The Winning of the West, Volume Four | Page 5

which the race has raised itself by the slow toil of ages.
Inevitable Shortcomings of the Frontiersmen.
The conditions cannot but tell upon them. Inevitably, and for more than one lifetime--perhaps for several generations--they tend to retrograde, instead of advancing. They drop away from the standard which highly civilized nations have reached. As with harsh and dangerous labor they bring the new land up towards the level of the old, they themselves partly revert to their ancestral conditions; they sink back towards the state of their ages-dead barbarian forefathers. Few observers can see beyond this temporary retrogression into the future for which it is a preparation. There is small cause for wonder in the fact that so many of the leaders of Eastern thought looked with coldness upon the effort of the Westerners to push north of the Ohio.
The Westerners Solved the Problem.
Yet it was these Western frontiersmen who were the real and vital factors in the solution of the problems which so annoyed the British Monarchy and the American Republic. They eagerly craved the Indian lands; they would not be denied entrance to the thinly-peopled territory wherein they intended to make homes for themselves and their children. Rough, masterful, lawless, they were neither daunted by the prowess of the red warriors whose wrath they braved, nor awed by the displeasure of the Government whose solemn engagements they violated. The enormous extent of the frontier dividing the white settler from the savage, and the tangled inaccessibility of the country in which it everywhere lay, rendered it as difficult for the national authorities to control the frontiersmen as it was to chastise the Indians.
Why the East backed the West.
If the separation of interests between the thickly settled East and the sparsely settled West had been complete it may be that the East would have refused outright to support the West, in which case the advance would have been very slow and halting. But the separation was not complete. The frontiersmen were numerically important in some of the States, as in Virginia, Georgia, and even Pennsylvania and New York; and under a democratic system of government this meant that these States were more or less responsive to their demands. It was greatly to the interest of the frontiersmen that their demands should be gratified, while other citizens had no very concrete concern in the matter one way or the other. In addition to this, and even more important, was the fact that there were large classes of the population everywhere who felt much sense of identity with the frontiersmen, and sympathized with them. The fathers or grandfathers of these peoples had themselves been frontiersmen, and they were still under the influences of the traditions which told of a constant march westward through the vast forests, and a no less constant warfare with a hostile savagery. Moreover, in many of the communities there were people whose kinsmen or friends had gone to the border; and the welfare of these adventurers was a matter of more or less interest to those who had stayed behind. Finally, and most important of all, though the nation might be lukewarm originally, and might wish to prevent the settlers from trespassing on the Indian lands or entering into an Indian war, yet when the war had become of real moment and when victory was doubtful, the national power was sure to be used in favor of the hard-pressed pioneers.
The Government Ultimately supports the Frontiersmen.
At first the authorities at the national capital would blame the whites, and try to temporize and make new treaties, or even threaten to drive back the settlers with a strong hand; but when the ravages of the Indians had become serious, when the bloody details were sent to homes in every part of the Union by letter after letter from the border, when the little newspapers began to publish accounts of the worst atrocities, when the county lieutenants of the frontier counties were clamoring for help, when the Congressmen from the frontier districts were appealing to Congress, and the governors of the States whose frontiers were molested were appealing to the President--then the feeling of race and national kinship rose, and the Government no longer hesitated to support in every way the hard-pressed wilderness vanguard of the American people.
The Situation in 1791.
The situation had reached this point by the year 1791. For seven years the Federal authorities had been vainly endeavoring to make some final settlement of the question by entering into treaties with the Northwestern and Southwestern tribes. In the earlier treaties the delegates from the Continental Congress asserted that the United States were invested with the fee of all the land claimed by the Indians. In the later treaties the Indian proprietorship of the lands was conceded. [Footnote: American State Papers, Vol. IV., Indian