Texas, Oregon, and the fruits of the Mexican War
extended its confines to the Western Sea. Incredibly swift as was this
march of the Stars, the American pioneer was always in advance.
The pathfinders were virtually all of American stock. The States
admitted to the Union prior to 1840 were not only founded by them;
they were almost wholly settled by them. When the influx of
foreigners began in the thirties, they found all the trails already
blazed, the trading posts established, and the first terrors of the
wilderness dispelled. They found territories already metamorphosed
into States, counties organized, cities established. Schools,
churches, and colleges preceded the immigrants who were settlers and
not strictly pioneers. The entire territory ceded by the Treaty of
1783 was appropriated in large measure by the American before the
advent of the European immigrant.
Washington, with a ring of pride, said in 1796 that the native
population of America was "filling the western part of the State of
New York and the country on the Ohio with their own surplusage." And
James Madison in 1821 wrote that New England, "which has sent out such
a continued swarm to other parts of the Union for a number of years,
has continued at the same time, as the census shows, to increase in
population although it is well known that it has received but
comparatively few emigrants from any quarter.
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