The Crossing

by Winston Churchill

  AFTERWORD

  This book has been named “The Crossing” because I have tried to expressin it the beginnings of that great movement across the mountains whichswept resistless over the Continent until at last it saw the Pacificitself. The Crossing was the first instinctive reaching out of an infantnation which was one day to become a giant. No annals in the world’shistory are more wonderful than the story of the conquest of Kentuckyand Tennessee by the pioneers.

  This name, “The Crossing,” is likewise typical in another sense. Thepolitical faith of our forefathers, of which the Constitution is thecreed, was made to fit a more or less homogeneous body of people whoproved that they knew the meaning of the word “Liberty.” By Liberty,our forefathers meant the Duty as well as the Right of man to governhimself. The Constitution amply attests the greatness of its authors,but it was a compromise. It was an attempt to satisfy thirteencolonies, each of which clung tenaciously to its identity. It suited theeighteenth-century conditions of a little English-speaking confederacyalong the seaboard, far removed from the world’s strife and jealousy. Itscarcely contemplated that the harassed millions of Europe would flockto 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 forestand plain and mountain to the Western Ocean, absorb French and SpanishLouisiana, Spanish Texas, Mexico, and California, fill this landwith broad farmsteads and populous cities, cover it with a network ofrailroads.

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

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

  It was a difficult task in a novel to gather the elements necessary topicture this movement: the territory was vast, the types bewildering.The lonely mountain cabin; the seigniorial life of the tide-water; thefoothills and mountains which the Scotch-Irish have marked for their ownto this day; the Wilderness Trail; the wonderland of Kentucky, and thecruel fighting in the border forts there against the most relentless offoes; George Rogers Clark and his momentous campaign which gave to theRepublic Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; the transition period--thecoming of the settler after the pioneer; Louisiana, St. Louis, and NewOrleans,--to cover this ground, to picture the passions and politicsof the time, to bring the counter influence of the French Revolutionas near as possible to reality, has been a three years’ task. Theautobiography 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 throughthe stirring period which ended, by a chance, when a steamboat broughtsupplies to Jackson’s army in New Orleans--the beginning of the era ofsteam commerce on our Western waters. This work will have to be reservedfor a future time.

  I have tried to give a true history of Clark’s campaign as seen by aneyewitness, trammelled as little as possible by romance. Elsewhere, asI look back through these pages, I feel as though the soil had only beenscraped. What principality in the world has the story to rival that ofJohn Sevier and the State of Franklin? I have tried to tell the truth asI went along. General Jackson was a boy at the Waxhaws and dug his toesin the red mud. He was a man at Jonesboro, and tradition says that hefought with a fence-rail. Sevier was captured as narrated. MonsieurGratiot, Monsieur Vigo, and Father Gibault lost the money which theygave to Clark and their country. Monsieur Vigo actually travelled inthe state which Davy describes when he went down the river with him.Monsieur Gratiot and Colonel Auguste Chouteau and Madame Chouteau arenames so well known in St. Louis that it is superfluous to say that suchpersons existed and were the foremost citizens of the community.

  Among the many to whom my apologies and thanks are due is Mr. PierreChouteau of St. Louis, whose unremitting labors have preserved andperpetuated the history and traditions of the country of his ancestors.I would that I had been better able to picture the character, thecourage, the ability, and patriotism of the French who settledLouisiana. The Republic owes them much, and their descendants are to-dayamong the stanchest preservers of her ideals.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL. Boston, April 18, 1904