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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Winning of the West: A History of the American Frontiers," Theodore Roosevelt presents a compelling narrative that chronicles the westward expansion of the United States, intertwining historical facts with a vivid literary style. This work spans the early explorations and the conflicts that shaped the American frontier, employing Roosevelt's characteristic vigor and eloquence. The book is anchored in a blend of personal anecdotes, detailed historical accounts, and a profound reflection on American identity during the late 19th century, set against the backdrop of manifest destiny and the ongoing struggle between civilization and wilderness. Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, was not only a statesman but also an ardent historian and naturalist. His passion for the outdoors and deep-seated belief in American exceptionalism propelled him to explore the themes of conquest and frontier life. Roosevelt's experiences as a rancher and author, coupled with his astute understanding of American history, enable him to synthesize complex narratives, shedding light on the social and political implications of westward expansion. "The Winning of the West" is an essential read for anyone interested in American history, providing readers with an authentic lens through which to view the spirit of the nation. Roosevelt's engaging prose and thoughtful analysis make it a valuable resource for historians, students, and general readers alike, inviting them to reflect on the formative moments of the American experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Winning of the West: A History of the American Frontiers
Table of Contents
Introduction
Across trackless forests, brown rivers, and raw palisades from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, a people contests a continent and, in the struggle, discovers what kind of nation it intends to become.
The Winning of the West endures as a classic because it marries panoramic history with a muscular narrative voice that helped define the American frontier as both place and idea. Theodore Roosevelt’s synthesis of military action, settlement, diplomacy, and character study gave readers a sweeping, accessible account that influenced how generations imagined early national expansion. Its themes—risk, resilience, improvisation, and public spirit—recur in later histories and fiction that wrestle with the opportunities and costs of conquest. The book’s energy, scope, and insistence on connecting individual deeds to national development secured it a prominent position in the canon of American historical writing.
Written by Theodore Roosevelt in multiple volumes between 1889 and 1896, The Winning of the West recounts the advance of settlers into the trans-Appalachian frontier during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It explores encounters among settlers, Native nations, and imperial rivals, and it traces the emergence of frontier communities and institutions. Composed before Roosevelt’s presidency, the work reflects a young scholar-statesman’s fascination with how geography, conflict, and civic habits forged a continental republic. Without disclosing specific outcomes, it follows the movement of people and ideas across rivers, trails, and forts, emphasizing the contingencies that shaped early American power beyond the original seaboard.
Roosevelt’s stated intention was to explain how the frontier molded American character and statecraft, linking local defense, household labor, and political organization to national destiny. He draws on published documents, correspondence, and earlier histories to animate episodes of settlement and war, while situating them within broader policy debates. The book aims to be both instructive and stirring: a record of events and a meditation on citizenship under pressure. Roosevelt underscores leadership, discipline, and communal responsibility, but he also pays attention to improvisation and the stubborn facts of terrain. His purpose is not mere chronicle; it is to illuminate the habits that, in his view, sustained republican self-government.
Appearing at the cusp of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the work speaks to a nation industrializing quickly yet haunted by questions of origin and identity. Its frontier scenes resonate with a contemporary fascination for self-made communities and the testing of institutions on the edge of order. The book belongs to a nineteenth-century tradition of expansive national histories, written in a confident, declamatory style. At the same time, modern readers will recognize how its judgments and language reflect its moment, including limitations of perspective toward Indigenous peoples. That duality—literary vigor alongside period-bound assumptions—has made it both formative and a subject of ongoing critique.
Its influence can be measured less by single disciples than by the breadth of conversation it helped spark about the frontier as a defining American narrative. The Winning of the West circulated widely, entered libraries and classrooms, and shaped popular memory of backcountry militias, river corridors, and hard-won settlements. It appeared in the same era that scholars advanced broader frontier theses, and its stories furnished touchstones for later historians and authors to extend, refine, or challenge. As a result, it sits at a crossroads of scholarship and mythmaking: a text that helped codify a national legend even as it supplied facts, episodes, and characters for critical reexamination.
