The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson

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 gi...

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, wh...

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....

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 o...

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 t...

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, impel...

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 forgettin...

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...

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...

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 w...

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 Sacram...

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 civ...

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 outw...

“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, J...

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...

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. Witho...

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 adventur...

The customary method in writing history is to rely on chronological sequence as the only connecting thread in the narrative. For this reason many books of history are but little...

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...

I. THE AMERICAN AX 7 II. THE AMERICAN RIFLE 11 III. THE AMERICAN BOAT 19 IV. THE AMERICAN HORSE 25 V. THE PATHWAY OF THE WATERS 32 VI. THE MISSISSIPPI, AND INDEPENDENCE 58 VII....