[Illustration: Map. The West during the Revolution. Showing Hamilton's route from Detroit to Vincennes; Clark's route from Redstone to the Illinois, and thence to Vincennes; Boon's trail, on the Wilderness Road to Kentucky; Robertson's trail to the settlement he founded on the Cumberland; the water route from the Watauga to Nashboro, that taken by the _Adventure_; the march of the backwoodsmen from the Sycamore Shoals to King's Mountain. The flags denote the battles of the Great Kanawha, the Blue Licks, the Island Flats of the Holston, and King's Mountain; and the assaults on Boonsboro and Vincennes. Based on a map by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London.] THE WINNING OF THE WEST. CHAPTER I. THE SPREAD OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES. During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world's history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance. The tongue which Bacon feared to use in his writings, lest they should remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimportant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two continents. The Common Law which Coke jealously upheld in the southern half of a single European island, is now the law of the land throughout the vast regions of Australasia, and of America north of the Rio Grande. The names of the plays that Shakespeare wrote are household words in the mouths of mighty nations, whose wide domains were to him more unreal than the realm of Prester John. Over half the descendants of their fellow countrymen of that day now dwell in lands which, when these three Englishmen were born, held not a single white inhabitant; the race which, when they were in their prime, was hemmed in between the North and the Irish seas, to-day holds sway over worlds, whose endless coasts are washed by the waves of the three great oceans. There have been many other races that at one time or another had their great periods of race expansion--as distinguished from mere conquest,--but there has never been another whose expansion has been either so broad or so rapid. At one time, many centuries ago, it seemed as if the Germanic peoples, like their Celtic foes and neighbors, would be absorbed into the all-conquering Roman power, and, merging their identity in that of the victors, would accept their law, their speech, and their habits of thought. But this danger vanished forever on the day of the slaughter by the Teutoburger Wald, when the legions of Varus were broken by the rush of Hermann's wild warriors.