When the advance guard of the Spanish pioneers reached the valley it was entirely uncultivated. To-day, by means of irrigation, it has been turned into the fruit garden of the world, where apples and peaches and plums and oranges and apricots grow and prosper in exchange for a very reasonable expenditure of labour.
This valley proved to be a veritable godsend to California, for when the great gold rush of the forties of the last century had come to an end, the miners and their followers discovered that they could hope to make quite a comfortable living by merely changing their profession and by becoming fruit farmers instead of prospectors. In Alaska and in Australia, once the veins of gold had been exhausted, there was no possible chance of feeding the multitudes, and they disappeared as fast as they had come, leaving behind them their empty towns and villages and tin cans. But California, instead of being impoverished by its golden treasures, as most gold-providing countries have been, was actually enriched by them, and the fact should be noted as unique in the history of mankind.
THE DESERT
THE ZAMBESI FALLS
WASTE: THE DESERTED MINE
When it was shown that deep down below the soil there lay vast reservoirs of oil, the future of the State was entirely assured. It is true that the entire region is a bit shaky, and that the deep incision of the Gulf of California may cause an occasional shifting of the different layers of rock which are apt to be dangerous (specially when followed by fire), but earthquakes are only temporary inconveniences, while sunshine and an agreeable and even climate are permanent blessings. California has only started upon its career as one of the most densely populated spots of the entire northern continent.
Between the Sierra Nevada and the actual range of the Rockies lies an enormous valley consisting of three parts. In the north lies the Columbia plateau which sends the Snake river and the Columbia river to the Pacific, and in the south it is bordered by the Wasatch mountains and the Colorado plateau through which the Colorado river has dug its famous canyon. Between these two plateaux lies the depression known as the Great Basin, which the Mormons chose as their permanent place of residence after they had been forced to flee from the eastern part of the United States and which, in spite of its lack of moisture (the Great Salt Lake is full of water, but it is much saltier than the ocean), they have in less than a single century been able to turn into a most profitable venture.
That this entire region is of a highly volcanic nature and that it must have been shaken about considerably is shown by the fact that from the bottom of the Death Valley, which is 276 feet below the surface of the ocean, one can see the top of that Mount Whitney which, as I have said, is the highest peak (14,496 feet) of the United States, excluding Alaska.
To the east of the Rockies lies that tremendous plain which on the north is bounded by the Arctic Ocean, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, and on the east by the Laurentian highlands of Labrador and the Appalachians of the United States. That part of the world alone could, if brought under proper cultivation, feed the entire population of our globe. The so-called Great Plains (where the Rockies gradually slope off into the flat country) and the Central Plains, through which the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Ohio and the Arkansas and the Red rivers flow to the Gulf of Mexico, are one vast granary. The northern part is less well favoured because here the rivers, the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan and the Albany river, all lose themselves either in the Arctic Ocean or in Hudson Bay and are therefore only of local importance, being frozen up for the greater part of each year. But the Missouri, which rises near the Yellowstone Park in Montana, and the Mississippi (together with the Missouri the longest river in the world), which takes its origin on the divide between Lake Winnipeg in Canada and Lake Superior, are navigable almost all the way from their sources to their deltas and pass through a region that in centuries to come will resemble eastern China in its density of population.
HOW AMERICA DAWNED UPON EUROPE
The other lakes of this slightly elevated region, which is the divide between Hudson Bay (or the Arctic Ocean), the Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico, are Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario. The latter two are connected by a short river which is unnavigable on account of a waterfall called Niagara (Niagara is wider than the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi river but only half as high, while Yosemite Creek beats them both with a sheer drop of 1430 feet over a precipice which is 2600 feet high), and they are therefore connected by a canal, the Welland canal. The Huron lake and Lake Superior are also connected by a canal, the Sault Ste Marie canal, which has more tonnage pass through its locks than the Panama canal and the Suez canal and the Kiel canal put together.
THE CARIBBEAN
IF THE CARIBBEAN SHOULD RUN DRY
The waters of these lakes then pass into the Atlantic Ocean through the St Lawrence river, emptying into St Lawrence Bay, which is a sort of inland sea situated between the Canadian mountains in the west, the island of Newfoundland in the east (it was ‘New’ when John Cabot, the Genoese seafarer, found it in 1407 and in 1500 when it got its first Portuguese governor-general) and Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the south. The name of the Cabot strait, separating Newfoundland from Cape Breton Island, bears witness to the fact that this region was first visited by an Italian.
