The American explorer Daniel Boone (1735 – 1820). Original Artwork: From a drawing by R Pollard (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Last Friday we looked at the great Migration from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. It was perhaps one of the most spectacular events in history.. By the onset of the Civil War it was pretty much done, after that war, we started backfilling the map as the railroads spread. But only those highways pf steel could carry the prodigious output of the American west. The Cowboys, the cavalry, the farmers. and the Homesteader, took center stage to thing penultimate part pf the story. It was all paid for from the Civil War through at least the Spanish American War by California gold and Montana silver.
An so the prophecy that Adam Smith made in 1776 came to be, The center of English peaking finance left London for the New World. It too ha the guts to board the boat.
But what about before that day in 1831 in St Joe, Missouri? What happened before That is pir story today. For today marks a remarkable anniversary in American history. For on March 27,177852. 20 years ago today, a month before the first of American wars started. Daniel Boone signed a treaty with the Shawnee, purchasing fir the men he represented a large portion of Kentucky. The Shawnee predicted it would be a hard story, and it was. but this was the occasion for the beginning of the first of the Great American trails, The Wilderness Road, leading from Virginia over the Appalachian Mountains into the lush grasslands of Kentucky. This is that story.
Here is part 2;
Abs that is the story of how the American people in just 225 years, took aa land populated by a group of warring stone age tribes and transformed it into the mist powerful nation in the history of the world. All because as an American tourist in Liverpool told an Englishman, The only difference between us is that our American forebearers dared to get on the boat.
The American frontier closed in 1900, in 19661 John Kennedy penned a mew one. We’ve been to the moon and back safely and will return, but the next goal, set by another man who dared get on the boat. Elon Musk has said. is to Occupy Mars.
America remains a place of innovation, entrepreneurship, and above all movement. Horace Greely told us to “Look west, young man”, but now it is time to look up and see our pioneers off to mew worlds.