A half-century ago, few of the twenty-one Western towns whose stories are herein collected had taken upon themselves the characteristics which to-day chiefly distinguish them. We have seen that the advent of the railway was for many the starting-point upon the road to prosperity; the arrival of European immigrants, with traditions of toil and thrift, proved the turning stage for others, and strengthened all. The War of Secession shook the Republic to its foundations; but from it the North rose with fresh vigor, and rapidly developed in growth and ambition, with the ensuing commercial and industrial conditions which we encounter to-day. Nowhere has this development been quite so noticeable as in the towns of the West. Pioneer men and women are necessarily too closely engaged in taming the wilderness to have either thought or leisure for any but the most elementary education. But now that the West is no longer the frontier, and mines, forests, fisheries, manufactures, and scientific agriculture have brought wealth and comparative leisure, there is among her people no lack of aspiration for culture. In no section of the United States are study clubs relatively more numerous, in town and country; university extension courses and the lyceum prosper everywhere; the common-school systems, capped by the fast-growing State universities with their thousands of students, are exhibiting a healthy growth along the most approved lines under the guidance of teachers of national reputation; excellent private academies and colleges are numerous in every commonwealth. Several of the towns mentioned in this volume have won wide reputation as educational centres--notably Cleveland, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and San Francisco. From these Western towns there issues no note of decadence. Theirs is the glowing ambition of youth. Each of our several authors is quite confident, and properly so, that his town is the handsomest, brightest, and most prosperous of all; or, if it is not, that it is soon to be. Its commerce ever widens, its industries expand in capacity and number, its railways connect it each year with some new sphere of trade; and, what is better, it is making strides, in breezy Western fashion, in the cultivation of the higher things of life, in its churches, its schools, its libraries and museums, its charities, its parks, its popular conveniences, its insistence upon moral and material municipal cleanliness. It is pleasant and profitable to trace the careers of communities such as this; to note, for instance, by what means the Indian village became a trading post, then a fort, next a hamlet, and at last comes to be pulsating with the ambitions and struggling with the multifarious problems of a great modern city. Herein is a record of urban development crowded into the span of a single human life, that in the Old World it took centuries to accomplish.