Woman on the American Frontier / A Valuable and Authentic History of the Heroism, Adventures, Privations, Captivities, Trials, and Noble Lives and Deaths of the "Pioneer Mothers of the Republic"

by William Worthington Fowler

"Another race shall be, and other palms are won,"

but never, while our nation or our language endures, shall the memory of those names and deeds pass away. In every succeeding year that registers the history of the Republic which they contributed to build, brighter and brighter shall grow the record of the Patriot Women of the Revolution.

CHAPTER VII.

MOVING WEST—PERILS OF THE JOURNEY

In regarding or in enjoying an end already accomplished by others, we are too apt to pass by the means through which that end was reached. America of to-day represents a grand result. We see that our land is great, rich, and powerful; we see that the flag waves from ocean to ocean, over a people furnished with all the appliances of civilization, and happy in their enjoyment; we are conscious that all this has come from the toils and the sufferings of many men and of many women who have lived and loved before us, and passed away, leaving behind them their country growing greater and richer, happier and more powerful, for what they have borne and done. But our views of the means by which that mighty end was reached are apt to be altogether too vague and general. While we are enjoying what others have worked to attain, let us not selfishly and forgetfully pass by the toils, the struggles, the firm endurance of those who went before us and accomplished this vast aggregate of results.

Each stage in the process by which these results were wrought out, had its peculiar trials, its special service. Looking back to that far-off past, and in the light of our own knowledge and conceptions, we find it almost impossible to decide which stage was encompassed with the deadliest dangers, the severest labors, the keenest sorrows, the largest list of discomforts. But certainly to woman, the breaking up of her eastern home, and the removal to the far west, was not the least burdensome and trying.

No characteristic of woman is more remarkable than the strength of her local associations and attachments. In making the home she learns to love it, and this feeling seems to be often strongest when the surroundings are the bleakest, the rudest, and the most comfortless. The Highlander and the Switzer pine amid the luxuriant scenes of tropical life, when their thoughts revert to the smoky shieling or to the rock-encompassed chalet of their far-off mountains. Such, too, doubtless, was the clinging fondness with which, the women regarded their rude cabins on the frontier of the Atlantic States. They had toiled and fought to make these rude abodes the homes for those dearest to them; here children, the first-born of the Republic, had been nurtured; here, too, were the graves of the first fathers and mothers of America. Humble and comfortless as those dwelling-places would have seemed to the men and women of to-day, they were dear to the wives and mothers of colonial times.

Comprehending, as we may, this feeling, and knowing the peculiar difficulties of long journeys in those days, into a wild and hostile country, we can understand why the westward march of emigration and settlement was so slow during the first one hundred and fifty or sixty years of our history. New England had, it is true, been largely subjugated and reclaimed; a considerable body of emigrants, wedge-like, were driving slowly up through the Mohawk Valley towards Niagara; a weak, thin line, was straggling with difficulty across the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, towards the Ohio, and a more compact and confident battalion in Virginia, was pushing into Kentucky. But how scattered and feeble that picket-line compared to the army which was soon to follow it.

For a season, and while the British were trying to force their yoke on the reluctant colonists, the westward movement had a check. The danger was in the rear. His old home in the east was threatened, and the pioneer turned about and faced the rising sun, until the danger was past and he could pursue his journey.

The close of the Revolutionary struggle gave a new impulse to the westward march of the American people, which had been arrested for the time being by the War of Independence.