The passing of the frontier : a chronicle of the old West . d pictures of savage tribes-men, decked in fur-trimmed war-shirts and plumedbonnets, armed with lance and sinewed bow andbull-neck shield, not forgetting whence they gottheir horses and how they got their food. The great early mid-continental highway, knownas the Oregon Trail or the Overland Trail, was byway of the Missouri up the Platte Valley, thenceacross the mountains. We know more of this routebecause it was not discontinued, but came steadilymore and more into use, for one reason after an-other. The fur traders used it, the Fort
The passing of the frontier : a chronicle of the old West . d pictures of savage tribes-men, decked in fur-trimmed war-shirts and plumedbonnets, armed with lance and sinewed bow andbull-neck shield, not forgetting whence they gottheir horses and how they got their food. The great early mid-continental highway, knownas the Oregon Trail or the Overland Trail, was byway of the Missouri up the Platte Valley, thenceacross the mountains. We know more of this routebecause it was not discontinued, but came steadilymore and more into use, for one reason after an-other. The fur traders used it, the Forty-Ninersused it, the cattlemen used it in part, the railroadsused it; and, lastly, the settlers and farmers usedit most of all. In physical features the Platte River route wassimilar to that of the Arkansas Valley. Eachat its eastern extremity, for a few days travel,passed over the rolling grass-covered and flower-besprinkled prairies ere it broke into the highand dry lands of the Plains, with their green orgrey or brown covering of practically flowerless. THE PATHWAYS OF THE WEST 91 short grasses. But between the two trails of theArkansas and the Platte there existed certain widedifferences. At the middle of the nineteenth cen-tury the two trails were quite distinct in personnel,if that word may be used. The Santa Fe Trailshowed Spanish influences; that of the Platte Val-ley remained far more nearly American. Thus far the frontier had always been alteringthe man who came to it; and, indirectly, alwaysaltering those who dwelt back of the frontier,nearer to the Appalachians or the Atlantic. Anew people now was in process of formation — apeople born of a new environment. America andthe American were conceiving. There was soon tobe born, soon swiftly to grow, a new and lastingtype of man. Man changes an environment onlyby bringing into it new or better changes man. Here in the mid-continent, at the mid-century, the frontier andthe ways of the frontier
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectfrontierandpioneerli
