They strove to keep peace, and made many efforts to persuade the
frontiersmen to observe the Indian boundary lines, and not to intrude on
the territory in dispute; and they were quite unable to foresee the
rapidity of the nation's westward growth. Like the people of the eastern
seaboard, the men high in governmental authority were apt to look upon
the frontiersmen with feelings dangerously akin to dislike and
suspicion. Nor were these feelings wholly unjustifiable. The men who
settle in a new country, and begin subduing the wilderness, plunge back
into the very conditions from which the race has raised itself by the
slow toil of ages.

Inevitable Shortcomings of the Frontiersmen.

The conditions cannot but tell upon them. Inevitably, and for more than
one lifetime--perhaps for several generations--they tend to retrograde,
instead of advancing. They drop away from the standard which highly
civilized nations have reached. As with harsh and dangerous labor they
bring the new land up towards the level of the old, they themselves
partly revert to their ancestral conditions; they sink back towards the
state of their ages-dead barbarian forefathers. Few observers can see
beyond this temporary retrogression into the future for which it is a
preparation. There is small cause for wonder in the fact that so many of
the leaders of Eastern thought looked with coldness upon the effort of
the Westerners to push north of the Ohio.

The Westerners Solved the Problem.

Yet it was these Western frontiersmen who were the real and vital
factors in the solution of the problems which so annoyed the British