who has
dared to break the silence of the primeval forest by the blows
of the American ax. The hardy lumberman who has penetrated to
the remotest wilds of the Northwest, to drag from their
recesses the materials for building up towns and cities in the
great valley of the Mississippi, has been particularly marked
out as a victim. After enduring all the privations and
subjecting himself to all the perils incident to his
vocation--when he has toiled for months to add by his honest
labor to the comfort of his fellow men, and to the aggregate
wealth of the nation, he finds himself suddenly in the
clutches of the law for trespassing on the public domain. The
proceeds of his long winter's work are reft from him, and
exposed to public sale for the benefit of his paternal
government . . . and the object of this oppression and wrong
is further harassed by vexatious law proceedings against him.

Sibley's protest in congress against these "outrages" by which the
northern lumbermen were "harassed" in their work of what would now be
called stealing government timber, aroused no protest from his
colleagues. No president called this congressman an undesirable citizen
or gave him over to the courts.

Thus many of the pioneers, following the ideal of the right of the
individual to rise, subordinated the rights of the nation and posterity
to the desire that the country should be "developed" and that the
individual should advance with as little interference as possible.
Squatter doctrines and individualism have left deep traces upon American
conceptions.

But quite as deeply fixed in the pioneer's mind as the ideal of
individualism was the ideal of democracy. He had a passionate hatred for
aristocracy, monopoly and special privilege; he believed in simplicity,
economy and in the rule of the people. It is true that he honored the
successful man, and that he strove in all ways to advance himself. But
the West was so free and so vast, the barriers to individual achievement
were so remote, that the pioneer was hardly conscious that any danger to
equality could come from his competition for natural resources. He
thought of democracy as in some way the result of our political
institutions, and he failed to see that it was primarily the result of
the free lands and immense opportunities which surrounded him.
Occasional statesmen voiced the idea that American democracy