Then at last came the time when the frontier, held fast by many braided trails, looked back across the mountains, and resolved to pin fast its allegiance then and forever to the government that had been left behind, the government of Americans under principles established and fully proved on the American soil. The threads that bound fast the new settlements with the old, the threads that grew and strengthened into indissoluble bonds, which in spite of the fears of those who dreaded the accession of any more large territory, held firm the whole wide realm of the West to the mother colonies on the East, were simply the natural and artificial trails, later to be blended into a vast network, intermingling and inextricable, weaving and making permanent the web of a common and unsectionalized civilization. Such was the still pure Anglo-Saxon civilization, changed, purified and strengthened by some generations of tenure of the American soil, at the time when it reached the great central highway, the mighty Mississippi, there to pause for a time, facing new problems attendant upon the next great journey onward and outward in the pathway of the sun. ----- Footnote 10: Alexander Hynds, of Dandridge, Tenn. Footnote 11: N. P. Langford. Footnote 12: Alexander Hynds. Footnote 13: N. P. Langford. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE WAY TO THE ROCKIES CHAPTER I DAVY CROCKETT There is no figure of speech that so exactly describes the westward advance of the American population as that which compares it to the feeding of a vast flock of wild pigeons. These, when they fall on a forest rich with their chosen food, advance rapidly, rank after rank. As those in the front pause for a moment to feed, others behind rise and fly on beyond them, settling for a time to resume their own feeding operations. Thus the progress of the hosts resembles a series of rolling waves, one passing ever on beyond the other, each wave changing its own relative position rapidly, yet ever going forward. It was so with the American people. The Alleghanies could not stop them in their west-bound march, nor the terrors of a relentless Indian warfare, which endangered lives dearer to the rugged frontiersman than his own. Nothing would do until the pathway of the waters had brought the American settler to the Mississippi River, the great highway that, whether by whim, chance, or design, had now become wholly the property of the growing American government. Having arrived at the Mississippi River, the population could not rest. Those behind pressed ever on.