or a tavern-keeper. He will establish himself
in one or other of these callings, probably
to "bust up," or to make two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars—he is always going to
make just that particular sum. He knows
thoroughly that art, without which no new
country can grow great—the noble art of
"coming down." Generals and brigadier-
generals of the great civil war are earning
honest bread by industry.

The dashing cavalry leader to whom the
young ladies wrote poems, is in the grocery
trade at Chicago. One famous officer has gone
back to the plough, another is a newspaper
reporter, another is writing a History of Texas,
while practising law and photography. The
photography pays best, for he has a contrivance
of his own for giving the Mexicans a very pale
picture, which is said to suit them exactly, as
they have a desire to appear as white as
possible. Of such stock comes the true Western
Pioneer. Notwithstanding the banter about
his being so long in the legs and short in the
body, that a hat and a pair of trousers make a
good suit of clothes for him, he is a stalwart
sinewy fellow, infinite of resource, rough
in his talk, with little learning and no formal
piety. Ready to work, no matter how often
fortune defeats him, he is ever hopeful of
"wrestling through somehow." A peculiar
character has grown up in the valley of the
Mississippi, which may be called the Western
character. From the Mississippi it has spread, and
is daily spreading more and more to Columbia.
It is the out-growth of all circumstances
surrounding it, including climate and soil, and the
mingling of bloods. It tends to individualism,
freedom, self-reliance, and large views; there is
little of narrow sectarianism in its secular life
or religion; little provincialism, that is to say,
little of the prejudice that lives on for
generations in an untravelled community.

The Western character develops freedom and
takes in large calculations. This is more true
of the man of Western cities, than of the farmer
and the frontier-man, but still the character
applies to all. A Western man thinks nothing
of going one thousand or one thousand five
hundred miles, and has no traditional feud with any
class of Jew or Gentile. The elements of
various nationalities flowing together Westward
form a strong and tolerant community. If a man
out West has his horse stolen, he mounts another
and traces the thief; shoots him if he can.
The extending prairies, immense lakes, grand
rivers, seem to enlarge the whole conception of
things. The big farm yields thousands of
bushels of grain. The Western man may have
twenty horses, a hundred mules, and a thousand
head of cattle grazing in his pastures, and five
hundred pigs fattening in his fields. He reads
the price currents; knows all that is going on;
forms his own opinions, and is loud and bold in
the expression of them. He is a man of patient
courage, who will lose thousands of dollars by
the fall of the market, and make less account
of it than he would of the laming of a favourite
horse, or the loss of a faithful dog. If he doesn't
turn his loss off with a laugh, and is pushed to
speak of it, you may see the gleam of stern grit
flashing from his eyes, as he tells you he will do
better next time. He is full of reckless and
mercurial daring. As impulsive as the Southerner,
and yet practical in all things, he sees and
takes always the short cut to his end. Feeling
about the sacred character of ancestral acres
never disturbs the mind of a man whose possessions
were reclaimed from the wilds but yesterday,
and may be left to-morrow. Whatever he
has he will sell; and whatever you own he is
willing to buy, providing he can make some
"boot" on it. With him all things were made
to buy and sell. A frontier man once described
to me without the least idea of the strange
character of the transaction, how he had
"traded off a bible for a plaguey good fiddle."
If anything you have on you, or about you
strike his fancy, he will at once offer to buy it,
and has no notion that certain pieces of
property mayn't be for sale. My own experience
has lain chiefly among the vanguard of these
pioneers, the frontier man who paves the way
for others less able or willing to cope with
fortune; less traders than labourers upon the
land. These are the people who are fast filling
up with stern prose of the plough and the
reaping machine, and the whistle of steam, what
was once claimed by the pleasant poetry of the
songs of the voyageur, the coureur des bois,
and the hunters and trappers of the great Fur
Companies. But perhaps it is better after all?
Much as I have lived with the frontier man, I
have grown in liking for the pioneer who is
always "moving West."

Hailing generally from some border state,
early in life, he has settled down on some
" donation" claim. Making it his boast that he is
"half horse, half alligator, wi' a touch uv the
snappin' turtle," he soon has a good farm about
him, and remains until, by the miserable style
of agriculture learned in the cotton lands of the
Mississippi, he exhausts the soil; or until he
considers himself inconveniently crowded, upon
hearing that he has got a neighbour eight miles
off, and "more a comin'." Then he "kalk'-
lates he'll move West;" and is not long before
he " guess he'll locate"— still on the frontier
in some Little Big Snipe Swamp, or Dead Indian
Prairie. And there he does " locate," until the
old causes operating, or his land becoming valuable,
he sells out to some less enterprising settler,
hitches up his old bullock team once more, and
with his loose cattle, his horses, his long
Kentucky rifle, his Douglas axe, his copper camp-
kettle, and his long-handled frying-pan, off he
goes. Not forgetting his bouncing "gals,"
who rightly boast that they can "lick their
weight in wild cats," his four stalwart sons, each
of whom can shoot the bristles off a wolf and
drive a furrow so straight that, as they tell you,
if followed up, it would " knock the centre
out'er the north star, colonel," he moves, and
moves, still West. Rumbling every summer
over the great Plains go hundreds of such