Come waves of men with capital; come broadcloths,                silks, leghorns, crapes, all the refinementsthe train ushers into each village, and the settler                revolts, pushes into the interior, fleeswhat’s turned to edifices of brick, orchards, gardens,                colleges, churches: roll insteadwestward into the frontier’s crucible in which                all former servants of Europebecome American. Without the war cry                of Cheyenne and Iroquois,would we be ourselves? Would we have battled,                consolidated, traded, made selfand liberty our germs of government?                Would we have stayedand called home the lands of the upper Yadkin                had they remained untamedby farm and corncrib, their timbers not made                girdled, deadened, fenced?The West is too much                for any man. It takes himfrom board room and steam engine and loses him                to birch bark canoe. We see a mountainand level it; we see a plain                spread out like a meadowto overrun; nature the fault and fall line                we trace to our nextdestination, following the arteries                of our nation’s geology: lost shoresof inland seas, shale scarps and carapaces                carved from eastern Kentucky.All now replaced by these joins and joints                of an iron nervous system.Again and again, we return to the primitive                line which we alone believemarks progress; history does not move only forward                for the American, but back. The settlerwill not settle his desires, and so the soul                of our country stays restless, nervous, intolerantof administrative experience and education; hews                to the press of private liberty, which knowsno bounds, gives few benefits, risks                government laxity and a spoils system.We are Boone. We are Kit Carson. Hunter, trader, occupant                of the moment. We are the landwe can’t forget once thrived without us. This                is America, at the endof a hundred years of life                under the Constitution.The train is here. Our frontier is gone.