statesmen. It was a self-confident section, believing in its right
to share in government, and troubled by no doubts of its capacity to
rule.




CHAPTER VIII

THE FAR WEST (1820-1830)


In the decade of which we write, more than two-thirds of the present
area of the United States was Indian country--a vast wilderness
stretching from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. East of the
Mississippi, the pioneers had taken possession of the hardwoods of
the Ohio, but over the prairies between them and the Great Lakes the
wild flowers and grasses grew rank and undisturbed. To the north,
across Michigan and Wisconsin, spread the somber, white-pine
wilderness, interlaced with hardwoods, which swept in ample zone
along the Great Lakes, and, in turn, faded into the treeless expanse
of the prairies beyond the Mississippi. To the south, in the Gulf
plains, Florida was, for the most part, a wilderness; and, as we
have seen, great areas of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia were
still unoccupied by civilization.

West of the Mississippi lay a huge new world--an ocean of grassy
prairie that rolled far to the west, till it reached the zone where
insufficient rainfall transformed it into the arid plains, which
stretched away to the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. Over this