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 after the defeat of the Spanish Armada,
that culminated in the marvellous growth of the United States. The
winning of the West and Southwest is a stage in the conquest of a
continent.

1. To this I can testify of my own knowledge as regards Montana, Dakota,
and Minnesota. The mixture usually takes place in the ranks of the
population where individuals lose all trace of their ancestry after two
or three generations; so it is often honestly ignored, and sometimes