Frontiersman

“ We see a face sensitive, perhaps sensuous, subtle, passionate, daring, tenacious. Such a man could not bind himself to the task of patient colonization at Fort Frontenac, or even find satisfaction in the more varied and exciting life of a frontiersman and trader. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The white people who inhabited the frontier, from the constant state of warfare in which they lived with the Indians, had imbibed much of their character; and learned to delight so highly in scenes of crafty, bloody, and desperate conflict, that they as often gave as they received the provocation to hostilities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is the spirit of the frontier which is described, and one can by it, perhaps, the better understand why men, and women, too, willingly braved every privation and danger that the westward progress of the star of empire might be the more certain and rapid. ”

“ This region, however, viewed as a frontier, may prove of infinite importance to the United States, inasmuch as it is calculated to serve as a barrier to prevent too great an extension of our population westward, and secure us against the machinations or incursions of an enemy that might otherwise be disposed to annoy us in that part of our frontier. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What we have to consider, therefore, is the fact that a great Power, within the last forty or fifty years, has virtually advanced its old frontier for many hundred miles southwards, rapidly overrunning the country like a tidal wave over sands; absorbing decaying principalities, establishing forts at strategic points, taking possession of inland seas, routes, and river communications, until its frontier posts not only approach our own, but are on the confines of countries with which we are closely associated, and some of which are more or less under our direct influence and control. ”

“ In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.
The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You cannot travel on foot with a mounted escort—it would be dishonourable; and as I have a spare horse, you are welcome to it: on reaching Seminara, or even the frontiers, you can return it with the corporal.—Adieu!" And we parted.
The frontier! distraction! I could scarcely thank the young Frenchman: but memory yet recalls his gallant presence and commanding features—one of the true old noblesse. How different he was from Pepe, Regnier, Massena, and many others; whom the madness and crimes of the Revolution had raised to place and power, from the dregs of the French people. ”

“ It follows that Charlie See was not riding at a run, as frontiersmen do in the movies. It is a great and neglected truth that frontiersmen on the frontier never ride like the frontiersmen in films. And it may be mentioned in passing that frontiersmen on frontiers never do anything at all resembling as to motive, method or result those things which frontiersmen do in films. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, further still, between him and it. Let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting it, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can. ”

“ Defence of the frontier.—The missionaries were highly useful likewise as explorers and as diplomatic agents amongst the tribes. As defenders of the frontier they held the allegiance of the neophytes and secured their aid against savages and foreign intruders. ”

“ The vague and dreamlike mystery of what lay beyond that silent line of low dark hills, the thought of the preparations that might be going on behind it, the feeling that no Frenchman or Englishman could go up to it and live, and most of all, I think, the knowledge that 175across the road on which one stood, and all the other roads and railways that once were thoroughfares between the two countries for all the world to use, a line was now drawn which no man might pass, always seemed to make of the frontier a dreadful symbol of the war and its menace of evil to come. ”

“ I tell you, loyal as I am, humble subject of my King, whom I reverence, I affirm that this blackened, blood-soaked frontier is a barrier to England which she can never, never overcome, and though we win out to-day, and though we hang the rebels thick as pears in Lispenard's orchards, that barrier will remain, year by year fencing us in, crowding us back to the ocean, to our ships, back to the land from whence we English came. ”

“ The critters can fight, and fight well, too, and they're good soldiers; but what's the good of 'em in a frontier post? They know nothing of the country; they can't speak to the people, nor ask no questions, nor find out nothing about what's doing the other side of the river. They air no more than mere machines. What was wanted was two or three battalions of light troops, who would make friends with the country people and larn all that's doing opposite. If the Americans are sharp they'll give us lots of trouble this winter, and you'll find there won't be much sitting quiet for us at Bordentown. ”

“ The oldest member of a family is intrusted with the management of the land; his partner ranks equal with him, and they each receive a double share of the profits. All who are able to bear arms are sworn to the service from their twentieth year. The soldier of the frontier, who is clothed as well as armed and supplied with ammunition by government, finds it his duty not only to watch and protect the frontier, but to preserve peace and order in the interior, and to go on foreign service when required. ”

“ The soldier who had spent a lifetime on the frontier, fighting Indians and dealing with the roughest of his kind, was now more like the head of a great family, a band knitted all the more closely together because they were in a foreign land confronted by a great danger. ”

“ We mark the frontier line.
'But be it east or west,
One common sign we bear,
The tongue may change, the soil, the sky,
But where your British brothers lie,
The lonely cairn, the nameless grave,
Still fringe the flowing Saxon wave. ”

“ I desire, and it is my duty to desire, that my name should protect our frontier more effectually than lines and fortresses—that a single word of mine should be, to the Asiatics, more certain, more inevitable, than death. ”

“ The significance of our frontier has not been recognized except in social science. Fortunately its advance is well marked. The movement of the military frontier is preserved in monuments and military post buildings throughout the west. Court-house corner stones record the advance of law and order, we may say, the legal frontier—its earliest landmarks in the far west in the form of prominent trees, high bridges, 292and projecting beams, being pointed out with modest pride by the early inhabitants as memorials of Judge Lynch and the Vigilantes. ”

“ 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 strength and organisation of a force destined to undertake operations against the transborder clans of the Indian frontier is naturally conditioned by the physical features of the area, by its fertility, and by the numbers, character, organisation, and armament of its inhabitants.
It has been truly said that in war every available man should be employed, for one can never be too strong, but this aphorism is always qualified by the number of men that can be fed in the district which is to form the seat of war. ”

“ 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 has been my privilege to spend my working years on the frontier. I have known and served with commanders like Sherman, Sheridan, Miles, Custer and A.A. Carr—men who would be leaders in any army in any age. I have known and helped to fight with many of the most notable of the Indian warriors.
Frontiersmen good and bad, gunmen as well as inspired prophets of the future, have been my camp companions. Thus, I know the country of which I am about to write as few men now living have known it. ”

“ In other parts of our frontier, that are not the immediate residence and country of Indians, some other species of barrier should be thought of, of which nothing can be more effectual than a barrier colony: but even this cannot be carried ... into execution and effect, without the previous measure of entrepôts in the country between us and the enemy.... All mankind must know, that no body of men, whether as an army, or as an emigration of colonists, can march from one country to another, through an inhospitable wilderness, without magazines ”

“ It is easy enough to see now that regulars are worth little in this frontier warfare, where their manoeuvres count for nothing, and that the provincials should have been left to fight in their own fashion. ”

“ The whole line from Berwick to Carlisle was patrolled by setters and searchers, watchers and overseers, having sleuth-hounds to track the invader; also, many folk held lands by the tenure of cornage, and by blowing horns must warn the land of coming raids. Where the frontier line was a river the fords were carefully guarded; those held unnecessary were staked up; narrow passes were blocked in divers ways, so that chief element in Border craft was the knowledge of paths and passes through moorland and moss, and of nooks and coigns of security deep in the mountain glens. ”

“ You know that the lives of all the people west of the marches depend on this fort. Were it to fall, red axes would be splintering the gates of Velitrium before a horseman could cross the marches. His Majesty, or his Majesty's advisers, have ignored my plea that more troops be sent to hold the frontier. They know nothing of border conditions, and are averse to expending any more money in this direction. The fate of the frontier depends upon the men who now hold it. ”