Chapter II. The Range
Chapter III. The Cattle Trails
Chapter IV. The Cowboy
Chapter V. The Mines
Chapter VI. The Pathways Of The West
Chapter VII. The Indian Wars
Chapter VIII. The Cattle Kings
Chapter IX. The Homesteader
THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER
Chapter I. The Frontier In History
The frontier! There is no word in the English language more stirring,
more intimate, or more beloved. It has in it all the elan of the old
French phrase, _En avant!_ It carries all of the old Saxon command,
Forward!! It means all that America ever meant. It means the old hope of
a real personal liberty, and yet a real human advance in character and
achievement. To a genuine American it is the dearest word in all the
world.
What is, or was, the frontier? Where was it? Under what stars did it
lie? Because, as the vague Iliads of ancient heroes or the nebulous
records of the savage gentlemen of the Middle Ages make small specific
impingement on our consciousness today, so also even now begin the tales
of our own old frontier to assume a haziness, an unreality, which makes
them seem less history than folklore. Now the truth is that the American
frontier of history has many a local habitation and many a name. And
this is why it lies somewhat indefinite under the blue haze of the
years, all the more alluring for its lack of definition, like some old
mountain range, the softer and more beautiful for its own shadows.
The fascination of the frontier is and has ever been an undying thing.
Adventure is the meat of the strong men who have built the world for
those more timid. Adventure and the frontier are one and inseparable.
They suggest strength, courage, hardihood--qualities beloved in men
since the world began--qualities which are the very soul of the United
States, itself an experiment, an adventure, a risk accepted. Take away
all our history of political regimes, the story of the rise and fall
of this or that partisan aggregation in our government; take away our
somewhat inglorious military past; but leave us forever the tradition
of the American frontier! There lies our comfort and our pride. There
we never have failed. There, indeed, we always realized our ambitions.
There, indeed, we were efficient, before that hateful phrase was known.
There we were a melting-pot for character, before we came to know
that odious appellation which classifies us as the melting-pot of the
nations.
The frontier was the place and the time of the strong man, of the
self-sufficient but restless individual. It was the home of the rebel,
the protestant, the unreconciled, the intolerant, the ardent--and
the resolute. It was not the conservative and tender man who made our
history; it was the man sometimes illiterate, oftentimes uncultured, the
man of coarse garb and rude weapons. But the frontiersmen were the true
dreamers of the nation. They really were the possessors of a national
vision. Not statesmen but riflemen and riders made America. The noblest
conclusions of American history still rest upon premises which they
laid.
But, in its broadest significance, the frontier knows no country. It
lies also in other lands and in other times than our own. When and what
was the Great Frontier? We need go back only to the time of Drake
and the sea-dogs, the Elizabethan Age, when all North America was a
frontier, almost wholly unknown, compellingly alluring to all bold
men. That was the day of new stirrings in the human heart. Some strange
impulse seemed to act upon the soul of the braver and bolder Europeans;
and they moved westward, nor could have helped that had they tried. They
lived largely and blithely, and died handsomely, those old Elizabethan
adventurers, and they lie today in thousands of unrecorded graves upon
two continents, each having found out that any place is good enough for
a man to die upon, provided that he be a man.
The American frontier was Elizabethan in its quality--childlike, simple,
and savage. It has not entirely passed; for both Elizabethan folk and
Elizabethan customs are yet to be found in the United States. While
the half-savage civilization of the farther West was roaring on its
way across the continent--while the day of the keelboatman and the
plainsman, of the Indian-fighter and the miner, even the day of the
cowboy, was dawning and setting--there still was a frontier left far
behind in the East, near the top of the mountain range which made the
first great barrier across our pathway to the West. That frontier, the
frontier of Boone and Kenton, of Robertson and Sevier, still exists and
may be seen in the Cumberland--the only remaining part of America which
is all American. There we may find trace of the Elizabethan Age--idioms
lost from English literature and American speech long ago. There we may
see the American home life as it went on more than a hundred years
ago. We may see hanging on the wall the long muzzle-loading rifle of an
earlier day. We may see the spinning-wheel and the loom. The women still
make in part the clothing for their families, and the men still make
their own household furniture, their own farming implements, their own
boots.
This overhanging frontier of America is a true survival of the days of
Drake as well as of the days of Boone. The people are at once godly and
savage. They breed freely; they love their homes; they are ever ready
for adventure; they are frugal, abstemious, but violent and strong.
