wilderness.

The heroic enterprises recorded in the history of man have generally been
remarkable in proportion to their apparent original weakness. This is true
in an eminent degree of the settlement of European colonies on the western
continent. The sway which woman's influence exercised in these colonial
enterprises is all the more wonderful when we contemplate them from this
point of view. Three feeble bands of men and women;--the first at
Jamestown, Virginia, in 1609-1612; the second at Plymouth, in 1620; the
third on the Island of Manhattan, in 1624;--these were the dim nuclei from
which radiated those long lines of light which stretch to-day across a
continent and strike the Pacific ocean. This is a simile borrowed from
astronomy. To adopt the language of the naturalist, those three little
colonies were the puny germs which bore within themselves a vital force
vastly more potent and wonderful than that which dwells in the heart of the
gourd seed, and the acorn whose nascent swelling energies will lift huge
boulders and split the living rock asunder: vastly more potent because it
was not the blind motions of nature merely, but a force at once physical,
moral, and intellectual.

These feeble bands of men and women took foothold and held themselves
firmly like a hard-pressed garrison waiting for re-enforcements.
Re-enforcements came, and then they went out from their works, and setting
their faces westward moved slowly forward. The vanguard were men with pikes
and musketoons and axes; the rearguard were women who kept watch and ward
over the household treasures. Sometimes in trying hours the rearguard
ranged itself and fought in the front ranks, falling back to its old
position when the crisis was past.

In order to appreciate the actual value of woman as a component part of