Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/382

362 by a glance of the eye or by the close study of the mind over a full series of maps found in the journals of explorers or in our voluminous Government archives, illustrating the westward progress of our race and power on this continent. Along the courses and at the forks of all our great rivers, at their mouths and at their sources, on lake and creek, we find dotted the successive posts occupied for defence, for refuge, or for supplies. They are simply stages, — hardly so stable as that: they are scarcely more than the footmarks, the tread from step to step, of the restless white man. And the names which these earthen burrows or palisaded defences bear on the maps (for they are in many cases passing into oblivion) are the head-lines or titles of so many stories, — the names of military heroes, or hapless victims, or tragic scenes of endurance or massacre. It is hardly strange that our Western countrymen should be open to the charge from our mother land of having corrupted, or barbarized, or vulgarized the English language. Our Western explorers and adventurers have had occasion for words or vocables not found in the dictionaries, and they have not hesitated to invent them, or to let Nature do it for them. Our Government has under preparation an authentic and elaborate map, which is carefully to mark the original native names for the whole continent, and to note the successive nomenclature of red and white men. And the map will be a history. It will not, however, be desirable to perpetuate the names which pioneers and “prospectors” have transiently attached from their mean and often foul vocabularies to fresh wilderness scenes. Of these the following present specimens: “Tarryall Ranche,” “Cash Creek,” “ Gulcher Diggings,” “Buckskin Joe,” “Fair Play,” “Strip-and-at-him Mine,” “Hooked-Man's Prairie,” etc.

And before or following after these military occupations of our inner expanses have gone the frontiersmen, alone or with their families. And what description, but one that