Comprehended within the boundaries of that noble portion of our country called “The West,” is a people who can justly claim to be not only of the best muscle and nerve of the land, but second to none in intellectual vigor and sterling integrity of character. A single thought tells us how just this claim is. The West was settled by the picked men and women of the old States. When the sloping-roofed farmhouses of New England became too circumscribed for the sons and daughters that filled them, the most enterprising members of a household left the rest to till the homestead acres while they went forth into the wilderness to cut the forest trees away, and let sunshine into the shadowy bosom of the woods, to build their log cabins in the first clearing, and so work out a sure independence for themselves, as they became benefactors to the world. In the end both position and wealth followed these daring pioneers. As the roving Indian slowly retreated from the frontier which was stretching westward every hour, sweeping the wilderness away with it, he found the rich earth lavish of her returns for his self-sacrifice and his labor. He drank in enlargement of thought and purpose from amid the luxuriant prairies and vast wilderness which spread its untrodden bosom between his home and the Rocky Mountains. He watched the Father of Rivers cleaving the best portions of a continent with his broad waters, and drank in lessons of true freedom which will never lose their value to his descendants. With a rifle for his companion and an axe for his best friend, the backwoodsman of America learned the art of border warfare, and trained himself in a school of hardship that made his sinews firm as iron and capable of resisting any fatigue. With hearts and minds expanding with the boundless scenes around them, these adventurous men grew so careless of danger that the word fear was blotted from their lexicon long before the present generation came into existence. Is it strange that the descendants of such men should be open-handed, grand-hearted and brave, as we have found them in this war for our common Union? The enthusiasm of the old men who have dropped quietly away into their western graves, has broken forth anew in this younger generation. Like a spark of fire dropped upon a prairie in the autumn, their enthusiasm is easily enkindled. A single word against the old flag, one sacrilegious touch upon its flagstaff, was enough to rouse them into action. Nowhere on earth is the stars and stripes held more sacred than in the West. The first ball that cut through the flag at Fort Sumter aroused the old pioneer blood into determined and terrible resistance.