Often men backslid, and to a period of intense emotional religion succeeded one of utter unbelief and of reversion to the worst practices which had been given up.  Nevertheless, 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 West, they continued to fret and strain against the Spanish boundaries.  There was no temptation to them to take possession of Canada.  The lands south of the Lakes were more fertile than those north of the Lakes, and the climate was better.  The few American settlers who did care to go into Canada found people speaking their own tongue, and with much