NEXT WEEK IS THE 175TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF JAMES JEROME HILL, the great Nineteenth-Century entrepreneur and exemplar of laissez faire capitalism. Surely, this was the model that inspired, for Ayn Rand, the character of Nat Taggart. I believe it was in her lecture, "Notes on The History of American Free Enterprise," later printed by NBI as a little white brochure, and, of course, included years later in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, that Ayn Rand discussed the great Nineteenth Century railroad builders as a tragic example of coercive monopolies, with the sole and magnificent exception of the founder of the Great Northern, J.J. Hill, who refused government subsidies, building his great railroad to open the American Northwest, town by town, farm by farm, and built the only railroad that survived the terrible stock market crash of 1891. To me, this always seemed unimaginably heroic. Who needed Greeks fighting Trojans (just kidding). And so, I wrote what is, as far as I know, the first epic poem about the great era of railroad building that focuses on all the issues raised by Hill's magnificent career. The "I" in the poem is the voice of a J.J. Hill... This poem was published later in "The New Individualist" of the Atlas Society and then in my first book of poetry, "Touched By Its Rays." Readers of Atlas Shrugged will recognize in the title one of the great themes from Galt's speech.
Empire of Earth
I drop this sweet, black soil, but it clings
In creases of my hand, upraised against
The glaring, shoreless seas of prairie grass,
Where two bright blades of steel thrust to the west.
A half a continent--a decade, too--
Will take you back to where America ends,
And I began. Its where the wagon trains
Are like white threads of civilization
Unraveled westward by an unseen hand.
Where horse and mule and man took up their loads
For the lurching first steps west, I stood
And saw two lines converging at the sky.
What call it but a dream, or idler's boast?
I dreamed the streaming thousands gathered there
Were crossing desert, plain, and mountain range
As though from Albany to Buffalo--
As only slave-borne emperors once rode!
I would have done this, I, and writ my name
Upon the face of Earth in lines of steel
For who can say how many generations?
To hurl the locomotives like black steeds
Across that bounteous, unforgiving land--
For that, what price would be to high to pay?
By some good grace it isn't ours to know
The price the future sets upon our dreams.
I kneel and squeeze this rich, black prairie loam
Where tracks now split the seamless grasses
A thousand miles beyond Red River bridge,
Where a brash stranger rashly saw this day.
For tell me what he was that I am now?
A hand half stubs, half fingers? A face
The hue of cedar left turned to weather?
A beard as bleached as chalk-white trailside bones?
The doctors say that only dead men know
Such wounds as scar my chest, but I am here
To tell of how we dropped our tools and packs,
And bread half-eaten, when war cries slit the air.
Out of my little shard of looking glass
Stare blue eyes as stormed as mountain winter.
But the dream! Not a dream! No more a dream!
For now I see this thing upon Earth's face!
Three nights ago, I tarried in a town
New-built beside the track, like hundreds more,
Each with its grip upon this line of steel
Like climbers on a parlous mountain side.
Here were a dozen earthen prairie homes,
a trading shack still open to the air,
a blacksmith at his bench beneath the sky:
All plans, and talk, and work, and boasts, and hopes.
That night we feasted, danced, and drank the hale
Of the tiny town. And the eyes of girls
And the grins of lads are ever the same
Where the work is hard and the hope is high.
And suddenly voices and friendly hands
Were pushing me into the firelight, with cheers
And claps as though this were some jubilee.
I turned and saw those faces framed in light
As from a vision shimmering on air
Above the dark prairie. For they beheld
A dream as bright as rose for me one day.
No words escaped the fist that held my heart.
At dawn, the engine's steady, patient gasps
Raised swirling skirts of cloud about its knees;
The whistle loosed its iron moan to hills
That rolled it round the wakening plains.
And every man, and woman, some with babes,
Looked up to where I stood, and at their backs
The rising sun swept to the unknown West.
For them, the sun will always rise from home,
From yesterday, from east. But as for me:
I want no part of it, no corridors
Where tracks are laid on paper and war cries
Ring in halls of Congress, where land is staked
In gullies and washes of table linen,
And each day dawns upon more printed shares.
I do not lay my steel on ground the gift
Of public men who at a stroke dispose
A million acres they never saw or trod.
The day that men who live upon this land
Decline my clasp to seal my right to pass
That day forever will be end-of-steel.
When younger once I rode from off the plains
To take my tale to money men of myth
In the hushed cathedrals of Chicago's
Mighty banks and counting houses.
I stood and felt their frowning study,
Their glances at my beard, and clothes, and hands.
I might have been some missionary priest,
All scarred and bronzed by years in jungle climes,
Returned to witness he had done God's work.
Bishops in silken robes, amidst the gold,
The incense, and the priceless tapestries,
But half attend with arch, incurious smiles.
I wove in words and spelled upon the air
What I myself had seen: the prairie loam
The deepest plow but barely slits like skin,
The timber stands that lie like waiting nations
From the western mountain face to Puget Sound.
Pacific passage, yes! And let them stare
And sigh and shrug and patiently instruct
How virgin land unfolds a thousand miles
Where town and farm and mine are all unknown.
They deigned to tell what lies where I have trod
Three long months in lands where old maps fib
And snowshoes skim the seas of drifting white
In mountain passes that the old wolf shuns.
Go east, they said, go east, and lay your line
Along the ledges and plateaus that rise
At easy grade to the halls of Congress.
Your right of way will sweep such fields
And orchards, timber slopes and ranch lands,
As never blessed a swaying train of freight.
And there I would hold forth to bankers
Beholden to no savers, risking gold
They did not earn or own or reckon dear.
It's these, they said, who wager with a toss
On pushing tracks across the empty plains,
Through notches cut like letters on the sky,
And down to forests distant as the moon.
But I rode west and never east again.
I press my track into the yielding earth,
Beneath the weight of trains of immigrants,
Until new towns push up on either side.
And harder then I press as trains roll west
With seed, and crops arise as after rains.
I do not rush unfurling measured miles
To harvest crops of subsidies and grants,
And so they murmur in Chicago: “Folly”!
For advocates I have the tolling bells
That ring the passing trains from church to church.
Tonight, we make our camp at end-of-steel
Where high plains surge against the mountains,
Break and retreat; but we push on at dawn.
Surveyors first, on trail I broke and blazed
Long since; and then cutters, blasters, bedders,
All squalling Irish, Dutch, and Chinaman;
Then masons and engineers to brace the cuts
And cross the gorges with graceful trestles.
On every trail are straining mules and men
Until the blessed line like Atlas comes.
Will I ride someday to the ocean shore,
On trains that roar like Odin from the forest
Laden with lumber for Cathay, with wheat
From plains so fertile that hungry millions
May yet be fed, and with that handiwork
Unguessed that is the genius of free men?
Like friends these visions swarm about the fires
I keep in lonely camps too cold for sleep.
But I pretend no easy prophecy.
We live in sky, but walk upon the land;
And I will spike my dreams into the Earth.
--Walter Donway