during the first
years of the Revolution, until the Kentucky backwoodsmen conquered it.
Our rivals of European race had dwelt for generations along the lower
Mississippi and the Rio Grande, in Florida, and in California, when we
made them ours. Detroit, Vincennes, St. Louis, and New Orleans, St.
Augustine, San Antonio, Santa Fe, and San Francisco are cities that
were built by Frenchmen or Spaniards; we did not found them, but
conquered them. All but the first two are in the Southwest, and of
these two one was first taken and governed by Southwesterners. On the
other hand, the Northwestern cities, from Cincinnati and Chicago to
Helena and Portland, were founded by our own people, by the people who
now have possession of them.

The Southwest was conquered only after years of hard fighting with the
original owners. The way in which this was done bears much less
resemblance to the sudden filling up of Australia and California by
the practically unopposed overflow from a teeming and civilized mother
country, than it does to the original English conquest of Britain
itself. The warlike borderers who thronged across the Alleghanies, the
restless and reckless hunters, the hard, dogged, frontier farmers, by
dint of grim tenacity overcame and displaced Indians, French, and
Spaniards alike, exactly as, fourteen hundred years before, Saxon and
Angle had overcome and displaced the Cymric and Gaelic Celts. They
were led by no one commander; they acted under orders from neither
king nor congress; they were not carrying out the plans of any
far-sighted leader. In obedience to the instincts working half blindly
within their breasts, spurred ever onwards by the fierce desires of
their eager hearts, they made in the wilderness homes for their
children, and by so doing wrought out the destinies of a continental
nation. They warred and settled from the high hill-valleys of the
French Broad and the Upper Cumberland to the half-tropical basin of
the Rio Grande, and to where the Golden Gate lets through the
long-heaving waters of the Pacific. The story of how this was done
forms a compact and continuous whole. The fathers followed Boon or
fought at King's Mountain; the sons marched south with Jackson to
overcome the Creeks and beat back the British; the grandsons died at
the Alamo or charged to victory at San Jacinto. They were doing their
share of a work that began with the conquest of Britain, that entered
on its second and wider period aft