Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/379

Rh and to Great Britain, the Atlantic seaboard. As we follow out in the records and romances of our history the steady advance of exploration and settlement under crown and proprietary grants, opening the inner recesses of our continent, we trace the workings of two great branches of enterprise, — the one, combined and public, associated and aided by royalty and patronage; the other, guided wholly by individual energy and resources. The rival efforts and conflicting claims of European sovereignties have set the great stake on trial by the ordeal of battle between white men. The ardor and heroism of individual pioneer adventurers have pushed beyond the ventures of any associated enterprise, and, with a persistency of purpose which has seemed almost like the goading of fate, have resolved that this magnificent domain should no longer serve for the tramping covert of roaming and yelping savages, but should yield itself to the uses of civilized man. Hard would it have been for the aborigines, at any time since their first sight of Europeans, to have said where the frontier boundary line was to be drawn.

Yet none the less has there been here always a line, however unstable and shifting, which may be said to have marked the frontiers of the white settlement. Deeply and distinctly, ineffaceably forever, has that line been drawn at different times, in the records of heroism and tragedy, in deeds and tales of courage, daring, barbarity, and agony. I think I speak within the bounds of sober truth, when I say that there is not anywhere on this continent an area of twenty square miles that has not witnessed a death struggle between the white and the red men, not merely as individuals, but in bands. Never was a people so concerned, as within the last half century our own people have become, in searching out the local history and tracing the human associations of every spot of our settled territory. Indeed, we are overlaying our history with piles and masses of literature which no one lifetime can ever master.