to one generation. But one generation grows with the conquest, and it
is a great thing. It is man-making.

And from the east came more hewers of wood, not drawers of water, and
the axe swung all around, and new clearings were made and earlier ones
broadened, and where fireweed first followed, the burning of the logs
there were timothy and clover, though rough the mowing yet, and the
State was "settled." Roads through the woods showed wagon-ruts, now
well defined; houses were not so far apart, and about them were young
orchards. The wild was being subjugated. The tame was growing. The
boy was growing with it.

There was nothing particularly novel in the manner of this youth's
development, save that, as he advanced in years, he became almost a
young Indian in all woodcraft, and that the cheap, long,
single-barreled shotgun, which was his first great personal possession,
became, in his skilled hands, a deadly thing. Wild turkey and ruffed
grouse, and sometimes larger game, he contributed to the family larder,
and he had it half in mind to seek the remoter west when he grew older,
and become a mighty hunter and trapper, and a slaughterer of the Sioux.
The Chippewas of his own locality were scarcely to be shot at. Those
remaining had already begun the unpretending life most of them live
to-day, were on good terms with everybody, tanned buckskin admirably,
and he approved of them. With the Sioux it was quite different. He
had read of them in the weekly paper, which was now a part of progress,
and he had learned something of them at the district school--for the
district school had come, of course. It springs up in the United
States after forests have been cut away, just as springs the wheat or
corn. And the district school was, to the youth, a novelty and a vast
attraction. It took him into Society.