Julius Caesar struck the note of real history: Quorum pars magna
fui--"Of which I was a great part." If we are to seek the actual
truth, we ought most to value contemporary records,
representations made by men who were themselves a part of the
scenes which they describe. In that way we shall arrive not
merely upon lurid events, not alone upon the stereotyped
characters of the "Wild West," but upon causes which are much
more interesting and immensely more valuable than any merely
titillating stories from the weirdly illustrated Apocrypha of the
West. We must go below such things if we would gain a just and
lasting estimate of the times. We ought to look on the old range
neither as a playground of idle men nor as a scene of hysterical
and contorted human activities. We ought to look upon it from the
point of view of its uses to mankind. The explorers found it a
wilderness, the home of the red man and the buffalo. What were
the underlying causes of its settlement and development?

There is in history no agency so wondrous in events, no working
instrumentality so great as transportation. The great seeking of
all human life is to find its level. Perhaps the first men
traveled by hollowed logs down stream. Then possibly the idea of
a sail was conceived. Early in the story of the United States men
made commercial journeys from the head of the Ohio to the mouth
of the Mississippi by flatboats, and came back by keelboats. The
pole, the cordelle, the paddle, and the sail, in turn helped them
to navigate the great streams which led out into the West. And
presently there was to come that tremendous upheaval wrought by
the advent of the iron trails which, scorning alike waterways and
mountain ranges, flung themselves almost directly westward across