The Passing of the Frontier | Page 4

have built the world for
those more timid. Adventure and the frontier are one and inseparable.
They suggest strength, courage, hardihood--qualities beloved in men
since the world began--qualities which are the very soul of the United
States, itself an experiment, an adventure, a risk accepted. Take away
all our history of political regimes, the story of the rise and fall of this
or that partisan aggregation in our government; take away our
somewhat inglorious military past; but leave us forever the tradition of
the American frontier! There lies our comfort and our pride. There we
never have failed. There, indeed, we always realized our ambitions.
There, indeed, we were efficient, before that hateful phrase was known.
There we were a melting-pot for character, before we came to know
that odious appellation which classifies us as the melting-pot of the
nations.
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.
It was not the conservative and tender man who made our history; it
was the man sometimes illiterate, oftentimes uncultured, the man of
coarse garb and rude weapons. But the frontiersmen were the true
dreamers of the nation. They really were the possessors of a national
vision. Not statesmen but riflemen and riders made America. The
noblest conclusions of American history still rest upon premises which
they laid.
But, in its broadest significance, the frontier knows no country. It lies
also in other lands and in other times than our own. When and what
was the Great Frontier? We need go back only to the time of Drake and
the sea-dogs, the Elizabethan Age, when all North America was a
frontier, almost wholly unknown, compellingly alluring to all bold men.
That was the day of new stirrings in the human heart. Some strange
impulse seemed to act upon the soul of the braver and bolder
Europeans; and they moved westward, nor could have helped that had
they tried. They lived largely and blithely, and died handsomely, those
old Elizabethan adventurers, and they lie today in thousands of
unrecorded graves upon two continents, each having found out that any
place is good enough for a man to die upon, provided that he be a man.
The American frontier was Elizabethan in its quality--childlike, simple,

and savage. It has not entirely passed; for both Elizabethan folk and
Elizabethan customs are yet to be found in the United States. While the
half-savage civilization of the farther West was roaring on its way
across the continent--while the day of the keelboatman and the
plainsman, of the Indian-fighter and the miner, even the day of the
cowboy, was dawning and setting--there still was a frontier left far
behind in the East, near the top of the mountain range which made the
first great barrier across our pathway to the West. That frontier, the
frontier of Boone and Kenton, of Robertson and Sevier, still exists and
may be seen in the Cumberland--the only remaining part of America
which is all American. There we may find trace of the Elizabethan
Age--idioms lost from English literature and American speech long ago.
There we may see the American home life as it went on more than a
hundred years ago. We may see hanging on the wall the long
muzzle-loading rifle of an earlier day. We may see the spinning-wheel
and the loom. The women still make in part the clothing for their
families, and the men still make their own household furniture, their
own farming implements, their own boots.
This overhanging frontier of America is a true survival of the days of
Drake as well as of the days of Boone. The people are at once godly
and savage. They breed freely; they love their homes; they are ever
ready for adventure; they are frugal, abstemious, but violent and strong.
They carry on still the half-religious blood feuds of the old Scotch
Highlands or the North of Ireland, whence they came. They reverence
good women. They care little for material accumulations. They believe
in personal ease and personal independence. With them life goes on not
in the slow monotony of reiterated performance, but in ragged profile,
with large exertions followed by large repose. Now that has been the
fashion of the frontier in every age and every land of all the world. And
so, by studying these people, we may even yet arrive at a just and
comprehensive notion of what we might call the "feel" of the old
frontier.
There exists, too, yet another Saxon frontier in a far-off portion of the
world. In that strange country, Australia, tremendous unknown regions
still remain, and the wild pastoral life of such regions bids fair