The labor of this primitive transportation, this wading for hundreds of miles each spring against an icy torrent, was not work for children. It was not children that this wild trade begot, but men. The Titanic region demanded Titanic methods. It made its own laws and customs, struck out for itself new methods. The world beyond never asked the world behind what or how to do. This vast, rude land asked no other country how to perform the tasks that lay before it. Of the wildness and rudeness of this new world there could be no question, but its savagery was met by a savage determination more fearless and indomitable than its own. The mountain trapper, the prairie freighter and trader, the California miner were great men, tremendous men, fit successors of those that fought their way across the Alleghanies. The fur trade was practically over by 1834, and the Santa Fé trade lasted, roughly speaking, only about twenty years, being practically terminated in 1843 by the edict of Santa Anna. These difficulties in our Western commerce all came to an end with the Mexican War, and with the second and third great additions to our Western territory, which gave us the region on the south as well as the north, from ocean to ocean. This time was one of great activity in all the West, and the restless population that had gained a taste of the adventurous life of that region was soon to have yet greater opportunities. The discovery of gold in California unsettled not only all the West, but all America, and hastened immeasurably the development of the West, not merely as to the Pacific coast, but also in regard to the mountain regions between the great plains and the coast. The turbulent population of the mines spread from California into every accessible portion of the Rockies. The trapper and hunter of the remotest range found that he had a companion in the wilderness, the prospector, as hardy as himself, and animated by a feverish energy that rendered him even more determined and unconquerable than himself. Love of excitement and change invited the trapper to the mountains. It was love of gain that drove the prospector thither. Commercial man was to do in a short time what the adventurer would never have done. California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana,—how swiftly, when we come to counting decades, these names followed upon those of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio! In the new demands for locomotion and transportation, which now arose from these new armies of moving men, the best thinkers of the country could for a long time suggest nothing better than the sea and the rivers as the great highways. Steamboats ran regularly on every Western river where such navigation was possible. Yet at the head of the waters there still existed, and in greater degree than ever before, long gaps between the abodes of the mountain population and their bases of supplies. The demand, moreover, was for transportation of heavy goods.