His need was still the
primal threefold need family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the
day's work was done. We who look back with thoughtful eyes upon
the frontiersman--all links of contact with his racial past
severed, at grips with destruction in the contenting of his
needs--see something more, something larger, than he saw in the
log cabin raised by his hands, its structure held together solely
by his close grooving and fitting of its own strength. Though the
walls he built for himself have gone with his own dust back to
the earth, the symbol he erected for us stands.
Chapter III. The Trader
The trader was the first pathfinder. His caravans began the
change of purpose that was to come to the Indian warrior's route,
turning it slowly into the beaten track of communication and
commerce. The settlers, the rangers, the surveyors, went westward
over the trails which he had blazed for them years before. Their
enduring works are commemorated in the cities and farms which
today lie along every ancient border line; but of their
forerunner's hazardous Indian trade nothing remains. Let us
therefore pay a moment's homage here to the trader, who first--to
borrow a phrase from Indian speech--made white for peace the red
trails of war.
He was the first cattleman of the Old Southwest.
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