32 The Winning of the West 



lems which so annoyed the British Monarchy and 

 the American Republic. They eagerly craved the 

 Indian lands; they would not be denied entrance to 

 the thinly-peopled territory wherein they intended 

 to make homes for themselves and their children. 

 Rough, masterful, lawless, they were neither daunted 

 by the prowess of the red warriors whose wrath they 

 braved, nor awed by the displeasure of the Govern- 

 ment whose solemn engagements they violated. The 

 enormous extent of the frontier dividing the white 

 settler from the savage, and the tangled inaccessibil- 

 ity of the country in which it everywhere lay, ren- 

 dered it as difficult for the national authorities to 

 control the frontiersmen as it was to chastise the 

 Indians. 



If the separation of interests between the thickly 

 settled East and the sparsely settled West had been 

 complete it may be that the East would have refused 

 outright to support the West, in which case the ad- 

 vance would have been very slow and halting. But 

 the separation was not complete. The frontiersmen 

 were numerically important in some of the States, 

 as in Virginia, Georgia, and even Pennsylvania and 

 New York; and under a democratic system of gov- 

 ernment this meant that these States were more or 

 less responsive to their demands. It was greatly to 

 the interest of the frontiersmen that their demands 

 should be gratified, while other citizens had no very 

 concrete concern in the matter one way or the other. 

 In addition to this, and even more important, was 

 the fact that there were large classes of the popula- 



