THE PATHWAY OF THE WATERS[3]
On a busy street of a certain Western city there appeared, not long ago,
a figure whose peculiarities attracted the curious attention of the
throng through which he passed. It was a man, tall, thin, bronzed,
wide-hatted, long-haired, clad in the garb of a day gone by. How he came
to the city, whence he came, or why, it boots little to ask. There he
was, one of the old-time “long-haired men” of the West. His face,
furrowed with the winds of the high plains and of the mountains, and
bearing still the lines of boldness and confidence, had in these new
surroundings taken on a shade of timorous anxiety. His eye was
disturbed. At his temples the hair was gray, and the long locks that
dropped to his shoulders were thin and pitiful. A man of another day, of
a bygone country, he babbled of scoutings, of warfare with savages, of
the chase of the buffalo. None knew what he spoke. He babbled, grieved,
and vanished.
Into the same city there wandered, from a somewhat more recent West,
another man grown swiftly old. Ten years earlier this figure might have
been seen over all the farming-lands of the West, most numerous near the
boom towns and the land-offices. He was here transplanted, set down in
the greatest boom town of them all, but, alas! too old and too alien to
take root.
He wore the same long-tailed coat, the same white hat that marked him
years ago—tall-crowned, not wide-rimmed; the hat that swept across the
Missouri River in the early eighties. His beard was now grown gray, his
eye watery, his expression subdued, and no longer buoyantly and
irresistibly hopeful. His pencil, as ready as ever to explain the price
of lots or land, had lost its erstwhile convincing logic. From his soul
had departed that strange, irrational, adorable belief, birthright of
the American that was, by which he was once sure that the opportunities
of the land that bore him were perennial and inexhaustible. This man
sought now no greatness and no glory. He wanted only the chance to make
a living. And, think you, he came of a time when a man might be a
carpenter at dawn, merchant at noon, lawyer by night, and yet be
respected every hour of the day, if he deserved it as a man.
It was exceeding sweet to be a savage. It is pleasant to dwell upon the
independent character of Western life, and to go back to the glories of
that land and day when a man who had a rifle and a saddle-blanket was
sure of a living, and need ask neither advice nor permission of any
living soul. Those days, vivid, adventurous, heroic, will have no
counterpart on the earth again. Those early Americans, who raged and
roared across the West, how unspeakably swift was the play in which they
had their part! There, surely, was a drama done under the strictest law
of the unities, under the sun of a single day.
No fiction can ever surpass in vividness the vast, heroic drama of the
West. The clang of steel, the shoutings of the captains, the stimulus of
wild adventure—of these things, certainly, there has been no lack.
There has been close about us for two hundred years the sweeping action
of a story keyed higher than any fiction, more unbelievably bold, more
incredibly keen in spirit. And now we come upon the tame and tranquil
sequel of that vivid play of human action. “Anticlimax!” cries all that
humanity that cares to think, that dares to regret, that once dared to
hope. “Tell us of the West that was,” demands that humanity, and with
the best of warrant; “play for us again the glorious drama of the past,
and let us see again the America that once was ours.”
Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to
answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each
epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living
causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant
sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest
may attach to a quest that goes farther than a mere summons for the
spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West?
What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and
why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the
West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run wider
than the West, and, indeed, wider than America.
In the pursuit of this line of thought we need ask only a few broad
premises. These premises may leave us not so much of self-vaunting as we
might wish, and may tend to diminish our esteem of the importance of
individual as well as national accomplishment; for, after all and before
all, we are but flecks on the surface of the broad, moving ribbon of
fate. We are all,—Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World or
the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,—but the result of the
mandate that bade mankind to increase and multiply, that bade mankind to
take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken over temporarily
that portion of the earth and its fullness allotted or made possible to
us by that Providence to which all things belong. We have each of us
done this along the lines of the least possible resistance, for this is
the law of organic life.
The story of the taking over of the earth into possession has been but a
story of travel. Aryan, Cymri, Goth, Vandal, Westerner—they are all
one. The question of occupying the unoccupied world has been only a
question of transportation, of invasion, and of occupation along the
lines of least resistance. Hence we have at hand, in a study of
transportation of the West at different epochs, a clue that will take us
very near to the heart of things.
