The West [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION l! In the development of the United States no factor has been of greater significance than the existence of the West. The frontier, the vi^ide open spaces, the pioneer—these components of the West are conspicuous threads in the pattern of the American tradition. They symbohze the concept of the United States as a land of opportunity, of social regeneration, of progress—one of the most basic and enduring ingredients of the American point of view. The popular image of today's West is often a gaudy collage of interminable highways, mountain vacationlands, gamblers' oases in the desert, and jerry-built backgrounds for motion picture epics of the plains. But for by far the greater part of the American experience the West connoted, and in a sense guaranteed, the promise of America. It suggested an ever expanding area of abundance, rich in exploitable resources, which offered material and social betterment to enterprising individuals and increasing strength and security to the nation, as westward the course of settlement made its seemingly inevitable way. For more than three centuries the locale of the American West moved continuously westward. Homeseekers who hesitantly ventured inland in the seventeenth century created America's first West in the back country of the seaboard colonies. By the mid-eighteenth century a newer West had taken shape in the upland region between the Appalachian barrier and the falls of the rivers which flowed eastward out of its timbered heights. Already the insatiable settler was exploring the natural highways leading to another West, this one in the valley of the westward-flowing Ohio. The achievement of independence from Britain, in 1783, attracted settlers to the "Old Northwest," a term then applied to the forested region between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. Soon the demand for cotton was encouraging migration into the initial "Southwest"; and by 1830, the vanguard of farmer-