FRIENDS FRONTIERSMEN
FRIENDS. See LOYALTY.
harmonize with his environment. In consequence,
unless he leaves for still wilder lands, he ends by
getting hanged instead of founding a family which
would revere his name as that of a very capable
although not in all respects a conventionally moral,
ancestor. (1893.) Mem. Ed. II, 379-38o; Nat. Ed. II,
FRONTIER DEMOCRACY. The individualism of
the backwoodsmen . . . was tempered by a sound
common sense, and capacity for combination. The first
hunters might come alone or in couples, but the actual
colonization was done not by individuals, but by groups
of individuals. The settlers brought their families and
belonging, either on pack-horses along the forest trails,
or in scows down the streams; they settled in palisaded
villages, and immediately took steps to provide both a
civil and military organization. They were men of facts,
not theories; and they showed their usual hard common
sense in making a government. They did not try to
invent a new system; they simply took that under which
they had grown up, and applied it to their altered
conditions. . . .
They were also familiar with the representative
system; and accordingly they introduced it into the new
communities, the little forted villages serving as natural
units of representation. They were already thoroughly
democratic, in instinct and principle, and, as a matter of
course, they made the offices elective and gave full play
to the majority. (1889.) Mem. Ed. XI, 225-226; Nat. Ed.
325-326.
FRONTIER WARFARE. The history of the border
wars, both in the ways they were begun and in the ways
they were waged, makes a long tale of injuries inflicted,
suffered, and mercilessly revenged. It could not be
otherwise when brutal, reckless, lawless borderers,
despising all men not of their own color, were thrown
in contact with savages who esteemed cruelty and
treachery as the highest of virtues, and rapine and
murder as the worthiest of pursuits. Moreover, it was
sadly inevitable that the law-abiding borderer as well as
the white ruffian, the peaceful Indian as well as the
painted marauder, should be plunged into the straggle
to suffer the punishment that should only have fallen on
their evil-minded fellows.
Looking back, it is easy to say that much of the
wrongdoing could have been prevented; but if we
examine the facts to find out the truth, not to establish a
theory, we are bound to admit that the struggle was
really one that could not possibly have been avoided.
The sentimental historians speak as if the blame had
been all ours, and the wrong all done to our foes, and as
if it would have been possible by any exercise of
wisdom to reconcile claims that were in their very
essence conflicting; but their utterances are as shallow
as they are untruthful. Unless we were willing that the
whole continent west of the Alleghanies should remain
an unpeopled waste, the hunting-ground of savages,
war was inevitable; and even had we been willing, and
had we refrained from encroaching on the Indians'
lands, the war would have come nevertheless, for then
the Indians themselves would have encroached on ours.
(1889.) Mem. Ed. X, 78-79; Nat. Ed. VIII, 69-70.
IX, 13.
FRONTIER LIFE. Out on the frontier, and generally
among those who spend their lives in, or on the borders
of the wilderness, life is reduced to its elemental
conditions. The passions and emotions of these grim
hunters of the mountains, and wild rough-riders of the
plains, are simpler and stronger than those of people
dwelling in more complicated states of society. As soon
as the communities become settled and begin to grow
with any rapidity, the American instinct for law asserts
itself; but in the earlier stages each individual is obliged
to be a law to himself and to guard his rights with a
strong hand. Of course the transition periods are full of
incongruities. Men have not yet adjusted their relations
to morality and law with any niceness. They hold
strongly by certain rude virtues, and on the other hand
they quite fail to recognize even as shortcomings not a
few traits that obtain scant mercy in older communities
. . . . If the transition from the wild lawlessness of life in
the wilderness or on the border to a higher civilization
was stretched out over a term of centuries, he and his
descendants would doubtless accommodate themselves
by degrees to the changing circumstances. But
unfortunately in the far West the transition takes place
with marvellous abruptness, and at an altogether
unheard-of speed, and many a man's nature is unable to
change with sufficient rapidity to allow him to
FRONTIER. See also BOONE, DANIEL; CATTLEMAN;
CLARK, GEORGE ROGERS; COWBOYS; EXPANSION;
EXPLORERS; HOMESTEAD LAW; INDIANS;
INDIVIDUALISM; JESUITS; LOUISIANA PURCHASE;
MANIFEST DESTINY; MILITIA; NORTHWEST ; PIONEER;
SCOTCH-IRISH; SEVIER, J.; TEXAS; VIGILANTES; WAR
OF 1812; WATAUGA SETTLEMENT; WEST ; WESTWARD
MOVEMENT.
FRONTIERSMEN. There was not only much that was
attractive in their wild, free, reckless
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