We read to-day of forgotten Phenicia and of ancient Britain. They were
unlike, because they were far apart. The ancient captains who directed
the ships that brought them approximately together were great men in
their day, fateful men. The captains of transportation that made all
America one land are still within our reach, great men, fateful men; and
they hold a romantic interest under their grim tale of material things.
You and I live where they said we must live. It was they who marked out
the very spot where the fire was to rise upon your hearth-stone. You
have married a certain Phenician because they said that this must be
your fate. Your children were born because some captain said they should
be. You are here not of your own volition. The day of volitions, let us
remember, is gone.
The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far
different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax, of
linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of
trolley-cars and self-binders, of purple and fine linen, it must be
observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work,
and back of all these causes were the original law and the original
mandate. The force of this primeval impulse was behind all those early
actors, and Roundhead Cavalier, praying man and fighting man, who had
this continent for a stage. It was behind the men that followed inland
from the sea the first prophets of adventure. It is behind us to-day.
The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.
When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the
upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was
the Alleghanies, how then did the west-bound adventurers travel, these
folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation? The answer
would seem easy. They traveled as did the Cimri, the Goths—in the
easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse
and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind
followed the pathways of the waters.
Bishop Berkeley, prophetic soul, wrote his line: “Westward the course of
empire takes its way.” The public has always edited it to read the
“star” of empire that “takes it way” to the West. If one will read this
poem in connection with a government census map, he can not fail to see
how excellent is the amendment. Excellent census map, that holds between
its covers the greatest poem, the greatest drama ever written! Excellent
census map, that marks the center of population of America with a
literal star, and, at the curtain of each act, the lapse of each ten
years, advances this star with the progress of the drama, westward,
westward, ever westward! Excellent scenario, its scheme done in red and
yellow and brown, patched each ten years, ragged, blurred, until, after
a hundred years, the scheme is finished, and the color is solid all
across the page, showing that the end has come, and that the land has
yielded to the law!
The first step of this star of empire, that concluded in 1800, barely
removed it from its initial point on the Chesapeake. The direction was
toward the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The government at
Washington, young as it was, knew that the Ohio River, reached from the
North by a dozen trails from the Great Lakes, and running out into that
West which even then was coveted by three nations, was of itself a
priceless possession. The restless tide of humanity spread from that
point according to principles as old as the world. Having a world before
them from which to choose their homes, the men of that time sought out
those homes along the easiest lines.
The first thrust of the out-bound population was not along the parallels
of latitude westward, as is supposed to be the rule, but to the south
and southeast, into the valleys of the Appalachians, where the hills
would raise corn, and the streams would carry it. The early emigrants
learned that a raft would eat nothing, that a boat runs well
down-stream. Men still clung to the seaboard region, though even then
they exemplified the great law of population that designates the river
valleys to be the earliest and most permanent centers of population. The
first trails of the Appalachians were the waterways.
Dear old New England, the land sought out as the home of religious
freedom, and really perhaps the most intolerant land the earth ever
knew, sometimes flatters herself that she is the mother of the West. Not
so. New England holds mortgages only on the future of the West, not on
its past. The first outshoots of the seaboard civilization to run forth
into the West did not trace back to the stern and rock-bound shore where
the tolerants were punishing those who did not agree with them.
New York, then, was perhaps the parent of the West? By no means, however
blandly pleasant that belief might be to many for whom New York must be
ever the first cause and center of the American civilization, not the
reflection-point of that civilization. The rabid Westerner may enjoy the
thought that neither New England nor New York was the actual ancestor.
Perhaps he may say that the West had no parent, but was born
Minerva-like. In this he would be wrong. The real mother of the West was
the South. It was she who bore this child, and it has been much at her
expense that it has grown so large and matured so swiftly. If you sing
“arms and the man” for the West, you must sing Southerner and not
Puritan, knight-errant and not psalmodist. The path of empire had its
head on the Chesapeake. There was the American Ararat.
* * * * *
“The great American journeyings were far under way before New England
appeared to realize that there was a greater America toward the West.
The musket bearers of the New England states, the fighting men of the
South, and the riflemen of what might already have been called the West,
had finished the Revolutionary War long before New England had turned
her eyes westward. The pilgrimage over the Appalachians was made, the
new provinces of Kentucky and Tennessee were fighting for a commerce and
a commercial highway of their own, while yet the most that New England,
huddled along her stern and rock-bound shore, could do was to talk of
shutting off these Westerners from their highway of the Mississippi, and
compelling them to trade back with the tidewater provinces of what was
not yet an America.
