No fiction can ever surpass in vividness the vast, heroic drama of the West. The clang of steel, the shoutings of the captains, the stimulus of wild adventure—of these things, certainly, there has been no lack. There has been close about us for two hundred years the sweeping action of a story keyed higher than any fiction, more unbelievably bold, more incredibly keen in spirit. And now we come upon the tame and tranquil sequel of that vivid play of human action. “Anticlimax!” cries all that humanity that cares to think, that dares to regret, that once dared to hope. “Tell us of the West that was,” demands that humanity, and with the best of warrant; “play for us again the glorious drama of the past, and let us see again the America that once was ours.” Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest may attach to a quest that goes farther than a mere summons for the spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West? What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run wider than the West, and, indeed, wider than America. In the pursuit of this line of thought we need ask only a few broad premises. These premises may leave us not so much of self-vaunting as we might wish, and may tend to diminish our esteem of the importance of individual as well as national accomplishment; for, after all and before all, we are but flecks on the surface of the broad, moving ribbon of fate. We are all,—Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World or the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,—but the result of the mandate that bade mankind to increase and multiply, that bade mankind to take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken over temporarily that portion of the earth and its fullness allotted or made possible to us by that Providence to which all things belong. We have each of us done this along the lines of the least possible resistance, for this is the law of organic life. The story of the taking over of the earth into possession has been but a story of travel. Aryan, Cymri, Goth, Vandal, Westerner—they are all one. The question of occupying the unoccupied world has been only a question of transportation, of invasion, and of occupation along the lines of least resistance. Hence we have at hand, in a study of transportation of the West at different epochs, a clue that will take us very near to the heart of things.