“This explains why Missouri, rather than the northern tier of new states, became in its turn the vanguard and outpost of civilization, as Kentucky and Tennessee had been before her, and Virginia and Pennsylvania before them. It explains why, when mountain and forest barriers had been left behind, and the vast Western plain offered countless parallel routes of travel to the Rockies, such routes were not used, but all the great transcontinental trails, whether to Santa Fé, California, or Oregon, focused for half a century at St. Louis or Independence. It explains why the majority of our famous scouts and explorers and Indian fighters were men whose strain went back to the Shenandoah valley or the Yadkin, and why most of them could trace their descent still farther back to Pennsylvania, mother of Western pioneers.” There is much that is convincing in this study of facts and motives; yet perhaps the gentler and broader view is not that of personnel but of geography. I myself am more disposed to believe that St. Louis became great by reason of her situation on the great interior pathways of the waters; though all this may be said with no jot of abatement in admiration for the magnificent daring and determination of those men of the lower slopes of the Appalachians who, as history shows simply and unmistakably, were really the pioneers of the eastern, the middle and the most western portions of the splendid empire of the West. Let us reserve for a later chapter the more specific study of this typical adventurer and his origin, and pass for the present to the general consideration of the figure that we may call the American west-bound man. * * * * * We must remember that there had been two or three full American generations to produce him, this man that first dared turn away from the seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the sun, toward the dark and mysterious mountains and forests, which then encompassed the least remote land fairly to be called the West. Two generations had produced a man different from the Old-World type. Free air and good food had given him abundant brawn. He was tall, with Anak in his frame. Little fat cloyed the free play of his muscles, and there belonged to him the heritage of the courage that comes of good heart and lungs. He was a splendid man to have for an ancestor, this tall and florid athlete that never heard of athletics. His face was thin and aquiline, his look high and confident, his eye blue, his speech reserved. You may see this same man yet in those restricted parts of this country which remain fit to be called American. You may see him sometimes in the mountains of Tennessee, the brakes of Arkansas or Missouri, where the old strain has remained most pure. You might have seen him over all the West in the generation preceding our own.