The Passing of the Frontier | Page 5

to exist
yet for many years. A cattle king of Queensland held at one time sixty
thousand square miles of land. It is said that the average size of pastoral

holdings in the northern territory of Australia is two hundred and
seventy-five thousand acres. Does this not recall the old times of free
range in the American West?
This strange antipodal civilization also retains a curious flavor of
Elizabethan ideas. It does not plan for inordinate fortunes, the continual
amassing of money, but it does deliberately plan for the use by the
individual of his individual life. Australian business hours are shorter
than American. Routine is less general. The individual takes upon
himself a smaller load of effort. He is restive under monotony. He sets
aside a great part of his life for sport. He lives in a large and young day
of the world. Here we may see a remote picture of our own American
West--better, as it seems to me, than that reflected in the rapid and
wholly commercialized development of Western Canada, which is not
flavored by any age but this.
But much of the frontier of Australia is occupied by men of means who
had behind them government aid and a semi-paternal encouragement in
their adventures. The same is true in part of the government-fostered
settlement of Western Canada. It was not so with the American West.
Here was not the place of the rich man but of the poor man, and he had
no one to aid him or encourage him. Perhaps no man ever understood
the American West who did not himself go there and make his living in
that country, as did the men who found it and held it first. Each life on
our old frontier was a personal adventure. The individual had no
government behind him and he lacked even the protection of any law.
Our frontier crawled west from the first seaport settlements, afoot, on
horseback, in barges, or with slow wagon-trains. It crawled across the
Alleghanies, down the great river valleys and up them yet again; and at
last, in days of new transportation, it leaped across divides, from one
river valley to another. Its history, at first so halting, came to be very
swift--so swift that it worked great elisions in its own story.
In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow
country of the West--the high plains and the lower foothills running
from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary. The still more ancient
cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never come into acceptance
as the Old West. Always, when we use these words, we think of buffalo
plains and of Indians, and of their passing before the footmen and riders
who carried the phantom flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from the

Appalachians to the Rockies--before the men who eventually made
good that glorious and vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose
party turned back from the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name
of King George on all the country lying west of them, as far as the
South Sea!
The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to itself
the title of the real and typical frontier of all the world. We call the
spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it was; but even as the
Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact with the Spanish
civilization in Europe, on the high seas, and in both the Americas, so
the last frontier of the American West also was affected, and largely,
deeply, by Spanish influence and Spanish customs. The very
phraseology of range work bears proof of this. Scores of Spanish words
are written indelibly in the language of the Plains. The frontier of the
cow-range never was Saxon alone.
It is a curious fact also, seldom if ever noted, that this Old West of the
Plains was very largely Southern and not Northern on its Saxon side.
No States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and, later,
Missouri--daughters of Old Virginia in her glory--contributed to the
forces of the frontiersmen. Texas, farther to the south, put her stamp
indelibly upon the entire cattle industry of the West. Visionary,
impractical, restless, adventurous, these later Elizabethan
heroes--bowing to no yoke, insisting on their own rights and scorning
often the laws of others, yet careful to retain the best and most
advantageous customs of any conquered country--naturally came from
those nearest Elizabethan countries which lay abandoned behind them.
If the atmosphere of the Elizabethan Age still may be found in the
forgotten Cumberlands, let us lay claim to kinship with yonder
roystering heroes of a gallant day; for this was ever the atmosphere of
our own frontier. To feel again the following breezes of the Golden
Hind,