1889 HISTORY OF LINCOLN, NEBRASKA

     (9) A city is builded upon a great water way, where the commerce of half a hundred states may float to its wharves near the waters of a rapid stream that frets its banks with the impatient power which might turn the busy wheels of a hundred mills; where the generous earth needs but to be asked, to give up for man's uses unlimited stores of baser metals and the fuel with which they may be converted into things of utility and beauty; at the foot of mountains filled with gold and silver that attract thousands of fortune seekers, wild with dream of sudden wealth, and yield to Fortune's favored few the incomes of princes and kings.

     Another city is builded where no vessels float, no water power roars and foams, no coal nor iron nor gold nor silver rewards the delver in the earth; where nature offers no bonus to the favored few, nor cheats the many with the baseless fabric of dreams never to be fulfilled, but with even-handed justice holds out to all the promise of an adequate return for labor faithfully performed.

     Capital flows to the first city to take the bonus held out by nature's hand. and builds with the accumulations of other times and other field, in the hope of an ultimate return. Men to whose imaginations the extraordinary advantages of the place appeal, flock to it in the hope that there they may obtain the reward of labor without the unpleasant necessity of its exercise. It is built from without. Its future is mortgaged to the capitalist -- it has borrowed his money instead of making it. Its continuing present is menaced by its poorer citizens, who leave come to find wealth, not to produce it. But its (10) growth is rapid, for it holds out the gambler's hope of enormous gains, and appeals to the imagination of the restless emigrant.

     The second city attracts little capital from the outside; it has no extraordinary inducements to appeal to capital. The eyes of the country are not turned upon it; it has nothing within it to excite the imagination of the emigrant or fortune hunter. The capital within it is that only which it has itself produced. The residents are only those who have come because of the employment which they have been enabled to find in the ordinary avenues of life.

     If these two cities grow side by side, and the second shows the same percentage of growth as the first, which is the more remarkable? the one which has displayed lavish natural advantages to attract capital and excite the imagination of the world, or the one which could only hold out as an incentive the hope of moderate returns for energy and industry?

     If these two cities grow at an even pace, which has the more substantial prosperity and the more solid basis for future growth? the one which has been built up from the outside, which has attracted population by vague and extraordinary promises; or the one which has grown out of its own resources, and whose people have come to it because they saw work awaiting them which they were willing to do?

     An extraordinary effect ceases to be extraordinary when it is found to follow an extraordinary cause. An extraordinary effect for which no extraordinary cause can be discovered, becomes a phenomenon.

     The growth of Lincoln has been more remarkable than that of any other city in the West. It has no fuel, no mines, no water power, no remarkable natural advantages; and yet, on the spot where twenty-one years ago the emigrant, in his lonely covered wagon, scared the timid antelope from its grassy couch, and scanned the horizon with anxious eye to see if he might discover the form of some Indian brave cutting its even line, fifty thousand busy people throng the streets of a great city; a city which reaches 200,000 square miles of territory, and 2,000,000 people, by ten radiating lines of' railroad which do a business of nearly a million tons per year, and give employment to 1,350 men; a city which is traversed by thirty-five miles of street railway, and has seven miles of paving, with as much more provided for; twenty miles of sewerage, twenty miles of water mains; a hundred jobbing houses and many factories; four great State (11) institutions, besides the Capitol; three universities; a million dollars invested in church property; and hundreds of the finest residences in the State.

     The growth of Lincoln has not excited widespread interest over the country because there has been nothing sensational connected with it; and yet there is no visitor to the city who does not express the amazement which he feels when he learns its size and importance. Indeed, half the residents of Lincoln are themselves amazed when they drive about the city and see the growth and improvements which have been going on while they slept. The reason of this is that the growth has been due not to extraordinary causes, but to the steady though rapid development of the country of which Lincoln has become the most convenient point to supply. An agricultural region is the richest in the world; but its development is steady and commonplace. Lincoln is the railroad center of as magnificent an agricultural empire as exists in the world; and the whole secret of her great and rapid growth lies in this fact. This growth has been so quiet as hardly to excite comment; but it is as substantial, and certain of continuance, as is that natural and irresistible development in which its roots are driven deep.

