Hinterland

“ In the remoter West, the restless, rushing wave of settlement has broken with a shock against the arid plains. The free lands are gone, the continent is crossed, and all this push and energy is turning into channels of agitation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The arrangement of chapters is the same. The first four, treating of the geography, combine as many and accurate details of recent explorers or residents as the proportions of this section will permit. The extra-provincial regions are described from the researches of Russian, English, and Indian travellers of the last twenty years. It is a waste, mountainous territory for the most part and can never support a large population. Great pains have been taken by the cartographer, Jacob Wells, to consult the most authentic charts in the construction of the map of the Empire. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ The East has swept over this colony of the West. And still its generations pass on, rhythmically swinging; slaves of Nature, not, as in the West, rebels against her; cyclical as her seasons and her stars; infinite as her storms of dust ”

“ What do we find has been, and is, the tendency of the peoples of this continent? Does not history show, and do not modern and existing tendencies declare, that the lines of cleavage among them lie along the lines of latitude? Men spread from east to west, and from east to west the political lines, which mean the lines of diversity, extend. The central spaces are, and will be yet more, the great centres of population. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such are some of the varied historical associations, past and present, of the region I shall now endeavour to describe in its physical character only—a region which, with the exception of its western portion, has long been a closed country to the European, and a jealously-guarded barrier against the civilisation of the age. The term of its isolation, however, is doomed; the time of its freedom draws nigh. For the force of Western civilisation is irresistible. Through it the enlightenment of the age must soon shed its lustre upon these benighted regions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Out of the West, from which we had had only sheep and cattle, there were coming men destined to be [285] leaders in the affairs of the country. As men had risen from the ranks to guide the destinies of the Colonies, so men appeared from the West to shape this new America.
They came from a world where land was king. It was a boundless territory. A large section of it, which was once marked on the map as the Great American Desert, had been left untouched, a dead possession and a problem to the government, who did not know what use to make of it until the homesteaders pushed west. ”

“ I have seen too many evidences of wealth, natural and acquired, to doubt of the greatness of the future which is opening in the Far West to the citizens of the Republic; but I also have witnessed, even from the windows of a railway train, sufficient to make me aware of the great struggles which must be made by pioneers, and by the early colonists and settlers in 223 these distant regions, before the conditions of civilised life be fulfilled. ”

“ Protection for the manufacturing North at the expense of the agricultural South—an old storm centre! Territorial Rights—once a speck in the west, not so large as a man's hand, and now beneath it, the wrangling and darkened land! ”

“ The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. The English authorities would have checked settlement at the headwaters of the Atlantic tributaries and allowed the "savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet lest the peltry trade should decrease." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ She is separated from every other foreign country and joined to every other part of the British Empire by the sea alone. Her land frontier is long and has given cause for much dispute in times of crisis. ”

“ The West, save where special interests centre (as in those pockets of silver where men’s eyes catch as it were an eager gleam from the very ore itself) : the West is in less danger of sectionalization. Who shall say in that wide country where one region ends and another begins, or, in that free and changing society, where one class ends and another begins? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It soon became apparent to the meanest capacity, that, while nature had placed a barrier of desert to the extension of our population in the west, the measure had made us the masters of a belt of fertile country, which, in the revolutions of the day, might have become the property of a rival nation. ”

“ Within this vast empire there are geographic provinces, separate in physical conditions, into which American colonization has flowed, and in each of which a special society has developed, with an economic, political and social life of its own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When we endeavour to ascertain the probable date of the first invention of the operation in the East, the fog of uncertainty closes down over us, obliterates all trace of our quest, and drives us to fall back on inference. Those who have spent their lives in an Eastern land know the unbending force of tradition, the hereditary character of occupations, and the intense conservatism of Oriental peoples. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the valley of the North Red River shall be settled, and splendid harvest fields adorn its banks; when great factories take the place of wind-mills, and when railroads shall take the place of Red River carts, then we will have new cause to exclaim,
"Westward the course of empire takes its way!"
LETTER XI. THE TRUE PIONEER. Energy of the pioneer— Frontier life— Spirit of emigration— Advantages to the farmer in moving West— Advice in regard to making preemption claims— Abstract of the preemption law— Hints to the settler— Character and services of the pioneer. ”

“ Alas! too often those principles which give consistency, individuality, and form to the Northern character, which render it stanch, strong, and seaworthy, which bind it together as with iron, are sucked out, one by one, like the bolts of the ill-fated vessel, and from the miserable loosened fragments is formed that human anomaly, a Northern man with Southern principles. Sir, no such man can speak for the North. ”

“ The boarding-houses were corralling the easy dollars of the gamesome lawmakers. The greatest state in the West, an empire in area and resources, had arisen and repudiated the old libel of barbarism, lawbreaking, and bloodshed. Order reigned within her borders. Life and property were as safe there, sir, as anywhere among the corrupt cities of the effete East. ”

“ Indeed, how could we look for any such organism where small settlements were separated from each other by long spaces and bad roads, and where single cabins were so completely isolated, as in the New England and the Middle and Southern States a century and a half ago, or as in the earlier settled States of the West seventy years ago, or as in the newly-settled States of the West within the present generation, or as on the frontier proper to-day? ”

“ Our vast and relatively undiversified territory has brought men of the coast, the mountains, and the plains; of the rugged North and the languorous South, into closer and more constant contact than ever before. And to this unparalleled interplay we have welcomed myriads from every other climate and condition on the earth, and have set up for the whole theories of government which allow almost perfect freedom to all racial, local, and individual traits. ”

“ The busy minds of the Northern people were constantly more and more given to trade and traffic, while those of the South turned to the enjoyment of a home life; freed from restraint and care, they practiced the amenities of social life, with honor, truth, and charity to all. ”

“ Northern capital has generously outstretched a friendly hand, and poured its wealth into the empty coffers, and given the means of general rehabilitation; and the awakened South has brains to plan, and pluck and energy to carry on its noble campaign, while the world looks on with silent respect and expectation for the days that are to come. ”

“ If we turn to the Northern border, where we are about to celebrate a century of peace with England, we see in progress, like a belated procession of our own history the spread of pioneers, the opening of new wildernesses, the building of new cities, the growth of a new and mighty nation. ”

“ In the Hinter-land there is dense ignorance of the achievements and even of the names of most of those who are recognized as authorities in their several sciences. They are as unknown as is the Lord Mayor of London to the natives on the banks of the Zambesi. The heroes of the Hinter-land are the bold explorers who in militant fashion have made their way into regions as yet unsubdued. ”

“ Why, who are the laboring people of the North? They are the whole North. They are the people who till their own farms with their own hands; freeholders, educated men, independent men. Let me say, Sir, that five sixths of the whole property of the North is in the hands of the laborers of the North; they cultivate their farms, they educate their children, they provide the means of independence. ”