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The frontier! There is no word in the English language more stirring, more
intimate, or more beloved. It has in it all the elan of the old French
phrase, En avant! It carries all of the old Saxon command, Forward!! It
means all that America ever meant. It means the old hope of a real
personal liberty, and yet a real human advance in character and
achievement. To a genuine American it is the dearest word in all the
world.
What is, or was, the
frontier? Where was it? Under what stars did it lie? Because, as the vague
Iliads of ancient heroes or the nebulous records of the savage gentlemen
of the Middle Ages make small specific impingement on our consciousness
today, so also even now begin the tales of our own old frontier to assume
a haziness, an unreality, which makes them seem less history than
folklore.
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Pioneers on the Frontier, 1847, courtesy
Library of Congress.
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Now the truth is
that the
American frontier
of history has many a local habitation and many a name. And this is
why it lies somewhat indefinite under the blue haze of the years, all
the more alluring for its lack of definition, like some old mountain
range, the softer and more beautiful for its own shadows.
The fascination of
the frontier is and has ever been an undying thing. Adventure is the
meat of the strong men who have built the world for those more timid.
Adventure and the frontier are one and inseparable. They suggest
strength, courage, hardihood--qualities beloved in men since the world
began--qualities which are the very soul of the United States, itself
an experiment, an adventure, a risk accepted. Take away all our
history of political regimes, the story of the rise and fall of this
or that partisan aggregation in our government; take away our somewhat
inglorious military past; but leave us forever the tradition of the
American frontier!
There lies our comfort and our pride. There we never have failed.
There, indeed, we always realized our ambitions. There, indeed, we
were efficient, before that hateful phrase was known. There we were a
melting-pot for character, before we came to know that odious
appellation which classifies us as the melting-pot of the nations.
The frontier was
the place and the time of the strong man, of the self-sufficient but
restless individual. It was the home of the rebel, the protestant, the
unreconciled, the intolerant, the ardent--and the resolute. It was not
the conservative and tender man who made our history; it was the man
sometimes illiterate, oftentimes uncultured, the man of coarse garb
and rude weapons. But the frontiersmen were the true dreamers of the
nation. They really were the possessors of a national vision. Not
statesmen but riflemen and riders made America. The noblest
conclusions of
American history still rest upon premises which they laid.
But, in its
broadest significance, the frontier knows no country. It lies
also in other lands and in other times than our own. When and what was
the Great Frontier? We need go back only to the time of Drake and the
sea-dogs, the Elizabethan Age, when all North America was a frontier,
almost wholly unknown, compellingly alluring to all bold men. That was
the day of new stirrings in the human heart. Some strange impulse
seemed to act upon the soul of the braver and bolder Europeans; and
they moved westward, nor could have helped that had they tried. They
lived largely and blithely, and died handsomely, those old Elizabethan
adventurers, and they lie today in thousands of unrecorded graves upon
two continents, each having found out that any place is good enough
for a man to die upon, provided that he be a man.
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The
American
frontier
was Elizabethan in its quality--childlike, simple, and savage. It has not
entirely passed; for both Elizabethan folk and Elizabethan customs are yet
to be found in the United States. While the half-savage civilization of
the farther West was roaring on its way across the continent—while the day
of the keelboatman and the plainsman, of the Indian-fighter and the miner,
even the day of the cowboy, was dawning and setting--there still was a
frontier left far behind in the East, near the top of the mountain range
which made the first great barrier across our pathway to the West. That
frontier, the frontier of Boone and Kenton, of Robertson and Sevier, still
exists and may be seen in the Cumberland--the only remaining part of
America which is all American. There we may find trace of the Elizabethan
Age--idioms lost from English literature and American speech long ago.
There we may see the American home life as it went on more than a hundred
years ago. We may see hanging on the wall the long muzzle-loading rifle of
an earlier day. We may see the spinning-wheel and the loom. The women
still make in part the clothing for their families, and the men still make
their own household furniture, their own farming implements, their own
boots.
This overhanging frontier of America is a true survival of the days of
Drake as well as of the days of Boone. The people are at once godly and
savage. They breed freely; they love their homes; they are ever ready for
adventure; they are frugal, abstemious, but violent and strong. They carry
on still the half-religious blood feuds of the old Scotch Highlands or the
North of Ireland, whence they came. They reverence good women. They care
little for material accumulations. They believe in personal ease and
personal independence. With them life goes on not in the slow monotony of
reiterated performance, but in ragged profile, with large exertions
followed by large repose. Now that has been the fashion of the frontier in
every age and every land of all the world. And so, by studying these
people, we may even yet arrive at a just and comprehensive notion of what
we might call the "feel" of the old frontier.
There exists, too, yet another Saxon frontier in a far-off portion of the
world. In that strange country, Australia, tremendous unknown regions
still remain, and the wild pastoral life of such regions bids fair to
exist yet for many years. A cattle king of Queensland held at one time
sixty thousand square miles of land. It is said that the average size of
pastoral holdings in the northern territory of Australia is two hundred
and seventy-five thousand acres. Does this not recall the old times of
free range in the
American
West?
This strange antipodal civilization also retains a curious flavor of
Elizabethan ideas. It does not plan for inordinate fortunes, the continual
amassing of money, but it does deliberately plan for the use by the
individual of his individual life. Australian
business hours are shorter than American. Routine is less general. The
individual takes upon himself a smaller load of 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 more ancient cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never come
into acceptance as the
Old West
.
Always, when we use these words, we think of buffalo plains and of
Indians, and of their passing before the footmen and riders who carried
the phantom flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from the Appalachians to
the Rockies--before the men who eventually made good that glorious and
vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose party turned back from
the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name of King George on all the
country lying west of them, as far as the South Sea!
The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to itself the
title of the real and typical frontier of all the world. We call the
spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it was; but even as the
Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact with the Spanish civilization in
Europe, on the high seas, and in both the Americas, so the last frontier
of the
American
West also
was affected, and largely, deeply, by Spanish influence and Spanish
customs. The very phraseology of range work bears proof of this. Scores of
Spanish words are written indelibly in the language of the Plains. The
frontier of the cow-range never was Saxon alone.
It is a curious fact also, seldom if ever noted, that this
Old West
of the Plains was very largely Southern and not Northern on its Saxon
side. No States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and, later,
Missouri--daughters
of Old Virginia in her glory--contributed to the forces of the
frontiersmen. Texas, farther to the south, put her stamp indelibly upon
the entire cattle industry of the West. Visionary, impractical, restless,
adventurous, these later Elizabethan heroes--bowing to no yoke, insisting
on their own rights and scorning often the laws of others, yet careful to
retain the best and most advantageous customs of any conquered
country--naturally came from those nearest Elizabethan countries which lay
abandoned behind them.
If the atmosphere of
the Elizabethan Age still may be found in the forgotten Cumberlands, let
us lay claim to kinship with yonder roistering heroes of a gallant day;
for this was ever the atmosphere of our own frontier. To feel again the
following breezes of the Golden Hind, or see again, floating high in the
cloudless skies, the sails of the Great Armada, was the privilege of
Americans for a double decade within the memory of men yet living, in that
country, so unfailingly beloved, which we call the
Old West
of America.
Added August, 2005
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