"I appreciate very deeply the trouble you have taken in writing to me; although in a way your letter has made me feel very melancholy. My idea of the questions at issue has been mainly derived from the 'Spectator,' a paper that I take and always like, and which impresses me as being honestly desirous of getting at the true facts in any given case. I paid especial heed to what it said because of its entire disapproval of Cecil Rhodes and the capitalist gang. Moreover, a friend of mine, Ferdinand Becker, who was in the Transvaal and who saw very clearly the rights and wrongs of each side, and for whose judgment I have great respect, insists that as things actually were the war was inevitable, that there had to be a fight, and that one or the other race had to be supreme in South Africa. By the way, much of the pro-Boer feeling here is really anti-English, and as I have a very warm remembrance of England's attitude to us two years ago, I have of course no sympathy with such manifestations. So I thought after Montague White's visit to me that I should like to hear the other side from someone whom I could thoroughly trust, and I appealed to you. It is largely an academic curiosity on my part, so to speak, for the answer of the English Premier to the communication of transmissal sent by President McKinley with the letters from the Presidents of the two Republics shows that any mediation would be promptly rejected. I do not suppose that the end can be very far distant now, unless there is a formidable uprising in the Cape Colony, for it would look as if there had never been fifty thousand Boers under arms, and Roberts has four times that number of troops in South Africa. Evidently the Boers are most gallant fighters, and quite as efficient as they are gallant.
"I had been inclined to look at the war as analogous to the struggles which put the Americans in possession of Texas, New Mexico, and California. I suppose the technical rights are about the same in one case as in the other; but, of course, there is an enormous difference in the quality of the invading people; for the Boers have shown that they have no kinship with the Mexicans. In Texas the Americans first went in to settle and become citizens, making an Outlander population. This Outlander population then rose, and was helped by raids from the United States, which in point of morality did not differ in the least from the Jameson raid—although there was at back of them no capitalist intrigue, but simply a love of adventure and a feeling of arrogant and domineering race-superiority. The Americans at last succeeded in wresting Texas from the Mexicans and making it an independent Republic. This Republic tried to conquer New Mexico but failed. Then we annexed it, made its quarrels our own, and did conquer both New Mexico and California. In the case of Texas there was the dark blot of slavery which rested on the victors; for they turned Texas from a free province into a slave republic. Nevertheless, it was of course ultimately to the great advantage of civilization that the Anglo-American should supplant the Indo-Spaniard. It has been ultimately to the advantage of the Indo-Spaniard himself, or at any rate to the advantage of the best men in his ranks. In my regiment, which was raised in the South-West, I had forty or fifty men of part Indian blood and perhaps half as many of part Spanish blood, and among my captains was one of the former and one of the latter—both being as good Americans in every sense of the word as were to be found in our ranks.
"If the two races, Dutch and English, are not riven asunder by too intense antagonism, surely they ought to amalgamate in South Africa as they have done here in North America, where I and all my fellows of Dutch blood are now mixed with and are indistinguishable from our fellow Americans, not only of English, but of German, Scandinavian, and other ancestry.
"The doubtful, and to my mind the most melancholy, element in the problem is what you bring out about the Englishman no longer colonizing in the way that the Boer does. This is a feature due, I suppose, to the enormous development of urban life and the radical revolution in the social and industrial conditions of the English-speaking peoples during the past century. In our Pacific States, and even more in Australia, we see the same tendency to the foundation of enormous cities instead of the settlement of the country districts by pioneer farmers. Luckily, America north of the Rio Grande and Australia definitely belong to our peoples already, and there is enough of the pastoral and farming element among us to colonize the already thinly-settled waste places which now belong to our people. But the old movement which filled the Mississippi valley at the beginning of this century with masterful dogged frontier-farmers, each skilled in the use of the rifle and axe, each almost independent of outside assistance, and each with a swarm of tow-headed children, has nearly come to an end. When Kentucky, at the close of the eighteenth century, was as populous as Oregon 100 years later, Kentucky did not have one-tenth of the urban population that Oregon had when she reached the same stage. Now, urban people are too civilized, have too many wants and too much social ambition, to take up their abode permanently in the wilderness and marry the kind of women who alone could be contented, or indeed could live in the wilderness. On the great plains of the West, when I was in the cattle business, I saw many young Easterners and young Englishmen of good families who came out there; but not one in twenty, whether from the Atlantic States or from England, married and grew up as a permanent settler in the country; and the twentieth was usually a déclassé. The other nineteen were always working to make money and then go home, or somewhere else, and they did not have their womankind with them. The 'younger son' of whom Kipling sings is a picturesque man always, and can do very useful work as a hunter and explorer, or even a miner, but he is not a settler, and does not leave any permanent mark upon any true frontier-community with which I am acquainted. After the frontier has been pushed back, when the ranchman and the cowboy and the frontier-ganger, who are fitted for the actual conditions, have come in, then the 'younger son' and the struggling gentleman-adventurer may make their appearance in the towns. Of course, there are exceptions to all of this, but as a rule what I have pointed out is true. I have seen scores—perhaps hundreds—of men from Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, who went into cattle-growing on the Great Plains, but they did just as I did; that is, worked with greater or less success at the business, gained an immense amount of good from it personally, especially in the way of strength and gratifying a taste for healthy adventure, learned much of human nature from associating with the men round about, and then went back to their own homes in England or New York or Boston, largely because, when it came to marrying and bringing up children, they could not well face the conditions; and so the real population of the future in the valleys of the upper Missouri, the Platte, and the Rio Grande, will be composed of the sons of their companions, who were themselves descendants of small farmers in Texas, Missouri, and Illinois, or of working-men from Scandinavia and Germany.
