Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 37, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 April 1905 — JUST WHERE IS THE WEST. [ARTICLE]

JUST WHERE IS THE WEST.

Section Which Can Not Easily Be Founded by Geographical I,iinits. It would be easier to toll where is the east. That is always toward the Atlantic. Boston is east to Cleveland; Chicago is east to Colorado, and everything this side of the Cascade mountains is east to the Pacific coast. It almost amounts to this: The west is where a man is; the east is where he or his father came from. So it comes to pass that the west has no fixed geographical limits like the south and New England. It. is something more than a geographical term. Like Boston, it is a state of mind. There are mountains anil fivers and oceans within the limits of which this state of'mind is pre-eminently to he found, but it is to be recognized in other regions as well. You can tell a westerner as you can tell a southerner —sometimes by his speech, always by his attitude toward life. The west means Americans who are controlled by certain ideas and motives. But American does not mean Anglo-Saxon beyond the Alleghenies. It is never, strictly speaking, a matter of descent, but this is doubly true of that great region where blood and ideas and habits of every people under the sun are fusing into a new race. Inevitably the west is cosmopolitan. With such an origin it could_ not be otherwise. Provincialism in any arrogant sense of the term you will not find outside of the thirteen original States of the Union. On the prairies too many men have succeeded where according to all precedent they oughl to have failed for anyone to claim a proprietary right in omniscience Lacking however - convinced it may be of its own superiority, tin west is tolerant, and the westerner b at home everywhere.