The Story of Our Country Part 1

The Story of Our Country.

Edited by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut.

A TALK WITH THE YOUNG READER ABOUT THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY

IF any of the readers of this book should have the chance to take a railroad ride over the vast region of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, they would see a wonderful display of cities and towns, of factories and farms, and a great mult.i.tude of men and women actively at work. They would behold, spread out on every side, one of the busiest and happiest lands the sun shines upon. Here and there, amid the miles on miles of farms, they might see a forest, here and there a wild beast, here and there a red-faced Indian, one of the old people of the land; but these would be almost lost in the rich and prosperous scene.

If our young traveler knew nothing of history he might fancy that it had been always this way, or that it had taken thousands of years for all those cities to be built and these great fields to be cleared and cultivated. Yet if he had been here only three hundred years ago he would have seen a very different sight. He could not then have gone over the country by railroad, for such a thing had never been thought of. He could not have gone by highroad, for there was not a road of any kind in the whole length and breadth of the land. Nowhere in this vast country would he have seen a city or town; nowhere a ploughed field, a farmhouse, or a barn; nowhere a horse, cow, or sheep; nowhere a man with a white or a black face. Instead of great cities he would have seen only cl.u.s.ters of rude huts; instead of fertile farms, only vast reaches of forest; instead of tame cattle, only wild and dangerous beasts; instead of white and black men, only red-skinned savages.

Just think of it! All that we see around us is the work of less than three hundred years! No doubt many of you have read in fairy tales of wonderful things done by the Genii of the East, of palaces built in a night, of cities moved miles away from their sites. But here is a thing as wonderful and at the same time true, a marvel wrought by men instead of magical beings. These great forests have fallen, these great fields have been cleared and planted, these great cities have risen, these myriads of white men have taken the place of the red men of the wild woods, and all within a period not longer than three times the life of the oldest men now living. Is not this as wonderful as the most marvelous fairy tale? And is it not better to read the true tale of how this was done than stories of the work of fairies and magicians? Let us forget the Genii of the East; men are the Genii of the West, and the magic of their work is as great as that we read of in the fables of the "Arabian Nights."

The story of this great work is called the "History of the United States." This story you have before you in the book you now hold. You do not need to sit and dream how the wonderful work of building our n.o.ble nation was done, for you can read it all here in language simple enough for the youngest of you to understand. Here you are told how white men came over the seas and found beyond the waves a land none of them had ever seen before. You are told how they settled on these sh.o.r.es, cut down the trees and built villages and towns, fought with the red men and drove them back, and made themselves homes in the midst of fertile fields. You are told how others came, how they spread wider and wider over the land, how log houses grew into mansions, and villages into cities, and how at length they fought for and gained their liberty.

Read on and you will learn of more wonderful things still. The history of the past hundred years is a story of magic for our land. In it you will learn of how the steamboat was first made and in time came to be seen on all our rivers and lakes; of how the locomotive was invented and railroads were built, until they are now long enough in our country to go eight times round the earth; of the marvels of the telegraph and telephone--the talking wire; of the machines that rumble and roar in a thousand factories and work away like living things, and of a mult.i.tude of marvels which I cannot begin to speak of here.

And you will learn how men kept on coming, and wars were fought, and new land was gained, and bridges were built, and ca.n.a.ls were dug, and our people increased and spread until we came to be one of the greatest nations on the earth, and our cities grew until one of them was the largest in the world except the vast city of London. All this and more you may learn from the pages of this book. It is written for the boys and girls of our land, but many of their fathers and mothers may find it pleasant and useful to read.

There are hundreds who do not have time to read large histories, which try to tell all that has taken place. For those this little history will be of great service, in showing them how, from a few half-starved settlers on a wild coast, this great nation has grown up. How men and women have come to it over the seas as to a new Promised Land. How they have ploughed its fields, and gathered its harvests, and mined its iron and gold, and built thousands of workshops, and fed the nations with the food they did not need for themselves. Year by year it has grown in wealth, until now it is the richest country in the world. Great it is, and greater it will be. But I need say no more. The book has its own story to tell. I only lay this beginning before you as a handy stepping-stone into the history itself. By its aid you may cross the brook and wander on through the broad land which lies before you.

THE STORY OF OUR COUNTRY

CHAPTER I

COLUMBUS, THE GREAT SAILOR

IF any of my young readers live in Chicago they will remember a wonderful display in that city in 1893. Dozens of great white buildings rose on the sh.o.r.e of the lake, as beautiful as fairy palaces, and filled with the finest of goods of all kinds, which millions of people came to see.

Do you know what this meant? It was what is called a World's Fair, and was in honor of a wonderful event that took place four hundred years before.

Some of you may think that white men have always lived in this country.

I hope you do not all think so, for this is not the case. A little more than four hundred years ago no white man had ever seen this country, and none knew that there was such a country on the face of the earth.

It was in the year 1492, that a daring sailor, named Christopher Columbus, crossed a wide ocean and came to this new and wonderful land.

Since then men have come here by the millions, and the mighty nation of the United States has grown up with its hundreds of towns and cities.

In one of these, which bears the name of Chicago, the grand Columbian World's Fair was held, in honor of the finding of America by the great navigator four hundred years before.

This is what I have set out to tell you about. I am sure you will all be glad to know how this broad and n.o.ble land, once the home of the wild red men, was found and made a home for the white people of Europe.

