The Winning of the West, Volume One | Page 5

it has been bitterly antagonized, not only by the short-sighted and the timid, but even by many who were neither one nor the other. There were many men who opposed the movement west of the Alleghanies and the peopling of the lands which now form Kentucky, Tennessee, and the great States lying between the Ohio and the Lakes. Excellent persons then foretold ruin to the country from bringing into it a disorderly population of backwoodsmen, with the same solemnity that has in our own day marked the prophecies of those who have seen similar ruin in the intaking of Hawaii and Porto Rico. The annexation of Louisiana, including the entire territory between the northern Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean, aroused such frantic opposition in the old-settled regions of the country, and especially in the Northeast, as to call forth threats of disunion, the language used by the opponents of our expansion into the Far West being as violent as that sometimes used in denouncing our acquisition of the Philippines. The taking of Texas and of California was complicated by the slave question, but much of the opposition to both was simply the general opposition to expansion--that is, to national growth and national greatness. In our long-settled communities there have always been people who opposed every war which marked the advance of American civilization at the cost of savagery. The opposition was fundamentally the same, whether these wars were campaigns in the old West against the Shawnees and the Miamis, in the new West against the Sioux and the Apaches, or in Luzon against the Tagals. In each case, in the end, the believers in the historic American policy of expansion have triumphed. Hitherto America has gone steadily forward along the path of greatness, and has remained true to the policy of her early leaders who felt within them the lift towards mighty things. Like every really strong people, ours is stirred by the generous ardor for daring strife and mighty deeds, and now with eyes undimmed looks far into the misty future.
At bottom the question of expansion in 1898 was but a variant of the problem we had to solve at every stage of the great western movement. Whether the prize of the moment was Louisiana or Florida, Oregon or Alaska, mattered little. The same forces, the same types of men, stood for and against the cause of national growth, of national greatness, at the end of the century as at the beginning.
My non-literary work has been so engrossing during the years that have elapsed since my fourth volume was published, that I have been unable to go on with "The Winning of the West"; but my design is to continue the narrative as soon as I can get leisure, carrying it through the stages which marked the taking of Florida and Oregon, the upbuilding of the republic of Texas, and the acquisition of New Mexico and California as the result of the Mexican war.
Theodore Roosevelt
EXECUTIVE CHAMBER, ALBANY, N. Y. January 1, 1900.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER
I.--THE SPREAD OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES
II.--THE FRENCH OF THE OHIO VALLEY, 1763-1775
III.--THE APPALACHIAN CONFEDERACIES, 1765-1775
IV.--THE ALGONQUINS OF THE NORTHWEST, 1769-1774
V.--THE BACKWOODSMEN OF THE ALLEGHANIES, 1769-1774
VI.--BOON AND THE LONG HUNTERS; AND THEIR HUNTING IN NO-MAN'S-LAND, 1769-1774
VII.--SEVIER, ROBERTSON, AND THE WATAUGA COMMONWEALTH, 1769-1774
VIII.--LORD DUNMORE'S WAR, 1774
IX.--THE BATTLE OF THE GREAT KANAWHA; AND LOGAN'S SPEECH, 1774
X.--BOON AND THE SETTLEMENT OF KENTUCKY, 1775
XI.--IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION--THE SOUTHERN BACKWOODSMEN OVERWHELM THE CHEROKEES, 1776
XII.--GROWTH AND CIVIL ORGANIZATION OF KENTUCKY, 1776
APPENDICES: APPENDIX A--TO
CHAPTER IV
. APPENDIX B--TO
CHAPTER V
. APPENDIX C--TO
CHAPTER VI
. APPENDIX D--TO
CHAPTER VI
. APPENDIX E--TO
CHAPTER VII
. APPENDIX F--TO
CHAPTER IX
.
[Illustration: Map. The West during the Revolution. Showing Hamilton's route from Detroit to Vincennes; Clark's route from Redstone to the Illinois, and thence to Vincennes; Boon's trail, on the Wilderness Road to Kentucky; Robertson's trail to the settlement he founded on the Cumberland; the water route from the Watauga to Nashboro, that taken by the _Adventure_; the march of the backwoodsmen from the Sycamore Shoals to King's Mountain. The flags denote the battles of the Great Kanawha, the Blue Licks, the Island Flats of the Holston, and King's Mountain; and the assaults on Boonsboro and Vincennes. Based on a map by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London.]

THE WINNING OF THE WEST.

CHAPTER I
.
THE SPREAD OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES.
During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world's history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance.
The tongue which Bacon feared to use in his writings, lest they should remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimportant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two continents. The Common Law which Coke jealously upheld in the southern half