generations the great feature in the nation's history, next only to the
preservation of its national life, was to be its westward growth; and
its distinguishing work was to be the settlement of the immense
wilderness which stretched across to the Pacific. But before the land
could be settled it had to be won.

The valley of the Ohio already belonged to the Americans by right of
conquest and of armed possession; it was held by rifle-bearing backwoods
farmers, hard and tenacious men, who never lightly yielded what once
they had grasped. North and south of the valley lay warlike and powerful
Indian confederacies, now at last thoroughly alarmed and angered by the
white advance; while behind these warrior tribes, urging them to
hostility, and furnishing them the weapons and means wherewith to fight,
stood the representatives of two great European nations, both bitterly
hostile to the new America, and both anxious to help in every way the
red savages who strove to stem the tide of settlement. The close
alliance between the soldiers and diplomatic agents of polished
old-world powers and the wild and squalid warriors of the wilderness was
an alliance against which the American settlers had always to make head
in the course of their long march westward. The kings and the peoples of
the old world ever showed themselves the inveterate enemies of their
blood-kin in the new; they always strove to delay the time when their
own race should rise to wellnigh universal supremacy. In mere blind
selfishness, or in a spirit of jealousy still blinder, the Europeans
refused to regard their kinsmen who had crossed the ocean to found new
realms in new continents as entitled to what they had won by their own
toil and hardihood. They persisted in treating the bold adventurers who
went abroad as having done so simply for the benefit of the men who
stayed at home; and they shaped their transatlantic policy in accordance
with this idea. The Briton and the Spaniard opposed the American settler