North-West Frontier

“ During all the earlier years of the century, while we were establishing our power in India, constant intrigues and wars occurred in Persia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia; and rumours were occasionally heard of threats against ourselves, which formed the subject of diplomatic treatment from time to time; but in reality the scene was so distant that our interests were not seriously affected, and it was not until 1836 that they began to exercise a powerful influence as regards our policy on the North-West frontier. ”

“ The dense population of the North, the habit of association for commercial and manufacturing purposes, weakened individuality of character, and horsemanship and the use of arms were exceptional accomplishments. The rapid development of railways and manufactures in the West had assimilated the people of that region to their eastern neighbors, and the old race of frontier riflemen had wandered to the far interior of the continent. Instruction and discipline soon equalized differences, and battles were decided by generalship and numbers ”

“ Great Britain could not view with equanimity the prospect of a powerful neighbour establishing herself along her eastern frontier, uncontrolled and ill-defined as such frontier was, and consisting of an ill-assorted patchwork of little-known tribes whose proclivities would be only too likely to lie in the direction of crooked diplomacy and intrigue ”

“ It is this distinctiveness of development, due to the mountains' challenge to every man's spirit as he passed, to the isolation which compelled him to work out his own salvation, and to the constant struggle, largely single-handed, with frontier forces—as well as the uniqueness of background—that gave the west a character which identifies it to discerning minds quite as much as its geographic boundaries. ”

“ And yet in important historical ideals—in the process of expansion, in the persistence of agricultural interests, in impulsiveness, in imperialistic ways of looking at the American destiny, in hero-worship, in the newness of its present social structure—the Old Northwest has much in common with the South and the Far West.
Behind her is the old pioneer past of simple democratic conditions, and freedom of opportunity for all men. Before her is a superb industrial development, the brilliancy of success as evinced in a vast population, aggregate wealth, and sectional power. ”

“ The wilderness disappears, the "West" proper passes on to a new frontier, and in the former area, a new society has emerged from its contact with the backwoods. Gradually this society loses its primitive conditions, and assimilates itself to the type of the older social conditions of the East; but it bears within it enduring and distinguishing survivals of its frontier experience. Decade after decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society has gone on, has left its traces behind it, and has reacted on the East. ”

“ Born at a time, and reared in an atmosphere, the most romantic and adventurous known in the history of our American frontier, when the tidal wave of human progress, sweeping westward, was making history faster than the historians could record it—it was his fate to be in the field, and his fortune to grasp the opportunities to meet the situation’s requirements, and, in the beaten path of what seemed ordinary daily duty, to rise, by reason of his sterling qualities, his daring, and his courage, to the distinction of a leader. ”

“ The rise of the new west was the most significant fact in American history in the years immediately following the War of 1812. Ever since the beginnings of colonization on the Atlantic coast a frontier of settlement had advanced, cutting into the forest, pushing back the Indian, and steadily widening the area of civilization in its rear. ”

“ Having colonized the Far West, having mastered its internal resources, the nation turned at the conclusion of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century to deal with the Far East to engage in the world-politics of the Pacific Ocean. ”

“ It has State universities, rivaling in conservative and scientific economic instruction those of any other part of the Union, and its citizens more often visit the East, than do Eastern men the West. As time goes on, its industrial development will bring it more into harmony with the East.
Moreover, the Old Northwest holds the balance of power, and is the battlefield on which these issues of American development are to be settled. It has more in common with all parts of the nation than has any other region. It understands the East, as the East does not understand the West. ”

“ The ideals of equality, freedom of opportunity, faith in the common man are deep rooted in all the Middle West. The frontier stage, through which each portion passed, left abiding traces on the older, as well as on the newer, areas of the province. Nor were these ideals limited to the native American settlers: Germans and Scandinavians who poured into the Middle West sought the country with like hopes and like faith. These facts must be remembered in estimating the effects of the economic transformation of the province upon its democracy. ”

“ That the small body of less than seven hundred men should exercise such control, not only over so vast an area of almost unknown wilderness, inhabited by such a diversity of human beings scattered widely apart, is practically an isolated fact in all history. To this magnificent Force is largely due, to-day, the conditions that invest the North-West with such promise and prosperity. ”

“ In the Western theatre of war we must remember first the enormous length of frontier in proportion to the population on either side. This necessarily made the progress of Northern invasion slow, and its proper direction hard to determine, for diversions could be created by a counter-invasion elsewhere along the frontier or a stroke at the invaders' communications. The principal feature of the whole region is the great waterways, on which the same advantages which gave the sea to the North gave it also an immense superiority in the river warfare of flotillas of gunboats. ”

“ Esmond Clarenden declared. "Some day when the West is full of people, and dowered with prosperity, it may remember the men who built the highway for the feet of trade to run in. And the West may yet measure its greatness somewhat by the honesty and faithfulness of the merchant of the frontier, and more by the courage and persistence of the boys who drove the ox-teams across the plains. ”

“ It has not been possible to eliminate from the blood of the American West, diluted though it has been by far less worthy strains, all the iron of the old home-bred frontiersmen. The frontier has been a lasting and ineradicable influence for the good of the United States. ”

“ The raw, strenuous, eager social life of these early dwellers on the western waters must be studied before it is possible to understand the conditions that determined the continual westward extension of the frontier. ”