Roosevelt’s canvas stretches from the first organized crossings through mountain gaps to the consolidation of communities along key waterways. He attends to the interplay of geography and decision, where passes, bottoms, and river forks guided strategy and commerce. The narrative ranges across Kentucky and Tennessee, the Old Northwest, and the lower Mississippi, following the spread of farms and forts, and the formation of local assemblies and militia structures. Portraits of well-known leaders appear beside sketches of ordinary settlers, hunters, and traders. Without foreclosing surprises, the book tracks how fragile outposts hardened into polities, and how frontier experience fed into debates over sovereignty, defense, and law.
Stylistically, the work is vigorous and declarative, balancing anecdote with analysis. Roosevelt favors clear moral judgments, but he grounds them in episodes, reports, and comparisons intended to give readers purchase on complex events. He moves swiftly from a skirmish or council fire to reflections on logistics, supplies, and the character of leadership, then back to the pressure of weather and distance. The prose carries a physical sense of place—mud, timber, ice, and flood—while keeping an eye on policy. This combination of concreteness and generalization has helped the book retain readability, inviting both close study and broad contemplation.
Beneath its action, the book invites questions that remain unsettled: What is gained and lost when a political community expands by force and migration? How do laws take root where formal institutions are sparse? Who defines the common good at the edge of authority? Roosevelt presents courage and industry as nation-making virtues, but the narrative also reveals friction—between settlers and Native nations, local militias and distant officials, ambition and restraint. The result is a study of power’s moral texture: the tension between necessity and justice, expedience and principle, and the ways memory simplifies what experience complicated.
Readers today will find a work that is accessible without being simplistic. Roosevelt explains unfamiliar places and practices while trusting the audience to weigh competing claims. He offers enough scaffolding—chronology, context, and causal links—to orient newcomers, yet he leaves room for interpretation. The book rewards attentive reading, whether one follows a stream of campaign episodes, examines the rise of townships, or traces patterns of alliance and rivalry. It also benefits from being read comparatively, alongside more recent scholarship, because it frames questions—about citizenship, violence, and governance—that later historians have expanded with new evidence and perspectives.
The themes that made the book resonate at publication still matter: mobility and belonging, federal reach and local autonomy, the obligations of defense, and the improvisation of order amid scarcity. In a world debating borders, migration, and pluralism, its account of institutions born under strain feels current. It also provides a case study in how national myths are constructed, contested, and repurposed. By showing how narrative momentum can shape public understanding, it warns and instructs at once. The Winning of the West remains relevant not as a final word but as a foundational one, a touchstone for discussion about power, identity, and memory.
Taken together, these volumes offer a capacious portrait of ambition, risk, and civic experiment, rendered with verve and argumentative clarity. They evoke courage, endurance, ingenuity, and the stubborn contingencies of landscape and chance. Their lasting appeal lies in scope and provocation: a story big enough to inspire and specific enough to debate. For contemporary audiences, the book is an invitation to revisit first principles—how communities form, protect themselves, and govern fairly—while recognizing the costs that attend nation-building. It is a classic because it compels engagement, not agreement, and because it keeps alive the questions that forged the republic’s earliest frontiers.
Synopsis
The Winning of the West is Theodore Roosevelt's multivolume history of the American frontier from roughly 1769 to 1807. He traces the movement of settlers beyond the Alleghanies into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, outlining how warfare, migration, diplomacy, and local governance shaped expansion. Drawing on letters, official reports, and frontier narratives, he reconstructs campaigns, treaties, and community making. The work follows a chronological course, beginning with hunters and station builders and closing as the United States consolidates authority to the Mississippi. Throughout, Roosevelt presents the intertwined actions of Native nations, imperial rivals, and American pioneers in determining control of the interior.
