In the year 1911 the writer saw, all through the Peace River Valley and even in the neighborhood of the Little Slave Lake, the advance-guard of wheat farmers crowding out even beyond the Canadian frontier in the covetous search for yet more cheap land.
In 1912 I talked with a school teacher, who herself had homestead land in the Judith Basin of Montana--once sacred to cows--and who was calmly discussing the advisability of going up into the Peace River country to take up yet more homestead land under the regulations of the Dominion Government! In the year 1913 I saw an active business done in town lots at Fort McMurray, five hundred miles north of the last railroad of Alberta, on the ancient Athabasca waterway of the fur trade!
Who shall state the limit of all this expansion? The farmer has ever found more and more land on which he could make a living; he is always taking land which his predecessor has scornfully refused.If presently there shall come the news that the land boomer has reached the mouth of the Mackenzie River--as long ago he reached certain portions of the Yukon and Tanana country--if it shall be said that men are now selling town lots under the Midnight Sun--what then? We are building a government railroad of our own almost within shadow of Mount McKinley in Alaska.There are steamboats on all these great sub-Arctic rivers.Perhaps, some day, a power boat may take us easily where I have stood, somewhat wearied, at that spot on the Little Bell tributary of the Porcupine, where a slab on a post said, "Portage Road to Ft.
McPherson"--a "road" which is not even a trail, but which crosses the most northerly of all the passes of the Rockies, within a hundred miles of the Arctic Ocean.
Land, land, more land! It is the cry of the ages, more imperative and clamorous now than ever in the history of the world and only arrested for the time by the cataclysm of the Great War.The earth is well-nigh occupied now.Australia, New Zealand, Canada, even Africa, are colonization grounds.What will be the story of the world at the end of the Great War none may predict.For the time there will be more land left in Europe; but, unbelievably soon, the Great War will have been forgotten; and then the march of the people will be resumed toward such frontiers of the world as yet may remain.Land, land, more land!
Always in America we have occupied the land as fast as it was feasible to do so.We have survived incredible hardships on the mining frontier, have lived through desperate social conditions in the cow country, have fought many of our bravest battles in the Indian country.Always it has been the frontier which has allured many of our boldest souls.And always, just back of the frontier, advancing, receding, crossing it this way and that, succeeding and failing, hoping and despairing--but steadily advancing in the net result--has come that portion of the population which builds homes and lives in them, and which is not content with a blanket for a bed and the sky for a roof above.
We had a frontier once.It was our most priceless possession.It has not been possible to eliminate from the blood of the American West, diluted though it has been by far less worthy strains, all the iron of the old home-bred frontiersmen.The frontier has been a lasting and ineradicable influence for the good of the United States.It was there we showed our fighting edge, our unconquerable resolution, our undying faith.There, for a time at least, we were Americans.
We had our frontier.We shall do ill indeed if we forget and abandon its strong lessons, its great hopes, its splendid human dreams.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ANDY ADAMS, "The Log of a Cowboy," 1903."The Outlet," 1905.
Homely but excellently informing books done by a man rarely qualified for his task by long experience in the cattle business and on the trail.Nothing better exists than Adams's several books for the man who wishes trustworthy information on the early American cattle business.
GEORGE A.FORSYTH, "The Story of the Soldier," 1900.
GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, "The Story of the Indian," 1895.
