This overhanging frontier of America is a true survival of the days of Drake as well as of the days of Boone.The people are at once godly and savage.They breed freely; they love their homes;they are ever ready for adventure; they are frugal, abstemious, but violent and strong.They carry on still the half-religious blood feuds of the old Scotch Highlands or the North of Ireland, whence they came.They reverence good women.They care little for material accumulations.They believe in personal ease and personal independence.With them life goes on not in the slow monotony of reiterated performance, but in ragged profile, with large exertions followed by large repose.Now that has been the fashion of the frontier in every age and every land of all the world.And so, by studying these people, we may even yet arrive at a just and comprehensive notion of what we might call the "feel" of the old frontier.
There exists, too, yet another Saxon frontier in a far-off portion of the world.In that strange country, Australia, tremendous unknown regions still remain, and the wild pastoral life of such regions bids fair to exist yet for many years.Acattle king of Queensland held at one time sixty thousand square miles of land.It is said that the average size of pastoral holdings in the northern territory of Australia is two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres.Does this not recall the old times of free range in the American West?
This strange antipodal civilization also retains a curious flavor of Elizabethan ideas.It does not plan for inordinate fortunes, the continual amassing of money, but it does deliberately plan for the use by the individual of his individual life.Australian business hours are shorter than American.Routine is less general.The individual takes upon himself a smaller load of effort.He is restive under monotony.He sets aside a great part of his life for sport.He lives in a large and young day of the world.Here we may see a remote picture of our own American West--better, as it seems to me, than that reflected in the rapid and wholly commercialized development of Western Canada, which is not flavored by any age but this.
But much of the frontier of Australia is occupied by men of means who had behind them government aid and a semi-paternal encouragement in their adventures.The same is true in part of the government-fostered settlement of Western Canada.It was not so with the American West.Here was not the place of the rich man but of the poor man, and he had no one to aid him or encourage him.Perhaps no man ever understood the American West who did not himself go there and make his living in that country, as did the men who found it and held it first.Each life on our old frontier was a personal adventure.The individual had no government behind him and he lacked even the protection of any law.
Our frontier crawled west from the first seaport settlements, afoot, on horseback, in barges, or with slow wagon-trains.It crawled across the Alleghanies, down the great river valleys and up them yet again; and at last, in days of new transportation, it leaped across divides, from one river valley to another.Its history, at first so halting, came to be very swift--so swift that it worked great elisions in its own story.
In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow country of the West--the high plains and the lower foothills running from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary.The still more ancient cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never come into acceptance as the Old West.Always, when we use these words, we think of buffalo plains and of Indians, and of their passing before the footmen and riders who carried the phantom flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from the Appalachians to the Rockies--before the men who eventually made good that glorious and vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose party turned back from the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name of King George on all the country lying west of them, as far as the South Sea!
The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to itself the title of the real and typical frontier of all the world.We call the spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it was; but even as the Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact with the Spanish civilization in Europe, on the high seas, and in both the Americas, so the last frontier of the American West also was affected, and largely, deeply, by Spanish influence and Spanish customs.The very phraseology of range work bears proof of this.Scores of Spanish words are written indelibly in the language of the Plains.The frontier of the cow-range never was Saxon alone.
It is a curious fact also, seldom if ever noted, that this Old West of the Plains was very largely Southern and not Northern on its Saxon side.No States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and, later, Missouri--daughters of Old Virginia in her glory--contributed to the forces of the frontiersmen.Texas, farther to the south, put her stamp indelibly upon the entire cattle industry of the West.Visionary, impractical, restless, adventurous, these later Elizabethan heroes--bowing to no yoke, insisting on their own rights and scorning often the laws of others, yet careful to retain the best and most advantageous customs of any conquered country--naturally came from those nearest Elizabethan countries which lay abandoned behind them.
If the atmosphere of the Elizabethan Age still may be found in the forgotten Cumberlands, let us lay claim to kinship with yonder roystering heroes of a gallant day; for this was ever the atmosphere of our own frontier.To feel again the following breezes of the Golden Hind, or see again, floating high in the cloudless skies, the sails of the Great Armada, was the privilege of Americans for a double decade within the memory of men yet living, in that country, so unfailingly beloved, which we call the Old West of America.
