CHAPTER I
OUR FIRST NATIONAL ROAD
The middle ages had their wars and agonies, but also their intense delights. Their gold was dashed with blood, but ours is sprinkled with dust. Their life was intermingled with white and purple; ours is one seamless stuff of brown.—Ruskin.
A PERSON cannot live in the American Central West and be acquainted with the generation which greets the new century with feeble hand and dimmed eye, without realizing that there has been a time which, compared with today, seems as the Middle Ages did to the England for which Ruskin wrote—when "life was intermingled with white and purple."
This western boy, born to a feeble republic-mother, with exceeding suffering in those days which "tried men's souls," grew up as all boys grow up. For a long and doubtful period the young West grew slowly and changed appearance gradually. Then, suddenly, it started from its slum-
