To appreciate how highly selected a race the Americans were at that time, one has only to consider the extraordinary group of men of talent and ability, some fifty-five in number, who represented the colonies at the Convention of 1787 at Philadelphia. Those men framed the Constitution of the United States, which after a hundred and fifty years of stress and strain still remains the model for such documents throughout the world.
Let the reader consider whether our 110,000,000 whites of today could produce the same number of men with corresponding ability and equally high motive, in spite of the fact that our population is more than thirty times as large as in 1787.
So we find in 1790 a practically empty continent, its eastern half buried under a mantle of forest, with a coast line broken by ports and short navigable rivers. Across low mountain ranges we first find a vast central valley traversed for hundreds of miles by wide rivers; then a belt of treeless plains covered with succulent buffalo grass; next a region long called the "Great American Desert"; then a range of mountains dimly known to the Colonials as the "Stony Mountains"; beyond them a great alkaline desert, next the Sierra range, and lastly the genial Pacific Coast. The western half of the continent abounded in mineral wealth, while in the central valley the virgin soil awaited the plow. These conditions had their counterpart in Canada. Wild game abounded, inviting the fur traders to explore the remoter places and enabling the settler to find ready food, while he built his log cabin and planted his crop.
Such was the continent and such the opportunity. In the following pages we shall see what has been done with these opportunities by the British race.
Before leaving the Colonial Period, it is well to call attention, once more, to the history of the frontier. For a hundred years and more the frontier was beset by savages often instigated by the French in Canada. The Indians killed and tortured the lonely settlers and burned their log cabins. This desultory warfare cost the English many hundreds, if not thousands of lives along the frontiers of New England as well as of Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The Indians found by English settlers on their arrival in America were probably, as to many of their tribes, the most formidable fighting men of any native race encountered by the Whites. Not only were they redoubtable warriors in their own surroundings, but they were beyond question the cruelest of mankind. The Assyrians, of all ancient peoples, were reputed to be the most fiendishly cruel, but bad as they were, they did not compare with the American Indian. The details of the torture of prisoners taken in open warfare are too revolting to describe. These tortures were carried out by the squaws while the bucks sat around and laughed at the agony of their victims. There is nothing like it in history in any part of the world and the result was that the aboriginal Indians were regarded as ravening wolves or worse and deprived of all sympathy, while the Whites stole their lands and killed their game. No one who knew the true nature of the Indian felt any regret that they were driven off their hunting grounds. This attitude was found wherever the Whites came in conflict with them and explains why they were scarcely regarded as human beings.
The effect of the existence of the Indians on the frontier was to slow down the advance westward of the settlements and to compel the backwoodsman to keep in touch with his countrymen in the rear. If there had been no hostile Indians, the settlers would have scattered widely and would have established independent communities, such as were attempted in Kentucky and Tennessee after the Revolution. In this respect the Indians were a benefit to the Whites.
At the close of the period ending in 1790, despite the loss of many valuable elements at the time of the Revolution, the American race was homogeneous and Scotch and English to the core. It was bursting the bonds of the old frontier and ready to pour a human deluge over the mountains and inundate the West.
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