“Canny and cautious, New York and New England were ready to fear this
new country in which they refused to believe; were ready to cripple it,
although they declined to credit its future. The pioneers of the South
fought their way into the West. New England bought her way, and that
after all the serious problems of pioneering had been solved. The ‘Ohio
Land Company’ of Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tucker and their none too honest
associate, the New Bedford preacher, Manasseh Cutler, were engaged in
the first great land steal ever known in the West. They did not fight
the Indians for their holdings, but went to Congress, and with practical
methods secured five million acres of land at a price of about eight or
nine cents an acre; the first offer to Congress being a million dollars
for a million and a half acres of what is now the state of Ohio, the
payment to be in soldiers’ scrip, worth twelve cents on the dollar.
“The Ohio company took its settlers out to its new land as a railway
does its colonists to-day. Reaching the Ohio River, they descended it in
a bullet-proof barge, called ‘with strange irony’ the ‘Mayflower.’ They
entered the mouth of the Muskingum and anchored under the guns of a
United States fort.”[4]
This is how New England got into the West. There is no hero story there.
The men of the South, men of North Carolina and Virginia, most of whom
had come from Pennsylvania and dropped down along the east slope of the
Appalachians, as it were sparring these mountain ranges for an opening
until at length they had found the ways of the game trails and Indian
trails from headwater to headwater, and so had reached the west-bound
streams—these actual adventurers had built Harrodsburg and
Boonesborough seventeen years before the Ohio company entered the
Muskingum. Already there was a West; even a West far beyond
Boonesborough and its adjacent corn grounds.
This actual record of the upper states in the exploration of the West is
to-day not generally remembered nor understood. Sometimes an ardent New
Englander will explain that the Puritans would have earlier pressed out
westward had it not been for the barrier of the Iroquois on their
western borders. They read their history but ill who do not know that
the Iroquois trafficked always with the English as against the French;
whereas Kentucky, the land opened by the Southern pioneers, was occupied
by a more dangerous red population, made up of many tribes, having no
policy but that of war, and no friends outside of each separate motley
hunting party, sure to be at knife’s point with either white or red
strangers. The most difficult and most dangerous frontier was that of
the South; yet it was the South that won through.
There are two explanations of this incontrovertible historical fact. One
lies perhaps in the general truth that early pioneers nearly always
cling to the river valleys, perhaps not more for purposes of
transportation by water than in obedience to a certain instinct that
seems to hold the pathways of the streams as foreordained guidance. The
man that is lost in the wilderness hails with delight the appearance of
a stream. It will lead him somewhere; it will guide him back again. Near
it will be game, near it, too, rich soil. The man that enters the
wilderness deliberately does so along the waterways.
All the great initial explorations have been made in this way. The men
of Kentucky and Tennessee having reached the headwaters of the Kentucky,
the Tennessee, the Holston or kindred riverways, moved out into their
promised land along paths, as it were, foreordained. The rivers of the
North did not run out into the West, but pointed ever toward the sea.
This is one explanation of the somewhat inglorious part of New England
in the discovery of the West. It does not explain her narrowness of view
in regard to that West after it had been discovered by others; neither
does this geographical explanation, in the opinion of many, cover the
main phenomena of her timid attitude in regard to Western exploration.
The true reason, in the belief of these students, is to be found in the
character of the New England population, as compared to the bolder breed
of men who overran the western sections of Pennsylvania and for two
generations were in continuous touch with the wilderness and its
savagery. This subject is taken up interestingly by Horace Kephart, a
scholar of much acquaintance with early American history, in the course
of an able paper. It is very much worth while for any one who wishes an
actual picture of the march across the Appalachians to read his
conclusions.
“In a vague way we think of all the East as old,” says this writer, “and
all the West as new. We picture civilization as advancing westward from
the Atlantic in a long, straight front, like a wave or a line of battle.
But in point of fact it was not so. There was a permanent settlement of
Europeans a thousand miles to the west of us before the Pilgrims landed
at Plymouth. Cahokia and Kaskaskia were thriving villages before
Baltimore was founded; and our own city of St. Louis was building in the
same year that New Jersey became a British possession. At a time when
Daniel Boone was hunting beaver on the Osage and the Missouri, Fenimore
Cooper was drawing the types for future ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ from his
neighbors in a ‘wilderness’ only a hundred and fifty miles from New York
City.
