Here across the Mississippi Valley is an exodus accomplished not of a
single night, as these two of which I have just spoken, but extended
through a hundred years of home leavings and love privations. Here is an
anabasis of a century of privations, titanic labors, frontier battles,
endured countless times, till these migrants of Europe and of the new-
world seaboard, became, as children of the wilderness, a new people, with
qualities so distinctive as to lead the highest authority [Footnote:
Frederick J. Turner, "The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in
American History," in Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical
Association (1909-10), 3:159-184.] on the history of that valley to
characterize the west not as a geographic division of the United States,
but as a "form of society" with its own peculiar flowering, developed, not
as Parkman's magnificent fleur-de-lis, [Footnote: See Epilogue.] by cross-
fertilization, nor by grafting, but simply by the planting or sowing of
Old World seeds on new and free land, where the mountains kept off the
pollen of alien spirit, where the puritanical winds of the New England
coast were somewhat tempered by the warmer winds from the south, where the
waters had some iron in them, but, most of all, where the soil was
practically as free as when it came from the hands of the glaciers and the
streams.
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