There were vague stories among the hardy settlers about new lands incredibly distant, mythically rich in interest. But who dreamed the import of the journey of strong-legged Zebulon Pike into the lands of the Sioux, and who believed all his story of a march from Santa Fé to Chihuahua, and thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused for the peaceful settler of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty miles away, by that ancient saga, that heroically done, Homerically misspelled story of Lewis and Clark? There was still to be room enough and chance enough in the West for any and all men.
The progress of civilization, accelerated with the passing of each century, was none the less slow at this epoch. There was an ictus here in the pilgrimage of humanity. It was as though the Fates wished that for a brief time the world might see the spectacle of a land of help and hope, of personal initiative and personal ambition. The slow-moving star of the West trembled and quivered with a new and unknown light, caught from these noble lakes and rivers, reflected from these mountains and these skies.
The stars of a new heaven looked down on another king, a king in linsey-woolsey. France kicked him forth a peasant, and, born again, he scorned the petty limitations of her seigniories, and stood on her rejected empire, the emperor of himself. England rotted him in her mines and ditches, but before the reversed flags of England were borne home from her war which did not subjugate, this same man, under another sky, was offering hospitality, and not obeisance, to her belted earls.
"If we call the roll of American scouts, explorers, trappers, Indian fighters of the Far West; of men like John Colter, Robert McClellan, John Day, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, Joe Meek, Kit Carson and their ilk, who trapped and fought over every nook and cranny of the Far West, from the Canadian divide to the 'starving Gila,' we shall find that most of them were of the old Shenandoah-Kentucky stock that made the first devious trail from Pennsylvania along and across the Appalachians."
This statement of a well-advised writer is curious and interesting to any student of the real West. It applies, also, of course, and much more closely, to those earlier pioneers that explored the first West, that of the Mississippi valley; the Boones, Kentons, Harrods, Finleys, Bryans, Stuarts and hundreds of others of the fighting breed of Virginia and North Carolina, the families of nearly all of whom had made one or more pilgrimages to the south or even to the southeastward before the great trek westward over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies.