: George Bird Grinnell
: Trails of the Pathfinders
: anboco
: 9783736420731
: 1
: CHF 0.90
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 691
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
The chapters in this book appeared first as part of a series of articles under the same title contributed to Forest and Stream several years ago. At the time they aroused much interest and there was a demand that they should be put into book form. The books from which these accounts have been drawn are good reading for all Americans. They are at once history and adventure. They deal with a time when half the continent was unknown; when the West-distant and full of romance-held for the young, the brave and the hardy, possibilities that were limitless. The legend of the kingdom of El Dorado did not pass with the passing of the Spaniards. All through the eighteenth and a part of the nineteenth century it was recalled in another sense by the fur trader, and with the discovery of gold in California it was heard again by a great multitude-and almost with its old meaning. Besides these old books on the West, there are many others which every American should read. They treat of that same romantic period, and describe the adventures of explorers, Indian fighters, fur hunters and fur traders. They are a part of the history of the continent. New York, April, 1911.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Three centuries ago half a dozen tiny hamlets, peopled by white men, were scattered along the western shores of the North Atlantic Ocean. These little settlements owed allegiance to different nations of Europe, each of which had thrust out a hand to grasp some share of the wealth which might lie in the unknown wilderness which stretched away from the seashore toward the west.

The “Indies” had been discovered more than a hundred years before, but though ships had sailed north and ships had sailed south, little was known of the land, through which men were seeking a passage to share the trade which the Portuguese, long before, had opened up with the mysterious East. That passage had not been found. To the north lay ice and snow, to the south—vaguely known—lay the South Sea. What that South Sea was, what its limits, what its relations to lands already visited, were still secrets.

St. Augustine had been founded in 1565; and forty years later the French made their first settlement at Port Royal in what is now Nova Scotia. In 1607 Jamestown was settled; and a year later the French established Quebec. The Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts in 1620 and the first settlement of the Dutch on the island of Manhattan was in 1623. All these settlers establishing themselves in a new country found enough to do in the struggle to procure subsistence, to protect themselves from the elements and from the attacks of enemies, without attempting to discover what lay inland—beyond the sound of the salt waves which beat upon the coast. Not until later was any effort made to learn what lay in the vast interior.

Time went on. The settlements increased. Gradually men pushed farther and farther inland. There were wars; and one nation after another was crowded from its possessions, until, at length, the British owned all the settlements in eastern temperate America. The white men still clung chiefly to the sea-coast, and it was in western Pennsylvania that the French and Indians defeated Braddock in 1755, George Washington being an officer under his command.

A little later came the war of the Revolution, and a new people sprang into being in a land a little more than two hundred and fifty years known. This people, teeming with energy, kept reaching out in all directions for new things. As they increased in numbers they spread chiefly in the direction of least resistance. The native tribes were easier to displace than the French, who held forts to the north, and the Spanish, who possessed territory to the south; and the temperate climate toward the west attracted them more than the cold of the north or the heat of the south. So the Americans pushed on always to the setting sun, and their early movements gave truth to Bishop Berkeley’s famous line, written long before and in an altogether different connection, “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” The Mississippi was reached, and little villages, occupied by Frenchmen and their half-breed children, began to change, to be transformed into American towns. Yet in 1790, ninety-five per cent. of the population of the United States was on the Atlantic seaboard.

Now came the Louisiana Purchase, and immediately after that the expedition across the continent by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The trip took two years’ time, and the reports brought back by the intrepid explorers, telling the wonderful story of what lay in the unknown beyond,