[125:1] Turner, in "Alumni Quarterly of the University of Illinois," ii, 133-136. [125:2] [It has seemed best in this volume not to attempt to deal with the French frontier or the Spanish-American frontier. Besides the works of Parkman, a multitude of monographs have appeared in recent years which set the French frontier in new light; and for the Spanish frontier in both the Southwest and California much new information has been secured, and illuminating interpretations made by Professors H. E. Bolton, I. J. Cox, Chapman, Father Engelhart, and other California and Texas investigators, although the works of Hubert Howe Bancroft remain a useful mine of material. There was, of course, a contemporaneous Old West on both the French and the Spanish frontiers. The formation, approach and ultimate collision and intermingling of these contrasting types of frontiers are worthy of a special study.] IV THE MIDDLE WEST[126:1] American sectional nomenclature is still confused. Once "the West" described the whole region beyond the Alleghanies; but the term has hopelessly lost its definiteness. The rapidity of the spread of settlement has broken down old usage, and as yet no substitute has been generally accepted. The "Middle West" is a term variously used by the public, but for the purpose of the present paper, it will be applied to that region of the United States included in the census reports under the name of the North Central division, comprising the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin (the old "Territory Northwest of the River Ohio"), and their trans-Mississippi sisters of the Louisiana Purchase,--Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. It is an imperial domain. If the greater countries of Central Europe,--France, Germany, Italy, and Austro-Hungary,--were laid down upon this area, the Middle West would still show a margin of spare territory. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo constitute its gateways to the Eastern States; Kansas City, Omaha, St. Paul-Minneapolis, and Duluth-Superior dominate its western areas; Cincinnati and St. Louis stand on its southern borders; and Chicago reigns at the center. What Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are to the Atlantic seaboard these cities are to the Middle West. The Great Lakes and the Mississippi, with the Ohio and the Missouri as laterals, constitute the vast water system that binds the Middle West together. It is the economic and political center of the Republic. At one edge is the Populism of the prairies; at the other, the capitalism that is typified in Pittsburgh. Great as are the local differences within the Middle West, it possesses, in its physiography, in the history of its settlement, and in its economic and social life, a unity and interdependence which warrant a study of the area as an entity. Within the limits of this article, treatment of so vast a region, however, can at best afford no more than an outline sketch, in