Prior to 1830 the mass of pioneer colonists in most of
the Mississippi Valley had been contributed by the up-country of the
south. The dominant strain in those earlier comers, as President Roosevelt
reminds us, was Scotch-Irish, a "race doubly-twisted in the making, flung
from island to island and toughened by exile"--a race of frontiersmen than
whom a "better never appeared"--a race which was as "steel welded into the
iron of an axe." They form the kernel of the "distinctively and intensely
American stock who were the pioneers of the axe and the rifle, succeeding
the French pioneers of the sword and the bateaux."
What I have just said of them, these Scotch-Irish, is in quotation, for as
I have already intimated, my own ancestry is of that double-twisting; and
since the time when my first American ancestor settled as the first
permanent minister beyond the mountains, following the paths of the French
priests in their missions and became a member of a presbytery extending
from the mountains to the setting sun, until my last collateral ancestor
living among the Indians helped survey the range lines of new States and
finally marked the boundaries of the last farms in the passes of the
Rockies, that ancestry has followed the frontier westward from where
Celoron planted the emblems of French possession along the Ohio to where
Chevalier la Verendrye looked upon the snowy and impassable peaks of the
Rockies.
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