He was a giant trader in a country without commerce, a ripened product
of the nineteenth century flourishing in a society as primitive as that
of the Mediterranean vandals. A captain of industry and a splendid
monopolist, he dominated the most independent aggregate of men ever
drawn together from the ends of the earth. An economic missionary, a
commercial St. Paul, he preached the doctrines of expediency and force.
Believing in the natural rights of man, a child himself of democracy,
he bent all men to his absolutism. Government of Jacob Welse, for
Jacob Welse and the people, by Jacob Welse, was his unwritten gospel.
Single-handed he had carved out his dominion till he gripped the domain
of a dozen Roman provinces. At his ukase the population ebbed and
flowed over a hundred thousand miles of territory, and cities sprang up
or disappeared at his bidding.
Yet he was a common man. The air of the world first smote his lungs on
the open prairie by the River Platte, the blue sky over head, and
beneath, the green grass of the earth pressing against his tender
nakedness. On the horses his eyes first opened, still saddled and
gazing in mild wonder on the miracle; for his trapper father had but
turned aside from the trail that the wife might have quiet and the
birth be accomplished. An hour or so and the two, which were now
three, were in the saddle and overhauling their trapper comrades.
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