Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/378

358 settlers on their bounds, to restrain the visiting of any vengeance upon the savages. The principal sufferers on the outskirts of the province were not Quakers, but, as we have noticed, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. Though these venturesome pioneers themselves provoked the hate of the savages, they suffered as common victims of the great conspiracy of the tribes.

An important word, which we meet more frequently than any other in every historic reference to our Indian relations, is that word “Frontiers.” It is used to define a supposed and somewhat imaginary boundary line between the fixed white settlements and territory vacant or still occupied by the Indians. That boundary line has always been, as it is now, a very ragged and unstable one. It has proved to be like the horizon, when one is walking towards it; it has never been a real barrier, but always movable, and always a line of strife and conflict. It has been shifting between every mountain range and every broad river between the Gulf of Mexico and the Lake of the Woods, till it has become self-obliterated, and no longer a significant word. Our frontiers, which that boundary line was supposed to limit, have become merged and blurred on the whole of this side of our continent, and have begun to advance inwards from the Pacific coast.

Less than three hundred years ago, there was not that number of Europeans on our broad domain: there are now more than forty millions of that stock here. In the development reaching to that result, it would be difficult to say where, for the space of even a single year, the frontiers of the white man have rested. The present domain of the United States may be set before our view, under joint European discovery and occupancy, as parted in three longitudinal strips dividing the continent to three great nationalities. Thus to Spain would be assigned the Pacific coast, advancing towards the Rocky Mountains; to France, the middle strip, from those Mountains to the Alleghanies;