As the frontiersmen conquered and transformed the wilderness, so the wilderness in its turn created and preserved the type of man who overcame it.

Nowhere else on the continent has so sharply defined and distinctively American a type been produced as on the frontier, and a single generation has always been more than enough for its production.

The influence of the wild country upon the man is almost as great as the effect of the man upon the country.

The frontiersman destroys the wilderness, and yet its destruction means his own.

He passes away before the coming of the very civilization whose advance guard he has been.