He opens with the backcountry setting, describing the geography of passes like the Cumberland Gap and the creation of isolated stations in Kentucky and on the Holston and Watauga. Explorers and hunters such as Daniel Boone and land companies like Transylvania spearhead movement, while family groups establish cabins and palisades at Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and along the Cumberland. The narrative explains subsistence patterns, the reliance on rifles, and the fragility of supply. Relations with nearby Native nations frame daily life, as negotiations, warnings, and sudden attacks lead settlers to organize militias and committees, laying the groundwork for civil order at the edge.
With the Revolution, he presents the western theater as a parallel struggle. British officials coordinate with Shawnee, Cherokee, and other Native allies, while Virginian and Carolinian backcountry militia defend scattered stations. The Overmountain men gather for expeditions over the Blue Ridge, culminating in actions such as Kings Mountain that alter the balance in the southern backcountry. At the same time, Kentucky forts withstand sieges and raids, and retaliatory expeditions strike north into the Ohio country. The chaptering keeps attention on logistics, leadership, and local initiative, showing how frontier warfare continued even as eastern campaigns determined the broader outcome.
Roosevelt devotes extended attention to George Rogers Clark's operations in the Illinois country during 1778 to 1779. Clark captures Kaskaskia and Vincennes, executes a winter march to surprise the British post, and secures a foothold that bolsters American claims to the Northwest at the peace. The narrative sets these moves within the network of French villages, British command, and Native alliances, stressing the tenuous nature of occupation. Despite successes, frontier fighting persists, culminating in setbacks like the defeat at Blue Licks in 1782 and ongoing raids. The period emphasizes the difficulties of recruiting, equipping, and paying forces far from coastal centers.
In the war's aftermath, migration accelerates and settlements mature into counties and prospective states. Roosevelt records conventions seeking Kentucky's separation from Virginia and the gradual formation of civil institutions, courts, and land offices. In the southwest, he recounts the Watauga Association, the failed State of Franklin, and the eventual organization that leads toward Tennessee statehood. Land speculation, overlapping claims, and surveying methods receive attention, as do patterns of smallholder farming that begin to replace pure hunting. Slavery, religious gatherings, and rudimentary schools appear in sketches of daily life. The emphasis remains on how communities created order while negotiating distant authority.
Turning north, the narrative follows the federal government's first major campaigns to pacify the Ohio country. Expeditions under Harmar in 1790 and St. Clair in 1791 fail with heavy losses, sharpening debates over militia performance and national military organization. Roosevelt then details General Anthony Wayne's reforms, the creation of the Legion of the United States, and the disciplined advance through forts that culminates in Fallen Timbers in 1794. The Treaty of Greenville in 1795 reshapes boundaries, enabling wider settlement in the Northwest Territory. Through dispatches and returns, he tracks garrisons, supply chains, and policy choices that extend federal authority.
In the southern frontier, he recounts ongoing conflicts and negotiations with the Cherokee and Creek, raids along the Cumberland, and attempts to enforce peace against dissident towns. Spanish influence from Florida and Louisiana threads the narrative, as trade networks, diplomatic overtures, and rumors complicate security. The question of Mississippi River navigation drives agitation in Kentucky and the Old Southwest, resolved by Pinckney's Treaty in 1795, which opens the river and sets boundaries. Roosevelt describes the use of rangers, mounted riflemen, and blockhouses to stabilize settlements around Nashville and along the Holston, while local leaders balance retaliation with treaty obligations.
The turn of the century brings shifting geopolitics. Roosevelt outlines Spain's retrocession of Louisiana to France and the purchase by the United States in 1803, which transforms the strategic map by granting control of New Orleans and the great interior basin. He summarizes the Lewis and Clark expedition as part reconnaissance, part assertion of sovereignty, and follows river traffic expanding by flatboat and keelboat. Domestic intrigue appears in the Burr affair, prompting marches and inquiries across the West in 1806 to 1807. Continued treaties extract land cessions from Native nations, while federal courts, revenue officers, and roads link western districts to the union.
