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.
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