Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/380

360 And the records or traditions of every town and village narration begin with an Indian story. We might expect it would be so as regards our seaboard, but it is equally and even emphatically the same with the youngest settlement of the West. If there might be judicious digests of personal experience and adventure in our successive frontiers, with the fresh coloring of real nature and actual life, without any heightening from romance, what stores of exciting and thrilling literature in biography and ballad would be provided for our young readers in the coming generations! When there are no longer here any virgin soil, nor pathless forests, nor lurking beasts, nor rivers unbridged, undammed, reposing with their lakes in wild solitudes; when cities and villages, manufactories and railways, fast dwellings and secure highways, stretch from ocean to ocean, — how breezy and rejuvenating will be the gathered lore of our early days of pioneers and adventurers, of white men who became Indians, of hardy and self-reliant solitary explorers and trappers, who trod only on grass and leaves, lived on their surroundings, drank from the stream, slept under the stars, and were ready at any moment for the yelling savage and his tomahawk!

We are to remember that, with the single exception of the English Puritan colonists, the first Europeans to come here were for a considerable time only men, without women, and to a man adventurers, daring, self-reliant, full of nerve and vigor, — often, too, reckless. It was not in the nature of such men to remain still anywhere. They did not love any kind of industrious, quiet occupation any better than did the Indians. Tillage and handicrafts were an abomination to most of them; they meant that the soil, the waters, and the woods should yield them free sustenance. The large mass of them deliberately cast themselves upon the Indian supplies, meagre as these often were. But as the stream of colonization swelled, the necessity of labor for life became a stern one. Then single settlers,