The Western railroads were only little spurs of iron thrusting out into the prairies. Indeed, they could not always boast rails of iron, as witness the old wooden-railed road from Chicago to Galena. Still eager, still harkening to the Voices of the West, the men who were to make the West pressed on, taking the railway as far as it went, then the stage-coach and the wagon and the horse and the lone path of the farthest venturer. The man of Virginia heard that the prairies of Iowa would give him a farm for a price per acre less than one-tenth that commanded by the red clay hills of the Old Dominion. He forsook the land of terrapin and peaches, of honeysuckle and sunshine, and started West by rail across the Alleghanies, across Ohio by the early Pennsylvania railway system, beyond the boom town of Chicago, across the Mississippi, and out into the black mud of the prairies for fifty miles or so. Thence by stage he went, the head of his tearful wife against his breast, but in that breast beating a heart whose one thought was the “better chance.” It was the better chance for these babes that tugged at the skirts of their mother—this was what the father wanted, and this was why the mother went with him, grieving, as she yet must, for the home land that she perhaps would never see again. One such settler, who went West from Virginia into an agricultural state in 1854, said that he came West in order that he might be able to educate his children. He educated them. To-day one child is buried in California, one in Dakota, three live in Iowa, and one in Illinois. Such is the typical record of an American family. The man of old New England might cross this trail of the Southern man, and find himself betimes in Kansas or Nebraska, forerunner of that day when it was to be said that Massachusetts was west of the Missouri River, as indeed is true to-day. Boston began to build Chicago, and the first of those men went West that were to make the old Red River cart-towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis little else than New England communities—cities of a state which to-day has a permanent school fund of nearly eight million dollars, and a university fund of nearly one million dollars, in securities largely made up of the bonds of other states, among them a large amount of the funding bonds of the ancient state of Virginia. It was a race into the West—a race in which now the North outstripped the South, the commercial outran the heroic, the ax and the plow outstripped the rifle and its creed.