d
mountain range, the softer and more beautiful for its own shadows.

The fascination of the frontier is and has ever been an undying thing.
Adventure is the meat of the strong men who have built the world for
those more timid. Adventure and the frontier are one and inseparable.
They suggest strength, courage, hardihood--qualities beloved in men
since the world began--qualities which are the very soul of the United
States, itself an experiment, an adventure, a risk accepted. Take away
all our history of political regimes, the story of the rise and fall
of this or that partisan aggregation in our government; take away our
somewhat inglorious military past; but leave us forever the tradition
of the American frontier! There lies our comfort and our pride. There
we never have failed. There, indeed, we always realized our ambitions.
There, indeed, we were efficient, before that hateful phrase was known.
There we were a melting-pot for character, before we came to know
that odious appellation which classifies us as the melting-pot of the
nations.

The frontier was the place and the time of the strong man, of the
self-sufficient but restless individual. It was the home of the rebel,
the protestant, the unreconciled, the intolerant, the ardent--and
the resolute. It was not the conservative and tender man who made our
history; it was the man sometimes illiterate, oftentimes uncultured, the
man of coarse garb and rude weapons. But the frontiersmen were the true
dreamers of the nation. They really were the possessors of a national
vision. Not statesmen but riflemen and riders made America. The noblest
conclusions of American history still rest upon premises which they
laid.

But, in its broadest significance, the frontier knows no country. It
lies also in other lands and in other times than our own. When and what
was the Great Frontier? We need go back only to the time of Drake
and the sea-dogs, the Elizabethan Age, when all North America was a
frontier, almost wholly unknown, compellingly alluring to all bold
men. That was the day of new stirrings in the human heart. Some strange
impulse seemed to act upon the soul of the braver and bolder Europeans;
and they moved westward, nor could have helped that had they tried. They
lived largely and blithely, and died handsomely, those old Elizabethan
adventurers, and they lie today in thousands of unrecorded graves upon
two continents, each having found out that any place is good enoug