I ask you to look at this splendid tool, the American ax, not more an implement of labor than an instrument of civilization. If you can not use it, you are not American. If you do not understand it, you can not understand America. This tool is so simple and so perfect that it has scarcely seen change in the course of a hundred years. It lacks decoration, as do the tools and the weapons of all strong peoples. It has no fantastic lines, no deviations from simplicity of outline, no ornamentations,

Witness this sweet ancient weapon of our fathers, the American rifle, maker of states, empire builder. Useful as its cousin, the ax, it is in design simple as the ax; in outline severe, practicable, purposeful in every regard. It is devoid of ornamentation. The brass that binds the foot of the stock is there to protect the wood. The metal guard below the lock is to preserve from injury the light set-triggers. The serrated edges of the lock plate may show rude file marks of a certain pattern, but

Here is that fairy ship of the wilderness, the birch-bark canoe, the first craft of America, antedating even the arrival of the white man. It is the ship of risk and of adventure, belonging by right to him who goes far and travels light, who is careless of his home coming. It is a boat that now carries the voyager, and now is carried by him. It is a great-hearted craft. You shall take it upon your shoulders, and carry it a mile across the land trail, without needing to set it down; but when you

Observe here a creature, a dumb brute, that has saved some centuries of time. Indeed, without this American horse, the American civilization perhaps could never have been. Without the ax, the rifle, the boat and the horse there could have been no West. To-day we would in some measure dispense with the horse, but in the early times no part of man’s possessions was more indispensable. This animal was not then quite as we find him to-day in the older settled portions of the country. In some of our

On a busy street of a certain Western city there appeared, not long ago, a figure whose peculiarities attracted the curious attention of the throng through which he passed. It was a man, tall, thin, bronzed, wide-hatted, long-haired, clad in the garb of a day gone by. How he came to the city, whence he came, or why, it boots little to ask. There he was, one of the old-time “long-haired men” of the West. His face, furrowed with the winds of the high plains and of the mountains, and bearing still

There was a generation of this down-stream transportation, and it built up the first splendid, aggressive population of the West—a population that continued to edge farther outward and farther down-stream. The settlement at Nashville, the settlements of Kentucky, were at touch with the Ohio River, the broad highway that led easily down to the yet broader highway of the Mississippi, that great, mysterious stream so intimately connected with American history and American progress. It was easy to g

“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 state

In preceding chapters we have taken up in general and in particular the origin, the purpose and the progress of the early American frontiersman. We have seen how this man, impelled by one reason or another, began to push outward on his way over the Appalachian range into the valley of the Mississippi. We have seen that the course of west-bound civilization was at first not wholly along the easiest way, but over barriers that had apparently been established by nature as insurmountable. From headw

If we have been successful in the first of our undertakings, that of investigating the first stage of the American transcontinental pilgrimage, which brought the Anglo-Saxon civilization permanently into the Mississippi valley, we must have gained in our earlier chapters some knowledge of the characteristics of the west-bound men, and of the motives that actuated them. We shall also have noticed the beginning of a new type of man,—a man born of new problems, new necessities. Obliged to think and

There is no figure of speech that so exactly describes the westward advance of the American population as that which compares it to the feeding of a vast flock of wild pigeons. These, when they fall on a forest rich with their chosen food, advance rapidly, rank after rank. As those in the front pause for a moment to feed, others behind rise and fly on beyond them, settling for a time to resume their own feeding operations. Thus the progress of the hosts resembles a series of rolling waves, one p

In 1810 the Western frontier of the United States slanted like the roof of a house from Maine to Louisiana. The center of population was almost exactly on the site of the city of Washington. The West was a distinct section, and it was a section that had begun to develop an aristocracy. We still wore linsey-woolsey in Kentucky; still pounded our corn in a hollow stump in Ohio; still killed our Indians with the ancient weapon of our fathers; still took our produce to New Orleans in flat-boats; sti

In reviewing the life of Christopher Carson, another of our Western leaders in exploration, we come upon the transition period between the time of up-stream transportation and that which led across the waters; the epoch wherein fell the closing days of Western adventure properly so called, and the opening days of a Western civilization fitly so named. Kit Carson, as he was always called, was born in Madison County, Kentucky, on December twenty-fourth, 1809. Thus it may be seen that his time lapp

To-day we think in straight lines. We believe, ignorantly, that our forefathers moved directly westward from their former homes. We do not ask how they did it, but think that in some way they must have done so. Dwellers in Chicago think of New York, and it means New York in a straight line due east. They think of California, and it implies a straight line due west. To us of to-day all railroads run without curves, and are governed only by time-schedules, which annually grow shorter. Geography is

In the distribution of the population of Western America, the mouths of many great Western rivers, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Columbia, the Colorado, the Red, the Sacramento, the Arkansas, perhaps even the Ohio, were known before their sources were fully explored. The journey over the Appalachians, and the down-stream movements that followed the Mississippi and its greater tributaries, were the first concerns of our new-American emigrants. The lower reaches of the great Western rivers ha

It is customary to read and to teach history in the time-honored fashion which begins at the beginning and comes on down until to-day, not skipping the battles and not forgetting the tables of dynasties, royal or political. Without wishing to be eccentric or iconoclastic, none the less one may venture to suggest that there may be a certain virtue in beginning with events well within our reach and comprehension, and then going backward, which is to say going forward, in our knowledge of our field

Twenty-five years ago potatoes were so high in price in certain towns of the Rocky Mountains that the merchants handling them often reserved the right to retain the peelings, which, in turn, were sold, for planting purposes, the eyes of the potatoes thus having a considerable commercial value, obviously in proportion to the distance from the nearest railroad or steamboat line. This situation could not forever endure. There must come a day when we could afford to throw away our peelings, and thro

At the time of the discovery of gold in California, there had been built up a splendid Western population, hardy, self-confident, able to shift for itself, wholly distinct from that population that it had for a generation left behind at the old starting places of the trails. These trails across the continent, wavering, tortuous, yet practicable, had been fully established. So far as might be within the horizon of those days, all was now ready for the epoch-making event that was to change all the

The open and abounding West is no more. From California, from all the interior regions of the great dry plains rises the same cry, that the government should take measures to give the people more land; that by means of irrigation it should restore, in some measure at least, the opportunities which allured the men who in the old days followed in the pilgrimage “out West.” This changed and restricted region has problems entirely different from those of the West that was. Once we wished a populatio