[5] The Century Magazine; Continued.

CHAPTER VII
ORIGIN OF THE PIONEER

“If we call the roll of American scouts, explorers, trappers, Indian fighters of the Far West; of men like John Colter, Robert McClellan, John Day, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, Joe Meek, Kit Carson and their ilk, who trapped and fought over every nook and cranny of the Far West, from the Canadian divide to the ‘starving Gila,’ we shall find that most of them were of the old Shenandoah-Kentucky stock that made the first devious trail from Pennsylvania along and across the Appalachians.”

This statement of a well-advised writer is curious and interesting to any student of the real West. It applies, also, of course, and much more closely, to those earlier pioneers that explored the first West, that of the Mississippi valley; the Boones, Kentons, Harrods, Finleys, Bryans, Stuarts and hundreds of others of the fighting breed of Virginia and North Carolina, the families of nearly all of whom had made one or more pilgrimages to the south or even to the southeastward before the great trek westward over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies.

America owes much of her national character and a vast part of her national territory to the individual initiative of these bold souls, who waited for no policies, no purchases, no leaderships, but pressed on, rifle and ax at hand, to find and hold our West for us. To-day we forget these men. The names of the captains of enterprise are lost in the tawdry modern lists of our so-called captains of industry. To-day, in a time that is fast becoming one of American serfdom, we lose in the haze of a national carelessness the figures of that earlier and more glorious day when the magnificent American West offered free scope and opportunity to a population wholly made up of men of daring, of individuality, of initiative, of self-leadership.

That was the day of the founding of the American aristocracy, of the birth of the American type, of the beginning of the American character. If we would study an actual American history, we can not leave out the American pioneer; and before, in our humble effort to approach the real genius of our America, we follow the strong sweep of the west-bound beyond the mighty Mississippi and toward the western sea, we shall do best to pause for a space and to make some inquiry into the origin and character of these early apostles of the creed of adventure.

If we ask chapter and verse in the study of the origin of this American frontiersman, this pioneer whose ambition was an indisputable personal independence, we shall not find the details of his ancestry among the records of wealthy and aristocratic dwellers of the seaboard region. The bone and brawn of the early frontier did not come from the Cavaliers, properly so-called; though it were doing the Cavaliers, the aristocrats, an injustice to say that they were deaf to the summons of adventure.

The man that dared life and fortune in moving to America would dare life and fortune west of the Alleghanies; and the history of many a colony and land grant in the early West is proof enough of this. The Cavalier or aristocrat, however, was not our typical axman or rifleman. The man of accomplished fortune, of stable social connections, dwelt farther back in that East that offered the most settled society of the American continent. The man in linsey-woolsey, the woodsman, the rifleman, was the man at the front, and it is in regard to his origin that we may profitably be somewhat curious. We shall, therefore, for a time be more concerned with the mountains of Pennsylvania than with the shores of Chesapeake Bay or the rich valleys of Maryland and the Old Dominion.