Palos de la Frontera

“ Providence seemed to favor the passage of the adventurers, for the first few days; the wind being favorable and the sea smooth. Between the morning of the 24th and the evening of the 26th, the caravel had made nearly a hundred leagues directly on her course to Palos, when she was met by a foul wind and another heavy sea. The gale now became violent again, though sufficiently favorable to allow them to steer east, a little northerly, occasionally hauling more ahead. ”

“ We arrived in the broad bay of La Paz. Circling hills and mountains arose red, parched and arid, enclosing on three sides a vast sheet of water—like an inland gulf—thirty miles in length and fifteen wide.
Vegetation appears to have forgotten this portion of the Peninsula entirely, at least to deck it in that delightful greenish hue that attracts the gaze when beheld from a distance—creeping up narrow valleys, or reposing, like an emerald carpet, on the sloping plains. Here Nature looks as if baked in an oven, until she had been thoroughly done too! ”

“ In American thought and speech the term "frontier" has come to mean the edge of settlement, rather than, as in Europe, the political boundary. By 1690 it was already evident that the frontier of settlement and the frontier of military defense were coinciding. As population advanced into the wilderness and thus successively brought new exposed areas between the settlements on the one side and the Indians with their European backers on the other, the military frontier ceased to be thought of as the Atlantic coast, but rather as a moving line bounding the un-won wilderness. ”

“ We have no frontier now, we are told,—except a broken fragment, it may be, here and there in some barren corner of the western lands, where some inhospitable mountain still shoulders us out, or where men are still lacking to break the baked surface of the plains and occupy them in the very teeth of hostile nature. But at first it was all frontier,—a mere strip of settlements stretched precariously upon the sea-edge of the wilds: an untouched continent in front of them, and behind them an unfrequented sea that almost never showed so much as the momentary gleam of a sail. ”

“ One corps, spreading out in broad battalions, marches across the great prairies and winding through the gorges of the Rocky mountains, encamps on the shore of Peaceful sea: another, skirting the waves of the gulfs and fording the wide rivers of the South, plants its outposts on the Rio Grande; a third cuts its way through the trackless forests on the northern border till it strikes the lakes, and then crossing these inland seas or passing round them, pauses and breathes for a season in that great expanse known as the country of the Red River of the North. ”

“ Anyhow, it was Brown who made me realise what tremendously interesting things frontiers are. That imaginary line, and then—people, language, costumes, and customs changing as if a fairy had waved a wand. The frontier between France and Spain is a great wide river—on purpose to give us another bridge. Doesn't the name, "Bidassoa," suggest a broad, flowing current running swiftly to the sea?
This time we would have none of the bridge. It was too much bother paying duty on the car, and having a lot of red tape about getting it back again in an hour or two ”

“ The Paraguay river, here 800 to 1000 yards broad, sags to the eastward, forming a bay or port of still, dead surface, like a little lake, and the bight is land-locked by a natural breakwater, a long green islet upon which cattle graze. ”

“ If you have ever gone, in a single day, from the sunlit orange groves of Pasadena up to the snow-crowned peaks of the Coast Range, you will have as good an idea as I can give you of the journey from the Isonzo up to the Carnia. Down on the Carso the war is being waged under a sky of molten brass and in summer the winds which sweep that arid plateau are like blasts from an open furnace-door. ”

“ This coast is strewn with bones of dead ships; a sand cliff borders the ocean, and every now and then, at some great storm, the sea breaks in through the sand barrier and hurls inland the wreck of a vessel, and in time the shifting sand buries it and perhaps uncovers it again before the eyes of some other generation.
The towns of this wild country border the bay. The back country comes to their very gardens—an impenetrable tract of marsh, heath, and woodland, after that the cruel and encroaching dunes. Back country, dunes, and sea are all of them untamed ”

“ It has proved to be like the horizon, when one is walking towards it; it has never been a real barrier, but always movable, and always a line of strife and conflict. It has been shifting between every mountain range and every broad river between the Gulf of Mexico and the Lake of the Woods, till it has become self-obliterated, and no longer a significant word. Our frontiers, which that boundary line was supposed to limit, have become merged and blurred on the whole of this side of our continent, and have begun to advance inwards from the Pacific coast. ”

“ The Mexican frontier, up to the old Jesuit missions, now abandoned and falling in ruins, forms the skirt of the great prairie of the Rio Gila or of Apacheria, which extends as far as the mournful desert of the Norte. In this portion of the prairie nature expands all that richness of growth and vegetation which may be in vain sought elsewhere. ”

“ At times one might have fancied one’s self on a great river in the interior of a continent, while a few minutes later, in the openings between the islands, the eye could range over miles of water to the mysterious recesses of the yet unexplored Cordillera of Patagonia, with occasional glimpses of snowy peaks at least twice the height of the summits near at hand. About two o’clock we reached the so-named English Narrows, where the only known navigable channel is scarcely a hundred yards in width between two islets bristling with rocks. ”

“ Here three clearly defined ranges diverge from the Ecuadorian frontier and spread northward like the ribs of a fan; the Western and Central Cordilleras merge before reaching the Caribbean Sea, and slope off into foothills and plains near the coast, and the Eastern Cordillera continues in an almost unbroken line until, as the Sierra de Parija, it plunges into the sea at the end of the bleak, forbidding peninsula (Goajira) west of the Gulf of Maracaibo. ”

