within sight of the sea!  The wilderness was their refuge; but how long before it became their joy and hope!  Here was their destiny cast; but their hearts lingered and held back.  It was only as generations passed and the work widened about them that their thought also changed, and a new thrill sped along their blood.  Their life had been new and strange from their first landing in the wilderness.  Their houses, their food, their clothing, their neighborhood dealings were all such as only the frontier brings.  Insensibly they were themselves changed.  The strange life became familiar; their adjustment to it was at length unconscious and without effort; they had no plans which were not inseparably a part and a product of it.  But, until they had turned their backs once for all upon the sea; until they saw their western borders cleared of the French; until the mountain passes had grown familiar, and the lands beyond the central and constant theme of their hope, the goal and dream of their young men, they did not become an American people.

When they did, the great determining movement of our history began.  The very visages of the people changed.  That alert movement of the eye, that openness to every thought of enterprise or adventure, that nomadic habit which knows no fixed home and has plans ready to be carried any whither,—­all the marks of the authentic type of the “American” as we know him came into our life.  The crack of the whip and the song of the teamster, the heaving chorus of boatmen poling their heavy rafts upon the rivers, the laughter of the camp, the sound of bodies of men in the still forests, became the characteristic notes in our air.  A roughened race, embrowned in the sun, hardened in manner by a coarse life of change and danger, loving the rude woods and the crack of the rifle, living to begin something new every day, striking with the broad and open hand, delicate in nothing but the touch of the trigger, leaving cities in its track as if by accident rather than design, settling again to the steady ways of a fixed life only when it must:  such was the American people whose achievement it was to be to take possession of their continent from end to end ere their national government was a single century old.  The picture is a very singular one!  Settled life and wild side by side:  civilization frayed at the edges,—­taken forward in rough and ready fashion, with a song and a swagger,—­not by statesmen, but by woodsmen and drovers, with axes and whips and rifles in their hands, clad in buckskin, like huntsmen.

It has been said that we have here repeated some of the first processes of history; that the life and methods of our frontiersmen take us back to the fortunes and hopes of the men who crossed Europe when her forests, too, were still thick upon her.  But the difference is really very fundamental, and much more worthy of remark than the likeness.  Those shadowy masses of men whom we see moving upon the face of the earth