198 NATIONAL GROWTH AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 



pioneers turned toward fresh conquest of nature : They pushed 

 over the plains, replacing buffalo and deer and antelope with 

 kine and sheep and swine ; they felled forests, and began the 

 development of the world's greatest lumbering industry ; they 

 broke the virgin soil, converting the profitless acres into fertile 

 fields and inaugurating a world-epoch of agriculture. As the 

 produce multiplied they cut canals more energetically than any 

 other people has ever done, and developed a large and luxurious 

 steamboat traffic, long the wonder of the nineteenth century. 

 The hunter and trapper led the lumberman and farmer in a long 

 chase ending at the foothills of the Rockies ; then Whitman and 

 others crossed the mountains and completed by settlement the 

 task begun by the explorations of Lewis and Clarke. The Indian 

 warfare served to keep alive the sense of eternal vigilance, while 

 a brush with the British proved anew the invincibility of free- 

 men ; yet withal the noblest conquest was that over the subtle 

 powers of darkness which have trammeled mankind from the 

 beginning — for knowledge was diffused more freely than ever 

 before through the public school system, genius was fostered 

 through the patent system, and the citizens were enabled to 

 look down on lower nature from ever-new and ever higher points 

 of vantage. The forces of dull nature move mechanically, but 

 humanity's powers are multiplied by inspiration and stimulated 

 by shock, and that quick outpushing of the bounds of American 

 enterprise which came with the doubling of territory stimulated 

 American faculty, set the personal and national pulse athrob, 

 and nerved the freemen to even swifter and nobler conquests 

 than those of their eventful earlier history. The acquisitions of 

 1803-1805 changed the map of a continent; they wrought far 

 deeper change in the minds and characters of Americans. 



The acquisition of Florida, albeit significant in many ways, 

 formed but a ripple in the stream of national progress; not so 

 the self-sought admission of Texas at the end of the most dra- 

 matic chapter in the history of the struggle for freedom — a 

 chapter not yet properly signalized in the world's literature. 

 When the Austins, father and son, migrated from Connecticut 

 to Virginia, thence to Missouri, and finally to Texas, the}' be- 

 came the nucleus of a group of adventurous spirits to whom the 

 growing conventionality of eastern and southern sections was 

 irksome, and in the free air of the Lone Star region they devel- 

 oped exultant strength of body and mind. At first hunters and 

 prospectors and pioneer plowmen — "brier-breakers" in their own 