“American settlement advanced toward the Mississippi in the shape of a
wedge, of which the entering edge was first Lancaster, in Pennsylvania,
then the Shenandoah valley, then Louisville, and finally St. Louis. When
the second census of the United States was taken, in 1800, nearly all
the white inhabitants of our country lived in a triangle formed by a
diagonal southwestward from Portland, Maine, to the mouth of the
Tennessee River, here meeting another diagonal running northwestward
from Savannah, with the Atlantic for a base. Central and western New
York, northern Pennsylvania, and all the territory north of the Ohio
River, save in its immediate vicinity, were almost uninhabited by
whites, and so were Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Yet the state of
Kentucky had half as many people as Massachusetts, and Tennessee had
already been admitted into the Union.
“As a rule, geographical expansion proceeds along the lines of least
resistance, following the natural highways afforded by navigable rivers
and open plains. It is easily turned aside by mountain chains, dense
forests, and hostile natives. Especially was this true in the days
before railroads. But the development of our older West shows a striking
exception to this rule; for the entering wedge was actually driven
through one of the most rugged, difficult, and inhospitable regions to
be found along the whole frontier of the British possessions.
“This fact is strange enough to fix our attention; but it is doubly
strange when we consider that there was no climatic, political nor
economic necessity for such defiance of nature’s laws. We can see why
the Mississippi should have been explored from the north, rather than
from its mouth, because Canada was settled before Louisiana, and it is
easier to float downstream than to pole or cordelle against the current.
But why was not the West entered and settled through the obviously easy
course of the Mohawk Valley?
“Beyond this valley were gentle slopes, and many a route practicable for
settlers into the rich country of Ohio. The central trail of the
Iroquois, beaten smoother than a wagon-road, ran straight west from
Albany, through the fairest portion of New York, to the present site of
Buffalo, and thence followed the southern shore of Lake Erie into Ohio.
Where it crossed the Genesee, the old war-trail of the Senecas branched
off to the south, passing behind the farthermost ramparts of the
Alleghanies, to the forks of the Ohio. Moccasined feet traveling over
these trails for centuries had worn them from three to twelve inches
into the ground, so that they were easy to follow on the darkest night.
These were only two of several well-marked routes from ancient Albany to
the new West. It was to this easy communication with the country beyond
the Appalachians that the Iroquois owed their commanding position on the
continent.
“These Iroquois were in the way, to be sure; but with them New York had
every advantage over her sister provinces. Her policy toward these
powerful Indians was conciliatory. She was allied with them against the
French. The Six Nations ravaged the frontiers of all the other colonies,
from Massachusetts to Carolina, and carried their conquests to the
Mississippi, but they spared New York and even invited her to build
forts on their border as outposts against the French. New York had the
most influential Indian agent of his time in Sir William Johnson, who
had married the sister of the Mohawk chief Brant, and by her had several
sons who were war-chiefs of the Iroquois. In 1745 the Iroquois even
ceded to New York a strip of land sixty miles wide, along the southern
shores of lakes Ontario and Erie, extending to the modern Cleveland. It
should have been easy for the Knickerbockers to secure passage for their
emigrants into the western country had they chosen to ask it.
“On the other hand, the southern colonies had no easy access to the
West. Nature herself had bidden these people to rest content in their
tidewater regions, and frowned upon any westward expansion by
interposing the mighty barriers of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies,
rising tier beyond tier in parallel chains from northern Pennsylvania to
Alabama. Few trails crossed these mountains. From base to summit they
were clad in dense forest, matted into jungle by luxuriant undergrowth.
No one knew what lay beyond them, nor how far through this ‘forest,
savage, harsh, impregnable,’ the traveler must bore until he reached
land fit for settlement.
“It was well known, however, that the trans-Alleghany region, whatever
might be its economic features, was dangerous ground. The Indians
themselves could not occupy it, for it had been for ages the common
battle-ground of opposing tribes. Any savage met within its confines was
sure to be on the war-path against any and all comers. He that entered
took his life in his hand.
