marched up the slopes of the Appalachians, across the trails of the summits, and down the various approaches to the Mississippi Valley. When times have been hard in the East, the stream has swollen to flood proportions. In the five years which followed the English war the accelerated current moved more rapidly than ever before; while never since has its speed been equalled save in the years following similar catastrophes, as the panics of 1837 and 1857, or in the years under the direct inspiration of the gold fields.

Five new states between 1815 and 1821 carried the area of settlement down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and even up the Missouri to its junction with the Kansas. The whole eastern side was filled with states, well populated along the rivers, but sparsely settled to north and south. The frontier wedge, noticeable by 1776, was even more apparent, now that the apex had crossed the Mississippi and ascended the Missouri to its bend, while the wings dragged back, just including New Orleans at the south, and hardly touching Detroit at the north. The river valleys controlled the distribution of population, and as yet it was easier and simpler to follow the valleys farther west than to strike out across country for lands nearer home but lacking the convenience of the natural route.

For the pioneer advancing westward the route lay direct from the summit of the Alleghanies to the bend of the Missouri. The course of the Ohio facilitated his advance, while the Missouri River, for two hundred and fifty miles above its mouth, runs so nearly east and west as to afford a natural continuation of the route. But at the mouth of the Kansas the Missouri bends. Its course changes to north and south and it ceases to be a highway for the western traveller. Beyond the bend an overland journey must commence. The Platte and Kansas and Arkansas all continue the general direction, but none is easily navigable. The emigrant must leave the boat near the bend of the Missouri and proceed by foot or wagon if he desire to continue westward. With the admission of Missouri in 1821 the apex of the frontier had touched the great bend of the river, beyond which it could not advance with continued ease. Population followed still the line of easiest access, but now it was simpler to condense the settlements farther east, or to broaden out to north or south, than to go farther west. The flanks of the wedge began to move. The southwest cotton states received their influx of population. The country around the northern lakes began to fill up. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made easier the advancing of the northern frontier line, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Iowa and Minnesota to be colonized. And while these flanks were filling out, the apex remained at the bend of the Missouri, whither it had arrived in 1821.

There was more to hold the frontier line at the bend of the Missouri than the ending of the water route. In those very months when pioneers were clearing plots near the mouth of the Kaw, or Kansas, a major of the United States army was collecting data upon which to build a tradition of a great American desert; while the Indian difficulty, steadily increasing as the line of contact between the races grew longer, acted as a vigorous deterrent.

Schoolboys of the thirties, forties, and fifties were told that from the bend of the Missouri to the Stony Mountains stretched an American desert. The makers of their geography books drew the desert upon their maps, coloring its brown with the speckled aspect that connotes Sahara or Arabia, with camels, oases, and sand dunes. The legend was founded upon the fact that rainfall becomes more scanty as the slopes approach the Rockies, and upon the observation of Major Stephen H. Long, who traversed the country in 1819–1820. Long reported that it could never support an agricultural population. The standard weekly journal of the day thought of it as "covered with sand, gravel, pebbles, etc." A writer in the forties told of its "utter destitution of timber, the sterility of its sandy soil," and believed that at "this point the Creator seems to have said to the tribes of emigration that are annually rolling toward the west, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.'" Thus it came about that the frontier remained fixed for many years near the bend of the Missouri. Difficulty of route, danger from Indians, and a great and erroneous belief in the existence of a sandy desert, all served to barricade the way. The flanks advanced across the states of the old Northwest, and into Louisiana and Arkansas, but the western outpost remained for half a century at the point which it had reached in the days of Stephen Long and the admission of Missouri.

By 1821 many frontiers had been created and crossed in the westward march; the seaboard, the falls line, the crest of the Alleghanies, the Ohio Valley, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had been passed in turn. Until this last frontier at the bend of the Missouri had been reached nothing had ever checked the steady progress. But at this point the nature of the advance changed. The obstacles of the American desert and the Rockies refused to yield to the "heel-and-toe" methods which had been successful in the past. The slavery quarrel, the Mexican War, even the Civil War, came and passed with the area beyond this frontier scarcely changed. It had been crossed and recrossed; new centres of life had grown up beyond it on the Pacific coast; Texas had acquired an identity and a population; but the so-called desert with its doubtful soils, its lack of easy highways and its Indian inhabitants, threatened to become a constant quantity.

From 1821 to 1885 extends, in one form or another, the struggle for the last frontier. The imperative demands from the frontier are heard continually throughout the period, its leaders in long succession are filling the high places in national affairs, but the problem remains in its same territorial location. Connected with its phases appear the questions of the middle of the century. The destiny of the Indian tribes is suggested by the long line of contact and the impossibility of maintaining a savage and a civilized life together and at once. A call from the farther West leads to more thorough exploration of the lands beyond the great frontier, bringing into existence the continental trails, producing problems of long-distance government, and intensifying the troubles of the Indians. The final struggle for the control of the desert and the elimination of the frontier draws out the tracks of the Pacific railways, changes and reshapes the Indian policies again, and brings into existence, at the end of the period, the great West. But the struggle is one of half a century, repeating the events of all the earlier struggles, and ever more bitter as it is larger and more difficult. It summons the aid of the nation, as such, before it is concluded, but when it is ended the first era in American history has been closed.

CHAPTER II
THE INDIAN FRONTIER

A lengthening frontier made more difficult the maintenance of friendly relations between the two races involved in the struggle for the continent. It increased the area of danger by its extension, while its advance inland pushed the Indian tribes away from their old home lands, concentrating their numbers along its margin and thereby aggravating their situation. Colonial negotiations for lands as they were needed had been relatively easy, since the Indians and whites were nearly enough equal in strength to have a mutual respect for their agreements and a fear of violation. But the white population doubled itself every twenty-five years, while the Indians close enough to resist were never more