"Pardon this long letter, which has wandered aside from the thesis with which it started. I hope that the language of the more highly civilized people will, in spite of the evil influences of to-day, gradually oust the 'Taal' or whatever you call Boer Dutch in South Africa, and that when the conquest of the two Republics is succeeded by the full liberty which I understand the Cape Dutch enjoy, there will come a union in blood as well as in that between the two peoples who are so fundamentally alike.
"I am looking forward to the receipt of the three books you have been so very kind as to send me. I do know a certain amount about the Boers from the time of their great trek onward, for it has always seemed to me to be one of the most fascinating bits of modern history."
In the spring of 1900 Selous went on a bird-nesting trip to the forest and marshes of the Danube in Hungary, and was successful in getting the eggs of many new species for his collection. When he arrived home in June he found his finances in low water, owing to enlarging his house, and so feared he would be unable to make an extensive autumn hunt, but later on things improved, and he was able to go West after all.
In September, 1900, he went to Canada to hunt moose, and arrived at Mattawa, Ontario, on September 24th. On this trip he was fortunate in securing the services of George Crawford, a half-breed Indian, who was probably the best moose-caller and hunter in that province. In spite of the number of American hunters who at this time made the districts of Kippewa and Tamiskaming their favourite hunting-grounds, Crawford always knew where to go to secure moose, and it was not long before Selous reached a hunting-ground, about three days north of Mattawa, on Lake Bois Franc, where he killed two fine bulls. After this short trip he went to Snake Lake to try and secure a good white-tailed deer stag, but was not very successful, as he only secured a four-year-old buck with moderate horns. On October 26th he landed in Newfoundland and, being supplied with bad information, went by railway from Port-aux-Basque to Howley, a station on the main line, where the annual slaughter of caribou took place late in the season.
It was not long before Selous found that the so-called "sport" of shooting caribou on migration as they crossed the line in their southern migration was not sport at all, and that frequently, owing to the number of bullets flying in all directions fired by enthusiastic meat-hunters, the shooting was likely to result in human as well as cervine casualties. Moreover, hardly any good stags come south with the mass of does and immatures, so, taking his guide Stroud and an old man named Robert Saunders he left the place in disgust and went south to the Terra Nova river, intending to strike into the heart of the country and, if possible, catch up the main body of the migrating deer before they cast their horns and reached their winter-quarters near the south coast. But he was too late, and after an onerous tramp, during which he penetrated beyond the limits reached by other white men, he was forced to return owing to lack of food, but not before his sharp eyes had seen numerous trees stripped by "summering" stags in the neighbourhood of St. John's Lake. These signs convinced him that the local movements of the deer were unknown even to the hunters in Newfoundland, and that the big stags would probably be found in autumn in the heart of the island, and not on migration in the north. In this he was quite correct. He did not, however, go home without a specimen, for he killed one nice stag on his journey inland.
Accordingly he made plans to hunt in the neighbourhood of St. John's Lake in the following autumn of 1901, and procuring two canoes from Peterborough in Ontario, and enlisting the services of Saunders and his cousin John Wells, he ascended the rocky Terra Nova river in September. To the reader it may seem easy to go seventy miles in a canoe up-stream, but the fact that previous hunters had not been there proves that there were difficulties. No Newfoundland boats in fact would withstand the rocky benches of this swift-flowing river, so progress can only be made for the most part by wading and dragging the canoes, whilst the hunter has to force his way through dense forest, so thick at times that an axe has to be used for progress to be made before reaching the higher plateaux, where lakes and streams are easily passed. Once on Lake St. John, all was easy, and Selous found game abundant and a small migration of big stags already in progress.[53]