“Thus the chances of success in any westward movement were in favor of
New York and New England, and against Pennsylvania. Yet it was the
latter that did the work. Central and western New York remained a
wilderness until Missouri was settling with Americans. New England took
little or no part in Western affairs until, the West having been won,
Massachusetts and Connecticut, calmly overstepping New York and
Pennsylvania, laid thrifty hand upon the public domain north of
Pittsburg and west to the Mississippi.
“We have seen that the West was actually entered by the most difficult
and hostile route, and this in spite of political and economic reasons
for choosing a more northerly and easier line of advance. I do not
remember that this has ever before been pointed out; but it is a fact of
deep significance, for it determined what should be the temper of the
great West, and what should be its course of development.
“The wedge of settlement was driven through the heart of the Alleghanies
because there dwelt at the foot of the mountains a people more
aggressive, more daring, and more independent than the tidewater stock.
This people acted on its own initiative, not only without government
aid, but sometimes in defiance of government. It won to the American
flag not only the central West, but the Northwest and Southwest as well;
and it was, for the most part, the lineal descendants of these men that
first, of Americans, explored the far West, and subdued it for future
settlement.
“This explains why Missouri, rather than the northern tier of new
states, became in its turn the vanguard and outpost of civilization, as
Kentucky and Tennessee had been before her, and Virginia and
Pennsylvania before them. It explains why, when mountain and forest
barriers had been left behind, and the vast Western plain offered
countless parallel routes of travel to the Rockies, such routes were not
used, but all the great transcontinental trails, whether to Santa Fé,
California, or Oregon, focused for half a century at St. Louis or
Independence. It explains why the majority of our famous scouts and
explorers and Indian fighters were men whose strain went back to the
Shenandoah valley or the Yadkin, and why most of them could trace their
descent still farther back to Pennsylvania, mother of Western pioneers.”
There is much that is convincing in this study of facts and motives; yet
perhaps the gentler and broader view is not that of personnel but of
geography. I myself am more disposed to believe that St. Louis became
great by reason of her situation on the great interior pathways of the
waters; though all this may be said with no jot of abatement in
admiration for the magnificent daring and determination of those men of
the lower slopes of the Appalachians who, as history shows simply and
unmistakably, were really the pioneers of the eastern, the middle and
the most western portions of the splendid empire of the West. Let us
reserve for a later chapter the more specific study of this typical
adventurer and his origin, and pass for the present to the general
consideration of the figure that we may call the American west-bound
man.
* * * * *
We must remember that there had been two or three full American
generations to produce him, this man that first dared turn away from the
seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the sun, toward the dark
and mysterious mountains and forests, which then encompassed the least
remote land fairly to be called the West. Two generations had produced a
man different from the Old-World type. Free air and good food had given
him abundant brawn. He was tall, with Anak in his frame. Little fat
cloyed the free play of his muscles, and there belonged to him the
heritage of the courage that comes of good heart and lungs. He was a
splendid man to have for an ancestor, this tall and florid athlete that
never heard of athletics. His face was thin and aquiline, his look high
and confident, his eye blue, his speech reserved. You may see this same
man yet in those restricted parts of this country which remain fit to be
called American. You may see him sometimes in the mountains of
Tennessee, the brakes of Arkansas or Missouri, where the old strain has
remained most pure. You might have seen him over all the West in the
generation preceding our own.
In time this early outbound man learned that there were rivers that ran,
not to the southwest and into the sea, but outward, beyond the mountains
and toward the setting sun. The winding trails of the Alleghanies led
one finally to rivers that ran toward Kentucky, Tennessee, even farther
out into that unknown, tempting land which still was called the West.
Thus it came that the American genius broke entirely away from
salt-water traditions, asked no longer “What cheer?” from the ships that
came from across the seas, clung no longer to the customs, the costumes,
the precedents or standards of the past.
There came the day of buckskin and woolsey, of rifle and ax, of men
curious for adventures, of homes built of logs and slabs, with puncheons
for floors, with little fields about them, and tiny paths that led out
into the immeasurable preserves of the primeval forests. A few things
held intrinsic value at that time—powder, lead, salt, maize, cow-bells,
women that dared. It was a simple but not an ill ancestry, this that
turned away from the sea-coast forever and began the making of another
world. It was the strong-limbed, the bold-hearted that traveled, the
weak that stayed at home.
