Thanks to the man that could go up-stream, corn was no longer worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel anywhere in America. Corn was worth fifty cents a bushel, and calico was worth fifty cents a yard, at the city of Kaskaskia, in the heart of the Mississippi valley. Kaskaskia, the ancient, was queen of the down-stream trade in her day. She was important enough to command a visit from General Lafayette, early in this century; and the governor of Illinois addressed the distinguished visitor with an oratory not without interest, since it was alike full of bombast, of error, of truth, and of prophecy:
"Sir, when the waters of the Mississippi, generations hence, are traversed by carriers of commerce from all parts of the world; when there shall live west of the Father of Waters a people greater in numbers than the present population of the United States; when, sir, the power of England, always malevolent, shall have waned to nothing, and the eagles and stars of our national arms be recognized and honored in all parts of the globe; when the old men and the children of to-day shall have been gathered to their fathers, and their graves have been obliterated from the face of the earth, Kaskaskia will still remember and honor your name. Sir, as the commercial queen of the West, she welcomes you to a place within her portals. So long as Kaskaskia exists, your name and praises shall be sung by her."
To-day Kaskaskia is forgotten. The conditions that produced her have long since disappeared. The waters, in pity, have literally washed her away and buried her far in the southern sea. Yet Kaskaskia serves admirably as a measuring point for the West of that day. She stood at the edge of civilization on the one hand, of barbarism on the other. Beyond her lay a land as unknown as the surface of the moon, a land that offered alike temptation and promise. Calico was worth fifty cents a yard at Kaskaskia; it was worth three dollars a yard in Santa Fé. A beaver skin was worth three dollars in New York; it was worth fifty cents at the head of the Missouri.
There you have the problems of the men of 1810, and that, in a nutshell, is the West of 1810, 1820, 1830. The problem was then, as now, how to transport a finished product into a new country, a raw product back into an old country, and a population between the two countries. There sprang up then, in this second era of American transportation, that mighty commerce of the prairies, which, carried on under the name of trade, furnished one of the boldest commercial romances of the earth. Fostered by merchants, it was captained and carried on by heroes, and was dependent upon a daily heroism such as commerce has never seen anywhere except in the American West. The Kit Carsons now took the place of the Simon Kentons, the Bill Williamses, of the Daniel Boones. The Western scout, the trapper, the hunter, wild and solitary figures, took prominent place on the nation's canvas.