St. Clair and Wayne 31 



States officials. They strove to keep peace, and 

 made many efforts to persuade the frontiersmen to 

 observe the Indian boundary lines, and not to intrude 

 on the territory in dispute ; and they were quite un- 

 able to foresee the rapidity of the nation's westward 

 growth. Like the people of the Eastern seaboard, 

 the men high in govermental authority were apt to 

 look upon the frontiersmen with feelings danger- 

 ously akin to dislike and suspicion. Nor were these 

 feelings wholly unjustifiable. The men who settle 

 in a new country, and begin subduing the wilder- 

 ness, plunge back into the very conditions from 

 which the race has raised itself by the slow toil of 

 ages. The conditions can not but tell upon them. 

 Inevitably, and for more than one lifetime perhaps 

 for several generations they tend to retrograde, 

 instead of advancing. They drop away from the 

 standard which highly civilized nations have 

 reached. As with harsh and dangerous labor they 

 bring the new lands up toward the level of the old, 

 they themselves partly revert to their ancestral con- 

 ditions; they sink back toward the state of their 

 ages-dead barbarian forefathers. Few observers 

 can see beyond this temporary retrogression into the 

 future for which it is a preparation. There is small 

 cause for wonder in the fact that so many of the 

 leaders of Eastern thought looked with coldness 

 upon the effort of the Westerners to push north of 

 the Ohio. 



Yet it was these Western frontiersmen who were 

 the real and vital factors in the solution o-f the prob- 



