Frontage

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They saw what every Westerner sees to-day,—illimitable reaches of prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon. They saw a land waiting for its people, wealth waiting for possessors, an empire waiting for the nation builders. ”

“ A march it was of military speed,
And Earth did change her images and forms
Before us, fast as clouds are changed in heaven.
Day after day, up early and down late,
From hill to vale we dropped, from vale to hill
Mounted—from province on to province swept,
Keen hunters in a chase of fourteen weeks,
Eager as birds of prey, or as a ship
Upon the stretch, when winds are blowing fair:
Sweet coverts did we cross of pastoral life,
Enticing valleys, greeted them and left
Too soon, while yet the very flash and gleam
Of salutation were not passed away. ”

“ CHAPTER XI OLD FORT DEARBORN It makes my old head dizzy to recall the events of that hour across the years that have intervened. Possibly I, as I write these words, am the only person living who has looked upon that old stockade and taken part in its tragic history. What a marvellous change has less than a century witnessed! Once the outermost guard of our western frontier, it is now the site of one of the great cities of two continents. ”

“ As a frontiersman, I, myself, may not care to again experience what I have passed through, yet, with all its perils and dangers I would not give my pioneer days in the West for all the balance of my life. ”

“ Our frontier-men, although brave in council and action, and possessing an intelligence that quickens in the face of danger, are apt to feel shy of the pen. They shun the atmosphere of the student's closet; their sphere is in the free and open wilderness. ”

“ Here in the West you are near the centre of a vast empire, you feel its mighty pulse, the throb and heartbeat of its immense and growing strength. Some of you have seen this great civilization actually grow on the vacant prairies, in the unoccupied wilderness, on the sandy shores of the inland seas. ”

“ Last night ye had struck at a Border thief— tonight 'tis a man of the Guides!” Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth! ”

“ For without again touching on the question—do they, or do they not, vary from each other in point of time by twenty-three and by thirty years—it will be admitted by everybody that, at any rate, the three events stand equally upon the frontier line of authentic history. A frontier or debateable land is always of some breadth. ”

“ In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. ”

“ Yet everybody knew all the time that there was nothing in the world that concerned us so closely. If France had been massing troops on your frontier you would at once have asked her to state her intentions, or even possibly have taken action without asking her. Well, the sea is our frontier. ”

“ But he knew from long experience that on the frontier—the ragged edge of civilization—where life is wild and strenuous, only strong men could succeed; men sound in limb, keen in intellect, and thoroughly consecrated to the Master's cause. ”

“ As the country was growing by the expansive drive of which the frontier was the cutting edge, it was also growing up, both behind and on the frontier. The process of maturing is as significant as that of expanding. ”

“ All the stages of social development went on under the eye of the traveler as he passed from the frontier towards the east. Such were the forces which were steadily pushing their way into the American wilderness, as they had pushed for generations. ”

“ In tracing the fluctuations of the frontier of the Eastern Empire from the beginning of the ninth century, we are struck by the wonderful power of revival and reconquest which is shown throughout the whole history. ”

“ We grew along up, in that plodding and peaceful region, and got to be good-sized boys and girls—big enough, in fact, to begin to know as much about the wars raging perpetually to the west and north of us as our elders, and also to feel as stirred up over the occasional news from these red fields as they did. ”

“ Our fathers' communities were a slender chain of frontier settlements, separated from an ancient civilization by an unknown and dangerous sea on the one hand, menaced by all the perils of a virgin wilderness upon the other. ”

“ The nations rise and pass. The empires flutter westwards and are gone.⁠ ⁠... The sun grows older and the stars turn pale.⁠ ⁠... Winds shift the line of the horizons, and our River moves its bed. But we, everlasting and unchangeable, remain. ”

“ It is easy, then, to picture successive hordes of dusky wanderers pouring over from the old, old East upon the virgin soil of what was then emphatically a new world, since no human beings roamed its vast plains or traversed its stately forests. ”

“ 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. ”

“ English frontiersmen and traders, though they had no advancing military posts behind them, were none the less quick to go themselves deep into the shadowed wilderness, there to meet the French face to face in their own haunts. ”