     The explanation of the growth to greatness, of a city which could boast of no water power, mines, fuel, nor other so-called "natural advantages," lies in the fact that it is commerce, and not manufactures, that builds great cities. Natural advantages may afford the foundation for a limited number of factories; cheap coal may give birth to a few industries in the operation of which fuel is the most expensive item; abundant raw material may attract a few of the factories which use the material; and these factories may support a hundred or a thousand families; if they support five thousand families the limit of population may be little beyond this number. Some of the largest manufacturing institutions in the United States are in small towns. They present no attractions to anybody except to a man who wants to buy a bill of goods and get away, or to the sight seer whose curiosity is of a limited and special character. But commerce knows no natural limitations. Given the means of reaching a great and populous territory, and a commercial city lays under tribute the factories of the world, and turns to its own profit the special advantages that have given rise to a thousand manufacturing towns. It becomes the center to which tradesmen of every kind collect to purchase their wares; to (12) which the members of all professions gather to procure those things which they use in the practice of their vocations; to which the sight seer and the politician gravitate to see the most of things or persons in the shortest time. In the commercial center supply and demand meet in every avenue of life, -- mercantile, professional, physical, intellectual, aesthetic, moral. The diversity of interests in such a city becomes its greatest power of attraction; every source of supply seeks there a demand; every demand seeks there a source of supply. There are no waterways west of the Mississippi river which are of service to commerce, and it is at the great railway center, wherever that may by man lie placed, that she sets her throne.

     It is by virtue of being such a railway center that Lincoln has grown so marvelously; grown in spite of the lack of "natural advantages;"  grown in the face of the repeated predictions of her own citizens that no further growth could be looked for. And that growth will continue until the development of the country which her railroads make tributary to her shall cease. The railroad system of most importance to Lincoln is the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad, which has nearly 2,500 miles of track in the State, and almost as much as all the other roads. There is no city in the country so preeminently the center of any railroad as Lincoln is of the B. & M. The road has six lines radiating from Lincoln to every part of the State. It handles all its transferring and reshipping here, as it has no yardage at any other place in the State. Here it has forty-two miles of side track, on which 800 men handle from 1,000 to 2,000 cars a day. Over these radiating roads there run out from Lincoln every week-day thirteen passenger trains and from fifty to seventy-five freight trains. The system girds the entire southern half of the State, and reaches out into northwestern Nebraska by three parallel lines which will occupy three-fourths of the northern half of the State and extend into the mining regions of Wyoming and Idaho, and the cattle ranches of Dakota and Montana. Every pound of merchandise that passes into all this vast territory from eastern points of supply, and every pound of grain, and every hog and steer that goes out of the State over the B. & M. system, passes through Lincoln.

      Besides this system, the Elkhorn operates over 960 miles of road in the State, giving Lincoln connection with all the northwestern part of the State to the line; the Union Pacific operates over 875 miles of (13) track, giving Lincoln connection with the Pacific coast and with the southern systems in Kansas; the Missouri Pacific has 400 miles of track in the State, and gives Lincoln a short line to Kansas City, St. Louis, and the Atlantic seaboard, and places the city in direct communication with the southern markets.

     In an elaborate review of Lincoln's railroad situation, published March 12, 1888, in a special edition of the State Democrat, prepared by one of the authors of this history, it was shown that the population reached directly by Lincoln's railroads was 989,591. This was an accurate estimate, made up from the censuses and votes of the counties reached by the roads in Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado, and did not include any of that vast territory in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming, which is reached by lines connecting with Lincoln's roads, and in which Lincoln jobbers are doing a large and rapidly increasing business.

     There is a philosophy of history; and this brief discussion of the territory tributary to Lincoln, and the city's facilities for reaching it, has been given in recognition of the fact that it is a part of the historian's duty to explain the causes of events, as well as to chronicle events themselves. The value of such historical study is in enabling the student to make the past foreshadow the future; and the following summary of the possibilities of Lincoln's growth, taken from the article referred to above, is deduced from the study made therein:

     "But it may be asked what grounds there are on which to expect that the country tributary to Lincoln will increase so steadily and rapidly in population as to build up a great commercial center here. The reply is that nearly all this territory is the very best kind of agricultural land, and that such land is too valuable to be idle. This, we take pains to say again, is not mere assertion. The settlement of the western counties of Nebraska has been and is marvelous. A few examples are given below, with authentic figures showing the population in 1880, in 1885, and in 1887, together with the population that the same territory would have at thirty-five per square mile; (14)

     "These figures are accurate, although one who is unacquainted with the development of the great West might well imagine that they were the creation of some statistical romancer. Here is a region, nearly all of which was so sparsely settled as to be unorganized in 1880, now supporting a population of 87,591; an empire which would easily support 800,000 people. The estimate of thirty-five per square mile is not an extravagant one. Kentucky has forty people per square mile; Indiana and Illinois have each fifty-four; Ohio has seventy-seven; New York has 103; Connecticut has 124; and Rhode Island has 243. If Cheyenne county had as many people per square mile as Rhode Island, her population would he 1,918,620.

     "Is it any wonder that Nebraska villages have grown into cities in a few years? Is there any reason to doubt that this growth is but the substantial and inevitable result of the development of the State? Is there any reason to doubt that Lincoln will become a great city when the 1,000,000 people now directly tributary may be swelled to 5,000,000 without making the population more dense than that now supported by Indiana and Illinois?

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