“ The old frontier conditions have gone. If you want trouble, you must go out to look for it; it no longer comes to you unsought. In a word the broad sea of the wilderness has shrunken to bayous and bays surrounded and intersected by dried areas fit for the cultivation of paper collars and tenderfeet. The frontier still exists, but exists in its isolation only because it is not as commercially desirable as the rest.
This is true of the country at large. It is also true of Pah-sap-pah, the Black Hills. Already a railroad has pushed its way up the main valley. ”

“ The widely-famed Far West is not to be compared with even the tamest portions of Scotland or Wales. You stand upon the prairie, and see the unbroken horizon all round you. You are on a great plain, which is like a sea without water. I am exceedingly fond of wild and lonely scenery, and believe that I have the faculty of being as much impressed by it as any man living. But the prairie fell, by far, short of my preconceived idea. I felt no such emotions as I do in crossing Salisbury Plain. ”

“ I find that it is impossible to make the life clear to citizens, even when they ask me to describe personally something of frontier days, unless they may have been over the Plains in their journeys to and from the Pacific coast. Even then, they look from the windows of the Pullman car on to the desert, white with alkali, over which the heat rises in waves, and upon earth that struggles to give even life to the hardy cactus or sage-brush. ”

“ Far as the eye can reach, and a thousand miles farther, not a mountain. Yonder dark line rising above the plain is but the rocky brow of another plain—a steppe of higher elevation.
Where are we? On what summit are we standing? On the Sierra Blanca, known to the hunter as the “Spanish Peaks.” We are upon the western rim of the Grand Prairie.
Looking eastward, the eye discovers no signs of civilisation. There are none within a month’s journeying. ”

“ The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, fur-trader, miner, cattle-raiser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. ”

“ In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. ”

“ In this treeless region the doors of the Indians’ dismal mud hovels were of stiff, sun-dried, hairy cowhides. As the bare world rose still higher, even these miserable dwellings died out, and only the bleak, brown uplands of the Andes spread about us on every hand.
In mid-morning we topped a great bare puna, from the chilly summit of which the white-crested Central Cordillera stretched like some mighty wall across the entire horizon, the snow-peaks and glaciers thrusting their hoary heads through the less-white banks of clouds. ”

“ The air grew perceptibly cooler as we wound back and forth, always at good speed behind the American engineer, mounting to the upper plateau surrounding the capital, not through mountains but by a vast, steadily rising world. Sometimes long, unmortared stone fences divided the landscape, more often mile after unobstructed mile of slightly undulating brown plain, tinted here and there by maguey, rolled by us into the north. ”

“ Six highways sally forth from the city, to march waveringly across the plain, mere threads lost at last in the enclosing range, broken, gnarled, pitched and tumbled into every manner of shape, bright peaks and valleys standing sharply forth where the sun strikes, great purple-black patches marking the shadows of the clouds. Beyond all else, at times lost in clouds, at others plainly visible, lay the central range of the Cordillera over which we must pass on our journey southward. ”

“ Behold, then, a sterile coastline, beaten by never-ending surf, broken by rocky promontories, bird-covered perhaps, and seal-haunted, whence the distant roar of breaking rollers at times comes seaward, and, inland, a rising, undulating zone of desert and cañon, brown or tawny or purple in its shadows, stretching away mysteriously for perhaps a hundred miles to where it meets the solemn Cordillera, which, grey, faint and serrated, with no form save that of outline—the true test of distance—forms our horizon on the east. ”

“ The oasis, as I now for the first time discovered, was a valley, a broad shallow depression in the desert falling in a gentle slope from the foot of the Cordillera to the sea, whereby its irrigation was greatly facilitated.
“How beautiful Quipai looks, and how like a river!” said Angela. “That is what I always think when I come here—how like a river!”
“Who knows that long ago the valley was not the bed of a river!”
“It must be very long ago, then, before there was any Cordillera. Rain-clouds never cross the Andes, and for untold ages there can have been no rain here on the coast.” ”

“ That was my first glimpse of the interior of a frontier fort, and, although I saw only the little open space lighted by a few waving torches, the memory abides with distinctness. A body of men met us at the gate, dim, indistinct figures, a few among them evidently soldiers from their dress, but the majority clothed in the ordinary garb of the wilderness. Save for one Indian squaw, not a woman was visible, nor did I recognize a familiar face, as the fellows, each man bearing a rifle, surged about us in noisy welcome, eagerly questioning those who had gone forth to our rescue. ”

“ One can climb quickly into the hills from Mayagüez, with a wonderful view of the bay, the half-ruined city, with its old gray-red tile roofs, rare now in Porto Rico, and seas of cane stretching from the coast to the foot-hills, which spring abruptly into mountains, little huts strewn everywhere over their crinkled and warty surface as far as the eye can see. ”

“ On and near the southern frontier is another transverse ridge, in part formed by the Sierra de Lipez, and in part by apparently detached groups of high peaks; it is a waterless desert like the Puna de Atacama. ”

“ As illustrations of the picturesque nomadic life of the frontiersman, these works are unique and unrivaled. They represent vividly the wild romance of the prairies, enchanting barbarism of hunter and trapper life, and the glowing scenery with which the West abounds. ”