most was a stalwart man, as strong in body as in faith. One of the continually recurring incidents in the biographies of the famous frontier preachers is that of some particularly hardened sinner who was never converted until, tempted to assault the preacher of the Word, he was soundly thrashed by the latter, and his eyes thereby rudely opened through his sense of physical shortcoming to an appreciation of his moral iniquity. The Frontiersmen Threaten the Spanish Regions. Throughout these years, as the frontiersmen pressed into the West, they continued to fret and strain against the Spanish boundaries. There was no temptation to them to take possession of Canada. The lands south of the Lakes were more fertile than those north of the Lakes, and the climate was better. The few American settlers who did care to go into Canada found people speaking their own tongue, and with much the same ways of life; so that they readily assimilated with them, as they could not assimilate with the French and Spanish creoles. Canada lay north, and the tendency of the backwoodsman was to thrust west; among the Southern backwoodsmen, the tendency was south and southwest. The Mississippi formed no natural barrier whatever. Boone, when he moved into Missouri, was but a forerunner among the pioneers; many others followed him. He himself became an official under the Spanish Government, and received a grant of lands. Of the other frontiersmen who went into the Spanish territory, some, like Boone, continued to live as hunters and backwoods farmers. [Footnote: American State Papers, Public Lands, II., pp. 10, 872.] Others settled in St. Louis, or some other of the little creole towns, and joined the parties of French traders who ascended the Missouri and the Mississippi to barter paint, beads, powder, and blankets for the furs of the Indians. Uneasiness of the Spaniards. Their Religious Intolerance.