effort. He is restive under monotony. He sets aside a great part
of his life for sport. He lives in a large and young day of the
world. Here we may see a remote picture of our own American
West--better, as it seems to me, than that reflected in the rapid
and wholly commercialized development of Western Canada, which is
not flavored by any age but this.

But much of the frontier of Australia is occupied by men of means
who had behind them government aid and a semi-paternal
encouragement in their adventures. The same is true in part of
the government-fostered settlement of Western Canada. It was not
so with the American West. Here was not the place of the rich man
but of the poor man, and he had no one to aid him or encourage
him. Perhaps no man ever understood the American West who did not
himself go there and make his living in that country, as did the
men who found it and held it first. Each life on our old frontier
was a personal adventure. The individual had no government behind
him and he lacked even the protection of any law.

Our frontier crawled west from the first seaport settlements,
afoot, on horseback, in barges, or with slow wagon-trains. It
crawled across the Alleghanies, down the great river valleys and
up them yet again; and at last, in days of new transportation, it
leaped across divides, from one river valley to another. Its
history, at first so halting, came to be very swift--so swift
that it worked great elisions in its own story.

In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow
country of the West--the high plains and the lower foothills
running from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary. The still