is people
into 'hotch-pot' with the wild men on the Missouri, nor with the mixed,
though more respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask
on the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi. . . . Do you suppose the
people of the Northern and Atlantic States will, or ought to, look on
with patience and see Representatives and Senators from the Red River
and Missouri, pouring themselves upon this and the other floor, managing
the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles, at least, from their
residence; and having a preponderancy in councils into which,
constitutionally, they could never have been admitted?"

Like an echo from the fears expressed by the East at the close of the
eighteenth century come the words of an eminent Eastern man of
letters[208:1] at the end of the nineteenth century, in warning against
the West: "Materialized in their temper; with few ideals of an ennobling
sort; little instructed in the lessons of history; safe from exposure to
the direct calamities and physical horrors of war; with undeveloped
imaginations and sympathies--they form a community unfortunate and
dangerous from the possession of power without a due sense of its
corresponding responsibilities; a community in which the passion for war
may easily be excited as the fancied means by which its greatness may be
convincingly exhibited, and its ambitions gratified. . . . Some chance
spark may fire the prairie."

Here, then, is the problem of the West, as it looked to New England
leaders of thought in the beginning and at the end of this century. From
the first, it was recognized that a new type was growing up beyond the
seaboard, and that the time would come when the destiny of the nation
would be in Western hands. The divergence of these societies became
clear in the struggle over the ratification of the federal constitution.
The up-country agricultural regions, the communities that were in debt
and desired paper money, with some Western exceptions, opposed the
instrument; but the areas of intercourse and property carried the day.

It is important to understand, therefore, what were some of the ideals
of this early Western democracy. How did the frontiersman differ from
the man of the coast?

The most obvious fact regarding the man of the Western Waters is that he
had placed himself under influences destructive to many of the gains of
civilization. Remote from the opportunity for systematic education,
substituting a log hut