The Pioneer West: Narratives of the Westward March of Empire
9781465680969
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The history of America is the story of trail-makers, pioneers in every sense of the word. Our forefathers had trails to make in new fields of government, of invention and in city building, but before all, smoothing the way for all, came the men and women who explored and ploughed and planted the wilderness. Their story will grow in interest as the years pass. Their deeds have already taken on something of the dim quality of heroic myths. They form the most distinctive of our contributions to history and poetry. Many of the most stark and stirring of these chronicles of the border have passed out of print and are now inaccessible even to the painstaking student. It is from among these almost forgotten, yet vital records that Mr. French has selected the chapters of his book of narratives of the Pioneer West. I am personally grateful to him for rescuing for me several of these chronicles of which I had heard but which I had not been able to read until they came to me in this volume. I perceive in this collection another link in the lengthening chain of our traditional story. The Great War has thrown the events of our early settlement suddenly into remote distance. It is as if an extra half-century had been abruptly interposed, and this added perspective has given us a new and keener interest in the beginnings of our nation. No one who has spent a recent summer in Europe can fail to perceive the change of sentiment which has come, since the war, to the peoples of the Old World. To them America is admittedly the dominating economic force of to-day. No well-informed European writer or speaker now pretends to patronize the United States as a young and unformed colony. The foundation stages of American history have acquired new value in the minds of many English and French readers, and such students this book which Mr. French has built up of scattered and neglected chronicles will stimulate to wider research. I commend it to all Americans who have neither time nor opportunity to read in their entirety the volumes from which these notable and representative chapters have been lifted. Broadly chronological in arrangement, they suggest a panorama of the rigorous Westward march of the hunters, woodsmen, planters and gold-miners who were chief actors of the century which ended with the outbreak of the Spanish War in 1898.
