Frontier Settlement Quotes

A few years back Texas was a wilderness, the home of the uncivilized and wandering Comanche and other tribes of Indians, who waged a constant warfare against the Spanish settlements…. In order to restrain these savages and bring them into subjection, the government opened Texas for settlement. Foreign emigrants were invited and called to that country. American enterprise accepted the invitation and promptly responded to the call

On the fourth day of July following, a party of about two hundred Indians attacked Boonsborough, killed one man, and wounded two.

It being perhaps the only large tract of country and certainly the first which lying out of the boundaries of the Union will be settled by the people of the United States.

Where others send invading armies, the Americans send their colonists … Texas will be lost to this republic if adequate measures are not taken.

If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.

It (the proclamation of 1763) must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying the lands. Any person, therefore, who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking out and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it.

Inhabitants flock in here daily, mostly from Pennsylvania and other parts of America, who are over-stocked with people and [some] make directly from Europe; they commonly seat themselves towards the West, and have got near the mountains.

The pioneer army perpetually... strikes to the front. Empire plants itself upon the trails.

Thus we behold Kentucky, lately an howling wilderness, the habitation of savages and wild beasts, become a fruitful field; this region, so favourably distinguished by nature, now become the habitation of civilization, at a period unparalleled in history, in the midst of a raging war, and under all the disadvantages of emigration to a country so remote from the inhabited parts of the continent.

The homestead policy was established only after long and earnest resistance; experience proves its wisdom. The lands in the hands of industrious settlers, whose labor creates wealth and contributes to the public resources, are worth more to the United States than if they had been reserved as a solitude for future purchasers.

The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Here at this far lost end of the continent, where the trail wagons had stopped and the people with them.