IN THE OLD WEST 95 



enterprise opened to commerce and the plow the 

 vast and fertile regions of the West. Rough and 

 savage though they were, they were the true pion- 

 eers of that extraordinary tide of civilization 

 which has poured its resistless current through 

 tracts large enough for kings to govern, over a 

 country now teeming with cultivation, where, a 

 few short years ago, countless herds of buffalo 

 roamed unmolested, where the bear and deer 

 abounded, and the savage Indian skulked through 

 the woods and prairies, lord of the unappreciated 

 soil that now yields its prolific treasures to the 

 spade and plow of civilized man. To the wild 

 and half-savage trapper, who may be said to ex- 

 emplify the energy, enterprise, and hardihood 

 characteristic of the American people, divested of 

 all the false and vicious glare with which a high 

 state of civilization, too rapidly attained, has ob- 

 scured their real and genuine character, in which 

 the above traits are eminently prominent to 

 these men alone is due the empire of the West, 

 destined in a few short years to become the most 

 important of those confederated States compos- 

 ing the mighty Union of North America. 



Sprung, then, out of the wild and adventurous 

 fur-trade, St. Louis, still the emporium of that 

 species of commerce, preserves even now, in the 

 character of its population, many of the marked 

 peculiarities distinguishing its early founders, who 

 were identified with the primitive Indian in hardi- 



