rifle, from our own country.  They often had flowers planted, including fragrant roses.  Their only live stock, except the dogs, were a few chickens and ducks.  They planted patches of mandioc, maize, sugarcane, rice, beans, squashes, pineapples, bananas, lemons, oranges, melons, peppers; and various purely native fruits and vegetables, such as the kniabo—­a vegetable-fruit growing on the branches of a high bush—­ which is cooked with meat.  They get some game from the forest, and more fish from the river.  There is no representative of the government among them—­indeed, even now their very existence is barely known to the governmental authorities; and the church has ignored them as completely as the state.  When they wish to get married they have to spend several months getting down to and back from Manaos or some smaller city; and usually the first christening and the marriage ceremony are held at the same time.  They have merely squatter’s right to the land, and are always in danger of being ousted by unscrupulous big men who come in late, but with a title technically straight.  The land laws should be shaped so as to give each of these pioneer settlers the land he actually takes up and cultivates, and upon which he makes his home.  The small homemaker, who owns the land which he tills with his own hands, is the greatest element of strength in any country.

These are real pioneer settlers.  They are the true wilderness-winners.  No continent is ever really conquered, or thoroughly explored, by a few leaders, or exceptional men, although such men can render great service.  The real conquest, the thorough exploration and settlement, is made by a nameless multitude of small men of whom the most important are, of course, the home-makers.  Each treads most of the time in the footsteps of his predecessors, but for some few miles, at some time or other, he breaks new ground; and his house is built where no house has ever stood before.  Such a man, the real pioneer, must have no strong desire for social life and no need, probably no knowledge, of any luxury, or of any comfort save of the most elementary kind.  The pioneer who is always longing for the comfort and luxury of civilization, and especially of great cities, is no real pioneer at all.  These settlers whom we met were contented to live in the wilderness.  They had found the climate healthy and the soil fruitful; a visit to a city was a very rare event, nor was there any overwhelming desire for it.

In short, these men, and those like them everywhere on the frontier between civilization and savagery in Brazil, are now playing the part played by our backwoodsmen when over a century and a quarter ago they began the conquest of the great basin of the Mississippi; the part played by the Boer farmers for over a century in South Africa, and by the Canadians when less than half a century ago they began to take possession of their Northwest.  Every now and then some one says that the “last frontier”