AFTERWORD

This book has been named “The Crossing” because I have tried to express in it the beginnings of that great movement across the mountains which swept resistless over the Continent until at last it saw the Pacific itself.  The Crossing was the first instinctive reaching out of an infant nation which was one day to become a giant.  No annals in the world’s history are more wonderful than the story of the conquest of Kentucky and Tennessee by the pioneers.

This name, “The Crossing,” is likewise typical in another sense.  The political faith of our forefathers, of which the Constitution is the creed, was made to fit a more or less homogeneous body of people who proved that they knew the meaning of the word “Liberty.”  By Liberty, our forefathers meant the Duty as well as the Right of man to govern himself.  The Constitution amply attests the greatness of its authors, but it was a compromise.  It was an attempt to satisfy thirteen colonies, each of which clung tenaciously to its identity.  It suited the eighteenth-century conditions of a little English-speaking confederacy along the seaboard, far removed from the world’s strife and jealousy.  It scarcely contemplated that the harassed millions of Europe would flock to its fold, and it did not foresee that, in less than a hundred years, its own citizens would sweep across the three thousand miles of forest and plain and mountain to the Western Ocean, absorb French and Spanish Louisiana, Spanish Texas, Mexico, and California, fill this land with broad farmsteads and populous cities, cover it with a network of railroads.

Would the Constitution, made to meet the needs of the little confederacy of the seaboard, stretch over a Continent and an Empire?

We are fighting out that question to-day.  But The Crossing was in Daniel Boone’s time, in George Rogers Clark’s.  Would the Constitution stand the strain?  And will it stand the strain now that the once remote haven of the oppressed has become a world-power?

It was a difficult task in a novel to gather the elements necessary to picture this movement:  the territory was vast, the types bewildering.  The lonely mountain cabin; the seigniorial life of the tide-water; the foothills and mountains which the Scotch-Irish have marked for their own to this day; the Wilderness Trail; the wonderland of Kentucky, and the cruel fighting in the border forts there against the most relentless of foes; George Rogers Clark and his momentous campaign which gave to the Republic Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; the transition period—­the coming of the settler after the pioneer; Louisiana, St. Louis, and New Orleans,—­to cover this ground, to picture the passions and politics of the time, to bring the counter influence of the French Revolution as near as possible to reality, has been a three years’ task.  The autobiography of David Ritchie is as near as I can get to its solution, and I have a great sense of its incompleteness.