Westward the Tide (1950) Read Online Free Page B

trek, and often enough the bravest of them, were criminals or worse. Portugee Phillips, of whom little good could have been said before his almost legendary ride through the blizzard, was one of these.
    He had been respected for his Indian lore and knowledge of the country, but disliked for his surly temper and uncertain honesty. Yet in the pinch, when honest men had cowered in fear of the deadly cold, the blizzard and the Sioux, it had been Phillips who risked death to ride for help.
    While the men of this wagon train were a chosen group, they were of a part with all those who migrated west. The United States had been settled to a great degree by the economic failures of Europe, albeit the ones with courage enough to attempt a change. The wealthy and satisfied do not migrate, they stagnate.
    Even those who offered religion as a reason for migration were also those who were impoverished. Many Puritans and Quakers remained in England, but they were those who had much to lose and little to gain. It was the peasants, the lower middle class, and a few adventurers or impoverished noblemen who settled America.
    The thirty men who were to form the nucleus of the new venture were like any such group that might have been chosen from a boom town. They were selected to the degree that they were better equipped physically and in a material way to face the ordeals and trials of beginning a new community in a wild and dangerous country.
    Phillips, Murphy, Hardy and himself were all experienced western men. The same could be said of the former stage driver, Elam Brooks.
    Aaron Stark, the hillbilly, was a lean and cold-eyed man who feared God and nothing else. He carried his squirrel rifle like an extension of his arm, as indeed it was, and he was the sort of man who would last in any venture. The juices of his hard, sinewy body had been drained away by hard living until he was one rawhide piece of toughness and durability. Improvident in the sense that he would never accumulate much, he nevertheless possessed all the qualities of the pioneer. He had courage, hardihood, and a stubborn will that balked at no problem as too great. In later years, in a tamed down and more civilized world his kind would be wasted, they would become drifting outcasts, scorned and betrayed, drifting on with their eyes forever searching for some new, distant horizon. They would find names for them, and call them "Okies" and "Arkies" and they would be despised by fatter and more adjusted men. It would be forgotten that it was of such stuff that the pioneers were made, the ones who always had the courage to move on.
    During the growth and expansion of the nation he was the durable body of the wagon train personnel. He was the man who refused to remain close to forts and so was often killed by Indians, his wife nursed her children with a rifle across her knees, and he tilled his fields with a gun strapped to his plough handles. He dared off Indians, the big cattlemen, the outlaws. He was the nester, the squatter, the man who moved west.
    Eventually, thrown back upon themselves, their horizons lopped off by the sea they would circle like migratory birds with no place to light. Yet these were the people who dared, the people who died for their land, but they rarely died alone, and not always in vain.
    From the source from which they sprang came an inexhaustible supply. Fatter, weaker, home staying men might deride them and betray them, yet when the Aaron Starks had opened up the land, they would follow on and buy up their land in tax sales or mortgages to grow fatter and weaker on the land these others had fought to win.
    Wherever there was a frontier there were men like Aaron Stark, strong, silent, ignorant men who knew only the longing for home and land. The others came to loot, but the Aaron Starks brought their families along, and of all who came west they alone came to build, to remain, not to loot.
    Railroads came west on government subsidy and gifts of government