Teddy Roosevelt

Yet underneath their moodiness and their fitful light-heartedness lay a spirit that when roused was terrible in its ruthless and stern intensity of purpose.

The backwoods people had to front peril and hardship without stint, and they loved for the moment to leap out of the bounds of their narrow lives and taste the coarse pleasures that are always dear to a strong, simple, and primitive race.

To succeed in the wilderness, it was necessary to possess not only daring, but also patience and the capacity to endure grinding toil.

They possessed the courage that enabled them to defy outside foes, together with the rough, practical commonsense that allowed them to establish a simple but effective form of government, so as to preserve order among themselves.

But the bulk of the settlers were men of sterling worth; fit to be the pioneer fathers of a mighty and beautiful state.

They exhorted no less earnestly in the bare meeting-houses on Sunday, because their hands were roughened with guiding the plow and wielding the axe on week-days; for they did not believe that being called to preach the word of God absolved…

They felt that they were dispossessing the Canaanites, and were thus working the Lord's will in preparing the land for a race which they believed was more truly His chosen people than was that nation which Joshua led across the Jordan.

Their preachers, all Presbyterians, followed close behind the first settlers, and shared their toil and dangers; they tilled their fields rifle in hand, and fought the Indians valorously.

Their untamed and turbulent passions, and the lawless freedom of their lives, made them a population very productive of wild, headstrong characters; yet, as a whole, they were a God-fearing race, as was but natural in those who sprang from…

It is a waste of time to quarrel over who first discovered a particular tract of this wilderness.

Frontiersmen are often content with the merest printed trash; but the better men among them appreciate really good literature quite as much as any other class of people.

But the credit belongs to the whole backwoods race, not to the individual backwoodsman.

We owe the conquest of the west to all the backwoodsmen, not to any solitary individual among them; where all alike were strong and daring there was no chance for any single man to rise to unquestioned preeminence.

The west was neither discovered, won, nor settled by any single man.

The American backwoodsmen had surged up, wave upon wave, till their mass trembled in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready to flood the continent beyond.

Generally the vigilantes, by a series of summary executions, do really good work; but I have rarely known them fail, among the men whom they killed for good reason, to also kill one or two either by mistake or to gratify private malice.

In many of the cases of lynch law which have come to my knowledge the effect has been healthy for the community; but sometimes great injustice is done.

In spite of their many failings, they were of all men the best fitted to conquer the wilderness and hold it against all comers.

They were relentless, revengeful, suspicious, knowing neither ruth nor pity; they were also upright, resolute, and fearless, loyal to their friends, and devoted to their country.

Thus the backwoodsmen lived on the clearings they had hewed out of the everlasting forest; a grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion, the love of freedom rooted in their very…

In the backwoods the lawless led lives of abandoned wickedness; they hated good for good's sake, and did their utmost to destroy it.

The ne'er-do-well of a family who in one place has his debts paid a couple of times and is then forced to resign from his clubs and lead a cloudy but innocuous existence on a small pension, in the other abruptly finishes his career by…

The man who in civilization is merely sullen and bad-tempered becomes a murderous, treacherous ruffian when transplanted to the wilds; while, on the other hand, his cheery, quiet neighbor develops into a hero, ready uncomplainingly to lay…

All qualities, good and bad, are intensified and accentuated in the life of the wilderness.

If a member of a bad family wished to reform, he had every opportunity to do so; if a member of a good family had vicious propensities, there was nothing to check them.