Some of you may have been told that America was really discovered more than four hundred years before Columbus was born. So it was. At that time some of the bold sailors of the northern countries of Europe, who made the stormy ocean their home, and loved the roll of the waves, had come to the frozen island of Iceland. And a ship from Iceland had been driven by the winds to a land in the far west which no man had ever seen before. Was this not America?

Soon after, in the year 1000, one of these Northmen, named Leif Ericson, also known as Leif the Lucky, set sail for this new land. There he found wild grapes growing, and from them he named it Vinland. This in our language would be called Wineland.

After him came others, and there was fighting with the red men, whom they called Skrellings. In the end the Northmen left the country, and before many years all was forgotten about it. Only lately the story has been found again in some old writings. And so time went on for nearly five hundred years more, and nothing was known in Europe about the land beyond the seas.

Now let us go from the north to the south of Europe. Here there is a kingdom called Italy, which runs down into the Mediterranean Sea almost in the shape of a boot. On the western sh.o.r.e of this kingdom is a famous old city named Genoa, in which many daring sailors have dwelt; and here, long ago, lived a man named Columbus, a poor man, who made his living by carding wool.

This poor wool-carder had four children, one of whom (born about 1436) he named Christopher. Almost everybody who has been at school in the world knows the name of this little Italian boy, for he became one of the most famous of men.

Many a boy in our times has to help his father in his shop. The great Benjamin Franklin began work by pouring melted tallow into moulds to make candles. In the same way little Columbus had to comb wool for his father, and very likely he got as tired of wool as Franklin did of candles.

The city he lived in was full of sailors, and no doubt he talked to many of them about life on the wild waters, and heard so many stories of danger and adventure that he took the fancy to go to sea himself.

At any rate we are told that he became a sailor when only fourteen years old, and made long and daring voyages while he was still young.

Some of those were in Portuguese ships down the coast of Africa, of which continent very little was known at that time. He went north, too; some think as far as Iceland. Who knows but that he was told there of what the Northmen had done?

Columbus spent some time in the island of Madeira, far out in the Atlantic ocean, and there the people told him of strange things they had seen. These had come over the seas before the west winds and floated on their island sh.o.r.es. Among them were pieces of carved wood, and canes so long that they would hold four quarts of wine between their joints. And the dead bodies of two men had also come ash.o.r.e, whose skins were the color of bronze or copper.

These stories set Columbus thinking. He was now a man, and had read many books of travel, and had studied all that was then known of geography.

For a time he lived by making maps and charts for ship captains. This was in the city of Lisbon, in Portugal, where he married and settled down and had little boys of his own.

At that time some of the most learned people had odd notions about the earth. You may have seen globes as round as an orange, with the countries laid out on them. But the people then had never seen such a globe, and the most of them thought that the earth was as flat as a table, and that any one who sailed too far over the ocean would come to the edge of the earth and fall off.

This seems very absurd, does it not? But you must remember that people then knew very little about the earth they lived on, and could not understand how people could keep on a round globe like flies on a ball of gla.s.s.

But there were some who thought the earth to be round, and Columbus was one of these.

At that time silk and spices and other rich goods were brought from China and India, thousands of miles to the east, by caravans that traveled overland. Columbus thought that by sailing west, over the broad Atlantic, he would come to these far countries, just as a fly may walk around the surface of an orange, and come to the place it started from.

The more Columbus thought about this, the more certain he became that he was right. He was so sure of it that he set out to try and make other people think the same way. He wanted ships with which to sail across the unknown seas to the west, but he had no money of his own to buy them with.

Ah! what a task poor Columbus now had. For years and years he wandered about among the kings and princes of Europe, but no one would believe his story, and many laughed at him and mocked him.

First he tried Genoa, the city where he was born, but the people there told him he was a fool or had lost his senses.

Then he went to the king of Portugal. This king was a rascal, and tried to cheat him. He got his plans from him, and sent out a vessel in secret, hoping to get the honor of the discovery for himself. But the captain he sent was a coward and was scared by the rolling waves. He soon came back, and told the king that there was nothing to be found but water and storm. King John, of Portugal, was very sorry afterward that he had tried to rob Columbus of his honor.

Columbus was very angry when he heard what the king had done. He left Portugal for Spain, and tried to get the king and queen of that country to let him have ships and sailors. But they were at war with a people called the Moors, and had no money to spare for anything but fighting and killing.

Columbus stayed there for seven long years. He talked to the wise men, but they made sport of him. "If the earth is round," they said, "and you sail west, your ships will go down hill, and they will have to sail up hill to come back. No ship that was ever made can do that. And you may come to places where the waters boil with the great heat of the sun; and frightful monsters may rise out of the sea and swallow your ships and your men." Even the boys in the street got to laughing at him and mocking him as a man who had lost his wits.

After these many years Columbus got tired of trying in Spain. He now set out for France, to see what the king of that country would do. He sent one of his brothers to England to see its king and ask him for aid.

He was now so poor that he had to travel along the dusty roads on foot, his little son going with him. One day he stopped at a convent called La Rabida, to beg some bread for his son, who was very hungry.

The good monks gave bread to the boy, and while he was eating it the prior of the convent came out and talked with Columbus, asking him his business. Columbus told him his story. He told it so well that the prior believed in it. He asked him to stay there with his son, and said he would write to Isabella, the queen of Spain, whom he knew very well.

So Columbus stayed, and the prior wrote a letter to the queen, and in the end the wandering sailor was sent for to come back to the king's court.

Queen Isabella deserves much of the honor of the discovery of America.