Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/381

Rh groups, or families began to trace the rivers inland to their sources, in search of fertile meadows and bottom lands, and game and peltry. From that time we began to have frontiers, and we have had them ever since. We may draw their lines as they advanced from year to year, by our river courses, and our mountain ranges and rich valleys. The Alleghanies seemed for a brief time as if they would be a permanent barrier to the English, especially as on the other side the Indians were already armed by the French and allied with them. If the genius of Walter Scott has invested with a romantic glow the raids of cattle-lifters and freebooters on the Scottish borders, as the Highlanders rushed from their glens to plunder the Lowlanders, what may not the pens of ready writers for all time to come do with a region like that which we first called the West, with its tales of prowess and heroism, of lonely settlers and sparse garrisons, and of fierce struggles in which every creek and meadow and hill-top was the prize at stake between red men and white men! The field for our story-tellers and romancers and poets is indeed a rich one. Cooper's tales and Campbell's “Gertrude of Wyoming” have hardly trenched upon its mines.

When enterprise, courage, and victory had secured the line at the foot of the Alleghanies, single pioneers had already advanced the line, and lonely settlers were carrying the frontier onwards. It crossed the territory of our Middle States; then Mississippi, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa, Kansas, Dakota, and the Plains, reaching the foot of the Rocky Mountains; and then the restless and adventurous white man traversed the whole land course to meet from the Pacific coast the traffickers who had gone round by sea to exchange cargoes on the Columbia.

Stockade forts, army posts, sylvan camps, military roads, emigrant trains, and mail stations have year by year marked the advances of this frontier line. There is hardly a more interesting and suggestive theme than that caught either