line, as we read this continental page from west to east, we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally, the manufacturing organization with city and factory system.1 This page is familiar to the student of census statistics, but how little of it has been used by our historians. Particularly in eastern states this page is a palimpsest. What is now a manufacturing state was in an earlier decade an area of intensive farming. Earlier yet it had been a wheat area, and still earlier the "range" had attracted the cattle herder. Thus Wisconsin, now developing manufacture, is a state with varied agricultural interests. But earlier it was given over to almost exclusive grain raising, like North Dakota at the present time.

Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic and political history; the evolution of each into a different industrial stage has worked political transformations.2 Wisconsin, to take an illustration, in the days when it lacked varied agriculture and complex industrial life, was a stronghold of the granger and greenback movements; but it has undergone an industrial transformation, and in the presidential contest of 1896 Mr. Bryan carried but three counties in the state. Again consider the history of Calhoun. His father came with the tide of Scotch-Irish pioneers that built their log cabins in the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. The young manhood of Calhoun was thoroughly western in its nationalistic and looseconstruction characteristics. But the extension of cotton culture to the Piedmont, following the industrial revolution in

1 Cf. Observations on the N. A. Land Company, pp. 15, 144 [London, 1796]; Logan, History of Upper S. C., I, 149–151; Turner, Indian Trade in Wisconsin, p. 18; Peck, New Guide for Emigrants, chap. iv [Boston, 1837]; Compendium, Eleventh Census, xl.

2 Turner, Introduction to Libby's Ratification of the American Constitution [Bull. of Univ. of Wis., Econ., Pol. Sci., and Hist. Series, Vol. I].

England, superseded the pioneer by the slave-holding planter. Calhoun's ideas changed with his section, until he became the chief prophet of southern sectionalism and slavery.1

Among isolated coves in the Appalachian mountains, and in other out-of-the-way places, the frontier has survived, like a fossil, in a more recent social formation. The primitive economic conditions of these mountains of Tennessee, or of Georgia, for instance, enable us to comprehend some of the characteristics of the frontier of earlier days. In the American Journal of Sociology for July, 1898, under the title "A Retarded Frontier," Professor Vincent has described such a community.

The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, fur trader, miner, cattle raiser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward the west, drawn by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand at Cumberland gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle raiser, the pioneer farmer and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader's frontier, the rancher's frontier, or the miner's frontier, and the farmer's frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line the trader's pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghenies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader's birch canoe. When the trappers scaled the Rockies the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri.

THE INDIAN TRADER'S FRONTIER

Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across the continent? What effects followed from the trader's frontier? The trade was coeval with American discovery. The Norsemen, Vespuccius, Verrazani, Hudson, John Smith, all trafficked for

1 Turner, Rise of New West, for other illustrations, and cf. Atlantic Monthly, April, 1897, LXXIX, 441–443.

furs. The Plymouth pilgrims settled in Indian cornfields, and their first return cargo was of beaver and lumber. The records of the various New England colonies show how steadily exploration was carried into the wilderness by this trade. What is true for New England is, as would be expected, even plainer for the rest of the colonies. All along the coast from Maine to Georgia the Indian trade opened up the river courses. Steadily the trader passed westward, utilizing the older lines of French trade. The Ohio, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Platte, the lines of western advance, were ascended by traders. They found the passes in the Rocky mountains and guided Lewis and Clark,1 Frémont, and Bidwell. The explanation of the rapidity of this advance is connected with the effects of the trader on the Indian. The trading post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of those that had purchased firearms, — a truth which the Iroquois Indians wrote in blood, and so the remote and unvisited tribes gave eager welcome to the trader. "The savages," wrote La Salle, "take better care of us French than of their own children; from us only can they get guns and goods." This accounts for the trader's power and the rapidity of his advance. Thus the disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness. Every river valley and Indian trail became a fissure in Indian society, and so that society became honeycombed. Long before the pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away. The farmers met Indians armed with guns. The trading frontier, while steadily undermining Indian power by making the tribes ultimately dependent on the whites, yet, through its sale of guns, gave to the Indians increased power of resistance to the farming frontier. French colonization was dominated by its trading frontier, English colonization by its farming frontier. There was an antagonism between the two frontiers as between the two nations. Said Duquesne to the Iroquois: "Are you ignorant of the difference between the king of England and the king of France? Go see the forts

1 But Lewis and Clark were the first to explore the route from the Missouri to the Columbia.

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that our king has established and you will see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. The English, on the contrary, are no sooner in possession of a place than the game is driven away. The forest falls before them as they advance, and the soil is laid bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a shelter for the night."

And yet, in spite of this opposition of the interests of the trader and the farmer, the Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this became the trader's "trace"; the trails widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into railroads. The same origin can be shown for important railroads of the South, the Far West, and the Dominion of Canada. The trading posts reached by these trails were on the sites of Indian villages which had been placed in positions suggested by nature; and these trading posts, situated so as to command the water systems of the country, have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburg, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City. Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist.2

The later railroads frequently deviated in important respects from the exact line of the old trails; but the statement is true in general. See Narrative and Critical History of America, VIII, 10; Sparks, Washington's Works, IX, 303, 327; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina, Vol. I; McDonald, Life of Kenton, p. 72.

* On the effect of the fur trade in opening the routes of migration, see the anthor's Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin.

The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important. From the close of the seventeenth century various intercolonial congresses have been called to treat with Indians and establish common measures of defense. Particularism was strongest in colonies with no Indian frontier. This frontier stretched along the western border like a cord of union. The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action. Most celebrated of these conferences was the Albany congress of 1754, called to treat with the Six Nations, and to consider plans of union. Even a cursory reading of the plan proposed by the congress reveals the importance of the frontier. The powers of the general council and the officers were, chiefly, the determination of peace and war with the Indians, the regulation of Indian trade, the purchase of Indian lands, and the creation and government of new settlements as a security against the Indians. It is evident that the unifying tendencies of the Revolutionary period were facilitated by the previous coöperation in the regulation of the frontier. In this connection may be mentioned the importance of the Indian frontier in the modification of western institutions and character, and particularly, as a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman. If the reader will compare the names of the officers whose exploits at Santiago and at Manila are now in everybody's mouth, with the names of the officers in the Indian fighting of the United States, he will understand better the importance of this aspect of the frontier.1

THE RANCHER'S FRONTIER

It would not be possible in the limits of this paper to trace the other frontiers across the continent. At the close of the seventeenth century in Virginia we find vast droves of wild

1 Colonel Leonard Wood, for example, in the Geronimo campaign under Lawton in 1886, added to his duties as surgeon the command of the infantry. Cf. Century Magazine, July, 1891, p. 369, and Scribner's Magazine, January, 1899, pp. 3-20.