This, then, was the great thing that the Santa Fé trail did for us, although we have forgotten it. It taught the people of New Mexico that the Americans were a greater and stronger people, a more just and steadfast people, than those to the south, who had done naught in all their lives but butcher and hesitate, butcher again and vacillate. They were not sad to take on the institutions of the United States in exchange for those of Spain. The Old World had not established its ways on the soil of the New World. The greatest of all Monroe doctrines still prevailed, the doctrine of the fit, the doctrine of evolution, of endurance by right, of hardihood got by a sane dwelling close to the great things of nature. Far to the north, the Oregon trail led to California and the Orient. The Santa Fé trail, broken as it was in its transcontinental flight, points now in the same direction. The only ignoble part of the American story is the history of American politics. All politics aside, is it not easy to see that the old broken trail is a fate-finger pointing to Mexico and the trans-Isthmian canal; to an America wholly American; and to an Orient that again and by another trail is destined to be our West? We may spill our oratory, may deplore utterly and sincerely, yet we shall not prevail to build any wall high enough to stop this thing. The Old World might combine for the time against the New, might for a term of years conspire to put our venturers in prison; but at last it all were futile. Much of the temperate zone of the world belongs to a people whose history is but the history of a West; it will always so belong while the character of that people shall retain the dignity and force of those men who “could not otherwise.” This people is concerned to-day, as it has always been, not with sentiment but with self interest. Its great movements have been based not on theories but on common sense. Its great policies have been founded on geography and not on polemics. Its great adversities have been those of transportation; its great successes have been those built on transportation problems ably mastered. To-day this American people waxes somewhat flamboyantly boastful, according lightly and cheerfully to itself the title of the greatest nation of the world. It may indeed be such, or potentially such; but it will retain better claim upon that greatness if in all humility it shall remember the slow days wherein that greatness was founded, wherefrom that greatness grew. Therein lies the import of the early Western trails. ----- Footnote 33: The spelling of this name is by most authorities given as “Becknell,” which is thought to be correct. Footnote 34: V. Chapter IV, Vol. III; “Early Explorers of the Trans-Missouri.” Footnote 35: Other authorities, as for instance Chittenden, make it 392 miles. CHAPTER III THE OREGON TRAIL