The loss of these men would have been very serious, but of no one of them can it be said, as of Clark, that he alone could have done the work he actually did.] Important though they are for their own sakes, they are still more important as types of the men who surrounded them.
The individualism of the backwoodsmen, however, was tempered by a sound common-sense, and capacity for combination.

The first hunters might come alone or in couples, but the actual colonization was done not by individuals, but by groups of individuals.

The settlers brought their families and belongings either on pack-horses along the forest trails, or in scows down the streams; they settled in palisaded villages, and immediately took steps to provide both a civil and military organization.

They were men of facts, not theories; and they showed their usual hard common-sense in making a government.

They did not try to invent a new system; they simply took that under which they had grown up, and applied it to their altered conditions.