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.
I had hoped when I planned the series to bring down
this novel through the stirring period which ended, by a
chance, when a steamboat brought supplies to Jackson's
army in New Orleans—the beginning of the era of steam
commerce on our Western waters. This work will have
to be reserved for a future time.
I have tried to give a true history of Clark's campaign
as seen by an eyewitness, trammelled as little as possible
by romance. Elsewhere, as I look back through these pages,
I feel as though the soil had only been scraped. What
principality in the world has the story to rival that of John
Sevier and the State of Franklin? I have tried to tell the
truth as I went along. General Jackson was a boy at the
Waxhaws and dug his toes in the red mud. He was a
man at Jonesboro, and tradition says that he fought with a
fence-rail. Sevier was captured as narrated. Monsieur
Gratiot, Monsieur Vigo, and Father Gibault lost the money
which they gave to Clark and their country. Monsieur
Vigo actually travelled in the state which Davy describes
when he went down the river with him. Monsieur Gratiot
and Colonel Auguste Chouteau and Madame Chouteau are
names so well known in St. Louis that it is superfluous to
say that such persons existed and were the foremost citizens
of the community.
Among the many to whom my apologies and thanks are
due is Mr. Pierre Chouteau of St. Louis, whose unremitting
labors have preserved and perpetuated the history and
traditions of the country of his ancestors. I would that I
had been better able to picture the character, the courage,
the ability, and patriotism of the French who settled
Louisiana. The Republic owes them much, and their
descendants are to-day among the stanchest preservers of her
ideals.
WINSTON CHURCHILL.
Boston, April 18, 1904.