As the northern part of Canada, the so-called North-Western Territory, is too cold to be entirely suited to the white man’s occupation, we rarely hear of it except in connexion with its picturesque local police force. It is a land of lakes, and most of if used to belong to the Hudson’s Bay Company. This company was founded in 1670, exactly fifty-nine years after Henry Hudson, the discoverer of the bay that bears his name, had been murdered there by his mutinous sailors. The “adventurers of England” who organized the company lived up to their name but without much discrimination. Had they been given another half-century they would have killed off all the livestock of the lakes and forests (even during the breeding season the slaughter of fur-bearing animals did not cease) and the Indians, most liberally supplied with the fire-water, would have exterminated themselves completely by way of the gin bottle. Wherefore Queen Victoria intervened, annexed most of the Company’s sovereign territory to her Majesty’s dominions in Canada and left the Hudson’s Bay Company behind as an historical curiosity which still (though greatly diminished in size) continues to do business in the same region (262 consecutive years under the same management—no mean record, if you please, for any business house!) but no longer on the old, irresponsible scale of former times.
The Labrador peninsula between Hudson Bay and the St Lawrence is too near the cold currents that come from Greenland’s icy shores to be of value to anybody. But the Dominion of Canada is only at the threshold of its enormous future, and to-day suffers chiefly from a very serious lack of population.
Politically Canada is one of the most interesting remains of a former dream of empire. We are apt sometimes to forget that when George Washington was born the North American continent belonged for the greater part to France and to Spain, and that the English colonies along the coast of the Atlantic were only a small Anglo-Saxon enclave surrounded entirely by hostile nations. As early as 1608 the French had established themselves at the mouth of the St Lawrence. Then they had turned their attention to the interior, first of all travelling due west until Champlain reached Lake Huron. They explored the entire region of the Great Lakes, Marquette and Joliet found the upper part of the Mississippi, and La Salle in 1682 descended the river to the sea and took possession of its entire valley, which he called Louisiana after Louis XIV. By the end of the seventeenth century the French were laying claim to all the land as for as the Rocky Mountains, beyond which the territories of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain were supposed to begin. The Alleghenies, which were a real harrier in those days, separated this enormous French colonial empire from (be English and the Dutch possessions along the Atlantic seaboard and from Florida, which was another colony of Spain.
In 1819 Florida was added to these newly acquired domains, and in 1848 Texas and New Mexico and Arizona and California and Nevada and Utah were taken away from Mexico; and less than a hundred years after it had seemed certain that the northern half of the continent was to be a hinterland of two Latin powers, it had completely changed hands and had become an extension of the great north European plain.
As for the subsequent economic development of those heterogeneous parts which the chances of war, but above all things the indifference and lack of foresight of the original owners, had so suddenly and unexpectedly thrown together, it took on such proportions as the world had never seen. As soon as the first railways had been constructed and the first steamers had been built, hundreds of thousands of immigrants followed the water routes to the Great Lakes or crossed the Alleghenies to take their share of the Great Plains and make them ready for human habitation and cultivate that wheat which was to make Chicago the most important grain centre of the world.
THE FIRST RAILWAY TRACK
When the triangle between the Great Lakes, the Alleghenies, and the foothills of the Rockies was found to contain coal and oil and iron and copper in unprecedented quantities, this region became the great factory area of the new commonwealth, with cities like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and St Louis and Cleveland and Detroit and Buffalo attracting labourers from all over the world to assist the earlier arrivals in exploiting these hidden treasures. And as these towns needed harbours from which to export their steel and iron and their oil and their motor cars, the old colonial settlements of the Atlantic seaboard, New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore, achieved positions of eminence which they had never enjoyed before.
YOSEMITE
Meanwhile the southern States, at last emerging from the dark days of the reconstruction period (infinitely more disastrous than the Civil War itself had been), were scraping together enough money to begin cultivating their cotton crops without the assistance of slave labour. Galveston and Savannah and New Orleans returned to life. The railways and telegraph lines and telephone wires turned the whole country into one enormous farm and factory. Sixty million Europeans crossed the ocean in less than half a century and joined the earlier arrivals in planning and building and making and selling, and such a workshop as they set up the world had never seen before. But neither had Nature ever given a nation such unlimited opportunities as America enjoyed—a gigantic plain with an excellent climate and an excellent soil, protected on both sides by convenient mountain-ranges and practically uninhabited—almost inexhaustible resources—handy waterways to which history had added an almost more important gift, one nation and one language and no past.
THE MISSISSIPI
What these advantages really mean to a nation we realize as soon as we go a little further down south and reach Mexico and Central America. Mexico, with the exception of the peninsula of Yucatan, where the ancient Mayans lived, is a mountainous region which slowly increases in height from the Rio Grande towards the south until in the Plateau of Sierra Madre and that of Anáhuac it reaches peaks of sixteen and seventeen thousand feet. Most of these higher mountains like Popocatepetl (17,881 feet) and Orizaba (18,206) and Ixtaccihuatl (16,960) are of volcanic origin, but Colima (13,092) is the only active volcano as I write.
