If we have been successful in the first of our undertakings, that of investigating the first stage of the American transcontinental pilgrimage, which brought the Anglo-Saxon civilization permanently into the Mississippi valley, we must have gained in our earlier chapters some knowledge of the characteristics of the west-bound men, and of the motives that actuated them.
We shall also have noticed the beginning of a new type of man,--a man born of new problems, new necessities. Obliged to think and act for himself, it was natural that this man should learn to be restive when others thought for him. It was not to be expected that the men of New England and New York should understand this new man. We do not understand the Asiatics to-day; and at the time Daniel Boone reached the Mississippi it was farther from the Mississippi to New York than it is from New York to the Philippines to-day.
The American pilgrimage, whether at times painful, halting, broken, or at other times rapid, feverish, insane, has at the one time or the other been no better than the transportation at hand. The long, hard roads, the slow travel of those early trans-Appalachian days were at the bottom of the greatest national problem of those days.
The men of the East could not believe that loyalty might be expected of the men of the West; and the latter, feeling the force of their geographical position, and feeling also their own ability to take care of themselves, openly talked of all manner of schisms, sectionalisms and governmental speculations. The West talked secession almost before it was a West. Under the conditions of those days it was small crime that it did so; the fact proved no disloyalty of the old type, but the strength and vigor of the new type of American that had now been born, which declared itself able to hold and govern its own new-found world.
It may profit us at this stage of our study to turn for a time from the individual frontiersman and settler, and to take up in more concrete form some of the things that these frontiersmen and settlers did in combination--some of the phases of the Western civilization as affected by the ever present problems of transportation.
The question of geography, which is the same as to say the question of transportation, led to more than one attempt to set up entirely independent governments west of the Allegheny Divide, just as it also much affected the destinies of the unborn states of the Northwest Territory--Asenesipia, Pelesipia, Cherronesus, and others. Of these divers attempts at secession, some were honestly based upon a wish for commercial development that did not seem possible in connection with a government situated far to the east, at the end of impassable mountain roads. Other attempts were mere personal intrigues, carried on with a view to personal advantage, as was the effort of the unspeakable Wilkinson to alienate the population of the Mississippi valley from the standards of the government at Washington. There were other attempts, honest attempts at secession, or more properly speaking, segregation, on the part of considerable communities whose interests, under the conditions of the time, seemed far from identical with those of the tidewater population.