American Money Gone A Wool Cultivating
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American Money Gone A Wool Cultivating
What has become confessedly needed over the wild and unknown regions that lie between the Missouri river and the Pacific coast, is a national road-line of connection for travel between the great Western States, and perhaps two points near the Pacific, one in Oregon and one in California. It is too soon to build a Pacific railroad. That will come in good time, but at present those interior regions “must creep before they can walk.”
To serve as a commencement Congress last winter passed laws to build Wagon Roads over these vast tracts; and also to have an “overland mail” carried twice a week from the valley of the Mississippi to the regions along the Pacific.
The bulk of the United States possessions, the vast territories of Washington, Oregon and Northern Nebraska, lie above the line of 42 deg. north latitude. Out of these, in the course of fifty years, will be shaped ten or fifteen great States, especially out of Washington and Oregon. It would of course be an immense advantage to have the Overland Mail, and the National Wagon-Roads, so run as to serve the settlement of these territories, and to open a wider and more definite knowledge of them. The main strength, density, and scope of our inland and Pacific possessions will always exist toward the North—as they exist already eastward.
But not upon these premises has the government acted. The Overland Mail, and the principal of the Wagon-Roads, are distorted out of the way so as to leave the centre of the State of Arkansas, in latitude 85 deg. north, in the midst of a dead slave country, where nothing is doing, where nobody travels, far below the great lines of travel—and thence run through the dreary deserts of Red River, along Texas (at that part a perfect blank,) and so through the North Pass of the Anahuac Mountains, at latitude 42 deg. north, touching the boundary lines of Mexico. It seems indeed to be more intended for Mexico than the United States.
Of course every one familiar with the points of “the great Plains,” knows that the proper point of departure for such a scheme as this of the Overland Mail, ought to have been Independence, (latitude 40 degrees,) on the Kansas river, on the western line of Missouri. The unfailing instincts of private trade and travel have long fixed upon this point; but the government, it seems, had other instincts to direct it.
Will not these things lead to some stern consideration among the people? Will it not be asked what such distortion and misapplication of money are for?