Thus began the true American aristocracy, the aristocracy of ability.
The dashing Cavalier, your high-churchman from England, was not the
first over the Appalachians. It was the Protestant, the Quaker, the
dissenter, the independent who led the way into another world and into
another order of things.
Of this hardy folk who left home when yet there was no need of so doing,
and who purposed never to come back from the land they were to
discover,—types of that later proverb-making Western man who “came to
stay,”—let us seek out one where there were many, some distant
Phenician, some master of ways and means, some captain of his time. One
man and one community may serve as typical of this epoch.
In 1779 one James Robertson, of the Watauga settlements of North
Carolina, a steadfast man, heard certain voices that called him to the
West. James Robertson, the steadfast, forming his company for this
uncertain, perilous enterprise, said: “We are the advance guard of a
civilization, and our way is across the continent.” Simple words,—yet
that was in 1779!
Now, for the building of this one town, the town that is now the city of
Nashville, and the capital of Tennessee, this leader had gathered three
hundred and eighty persons, men, women, and children. All the women and
children, one hundred and thirty in number, in charge of a few men, went
by boat, scow, pirogue, and canoe, in the winter-time, down the bold
waters of the Holston and Tennessee rivers. The rest traveled as best
they might over the five hundred miles of “trace” across Kentucky. Of
this whole party two hundred and twenty-six got through alive.
The boat party had many hundreds of miles of unknown and dangerous
waters to travel, and the journey took them three months, a time longer
than it now requires to travel around the world. They ran thirty miles
of rapids on the shoals of the Tennessee, pursued and fired upon by
Cherokees. Of this division of the party only ninety-seven got through
alive, and nine of these were wounded. One was drowned, one died of
natural causes and was buried, and the rest were killed by the Indians.
[Illustration: THE DOWN-RIVER MEN.]
Their voyage was indeed “without a parallel in modern history.” Among
those who survived the hardships of the journey was Rachel Donelson,
later the wife of Andrew Jackson.
The path of empire in America, the path of corn and venison, was a
highway that never ran backward. These men would never leave this
country now that they had taken it. But what a tax was this that the
barbaric land demanded of them! In November of 1780, less than a year
after the party was first organized, there were only one hundred and
thirty-four persons left alive out of the original three hundred and
eighty, but in the settlement itself there had not been a natural death.
The Indians killed these settlers, and the settlers killed the Indians.
Death and wounds meant nothing to the adults. The very infants learned a
stoic hardihood. Out of two hundred and fifty-six survivors, thirty-nine
were killed in sixty days. Out of two hundred and seventeen survivors,
the next season saw but one hundred and thirty-four left.
The spring of 1781 found only seventy persons left alive. But when the
vote was cast whether to stay or return, not one man voted to give up
the fight. In that West corn was worth one hundred and sixty-five
dollars a bushel, and in its raising the rifle was as essential as the
plow. Powder and lead were priceless. Man and woman together, fearless,
changeless, they held the land, giving back not one inch of the
west-bound distance they had gained!
In 1791 there were only fifteen persons left alive out of the three
hundred and eighty that made this American migration. There had been
only one natural death among them. In such a settlement there was no
such thing as a hero, because all were heroes. Each man was a master of
weapons, and incapable of fear. No fiction ever painted a hero like to
any one of these. One man, after having been shot and stabbed many
times, was scalped alive, and jested at it. A little girl was scalped
alive, and lived to forget it. An army of Indians assaulted the
settlement, and fifteen men and thirty women beat them off. Mrs. Sally
Buchanan, a forgotten heroine, molded bullets all one night during an
Indian attack, and on the next morning gave birth to a son.
This was the ancestral fiber of the West. What time had folk like these
for powder-puff or ruffle, for fan or jeweled snuff-box? Their garb was
made from the skin of the deer, the fox, the wolf. Their shoes were of
hide, their beds were made of the robes of the bear and buffalo. They
laid the land under tribute. Yet, so far from mere savagery was the
spirit that animated these men that in ten years after they had first
cut away the forest they were founding a college and establishing a
court of law. Read this forgotten history, one chapter and a little one,
in the history of the West, and then turn, if you like, to the chapters
of fiction in an older world. You have your choice of lace or elkskin.
-----
Footnote 3:
The Century Magazine, November, 1901.
Footnote 4:
Kephart.