He passes away before the coming of the very civilization whose advance guard he has been.

The pioneer days, with their fierce and squalid struggle for bare life, were over.

They were all Americans, in feeling as well as in name, by habit as well as by birth; and the positions they took in the political life of the West was determined partly by the new conditions surrounding them, and partly by the habits bred…

These men were themselves uncompromisingly in favor of statehood for Kentucky; but they insisted that it should come in an orderly way, and not by a silly and needless revolution, which could serve no good purpose and was certain to entail…

The purpose of the extreme separatist was, unquestionably, to keep Kentucky out of the Union and turn her into a little independent nation,--a nation without a present or a future, an English-speaking Uraguay or Ecuador.

Thus Kentucky was saved from the career of ignoble dishonor to which she would have been doomed by the success of the disunion faction.

The frontiersmen who chopped the first trails across the Alleghanies, who earliest wandered through the lonely western lands, and who first built stockaded hamlets on the banks of the Watauga, the Kentucky, and the Cumberland, acted each…

Only the backwoodsmen themselves felt the thirst for exploration of the unknown, the desire to try the untried, which drove them hither and thither through the dim wilderness.

They elected their own military leaders, and waged war on their own account against their Indian foes.

They constructed their own governmental systems, on their own motion, without assistance or interference from the parent States, until the settlements were firmly established, and the work of civic organization well under way.

The West could neither have been won nor held by the frontiersmen, save for the backing given by the Thirteen States.

But the real work was done by the settlers themselves.

The distinguishing feature in the exploration, settlement, and up-building of Kentucky and Tennessee was the individual initiative of the backwoodsmen.

Here, also, the enterprise, daring, and energy of the individual settlers were of the utmost consequence; the land could never have been won had not the incomers possessed these qualities in a very high degree.

The Northwest owes its life and owes its abounding strength and vigorous growth to the action of the nation as a whole.

It was founded not by individual Americans, but by the United States of America.

They were much better stuff out of which to make a free, self-governing nation, and they were much better able to hold their own in the world, and to shape their own destiny; but they were far less pleasant people to govern.

To this day the very virtues of the pioneers--not to speak of their faults--make it almost impossible for them to get on with an ordinary army officer, accustomed as he is to rule absolutely, though justly and with a sort of severe…

The borderers are usually as suspicious as they are independent, and their self-sufficiency and self-reliance often degenerate into mere lawlessness and defiance of all restraint.

The most striking feature in the settlement of the Southwest was the free play given to the workings of extreme individualism.

The settlement of the Northwest represented the triumph of an intelligent collectivism, which yet allowed to each man a full measure of personal liberty.

It was the United States and not Georgia that actually won and held the land in dispute; and it was a discredit to Georgia's patriotism that she so long wrangled about it, and ultimately drove so hard a bargain concerning it with the…

At present no State in the Union fears the growth of a neighbor, or would ever dream of trying to check that growth.

The direct reverse was the case during and after the Revolution; for the jealousy and distrust which the different States felt for one another were bitter to a degree.

The wisest and coolest leaders saw that the matter could never be determined on a mere consideration of the abstract rights, or even of the equities, of the case.