286 The Winning of the West 



heartily support them, but in others, where the 

 vicious and lawless elements were in control, they 

 were in constant danger of mobs. The godless and 

 lawless people hated the religious with a bitter ha- 

 tred, and gathered in great crowds to break up their 

 meetings. On the other hand, those who had ex- 

 perienced religion were no believers in the doc- 

 trine of non-resistance. At the core, they were 

 thoroughly healthy men, and they fought as val- 

 iantly against the powers of evil in matters physical 

 as in matters moral. Some of the successful fron- 

 tier preachers were men of weak frame, whose in- 

 tensity of conviction and fervor of religious belief 

 supplied the lack of bodily powers ; but as a rule the 

 preacher who did most was a stalwart man, as strong 

 in body as in faith. One of the continually recur- 

 ring incidents in the biographies of the famous 

 frontier preachers is that of some particularly hard- 

 ened sinner who was never converted until, tempted 

 to assault the preacher of the Word, he was soundly 

 thrashed by the latter, and his eyes thereby rudely 

 opened through his sense of physical shortcomings 

 to an appreciation of his moral iniquity. 



Throughout these years, as the frontiersmen 

 pressed into the West, they continued to fret and 

 strain against the Spanish boundaries. There was 

 no temptation to them to take possession of Canada. 

 The lands south of the Lakes were more fertile than 

 those north of the Lakes, and the climate was bet- 

 ter. The few American settlers who did care to 

 go into Canada found people speaking their own 



