It is a matter of wonder that any American literature could ever speak of the American West in anything but terms of pride and honor. There is a certain literature, color-crammed, superficial, and transient, because wrong, that affects to believe that there is still a West that is a land of crude souls exclusively and of little hope for a hereafter. If the good folk who so believe lack the great privilege of actual American travel, they have at least left for them the resources of an American railroad map. Let them study; and even if they study no deeper than the map, they must come to see that the West is no more as once it was. Changed unspeakably and utterly, the old West lies in ruins. To pick about among those ruins may, indeed, be to find here and there a bit of local color; but were it not better to reflect that this color may be only the broken bits of a cathedral pane? Restore that cathedral, in recollection, in imagination at least, if it be within the skill of art or literature to do so. Restore it, and write upon its arch the thought that history may be more than a mere recital of wars and religions; that the destruction of human life may be nationally not so great as the development of human character. Give the men of the old West, parents of the men of the new West, this epitaph: They had character. Let the heroes have place of honor in their own cathedral; and so may the Western earth lie light above them, and the Western skies smile over them rememberingly. ----- Footnote 48: The Century Magazine, January, 1902. Footnote 49: Another instance of changed standards in the West may be seen in the revolution as to petty prices. Up to twenty years ago, in most Rocky Mountain communities, the quarter-dollar was the smallest coin in circulation. With the railroads came the dime, the nickel, and at last the penny; but they came to a West that was no more. A Montana periodical thus comments on these matters as they appeared at the time when the railroad reached Miles City: “The advent of the Northern Pacific Railroad, in November, 1881, brought about a complete change in the methods and manners of the people. The railroad brought the community at once in touch with the more concise and narrower life of ‘the States’; the ‘nickel’ displaced the ‘quarter’ as the smallest coin in use, and prices shrunk accordingly. . . . This proposed innovation was hotly contested for a while by the adherents of the ‘two-bit’ theory, resulting finally in a compromise that established ‘two-for-a-quarter’ as the going rate. It would be hard to describe the feeling of dejection that overwhelmed the old-timers when this conclusion was reached. It was accepted by them as a pronounced and evident sign of decadence.” Footnote 50: