EKONTIEESMEN AND FKONTIEKSMEN. 69 



drunken quarrels, insolence, and dishonesty. All such call 

 themselves frontiersmen, and how is the foreign stranger to 

 know that there are frontiersmen and frontiersmen, or where- 

 in is the difference ? 



The non-producers amongst the border settlers, the floating 

 population of non-labouring unprofessional males, may be 

 roughly divided into two portions those who are there from 

 an unrecognised but no less imperative compulsion, and 

 those who are there because they choose to be. 



To the former division belong all whom the genius of 

 industry and competition has crowded to the borderland 

 men who from their innate worthlessness are incompetent 

 to hold a place within the pale of the ever active energetic 

 civilisation of the great American people ; the low, cheating 

 gambler, who has been found out too often ; the cattle- 

 lifter and the horse-thief; the man who has "served his 

 time;" the bar-room loafer and the escaped jail-bird. 



The true frontiersman is to be found amongst the latter 

 division. A love of nature, a sturdy inborn independence 

 of mind, a thirst after adventure, the love of sport, an 

 impatience of the petty restraints, annoyances, and small 

 meannesses inseparable from a high state of civilisation, 

 send him there. These are his impelling motives. Suci 

 feelings, such motives, have sent the pioneers of civilisation 

 to every clime Columbus to the discovery of a continent, 

 Cortez to the conquest of an empire. 



The English tourist-sportsman necessarily carries with 

 him his habitual British manner ; unconsciously he treats at 

 their first interview his supposed social inferior that is 

 to say the man who is worse dressed than himself with 



