was unconscious of its spiritual significance.

The pioneer was taught in the school of experience that the crops of one
area would not do for a new frontier; that the scythe of the clearing
must be replaced by the reaper of the prairies. He was forced to make
old tools serve new uses; to shape former habits, institutions and ideas
to changed conditions; and to find new means when the old proved
inapplicable. He was building a new society as well as breaking new
soil; he had the ideal of nonconformity and of change. He rebelled
against the conventional.

Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the
ideal of personal development, free from social and governmental
constraint. He came from a civilization based on individual competition,
and he brought the conception with him to the wilderness where a wealth
of resources, and innumerable opportunities gave it a new scope. The
prizes were for the keenest and the strongest; for them were the best
bottom lands, the finest timber tracts, the best salt-springs, the
richest ore beds; and not only these natural gifts, but also the
opportunities afforded in the midst of a forming society. Here were mill
sites, town sites, transportation lines, banking centers, openings in
the law, in politics--all the varied chances for advancement afforded in
a rapidly developing society where everything was open to him who knew
how to seize the opportunity.

The squatter enforced his claim to lands even against the government's
title by the use of extra-legal combinations and force. He appealed to
lynch law with little hesitation. He was impatient of any governmental
restriction upon his individual right to deal with the wilderness.

In our own day we sometimes hear of congressmen sent to jail for
violating land laws; but the different spirit in the pioneer days may be
illustrated by a speech of Delegate Sibley of Minnesota in Congress in
1852. In view of the fact that he became the State's first governor, a
regent of its university, president of its historical society, and a
doctor of laws of Princeton, we may assume that he was a pillar of
society. He said:

The government has watched its public domain with jealous eye,
and there are now enactments upon your statute books, aimed at
the trespassers upon it, which should be expunged as a
disgrace to the country and to the nineteenth century.
Especially is he pursued with unrelenting severity,