Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 May 1878 — The Great West. [ARTICLE]

The Great West.

When good Bishop Berkeley wrote the famous line, Westward the star of empire takes its way, he hardly would have realized how literally the poetic prophecy would be fulfilled within a few generations of his own time. He was thinking only of the narrow strip of territory along the Atlantic coast of America, behind which lay thousands of leagues of primeval forest, where the red man was sole master of the soil, and where the great lakes and rivers, now teeming with commerce, and bordered by populous cities and thriving villages, laved shores which the foot of white man had never trod. His ‘imagination would have been appalled had a vision of the present day flashed upon his eye ; had he seen the vast wilderness filled with a mighty people, enterprising, intelligent, intellectual, with great cities, universities, colleges, schools, churches, newspapers, steamboats, railroads; a country compared to which his own little island is but an insignificant patch on the map of the world; a country which gathers to itself the literary and artistic treasures of the Old World with a prodigality of expenditure unsurpassed by any nation of Europe. Less than fifty years ago the great West was a “ howling wilderness,” but to-day it rivals the East in culture aud intelligence, and nowhere in the world is there a more eager demand for books of the highest order of literary excellence. — Harper's Bazar.