the Bighorn, exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years
previously built their log-cabins beside the Kentucky or in the
valleys of the Great Smokies. The men who have shared in the fast
vanishing frontier life of the present feel a peculiar sympathy with
the already long-vanished frontier life of the past.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL, _May_, 1889




FOREWORD.

In the year 1898 the United States finished the work begun over a
century before by the backwoodsman, and drove the Spaniard outright
from the western world. During the march of our people from the crests
of the Alleghanies to the Pacific, the Spaniard was for a long period
our chief white opponent; and after an interval his place among our
antagonists was taken by his Spanish-American heir. Although during
the Revolution the Spaniard at one time became America's friend in the
sense that he was England's foe, he almost from the outset hated and
dreaded his new ally more than his old enemy. In the peace
negotiations at the close of the contest he was jealously eager to
restrict our boundaries to the line of the Alleghanies; while even
during the concluding years of the war the Spanish soldiers on the
upper Mississippi were regarded by the Americans in Illinois as a
menace no less serious than the British troops at Detroit.

In the opening years of our national life the Western backwoodsman