The Winning of the West, Volume Four | Page 5

in dispute; and they were quite unable to foresee the
rapidity of the nation's westward growth. Like the people of the eastern
seaboard, the men high in governmental authority were apt to look
upon the frontiersmen with feelings dangerously akin to dislike and
suspicion. Nor were these feelings wholly unjustifiable. The men who
settle in a new country, and begin subduing the wilderness, plunge back
into the very conditions from 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