri Valley from every section of the Union, influenced by that delirious lust for a speedy and great fortune which so utterly enslaves the moral and intellectual powers of those whom it seizes. It is Hawthorne, if I recollect rightly, who in one of his impressive, though lurid narratives, gives us a sketch of a party who started on a hunt for a jewel of inestimable value which was supposed to exist in a neighboring mountain. Their haggard and frenzied pursuit of this vast prize; the degrees by which the flame burned out all their true and right affections; the maniac restlessness of eye, and more than maniac drying up of the heart; may well be used to describe those who have entered upon the great Western property-hunt. They form a class by them. VOL. VI.-18

« ElőzőTovább »