n the coast towns and
old-settled districts, were inclined to look eastward, rather than
westward. They were interested in the quarrels of the old-world nations;
they were immediately concerned in the rights of the fisheries they
jealously shared with England, or the trade they sought to secure with
Spain. They did not covet the Indian lands. They had never heard of the
Rocky Mountains--nobody had as yet,--they cared as little for the
Missouri as for the Congo, and they thought of the Pacific Slope as a
savage country, only to be reached by an ocean voyage longer than the
voyage to India. They believed that they were entitled, under the
treaty, to the country between the Alleghanies and the Great Lakes; but
they were quite content to see the Indians remain in actual occupancy,
and they had no desire to spend men and money in driving them out.
Nevertheless, they were even less disposed to proceed to extremities
against their own people, who in very fact were driving out the Indians;
and this was the only alternative, for in the end they had to side with
one or the other set of combatants.

The governmental authorities of the newly created Republic shared these
feelings. They felt no hunger for the Indian lands; they felt no desire
to stretch their boundaries and thereby add to their already heavy
burdens and responsibilities. They wished to do strict justice to the
Indians; the treaties they held with them were carried on with
scrupulous fairness and were honorably lived up to by the United States
officials.

The Government Especially Averse to War.

They strove to keep peace, and made many efforts to persuade the
frontiersmen to observe the Indian boundary lines, and not to intrude on
the territory in dispute; and they were quite unable to foresee the
rapidity of the nation's westward growth. Like the people of the eastern
seaboard, the men high in governmental authority were apt to look upon
the frontiersmen with feelings dangerously akin to dislike and
suspicion. Nor were these feelings wholly unjustifiable. The men who
settle in a new country, and begin subduing the wilderness, plunge back
into the very conditions from which the race has raised itself by the
slow toil of ages.

Inevitable Shortcomings of the Frontiersmen.

The conditions cannot but tell upon them. Inevitably, and for more than
one lifetime--perhaps for several generations--they tend to retrograde,
instead of advancing. They drop away fr