ed, Boone grew restless and ill at ease.
He loved the wilderness; he loved the great forests and the great
prairie-like glades, and the life in the little lonely cabin, where from
the door he could see the deer come out into the clearing at nightfall.
The neighborhood of his own kind made him feel cramped and ill at ease.
So he moved ever westward with the frontier; and as Kentucky filled up
he crossed the Mississippi and settled on the borders of the prairie
country of Missouri, where the Spaniards, who ruled the territory, made
him an alcalde, or judge. He lived to a great age, and died out on the
border, a backwoods hunter to the last.

GEORGE ROGERS CLARK AND THE CONQUEST OF THE NORTHWEST

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the
seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world;

Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the
march,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing, as we go the unknown
ways,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!

* * * * * * *

The sachem blowing the smoke first towards the sun and then
towards the earth,
The drama of the scalp dance enacted with painted faces and
guttural exclamations,
The setting out of the war-party, the long and stealthy march,
The single file, the swinging hatchets, the surprise and
slaughter of enemies.
--Whitman.

In 1776, when independence was declared, the United States included only
the thirteen original States on the seaboard. With the exception of a
few hunters there were no white men west of the Alleghany Mountains, and
there was not even an American hunter in the great country out of which
we have since made the States of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and
Wisconsin. All this region north of the Ohio River then formed apart
of the Province of Quebec. It was a wilderness of forests and prairies,
teeming with game, and inhabited by many warlike tribes of Indians.

Here and there through it were dotted quaint little towns of French
Creoles, the most important being Detroit, Vincennes on the Wabash, and
Kaskaskia and Kahokia on the Illinois. These F