FRONTIERSMEN FRONTIERSWOMEN
lives, but there was also very much good about the men
themselves. They were—and such of them as are left
still are—frank, bold, and self-reliant to a degree. They
fear neither man, brute, nor element. They are generous
and hospitable; they stand loyally by their friends, and
pursue their enemies with bitter and vindictive hatred.
For the rest, they differ among themselves in their good
and bad points even more markedly than do men in
civilized life, for out on the border virtue and
wickedness alike take on very pronounced colors. A
man who in civilization would be merely a backbiter
becomes a murderer on the frontier; and, on the other
hand, he who in the city would do nothing more than
bid you a cheery good morning, shares his last bit of
sun-jerked venison with you when threatened by
starvation in the wilderness. (1888.) Mem. Ed. IV, 457;
Nat. Ed. I, 351.
____________. A single generation, passed under the
hard conditions of life in the wilder-ness, was enough to
weld together into one people the representatives of . . .
numerous and widely different races; and the children
of the next generation became indistinguishable from
one another. Long before the first Continental Congress
assembled, the backwoodsmen, whatever their blood,
had become Americans, one in speech, thought, and
character, clutching firmly the land in which their
fathers and grandfathers had lived before them. They
had lost all remembrance of Europe and all sympathy
with things European; they had become as emphatically
products native to the soil as were the tough and supple
hickories out of which they fashioned the handles of
their long, light axes. Their grim, harsh, narrow lives
were yet strangely fascinating, and full of adventurous
toil and danger; none but natures as strong, as freedom-
loving, and as full of bold defiance as theirs could have
endured existence on the terms which these men found
pleasurable. Their iron surroundings made a mould
which turned out all alike in the same shape. They
resembled one another, and they differed from the rest
of the world—even the world of America, and infinitely
more, the world of Europe—in dress, in customs, and in
the mode of life. (1889.) Mem. Ed. X, 101-102; Nat.
Ed. VIII, 89.1
____________. The old race of Rocky Mountain
hunters and trappers, of reckless, dauntless Indian
fighters, is now fast dying out. Yet here and there these
restless wanderers of the untrodden wilderness still
linger in wooded fastnesses so inaccessible that the
miners have not yet explored them, in mountain valleys
so far off that no ranchman has yet driven his herds
thither. To this day many of them wear the fringed tunic
or hunting-shirt, made of buckskin or homespun, and
belted in at the waist—the most picturesque and
distinctively national dress ever worn in America. . . .
These old-time hunters have been forerunners of
the white advance throughout all our Western land.
Soon after the beginning of the present century they
boldly struck out beyond the Mississippi, steered their
way across the flat and endless seas of grass, or pushed
up the valleys of the great lonely rivers, crossed the
passes that wound among the towering peaks of the
Rockies, toiled over the melancholy wastes of sage-
brush and alkali, and at last, breaking through the
gloomy woodland that belts the coast, they looked out
on the heaving waves of the greatest of all the oceans.
They lived for months, often for years, among the
Indians, now as friends, now as foes, warring, hunting,
and marrying with them; they acted as guides for
exploring parties, as scouts for the soldiers who from
time to time were sent against the different hostile
tribes. At long intervals they came into some frontier
settlement or some fur company's fort, posted in the
heart of the wilderness, to dispose of their bales of furs,
or to replenish their stock of ammunition and purchase
a scanty supply of coarse food and clothing.
From that day to this they have not changed their
way of life. But there are not many of them left now.
The basin of the upper Missouri was their last
stronghold, being the last great hunting-ground of the
Indians with whom the white, trappers were always
fighting and bickering, but who nevertheless by their
presence protected the game that gave the trappers their
livelihood. (1888.) Mem. Ed. IV, 455-456; Nat. Ed. I,
349-350.
FRONTIERSWOMEN. There are some striking
exceptions; but, as a rule, the grinding toil and hardship
of a life passed in the wilderness, or on its outskirts,
drive the beauty and bloom from a woman's face long
before her youth has left her. By the time she is a
mother she is sinewy and angular, with thin,
compressed lips and furrowed, sallow brow. But she
has a hundred qualities that atone for the grace she
lacks. She is a good mother and a hard-working
housewife, always putting things to rights, washing and
cooking for her stalwart spouse and offspring. She is
faithful to her husband, and like the true American that
she is, exacts faithfulness in return. Peril cannot daunt
her, nor hardship and poverty appall her. Whether on
the mountains in a log hut chinked with
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