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.
THE END.
The Crossing, by Winston Churchill
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