William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

[284] have grown into Thirty Nine States and Eight Territories, covering more than three million square miles of surface, counting upwards of forty millions of free inhabitants, without numbering the Kickapoos, who cannot be caught, and the Comanches and Cheyennes, who cannot be taxed.

A mere fringe of sea-board, the young Republic lay along the shores and inlets of a narrow mountain slope. From Penobscot river in Maine to Attamaha river in Georgia the inhabitable land was seldom more than a hundred miles in depth. Here and there a fertile valley ran up two or three hundred miles, but the foot of the Alleghannies usually came down within a hundred miles of the sea. At one point only had these mountain barriers been crossed; an opening in the Blue Ridge, through which a few adventurous planters had passed into the plains, now covered by West Virginia and Kentucky; and these stragglers from their kind had to live at the mercy of Red savages, who from time to time burned the homesteads, scalped the men, and carried the women to their camps. In patriotic talk the setting sun was called the western boundary; but the sun was then supposed to set, not in the