In closing, Roosevelt synthesizes themes of character, institutions, and power. He emphasizes the interplay between individual initiative and collective order, the contested nature of the frontier among Native nations, European empires, and Americans, and the gradual strengthening of federal structures over dispersed militias. By 1807, the book presents the United States as firmly established to the Mississippi, with states admitted and territories organized. The concluding chapters restate that sustained migration, persistent warfare, and pragmatic diplomacy decided possession of the interior. The overall message is that the frontier shaped national development by forging durable communities and securing continental space to the river.
Historical Context
The work is set primarily in the trans-Appalachian frontier from the 1760s to the early 1800s, when the British, Spanish, and the new United States contested rivers, forts, and trade routes between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. Its geographic canvas includes the Ohio Valley, Kentucky and Tennessee, the Old Northwest, the Mississippi corridor, and the edges of Louisiana. The narrative follows the shift from imperial borderlands to American-controlled territories, emphasizing rivers like the Ohio and Mississippi as strategic highways. Frontier forts such as Detroit, Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Natchez, and Native polities from the Shawnee to the Cherokee, anchor the book’s setting and conflicts.
The time was defined by demographic churn and violent competition. Scots-Irish and German migrants from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas poured through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and the Tennessee Valley, alongside enslaved Africans whose labor underwrote backcountry farms. Native confederacies including the Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw defended homelands and trade networks aligned at times with British or Spanish authorities. Subsistence hunting, land speculation, and militia organization shaped daily life. Informal compacts like the Watauga Association (1772) and rude forts dotted the landscape. Roosevelt situates this volatile world where river-borne commerce, kinship militias, and ambiguous sovereignty drove policy and violence.
The Proclamation of 1763 sought to halt Anglo-American settlement west of the Appalachians, but land-hungry colonists pressed beyond the line. The 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, negotiated with the Iroquois, pushed the boundary south of the Ohio, easing entry into Kentucky despite Native objections. Lord Dunmore’s War erupted in 1774, culminating in the Battle of Point Pleasant, which forced Shawnee concessions. In 1775, Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Company attempted to purchase a vast tract from the Cherokee at Sycamore Shoals. Virginia later voided the scheme, but settlers remained. Roosevelt presents these compacts and wars as the legal and extra-legal scaffolding of westward expansion.
Daniel Boone’s parties blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap in 1775, establishing Boonesborough on the Kentucky River and enabling towns like Harrodsburg and Logan’s Fort. Kentucky’s forted stations endured sieges and raids throughout the Revolutionary years. The September 1778 siege of Boonesborough, led by the Shawnee war leader Blackfish with British-allied auxiliaries, epitomized the close-quarters combat of the era. Boone’s capture and adoption, his escape, and the defense of the palisades became frontier lore. Roosevelt seizes on Boone as exemplar of the hunter-patriot, weaving his experiences into a narrative of persistence, improvisation, and the creation of durable settler communities.
The western theater of the American Revolution turned on George Rogers Clark’s Illinois Campaign. In July 1778 he seized Kaskaskia and Cahokia, undermining British control in the Illinois Country. In February 1779, after a winter march across flooded plains, Clark retook Vincennes, capturing Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton. These operations blunted British alliances with Native nations and secured American leverage in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which recognized U.S. claims to the Mississippi. Roosevelt showcases Clark’s logistics, diplomacy with French-speaking inhabitants, and audacious maneuvering, treating these feats as pivotal in ensuring that the Old Northwest would fall within the republic’s postwar boundaries.
War with the Cherokee fractured into the Chickamauga resistance led by Dragging Canoe after 1777, as settlements along the Holston and Watauga rivers faced repeated raids. Overmountain communities fielded militia leaders like John Sevier, whose men helped crush Major Patrick Ferguson at Kings Mountain on 7 October 1780, a crucial Loyalist defeat. After the Revolution, the State of Franklin (1784–1788) bid for autonomy from North Carolina, revealing frontier impatience with distant legislatures. Roosevelt treats these episodes as a crucible of self-government and armed vigilance, highlighting how border communities forged institutions and leaders under pressure from both Native antagonists and weak state authority.
