The Winning of the West, Volume Three | Page 2

and of armed possession; it was held by rifle-bearing
backwoods farmers, hard and tenacious men, who never lightly yielded
what once they had grasped. North and south of the valley lay warlike
and powerful Indian confederacies, now at last thoroughly alarmed and
angered by the white advance; while behind these warrior tribes, urging
them to hostility, and furnishing them the weapons and means
wherewith to fight, stood the representatives of two great European
nations, both bitterly hostile to the new America, and both anxious to
help in every way the red savages who strove to stem the tide of
settlement. The close alliance between the soldiers and diplomatic
agents of polished old-world powers and the wild and squalid warriors
of the wilderness was an alliance against which the American settlers
had always to make head in the course of their long march westward.
The kings and the peoples of the old world ever showed themselves the
inveterate enemies of their blood-kin in the new; they always strove to
delay the time when their own race should rise to wellnigh universal

supremacy. In mere blind selfishness, or in a spirit of jealousy still
blinder, the Europeans refused to regard their kinsmen who had crossed
the ocean to found new realms in new continents as entitled to what
they had won by their own toil and hardihood. They persisted in
treating the bold adventurers who went abroad as having done so
simply for the benefit of the men who stayed at home; and they shaped
their transatlantic policy in accordance with this idea. The Briton and
the Spaniard opposed the American settler precisely as the Frenchman
had done before them, in the interest of their own merchants and
fur-traders. They endeavored in vain to bar him from the solitudes
through which only the Indians roved.
All the ports around the Great Lakes were held by the British;
[Footnote: State Dep. MSS., No. 150, vol. ii., March, 1788. Report of
Secretary Knox.] their officers, military and civil, still kept possession,
administering the government of the scattered French hamlets, and
preserving their old-time relations with the Indian tribes, whom they
continued to treat as allies or feudatories. To the south and west the
Spaniards played the same part. They scornfully refused to heed the
boundary established to the southward by the treaty between England
and the United States, alleging that the former had ceded what it did not
possess. They claimed the land as theirs by right of conquest. The
territory which they controlled stretched from Florida along a vaguely
defined boundary to the Mississippi, up the east bank of the latter at
least to the Chickasaw Bluffs, and thence up the west bank; while the
Creeks and Choctaws were under their influence. The Spaniards
dreaded and hated the Americans even more than did the British, and
they were right; for three fourths of the present territory of the United
States then lay within the limits of the Spanish possessions. [Footnote:
State Dep. MSS., No. 81, vol. ii., pp. 189, 217. No. 120, vol. ii., June
30, 1786.]
Thus there were foes, both white and red, to be overcome, either by
force of arms or by diplomacy, before the northernmost and the
southernmost portions of the wilderness lying on our western border
could be thrown open to settlement. The lands lying between had
already been conquered, and yet were so sparsely settled as to seem
almost vacant. While they offered every advantage of soil and climate
to the farmer and cultivator, they also held out peculiar attractions to

ambitious men of hardy and adventurous temper.
The Rush of Settlers
With the ending of the Revolutionary War the rush of settlers to these
western lauds assumed striking proportions. The peace relieved the
pressure which had hitherto restrained this movement, on the one hand,
while on the other it tended to divert into the new channel of pioneer
work those bold spirits whose spare energies had thus far found an
outlet on stricken fields. To push the frontier westward in the teeth of
the forces of the wilderness was fighting work, such as suited well
enough many a stout soldier who had worn the blue and buff of the
Continental line, or who, with his fellow rough-riders, had followed in
the train of some grim partisan leader.
The people of the New England States and of New York, for the most
part, spread northward and westward within their own boundaries; and
Georgia likewise had room for all her growth within her borders; but in
the States between there was a stir of eager unrest over the tales told of
the beautiful and fertile lands lying along the Ohio, the Cumberland,
and the Tennessee. The days of the early pioneers, of the men who did
the hardest and roughest