Chapter I


When history has granted him the justice of perspective, we
shall know the American Pioneer as one of the most picturesque
of her many figures. Resourceful, self-reliant, bold; adapting
himself with fluidity to diverse circumstances and conditions;
meeting with equal cheerfulness of confidence and completeness of
capability both unknown dangers and the perils by which he has been
educated; seizing the useful in the lives of the beasts and men
nearest him, and assimilating it with marvellous rapidity; he
presents to the world a picture of complete adequacy which it would
be difficult to match in any other walk of life. He is a strong
man, with a strong man's virtues and a strong man's vices. In him
the passions are elemental, the dramas epic, for he lives in the age
when men are close to nature, and draw from her their forces. He
satisfies his needs direct from the earth. Stripped of all the
towns can give him, he merely resorts to a facile substitution.
It becomes an affair of rawhide for leather, buckskin for cloth,
venison for canned tomatoes. We feel that his steps are planted on
solid earth, for civilizations may crumble without disturbing his
magnificent self-poise. In him we perceive dimly his environment.
He has something about him which other men do not possess--a frank
clearness of the eye, a swing of the shoulder, a carriage of the
hips, a tilt of the hat, an air of muscular well-being which marks
him as belonging to the advance guard, whether he wears buckskin,
mackinaw, sombrero, or broadcloth. The woods are there, the plains,
the rivers. Snow is there, and the line of the prairie. Mountain