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. WHAT WAS THAT WEST? 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 which goes further than a mere summons on 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. [Illustration: One of the old-time long-haired men of the West.] We are all, here,--Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World or the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,--but the result of that mandate which bade mankind to increase and multiply, which bade mankind to take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken over temporarily that portion of earth and its fullness which was allotted or which was made possible to him by that Providence to which both 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 West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax, of linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of trolley-cars and self-binder, of purple and fine linen, it must be observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work, and back of all these causes were the original law and the original mandate. The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage. WHAT, THEN, WAS THE FIRST TRANSPORTATION OF THE WEST? When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was the Alleghanies, how then did the West-bound travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation? The answer would seem easy. They traveled in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters. THE RECORD OF THE AVERAGE LINE OF WEST-BOUND TRAVEL.