The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1931-02-20


frontier as fact belongs to long-past history,
this incident belongs to the story of the frontier
its elimination and it's climax.
That westward push" began $50 years ago. 1t
came about when sin the middle Of the Seven
teenth century, before the Carolinas Pennsyl-
vania were engendered before New Amsterdam had
been wrested from the Dutch, and while New Eng
land settlements still Rugged the shore chung to
the navigable waterways Virginian turned his
face to the West and sought to penetrate the wild
country beyond the head Of navigation of the rv-
ers" Capt. Abraham Wood was his name; the date
1850; and he journyed five days westward
from Fort Henry, at the falls of the Appamattox
river, where Petersburg, Va, now stands, to the
falls where the Dan and Staunton unite to form
the Roanoke river. Brief and inconsequential
though this first westwardfaring may appear to
be, it was important because it turned the minds
of the Englishspeaking c0lonists toward 1.-The land
of the setting sun" and for the next $50 years
their minds and the minds Of their descendants
were free from thoughts Of what lay there,
and there was cure for their restessness but to
go and see for themselves.
No better summary of this westward push"
has been written than that which appears in
Ralph II. GabriePs Foreword to the volume "The
Lure of the Frontier in the Yale University Press
Pageant of America" He says: "In the more
than two centuries and half in which the white
man faced the wilderness within the area which
is now the United States the fringe of settlement,
like an advancing army, moved forward from
position to position. The first frontier the
Seventeenth century chain Of villages along the
Atlantic coast in their day portion of the per-
iphery of the European culture area. By the mid
die of the Eighteenth century the outpost cabins
of the back country stood within the eastern
shadow Of the Appalachian mountains. Progress
across the coastal plain and the Piedmont pleateau
was slow, because the white population in the
New world yet not large and also because
transportation the and within the
continent difficult
1.-THE last decades of the Eighteenth century
saw Americans in possession of a considerable
area west of the MISUNDERSTANDING, Tennes
see and part of Ohio. The passing of the first
third of the Nineteenth century found in Missouri
and Iowa the frontier established on the grass
lands west of the Mississippi, with settlements
dottng the Old Southwest and other settlements
pushing northward against the forests of Wis
consin and Michigan By the end Of the first half
of the century frontiersmen, crossing the Great
Plains and the western mountains were founding
communities on the Pacific coast. In the following
forty years the mountains and plains, an area OF
imperial extent were occupied. The slow advance
of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries was
transformed into the Nineteenth to one Of the
most amazing population movements in modern
history Improvement of transportation and the
development of the mechanic arts were fundamen-
tai causes for the acceIeration."
Nearly two hundred years of slow, painful prog
ress from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and
Ahen through the magic of improved transporta-
ton swift rush of less than so years to the
Pacifcl In 1850 when Capt. Abraham Wood set
forth from Fort Henry with his mounted compan-
ices leading their pack horses, the time-dlstance
from the Atlantic to the Pacific could only have
been measured in months and years. Today, when