Identifier: industrialhistor00boll (find matches)
Title: Industrial history of the United States, from the earliest settlements to the present time: being a complete survey of American industries, embracing agriculture and horticulture; including the cultivation of cotton, tobacco, wheat; the raising of horses, neat-cattle, etc.; all the important manufactures, shipping and fisheries, railroads, mines and mining, and oil; also a history of the coal-miners and the Molly Maguires; banks, insurance, and commerce; trade-unions, strikes, and eight-hour movement; together with a description of Canadian industries
Year: 1878 (1870s)
Authors: Bolles, Albert Sidney, 1846-1939
Subjects: Industries Industries
Publisher: Norwich, Conn. : The Henry Bill pub. Company
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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are built to satisfy existing requirements for increased meansof communication; they are built to meet the wants of thickly-settled dis-tricts : in this country this is but one, and a minor one, of their offices.Their characteristic office here is to create such districts in places where none 620 INDUSTRIAL HISTORY exist. They are causes with us, not effects. The brightest dream of theAmerican patriot, irrespective of political creed, is to open up someportion of the wilderness of which the great area of his country is composed;and to do this he looks, and rightly, to the railroad as his principal aid. Itmust be confessed that the poetry of the railroad as the willing coadjutor ofhuman aspiration belongs to America, in common with all new countries,rather than to Europe, where it is merely an inevitable sequence of an actual,achieved status. The period of fifty years following the war of 1812 was one of restlessactivity and Titanic strides. The American mind was displaying a fertility
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LOCOMOTIVE OF 1828. and resource which had no parallel in the history of the world. InventionHaif-century succeeded invention with astonishing rapidity; and scarce wassucceeding the public mind aglow with some great idea for the comfort andwar of 1812. convenience of the human race, and government and people atwork to carry it into effect, when the drum-beat of a new thought would beheard, and a new regime be initiated, which should work wonders in thecivilization and happiness of the people and the development of the wealth ofthe nation. In no field was progress more rapid than in that of internaltransportation. Hardly had plans for building military wagon-roads to everypart of our extended domain been perfected — so that the trains of huge,canvas-topped, broad-tired wagons in use in early days, with their teams of OF THE UNITED STATES. 621 four or six big horses and orchestra of bells, might be made thoroughly*useful to the people — than steam was invented for the navigation of

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