On the Pacific side the Sierra Madre rises sharply from the coast; but on the Atlantic side the mountains slope down more gradually, and since the European invaders came from the east it was easy enough for them to find their way to the interior. The advance guard arrived during the first years of the sixteenth century. That was the time of Spain’s great disappointment, because the new discoveries of that damnable Genoese had proved to be a flop, a howling failure, no gold, no silver, naked savages who lay down and died when you tried to make them work, and endless mosquitoes.
Then rumour began to spread that beyond the mountains of the adjacent mainland there lived an emperor of a people called the Aztecs, who dwelt in golden castles and slept in golden beds and ate from golden plates. Ferdinand Cortez and his three hundred adventurers landed in Mexico in 1519. With the help of one dozen cannon and thirteen blunderbusses he conquered the whole realm of poor Montezuma, who was strangled to death ere he could witness the complete annihilation of what only a short time before had been a nation not much less efficiently administered than the realm of the Habsburg monarch in whose name he was murdered.
After that and for almost 300 years, until 1810 to be exact, Mexico remained a Spanish colony and was treated as such. Several of her native products were no longer allowed to be cultivated for fear that they might compete with the less acceptable products of the mother country. And most of the wealth which the soil produced disappeared into the pockets of a few rich landowners, or was set apart for the use of those religious establishments which even to-day are fighting to retain their hold upon the common lands.
Then, during the middle of last century, shortly after the grotesque adventure of poor Austrian Maximilian, who had hoped to become Montezuma’s successor with the help of the French, it was discovered that Mexico was not only a very rich agricultural country but that her soil contained as much or perhaps more iron and oil deposits than the United States. Thereupon the 15,000,000 Mexicans, of whom nearly 40% were still of pure Indian stock, were almost as badly off as they had been when Cortez first visited them. For now the big banking interests took a hand in their internal affairs and arranged for revolutions, which were then answered by counter-revolutions on the part of the natives, until the record of a hundred years (it averages twenty revolutions per year) was broken just before the Great War, and it seemed that the whole country would dissolve into murder and bloodshed. Fortunately during the Great War, when the big financial interests were otherwise occupied (that war cost a great deal of money), Mexico had a breathing space, and to-day a few strong men are trying to undo the harm of three centuries of neglect and sickness and ignorance, and apparently with success, for Vera Cruz and Tampico (the two harbours on the Gulf) are reporting larger and larger export figures. For half a dozen years Washington and Mexico City have not merely been on speaking terms, but have actually spoken to each other almost politely, and with a smile.
THE SOIL OF THE PLAINS
The isthmus of central America which connects the two continents is exceedingly fertile, produces coffee, bananas, sugar, and whatever else foreign capital is willing to plant there; but the climate is hard on the white man, and the black man is not particularly interested in working for the white man, and the volcanoes, which abound in this region, are hard on both the blacks and the whites.
To most people Guatemala (unless they collect postage stamps), Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica are merely romantic names, for this one rule holds good all over the world: “the emptier the country’s national treasury, the more elaborate its stamps.” But the next country, the Republic of Panama, is of great importance, especially to the United States.
That this isthmus was only a very narrow strip of land had already been known to the Spaniards after Balboa from his peak in Darien had contemplated both oceans at one and the
same moment. And as early as 1551 the Spaniards were playing with the idea of digging a canal of their own. Since then every generation was to hear of new plans. Every man of any importance in the realm of science favoured the world with at least one set of blue-prints showing how the puzzle could be best solved. But digging a canal through almost thirty miles of hard rock was a serious problem until Alfred Nobel made his unfortunate invention and gave us that dynamite with which he expected to remove tree-stumps and boulders from a farmer’s field but which he never intended to be used for the more common purpose of killing one’s neighbours.
Then came the California gold rush when thousands of people hastened to Panama so as not to be obliged to make the long detour via Cape Horn; and for them the trans-isthmus railway was built in 1855. Fifteen years later the world heard of the unexpected success of the Suez canal. Ferdinand de Lesseps, its author, now decided to try his hand at connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic. But the company he founded was scandalously mismanaged, and his engineers had made so many errors in their calculations, and his workmen died so miserably from malaria and yellow fever, that after eight years of struggle against the forces of Nature and the less direct but even more disastrous forces of the Paris Exchange, the French company went most disreputably out of existence.
THE INTERIOR OF A VOLCANO AFTER THE OUTER CRUST HAS ERODED AWAY REMAINS BEHIND AS A SOLID MOUNTAIN
Then nothing was done for almost a dozen years, and palm trees grew out of the smokestacks of the locomotives left behind by de Lesseps, until finally in 1902 the United States Government bought the rights of the bankrupt French concern. Thereupon Washington and the Republic of Colombia began to haggle about the price that America would eventually have to pay for a strip of land wide enough for her canal. Until Theodore Roosevelt, tired of the delay, arranged for a private little rebellion of his own in that somewhat out-of-the-way part of the world, recognized the new and independent Republic of Panama in less than twenty-four hours, and began to dig. That happened in 1903, and in 1914 the job was finished.
The Home of Mankind Page 40