on the whole there was an immense
gain for good. The people received a new light, and were given a sense
of moral responsibility such as they had not previously possessed. Much
of the work was done badly or was afterwards undone, but very much was
really accomplished. The whole West owes an immense debt to the
hard-working frontier preachers, sometimes Presbyterian, generally
Methodist or Baptist, who so gladly gave their lives to their labors and
who struggled with such fiery zeal for the moral wellbeing of the
communities to which they penetrated. Wherever there was a group of log
cabins, thither some Methodist circuit-rider made his way or there some
Baptist preacher took up his abode. Their prejudices and narrow
dislikes, their raw vanity and sullen distrust of all who were better
schooled than they, count for little when weighed against their intense
earnestness and heroic self-sacrifice. They proved their truth by their
endeavor. They yielded scores of martyrs, nameless and unknown men who
perished at the hands of the savages, or by sickness or in flood or
storm. They had to face no little danger from the white inhabitants
themselves. In some of the communities most of the men might heartily
support them, but in others, where the vicious and lawless elements were
in control, they were in constant danger of mobs. The Godless and
lawless people hated the religious with a bitter hatred, and gathered in
great crowds to break up their meetings. On the other hand, those who
had experienced religion were no believers in the doctrine of
nonresistance. At the core, they were thoroughly healthy men, and they
fought as valiantly against the powers of evil in matters physical as in
matters moral. Some of the successful frontier preachers were men of
weak frame, whose intensity of conviction and fervor of religious belief
supplied the lack of bodily powers; but as a rule the preacher who did
most was a stalwart man, as strong in body as in faith. One of the
continually recurring incidents in the biographies of the famous
frontier preachers is that of some particularly hardened sinner who was
never converted until, tempted to assault the preacher of the Word, he
was soundly thrashed by the latter, and his eyes thereby rudely opened
through his sense of physical shortcoming to an appreciation of his
moral iniquity.

The Frontiersmen Threaten the Spanish Regions.

Throughout these years, as the frontiersmen pressed into the