intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and
finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory
system.[11:2] This page is familiar to the student of census statistics,
but how little of it has been used by our historians. Particularly in
eastern States this page is a palimpsest. What is now a manufacturing
State was in an earlier decade an area of intensive farming. Earlier yet
it had been a wheat area, and still earlier the "range" had attracted
the cattle-herder. Thus Wisconsin, now developing manufacture, is a
State with varied agricultural interests. But earlier it was given over
to almost exclusive grain-raising, like North Dakota at the present
time.

Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic and political
history; the evolution of each into a higher stage has worked political
transformations. But what constitutional historian has made any adequate
attempt to interpret political facts by the light of these social areas
and changes?[12:1]

The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, fur-trader, miner,
cattle-raiser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, each type of
industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible
attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand
at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching
single file--the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the
Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer
farmer--and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the
Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals
between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the
frontier into the trader's frontier, the rancher's frontier, or the
miner's frontier, and the farmer's frontier. When the mines and the cow
pens were still near the fall line the traders' pack trains were
tinkling across the Alleghanies, and the French on the Great Lakes were
fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader's birch canoe.
When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the
mouth of the Missouri.

Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across the
continent? What effects followed from the trader's frontier? The trade
was coeval with American discovery. The Norsemen, Vespuccius, Verrazani,
Hudson, John Smith, all trafficked for furs. The Plymouth pilgrims
settled in Indian cornfields, and their first return cargo was o