The American Wilderness 15 



quest of the wilderness which has at last been prac- 

 tically achieved in our own day. Where they pitched 

 their camps and built their log huts or stockaded 

 hamlets, towns grew up, and men who were tillers 

 of the soil, not mere wilderness wanderers, thronged 

 in to take and hold the land. Then, ill-at-ease among 

 the settlements for which they had themselves made 

 ready the way, and fretted even by the slight re- 

 straints of the rude and uncouth semi-civilization 

 of the border, the restless hunters moved onward 

 into the yet unbroken wilds where the game dwelled 

 and the red tribes marched forever to war and hunt- 

 ing. Their untamable souls ever found something 

 congenial and beyond measure attractive in the law- 

 less freedom of the lives of the very savages against 

 whom they warred so bitterly. 



Step by step, often leap by leap, the frontier of 

 settlement was pushed westward ; and ever from be- 

 fore its advance fled the warrior tribes of the red 

 men and the scarcely less intractable array of white 

 Indian fighters and game hunters. When the Rev- 

 olutionary War was at its height, George Rogers 

 Clark, himself a mighty hunter of the old back- 

 woods type, led his handful of hunter-soldiers to the 

 conquest of the French towns of the Illinois. This 

 was but one of the many notable feats of arms 

 performed by the wild soldiery of the backwoods. 

 Clad in their fringed and tasseled hunting-shirt of 

 buckskin or homespun, with coonskin caps and 



