THE PIONEERS. 215 







lows was occasionally seen, wreathing in dense columns 

 towards the sky. Civilization, enterprise, energy and new 

 life were just starting on that career of progress which has 

 moved onward till the wilderness, under the influence of 

 their mighty power, has been made to blossom as the rose. 

 Those were pleasant times, as we look upon them now, just 

 fading into the dim and shadowy past, but they were times 

 of toil and privation. The arms of the men of those times 

 were nerved by the hope of the future, and the spirit 

 that sustained them was that of faith in the fact that the 

 promise of reward for their labor was sure. 



" Do the men of the present day ever think what a gigan- 

 tic labor that was of clearing away those old forests ? Con- 

 template a wilderness, reaching from the Atlantic to the Mis- 

 sissippi, from the great lakes and the majestic St. Lawrence 

 to the Gulf of Mexico, every acre of which was covered with 

 tall trees which had to be cut away one by one, not with 

 some great machine which mowed them down in broad 

 swaths like the grass of a meadow, but by a single arm and 

 a single axe. Talk about the Pyramids, the Chinese Wall, 

 the great canals of the earth I They sink into utter insigni- 

 ficance when compared with the prodigious labor of clearing 

 away the American forests, and spreading out green fields 

 where our fathers found only a limitless wilderness of woods. 

 The sons of these men who performed that labor, in my 

 judgment, have a better patent to preferment and honors 

 than those who come from other lands to claim their inheri- 

 tance after it has been thus perfected by such toil and 