“ Enough human beings and territory was left out that could make the scientific, deduction-based West fulfill it’s mission, namely, to force into submission all things – the entire material world and everything non-Western. ”

“ In his disappointment, Hearne learned what every other discoverer in North America had learned—that the Great Northwest was something more than a bridge between Europe and Asia, that it was a world in itself with its own destiny. ”

“ The new settlements furnished a market for eastern goods and provided commodities in exchange, and thus lessened the dependence of the coast upon Europe. Attended by Indian wars and border hostilities with French and Spanish neighbors, the westward movement had created a fighting frontier. At the same time, by bringing the international frontiers into conflict, it had prepared the way for the final struggle between France and England in America. ”

“ A call from the farther West leads to more thorough exploration of the lands beyond the great frontier, bringing into existence the continental trails, producing problems of long-distance government, and intensifying the troubles of the Indians. The final struggle for the control of the desert and the elimination of the frontier draws out the tracks of the Pacific railways, changes and reshapes the Indian policies again, and brings into existence, at the end of the period, the great West. ”

“ The small man is in office, but the big man, his master, is outside. The mischief is brought prominently forward in connection with the sale of public lands in the North-West, which have been claimed as the heritage of the people, and indeed of all the nations of the world. The government land attracted the hardy labour of all countries, covering the western west with thriving towns and populous counties. ”

“ The winning of the last frontier completed the conquest of the continent.
The greatest of American problems has been the problem of the West. For four centuries after the discovery there existed here vast areas of fertile lands which beckoned to the colonist and invited him to migration. On the boundary between the settlements and the wilderness stretched an indefinite line that advanced westward from year to year.2 Hardy pioneers were ever to be found ahead of it, blazing the trails and clearing in the valleys. ”

“ The students of what we like to call “progress,” especially if they are disciples of Mr. Ruskin, have an admirable field of investigation in the contrast of the social, economic, and educational structure of the North and the South at the close of the war. After a century of free schools, perpetual intellectual agitation, extraordinary enterprise in every domain of thought and material achievement, the North presented a spectacle at once of the highest hope and the gravest anxiety. What diversity of life! ”

“ Not the railway, not the cattle trail, not the path of forward-marching empire purposely hewing a way through the wilderness, opened the West. It was the fur trade that found the West. It was the fur trade that explored the West. It was the fur trade that wrested the West from savagery. The beginning was in the little fort built by Radisson and Groseillers. No great factor in human progress ever had a more insignificant beginning. ”

“ The West would divide from the East, the Atlantic States from the Lake States, the Mississippi States from the Pacific, the North Pacific States from the South Pacific, and where would be the end? Already the great West has learned her own gigantic strength, which before she knew not that she possessed, and if the time should come when her interests should apparently point in a different direction from those of the East, with such a precedent before her, would she not avail herself of that new-found strength? ”

“ But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the land-seeking man, the type of the American, began to alter distinctly. The million dead of our cruel Civil War left a great gap in the American population which otherwise would have occupied the West and Northwest after the clearing away of the Indians. ”

“ Thus the population of the Northwest became largely foreign. Each German or Scandinavian who found himself prospering in this rich new country was himself an immigration agency. He sent back word to his friends and relatives in the Old World and these came to swell the steadily thickening population of the New. ”

“ The West is forcing itself into the East, with all its restless activity. In the time to come this whole broad continent is destined to be covered with railroads as with a vast spider-web; new industries will be established, machinery introduced, and the great region of the steppes, famous in the past only as the starting-point of conquering migrations, must in the end become an active centre of industry, the home of peace and prosperity, a new-found abiding-place of civilization and human progress. ”

“ This, surely, is the moral of our history. The East has spent and been spent for the West: has given forth her energy, her young men and her substance, for the new regions that have been a-making all the century through. But has she learned as much as she has taught, or taken as much as she has given? Look what it is that has now at last taken place. The westward march has stopped, upon the final slopes of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens. Populations turn upon their old paths; fill in the spaces they passed by neglected in their first journey in search of a land of promise ”

“ These nations are at present the British, whose possessions of Canada secures them access to the north-western desert of America, the Americans, who have free access to the wilderness that lies between their territories and the Pacific Ocean, and the Russians, whose immense empire borders on the north-west coast of America, giving them ample opportunities, which they have duly improved, of establishing settlements on its shores ”

“ Most of the frontiersmen of these two types moved fitfully westward with the frontier itself, or near it, but in each place where they halted, or where the advance of the frontier was for the moment stayed, some of their people remained to grow up and mix with the rest of the settlers. ”

“ It is thought that a military post, to which our ships of war might resort, would afford protection to every interest, and have a tendency to conciliate the tribes to the North West, with whom our trade is extensive. It is thought also that by the establishment of such a post the intercourse between our Western States and Territories and the Pacific and our trade with the tribes residing in the interior on each side of the Rocky Mountains would be essentially promoted. ”

“ The threads that bound fast the new settlements with the old, the threads that grew and strengthened into indissoluble bonds, which in spite of the fears of those who dreaded the accession of any more large territory, held firm the whole wide realm of the West to the mother colonies on the East, were simply the natural and artificial trails, later to be blended into a vast network, intermingling and inextricable, weaving and making permanent the web of a common and unsectionalized civilization. ”