“It was well known, however, that the trans-Alleghany region, whatever might be its economic features, was dangerous ground. The Indians themselves could not occupy it, for it had been for ages the common battle-ground of opposing tribes. Any savage met within its confines was sure to be on the war-path against any and all comers. He that entered took his life in his hand.
“Thus the chances of success in any westward movement were in favor of New York and New England, and against Pennsylvania. Yet it was the latter that did the work. Central and western New York remained a wilderness until Missouri was settling with Americans. New England took little or no part in Western affairs until, the West having been won, Massachusetts and Connecticut, calmly overstepping New York and Pennsylvania, laid thrifty hand upon the public domain north of Pittsburg and west to the Mississippi.
“We have seen that the West was actually entered by the most difficult and hostile route, and this in spite of political and economic reasons for choosing a more northerly and easier line of advance. I do not remember that this has ever before been pointed out; but it is a fact of deep significance, for it determined what should be the temper of the great West, and what should be its course of development.
“The wedge of settlement was driven through the heart of the Alleghanies because there dwelt at the foot of the mountains a people more aggressive, more daring, and more independent than the tidewater stock. This people acted on its own initiative, not only without government aid, but sometimes in defiance of government. It won to the American flag not only the central West, but the Northwest and Southwest as well; and it was, for the most part, the lineal descendants of these men that first, of Americans, explored the far West, and subdued it for future settlement.
“This explains why Missouri, rather than the northern tier of new states, became in its turn the vanguard and outpost of civilization, as Kentucky and Tennessee had been before her, and Virginia and Pennsylvania before them. It explains why, when mountain and forest barriers had been left behind, and the vast Western plain offered countless parallel routes of travel to the Rockies, such routes were not used, but all the great transcontinental trails, whether to Santa Fé, California, or Oregon, focused for half a century at St. Louis or Independence. It explains why the majority of our famous scouts and explorers and Indian fighters were men whose strain went back to the Shenandoah valley or the Yadkin, and why most of them could trace their descent still farther back to Pennsylvania, mother of Western pioneers.”
There is much that is convincing in this study of facts and motives; yet perhaps the gentler and broader view is not that of personnel but of geography. I myself am more disposed to believe that St. Louis became great by reason of her situation on the great interior pathways of the waters; though all this may be said with no jot of abatement in admiration for the magnificent daring and determination of those men of the lower slopes of the Appalachians who, as history shows simply and unmistakably, were really the pioneers of the eastern, the middle and the most western portions of the splendid empire of the West. Let us reserve for a later chapter the more specific study of this typical adventurer and his origin, and pass for the present to the general consideration of the figure that we may call the American west-bound man.
We must remember that there had been two or three full American generations to produce him, this man that first dared turn away from the seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the sun, toward the dark and mysterious mountains and forests, which then encompassed the least remote land fairly to be called the West. Two generations had produced a man different from the Old-World type. Free air and good food had given him abundant brawn. He was tall, with Anak in his frame. Little fat cloyed the free play of his muscles, and there belonged to him the heritage of the courage that comes of good heart and lungs. He was a splendid man to have for an ancestor, this tall and florid athlete that never heard of athletics. His face was thin and aquiline, his look high and confident, his eye blue, his speech reserved. You may see this same man yet in those restricted parts of this country which remain fit to be called American. You may see him sometimes in the mountains of Tennessee, the brakes of Arkansas or Missouri, where the old strain has remained most pure. You might have seen him over all the West in the generation preceding our own.
In time this early outbound man learned that there were rivers that ran, not to the southwest and into the sea, but outward, beyond the mountains and toward the setting sun. The winding trails of the Alleghanies led one finally to rivers that ran toward Kentucky, Tennessee, even farther out into that unknown, tempting land which still was called the West. Thus it came that the American genius broke entirely away from salt-water traditions, asked no longer “What cheer?” from the ships that came from across the seas, clung no longer to the customs, the costumes, the precedents or standards of the past.
There came the day of buckskin and woolsey, of rifle and ax, of men curious for adventures, of homes built of logs and slabs, with puncheons for floors, with little fields about them, and tiny paths that led out into the immeasurable preserves of the primeval forests. A few things held intrinsic value at that time—powder, lead, salt, maize, cow-bells, women that dared. It was a simple but not an ill ancestry, this that turned away from the sea-coast forever and began the making of another world. It was the strong-limbed, the bold-hearted that traveled, the weak that stayed at home.