Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MAN ON THE FRONTIER Edgar E. Robinson UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN (Awarded second place in the Northern Oratorical League Contest, 1908) The Westerner, the type and master of our American life, will soon disappear. This prophecy, made scarcely ten years ago by an eminent historian, is partly true. For two hundred years our seemingly limitless unoccupied land has allured men who preferred the hardships of frontier life to the confinements of highly organized society. Wave after wave of population eager to grasp the great free domain has swept westward over the continent. But to-day from the Atlantic to the Pacific one people occupy a conquered continent. The Westerner as a frontiersman has passed; the charm and romance of border life is gone. Yet, I believe that the influence of the pioneer movement remains the controlling force in our present development; and that the traits of character that have made "the Westerner the type and master of our American life" will in the future dominate in the larger life of the nation. Is it not well for us, representative as we are to-night of the Old Northwest, to dwell on the rise and the passing of the frontier, and to consider the role that the larger West is to play in our national life ? It is natural to look upon the men who with rifle and axe fought and blazed their way into the wilderness as personifying the spirit of the frontier. We recall theromantic picture of Daniel Boone, who in coonskin cap and buckskin leggings threaded his way through a trackless forest and, amid perils that might well have terrified a dauntless soul, erected a cabin home. Such adventurers are indeed the extreme types of the American pioneer. The free land which the nation opened up impartially has been occupied by a sweeping movement of individuals. ...