Consider the terrible hardness of the pioneer’s physical life. I can think of no better description of it than in one of Sherwood Anderson’s stories, “Godliness,” in his book, “Winesburg, Ohio.” He is writing of the Bentley brothers just before the Civil War: “They clung to old traditions and worked like driven animals. They lived as practically all of the farming people of the time lived. In the spring and through most of the winter the highways leading into the town of Winesburg were a sea of mud. The four young men of the family worked hard all day in the fields, they ate heavily of coarse, greasy food, and at night slept like tired beasts on beds of straw. Into their lives came little that was not coarse and brutal, and outwardly they were themselves coarse and brutal.” Naturally, this intense concentration upon work is not the whole of the picture; there was gaiety and often there was romance in the early days of pioneering, it ran like a coloured thread through all the story of our _Drang nach Westen_. But on the whole the period from our confederation into a Union until the expanding industrial era following the Civil War--roughly the century from 1783 to 1883--was a period in which the cardinal command was, “Be active, be bold, and above all, work.” In that century we subdued and populated a continent. There was no time for the distractions of art or the amenities of literature. To be sure, a short-range perspective seems to belie this last generalization. The colonial times and the first part of the 19th century witnessed a valid and momentous literary and intellectual efflorescence, and it was then we contributed many names to the biography of greatness. Yet it was a culture centred almost wholly in New England and wholly East of the Alleghanies; it had its vitality because it was not self-conscious, it was frankly derivative from England and Europe, it made no pretensions to being intrinsically American. The great current of our national life went irresistibly along, ploughing, and tilling, and cutting down the trees and brush, making roads and bridges as it filled the valleys and the plains. That was the real America, a mighty river of life, compared with which, for instance, Emerson and the Transcendentalists seemed a mere backwater--not a stagnant or brackish one to be sure, often a pool of quietude in which the stars, like Emerson’s sentences, might be reflected. But the real America was still in the heart of the pioneer. And in one sense, it still is to-day.