This processional, "this gradual and continuous progress of the European
race toward the Rocky Mountains," says the vivid pen of De Tocqueville,
"has the solemnity of a providential event. It is like a deluge of men,
rising unabatedly and driven daily onward by the hand of God." [Footnote:
"Democracy in America," ed. Gilman, 1:512.]
The story of this anabasis has been told in hundreds and thousands of
fragments--the anabasis that has had no katabasis--the literal going up of
a people, as we shall see, from primitive husbandry and handicraft and a
neighborly individualism, to another level, of machine labor, of more
comfortable living, and of socialized aspiration.
De Quincey has gathered into an immortal story the dramatic details of an
exodus that had its beginning and end just at the time when these half
huntsmen, half traders were creeping down from the farther ridges of the
Alleghanies into the wilderness, where the little French settlements were
clinging like clusters of ripened grapes to a great vine--the story of the
flight of the Kalmuck Tartars from the banks of the Volga, across the
steppes of Europe and the deserts of Asia to the frontiers of China--the
story of the journey of over a half million semi-barbarians, half of whom
perished by the way from cold or heat, from starvation or thirst, or from
the sabres and cannon of the savage hosts pursuing them by day and night
through the endless stretches--the story of the translation of these nomad
herdsmen on the steppes of Russia through "infinite misery" into stable
agriculturists beneath the great wall of China.
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