It all sounds easy, but it took one man’s brain and one man’s life to do it. The story of the road and of the man that made it is not yet told, but it will be written in the development of one of the richest sections of America. It is writing daily in the trains that come from North to South, from South to North, agencies that daily break down and pass through any sectional barrier and bring about the better understanding which makes kin one with the other the sons of the old riflemen and the old axmen who built the West. Thus are the trails of the two forever interwoven. Beside this trail of commerce runs the old trail of the Mississippi, whose tawny flood still carries its burden of adventure and romance. Robertson, Thomas, Whitney, Osborn,—these are the names of a few of the prophets, forgotten men of the early and the modern days, who blazed the intercurrent trails where now march the feet of those living under a complex civilization. From these crude studies of early Western history we may gather one very significant fact, which will mean more a hundred years from now than it does to-day. It is that America got her territory first, and then her transportation and her population. She bought on a rising market, and her purchase was of territory, land, the only thing on earth that can not be increased or multiplied. Moreover, her land was such as the earth has never duplicated and can never duplicate. The magnificent American West was a realm unrivaled, and it was originally settled by men who had the most priceless of all possessions, a splendid ancestry. Providence held back the wheels for a hundred years while the Western character was forming. Let us, even though by dint of effort, fling away the personal plaint. It is un-American to snivel, and as the old-time Western men would not have done so, neither shall we. The West is not dead. It is immortal. We have come upon a century of force. The conflict is to be the bitterest the world has ever known; not the conflict of man with beast, or with savage nature, but the conflict of masses of men, masses of things, one combination against another, one wedge of impact, head on, against another. It is too late to call out for an America like that of Washington or Jefferson; too late to ask for a practical Monroe doctrine; too late to speak of policies or politics gone by.