“ Leaving the brown pastures of the moorlands, we descended into an open and cultivated country, and soon found ourselves upon the great military road which connects all the north country with the capital. ”

“ We had arrived at Landrecies, near enough the Frontier to excite us.
I wonder if you realise at home what the Frontier meant to us at first? We conceived it as a thing guarded everywhere by intermittent patrols of men staring carefully towards Germany and Belgium in the darkness, a thing to be defended at all costs, at all times, to be crossed with triumph and recrossed with shame. ”

“ In this connection it is interesting to note that in the wilds of our north one may still see the following stages of frontier life as they exist side by side, sometimes overlapping and crosscutting one another. ”

“ These frontier folk, the people of the up-country, or back-country, who lived near and among the forest-clad mountains, far away from the long-settled districts of flat coast plain and sluggish tidal river, were known to themselves and to others as backwoodsmen. ”

“ From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. ”

“ Neither rivers, deserts, nor mountains far higher than those in Europe, arrested her people. They built grand cities, they drew their fleets, as in a twinkling of the eye, from the very forests. A handful of men conquered empires. ”

“ Tracing the growth of the border is a pleasant pastime, a game of history in which amorini, grotesques and nymphs are the personages, and garlands of flowers their perpetual accessories, but first comes the time when there were no borders, the Middle Ages. ”

“ The foregoing volumes are of course but a few among the many scores or hundreds which will have been read avidly by every man concerned with frontier life or with the expansion of the American people to the West. ”

“ I followed his advice in regard to these stories, and, after brushing away the cobwebs from many a forgotten volume, have been able to give you the accurate histories of several important frontiersmen and heroes of the border. These tales are all true and are vouched for by early historians. All that I hope is that I have served them up to you in a manner that is interesting and is not dull. ”

“ The term frontier today would be a misnomer. There is no frontier. The immense areas of wild and waste country that then existed has vanished before the tide of civilization and settlement. The present generation can never realize the vast changes. ”

“ But they all knew that it would be difficult indeed to find a place in any one of those five provinces, where a march could be made for so great a distance, without encountering some signs of humanity, past, if not present. ”

“ The rough and crude form of frontier life reacted upon the entire people, and left an imprint which many generations will not entirely eradicate. As long as the frontier remained there was continual contact with the new and primitive. ”

“ The character of the Western frontiersman is often a singular accumulation of such strata,—the training and beliefs of his earliest days overlain by successions of unrelated and violent experiences, like geological deposits. ”

“ THIS is a tale of the adventurous and rugged pioneers, who, unconquered by other foes, were ever at war with the ancient wilderness, pushing the northern frontier of the white man farther and farther to the west. ”

“ A sparhawk in the rain, breast torn away,
His beating heart in view, his burning eyes!
“But everyone will see, the North will see,
Our cause was theirs, the South’s cause was the cause
Of everyone both north and south. They’ll see
Their liberties not long survive our own. ”

“ In the scene which followed that of the agricultural or pastoral people, I saw a great extent of cultivated plains, large cities on the sea-shore, palaces—forums and temples ornamenting them; men associated in groups, mounted on horses, and performing military exercises; galleys moved by oars on the ocean; roads intersecting the country covered with travellers and containing carriages moved by men or horses. ”

“ If I believed in omens, I should know that your successful work will be out on the frontier,—in the West, whence comes, after this dreary day, such a beautiful light, which suggests, I hope, the fame and glory you are to win there. ”

“ You will be sure to find a guide, some good fellow who will see you across the frontier; then you must avoid all the villages, only travel at nighty and as you have the happiness to be unknown, you can reach your ’papa's' house unperceived. ”

“ The great drawback to these frontiers, and one which will, I fear, exist for some time, unless the citizens of the towns take the law into their own hands, and execute it in a summary manner, is to be found in the presence of certain idle ruffians who exist here. ”

“ The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer bought than those of war. ”

“ Oh, the frontier is only the difference between two ways of looking at things. ”

“ No frontier picture is more familiar or more pleasing than that of the farmer's boy sitting or lying on the floor during the long winter evening industriously tracing by firelight or by candlelight the proverb or quotation assigned him as an exercise in penmanship, or wrestling with the intricacies of least common denominators and highest common divisors. ”