Twenty-five years ago potatoes were so high in price in certain towns of the Rocky Mountains that the merchants handling them often reserved the right to retain the peelings, which, in turn, were sold, for planting purposes, the eyes of the potatoes thus having a considerable commercial value, obviously in proportion to the distance from the nearest railroad or steamboat line. This situation could not forever endure. There must come a day when we could afford to throw away our peelings, and throw them away cut thick and carelessly. Equally true is it that the time is coming in America when we shall again gather up our potato-peelings and cherish them. There you have the three ages of the West.[49] The early American life was primitive, but it was never the life of a peasantry. Look ahead into the future, the time of the second saving of the peelings. Once there was a time in the West when every man was as good as his neighbor, as well situated, as much contented. It would take hardihood to predict such conditions in the future for the West or for America. For half a hundred years America looked across the Alleghanies. It was nearer to England than to Iowa. Our standards in fashion, in art, in literature, were yet those of an older world. Then came the age of Americanism, when it mattered not to the women of the frontier what were the modes brought in the latest ship from London or Paris. Under the Monroe doctrine of the frontier the women made their petticoats of elkskin, and found it good. Behold now a day when Iowa is as near as England, and England almost as near as New York. Again the contents of the ships are valid matter of curiosity to the women of the West. We are in the third age, the age of steam. The pack-horse and the sailboat were vehicles of the individual or of the section. Wheeled vehicles afforded a speedier and more flexible intercommunication that made the idea of secession forever impossible, and made us a national America. The common carrier made us and will destroy us as a national entity. The wheels have written epochal record on the surface of the land. Long and devious and delightful, weary and sad and tragic, are the old wheel-tracks of the West, worn deep into a soil red with blood, on paths lined with flowers, and with graves as well. At the half-way point of the century the early wheels of the West were crawling and creaking over trails where now rich cities stand. The Red River carts from Pembina, their wheels sawn from the ends of logs, and voicing a mile-wide protest of unlubricated axle, crept down to a “St. Paul’s” that had a population of about twelve hundred, mostly halfbreeds.[50] A yard of cloth or a butcher-knife still sold for twenty dollars at old Fort Benton in the beaver country.