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.
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