They carry on still the half-religious blood feuds of the old Scotch
Highlands or the North of Ireland, whence they came. They reverence
good women. They care little for material accumulations. They believe in
personal ease and personal independence. With them life goes on not in
the slow monotony of reiterated performance, but in ragged profile, with
large exertions followed by large repose. Now that has been the fashion
of the frontier in every age and every land of all the world. And so,
by studying these people, we may even yet arrive at a just and
comprehensive notion of what we might call the "feel" of the old
frontier.
There exists, too, yet another Saxon frontier in a far-off portion
of the world. In that strange country, Australia, tremendous unknown
regions still remain, and the wild pastoral life of such regions bids
fair to exist yet for many years. A cattle king of Queensland held
at one time sixty thousand square miles of land. It is said that the
average size of pastoral holdings in the northern territory of Australia
is two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres. Does this not recall the
old times of free range in the American West?
This strange antipodal civilization also retains a curious flavor
of Elizabethan ideas. It does not plan for inordinate fortunes, the
continual amassing of money, but it does deliberately plan for the use
by the individual of his individual life. Australian business hours are
shorter than American. Routine is less general. The individual takes
upon himself a smaller load of effort. He is restive under monotony. He
sets aside a great part of his life for sport. He lives in a large and
young day of the world. Here we may see a remote picture of our own
American West--better, as it seems to me, than that reflected in the
rapid and wholly commercialized development of Western Canada, which is
not flavored by any age but this.
But much of the frontier of Australia is occupied by men of means who
had behind them government aid and a semi-paternal encouragement in
their adventures. The same is true in part of the government-fostered
settlement of Western Canada. It was not so with the American West. Here
was not the place of the rich man but of the poor man, and he had no one
to aid him or encourage him. Perhaps no man ever understood the American
West who did not himself go there and make his living in that country,
as did the men who found it and held it first. Each life on our old
frontier was a personal adventure. The individual had no government
behind him and he lacked even the protection of any law.
Our frontier crawled west from the first seaport settlements, afoot, on
horseback, in barges, or with slow wagon-trains. It crawled across the
Alleghanies, down the great river valleys and up them yet again; and at
last, in days of new transportation, it leaped across divides, from one
river valley to another. Its history, at first so halting, came to be
very swift--so swift that it worked great elisions in its own story.
In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow
country of the West--the high plains and the lower foothills running
from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary. The still more ancient
cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never come into acceptance
as the Old West. Always, when we use these words, we think of buffalo
plains and of Indians, and of their passing before the footmen and
riders who carried the phantom flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from
the Appalachians to the Rockies--before the men who eventually made good
that glorious and vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose party
turned back from the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name of King
George on all the country lying west of them, as far as the South Sea!
The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to itself
the title of the real and typical frontier of all the world. We call
the spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it was; but even as the
Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact with the Spanish civilization
in Europe, on the high seas, and in both the Americas, so the last
frontier of the American West also was affected, and largely, deeply,
by Spanish influence and Spanish customs. The very phraseology of range
work bears proof of this. Scores of Spanish words are written indelibly
in the language of the Plains. The frontier of the cow-range never was
Saxon alone.
It is a curious fact also, seldom if ever noted, that this Old West of
the Plains was very largely Southern and not Northern on its Saxon
side. No States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and, later,
Missouri--daughters of Old Virginia in her glory--contributed to the
forces of the frontiersmen. Texas, farther to the south, put her stamp
indelibly upon the entire cattle industry of the West. Visionary,
impractical, restless, adventurous, these later Elizabethan
heroes--bowing to no yoke, insisting on their own rights and scorning
often the laws of others, yet careful to retain the best and most
advantageous customs of any conquered country--naturally came from those
nearest Elizabethan countries which lay abandoned behind them.
If the atmosphere of the Elizabethan Age still may be found in
the forgotten Cumberlands, let us lay claim to kinship with yonder
roystering heroes of a gallant day; for this was ever the atmosphere
of our own frontier. To feel again the following breezes of the Golden
Hind, or see again, floating high in the cloudless skies, the sails of
the Great Armada, was the privilege of Americans for a double decade
within the memory of men yet living, in that country, so unfailingly
beloved, which we call the Old West of America.