It might well be urged against the method employed in these pages that, although we undertook to speak of the last American frontier, all that we really thus far have done has been to describe a series of frontiers from the Missouri westward.In part this is true.But it was precisely in this large, loose, and irregular fashion that we actually arrived at our last frontier.
Certainly our westbound civilization never advanced by any steady or regular process.It would be a singularly illuminating map--and one which I wish we might show--which would depict in different colors the great occupied areas of the West, with the earliest dates of their final and permanent occupation.Such a map as this would show us that the last frontier of America was overleaped and left behind not once but a score of times.
The land between the Missouri and the Rockies, along the Great Plains and the high foothills, was crossed over and forgotten by the men who were forging on into farther countries in search of lands where fortune was swift and easy.California, Oregon, all the early farming and timbering lands of the distant Northwest--these lay far beyond the Plains; and as we have noted, they were sought for, even before gold was dreamed of upon the Pacific Slope.
So here, somewhere between the Missouri and the Rockies, lay our last frontier, wavering, receding, advancing, gaining and losing, changing a little more every decade--and at last so rapidly changed as to be outworn and abolished in one swift decade all its own.
This unsettled land so long held in small repute by the early Americans, was, as we have pointed out, the buffalo range and the country of the Horse Indians--the Plains tribes who lived upon the buffalo.For a long time it was this Indian population which held back the white settlements of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado.But as men began to work farther and farther westward in search of homes in Oregon, or in quest of gold in California or Idaho or Montana, the Indian question came to be a serious one.
To the Army, soon after the Civil War, fell the task of exterminating, or at least evicting, the savage tribes over all this unvalued and unknown Middle West.This was a process not altogether simple.For a considerable time the Indians themselves were able to offer very effective resistance to the enterprise.
They were accustomed to living upon that country, and did not need to bring in their own supplies; hence the Army fought them at a certain disadvantage.In sooth, the Army had to learn to become half Indian before it could fight the Indians on anything like even terms.We seem not so much to have coveted the lands in the first Indian-fighting days; we fought rather for the trails than for the soil.The Indians themselves had lived there all their lives, had conquered their environment, and were happy in it.They made a bitter fight; nor are they to be blamed for doing so.
The greatest of our Indian wars have taken place since our own Civil War; and perhaps the most notable of all the battles are those which were fought on the old cow range--in the land of our last frontier.We do not lack abundant records of this time of our history.Soon after the Civil War the railroads began edging out into the plains.They brought, besides many new settlers, an abundance of chroniclers and historians and writers of hectic fiction or supposed fact.A multitude of books came out at this time of our history, most of which were accepted as truth.That was the time when we set up as Wild West heroes rough skinclad hunters and so-called scouts, each of whom was allowed to tell his own story and to have it accepted at par.As a matter of fact, at about the time the Army had succeeded in subduing the last of the Indian tribes on the buffalo-range, the most of our Wild West history, at least so far as concerned the boldest adventure, was a thing of the past.It was easy to write of a past which every one now was too new, too ignorant, or too busy critically to remember.
Even as early as 1866, Colonel Marcy, an experienced army officer and Indian-fighter, took the attitude of writing about a vanishing phase of American life.In his Army "Life on the Border," he says:
"I have been persuaded by many friends that the contents of the book which is herewith presented to the public are not without value as records of a fast-vanishing age, and as truthful sketches of men of various races whose memory will shortly depend only on romance, unless some one who knew them shall undertake to leave outlines of their peculiar characteristics....I am persuaded that excuse may be found in the simple fact that all these peoples of my description--men, conditions of life, races of aboriginal inhabitants and adventurous hunters and pioneers--are passing away.A few years more and the prairie will be transformed into farms.The mountain ravines will be the abodes of busy manufacturers, and the gigantic power of American civilization will have taken possession of the land from the great river of the West to the very shores of the Pacific....
The world is fast filling up.I trust I am not in error when Iventure to place some value, however small, on everything which goes to form the truthful history of a condition of men incident to the advances of civilization over the continent--a condition which forms peculiar types of character, breeds remarkable developments of human nature--a condition also which can hardly again exist on this or any other continent, and which has, therefore, a special value in the sum of human history."Such words as the foregoing bespeak a large and dignified point of view.No one who follows Marcy's pages can close them with anything but respect and admiration.It is in books such as this, then, that we may find something about the last stages of the clearing of the frontier.
