LEARNING ABOUT THE WEST

Goodwin's Weekly: Not many people realize the immense migration of people from the east to find homes in the western states. The next census will astonish people. The population of Washington will have doubled, in Oregon the increase will be immense, Idaho will have more than doubled; Montana will have largely increased, but not so much as though her water for irrigation was under better control; Nevada will have probably increased 290 per cent, and there will be a large increase in Utah, though nothing at all to what would be were there not here the questions of church rule and polygamy, which make independent and country loving Americans fight shy of Utah unless upon some proposition of ranching.

It all, however, shows that there is a steadily increasing host of people in search of homes, and that just now the tide is setting toward the west. Neither is it remarkable. Where water can be obtained, a farmer can clear, plow and plant 40 acres of sage brush land. If successful he can pay for the place in one year and have more left than he could have laid up in the year working at wages. It is nothing like what the strong men of the last generation had to do in order to clear, subdue and put under cultivation the stubborn forests between the eastern seashore and the prairies. Then the profits are an incentive which those farmers in the east never had, and the markets something which were never presented to any other race of farmers.

Then there are the mines with their possible fortunes; then there are a thousand resources which a western man would overlook for years which an immigrant would seize upon in a day. Then there is a better climate than the east knows anything of, and a freedom of thought which lifts the eastern man out of grooves which he has followed until, on his awakening, he finds himself astonished that he ever bound his life in those grooves.

Gradually the old expression that "the west is the biggest part of the Union" is beginning to dawn upon the average man as true. There is not yet any New York or Philadelphia in the west, but as men measure the future they are beginning to see what will be when the Pacific becomes as black with steamship funnels, or as white with sails as is the Atlantic, and they do not forget how much larger the Pacific is than the Atlantic.

It is a great region and the conditions ought to result in a race of men and women superior to those of the east, for the reason that they have better air to breathe and hence ought to have a stronger physical formation, and second, because even as the lungs of men expand in the rarified air, so their brains ought to expand under the broader conditions and the higher friction of the west. Finally the real western man is impressed by nature's great exhibitions in the west, and as he more and more realizes the splendor of the land which the fathers made possible by the government they instituted, his patriotism ought to expand until he is ready to do what they did—pledge his fortune, his life and his sacred honor on our free institutions.