CHAPTER IV

THE STORY OF THE WEST

Under the caption of The West, we arbitrarily are grouping all of the states lying west of a line running north and south from the western borders of the Dakotas to the eastern edge of New Mexico. This excludes part of that great region long known in America as the Great West,—a country that is no more, and never again can be on the face of this earth, unless war and pestilence one day shall quite remove our present human population. What we retain as the West for A. P. L. classification purposes still has some distinct characteristics. It still is largely unknown land to Eastern citizens, still holds the flavor of a romantic past, as well as that of a great and unknown future.

The region thus set off comprises more than a third of the acreage of the United States. It is the most thinly settled portion of the United States and, made up as it is in large part of arid lands or mountainous regions, no doubt on the average it always will remain so. Yet here lie the richest remaining forests of America, and no one may know how much of additional mineral wealth. Here also, our country halts at the shore of the Pacific and looks westward at the future. In the march of King Charles, his knights paused at Rockfish Gap, and those merry gentlemen carelessly claimed possession of all those unknown lands that lay to the westward, "as far as the South Sea." Well, we have made the crossing of the continent. We are at the South Sea now.

Who and what are we, however, who stand at the edge of the Pacific and look westward? Are we Americans? Who could call us such? We are not the same Homeric breed now that we were when the first rails went west. Taking our arbitrary section herein, west of the Dakotas, and studying the statistical census map of the United States made in 1914—the first year of the war—we find that