Spain controlled Louisiana and West Florida after 1763, holding the lower Mississippi and New Orleans. By closing or constraining the river to American goods at moments such as 1784, Spanish governors like Esteban Miro threatened frontier economies. Spanish agents courted westerners, including General James Wilkinson, dangling trade privileges and political intrigue. Pinckney’s Treaty (Treaty of San Lorenzo) in 1795 finally secured U.S. navigation rights and a right of deposit at New Orleans, stabilizing commerce from Kentucky and the Old Southwest. Roosevelt links this diplomacy directly to settlers’ livelihoods, arguing that geopolitical leverage on the river determined whether farms and towns could flourish or fail.
Despite the 1783 peace, Britain retained forts at Detroit, Niagara, and Michilimackinac, channeling arms to Native confederates from Canadian depots. Figures like Alexander McKee and Matthew Elliott sustained supply lines, while Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe fortified Upper Canada. American anger culminated in Jay’s Treaty (1794; U.S. ratification 1796), which secured evacuation of the posts, eased trade tensions, and undercut British material support to Native resistance. Roosevelt condemns this imperial interference as prolonging border violence but credits the controversy with spurring the United States to professionalize its army and centralize frontier policy, lessons he traces through subsequent campaigns.
The Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided the institutional architecture for settlement north of the Ohio River. Surveyors imposed a township-and-range grid, and Congress outlined a staged path from territory to statehood, while prohibiting slavery in the Northwest. Marietta (1788) and Cincinnati (Fort Washington, 1789) anchored American presence, and courts and land offices regularized claims. Roosevelt regards these measures as crucial to disciplining chaotic migration and strengthening national sovereignty, portraying the law’s reach, the surveyor’s chain, and the soldier’s musket as mutually reinforcing tools that transformed a contested borderland into an American domain.
From 1785, a Native confederacy led by Miami war leader Little Turtle and Shawnee leader Blue Jacket fought to preserve the Old Northwest. General Josiah Harmar’s 1790 expedition into the Maumee and Wabash country suffered sharp defeats near Kekionga, as detachments were ambushed. Worse followed: Major General Arthur St Clair’s army was routed on 4 November 1791 on the Wabash, with some 600 regulars and 200 militia killed or mortally wounded, the deadliest U.S. defeat by Native forces. Roosevelt dissects militia indiscipline and supply failures, contrasting them with frontier scouts’ skill and arguing for a national, trained force capable of sustained operations.
After the St Clair disaster, President George Washington appointed Major General Anthony Wayne to rebuild the army. Wayne organized the Legion of the United States in 1792, training combined-arms sublegions at Legionville near Pittsburgh through winter 1792–1793. He insisted on strict discipline, bayonet practice, and standardized logistics, then advanced methodically, erecting a chain of forts that included Fort Recovery (1793) on the St Clair battlefield and Fort Defiance (1794) at the Maumee–Auglaize confluence. British officers responded by constructing Fort Miami near present-day Maumee, Ohio, signaling ongoing imperial entanglement. On 20 August 1794, Wayne smashed the Native confederacy at Fallen Timbers along the Maumee River’s oak-strewn floodplain, routing warriors under Blue Jacket while Little Turtle counseled caution. Casualties were limited but decisive, and when the defeated sought refuge at Fort Miami, British commanders refused them entry, exposing the limits of British patronage. Wayne’s victory, followed by a hard winter of diplomacy and fort-building, culminated in the Treaty of Greenville on 3 August 1795. Dozens of chiefs, including Blue Jacket and Tarhe, ceded most of Ohio and parts of Indiana, accepted annuities, and recognized American forts, while the United States pledged goods and promised boundaries it soon pressed again. In tandem, Jay’s Treaty cleared British posts, removing a crucial external support. Roosevelt exalts Wayne’s methodical strategy, professional training, and logistical rigor as the turning point that secured the Old Northwest, framing the campaign as proof that a disciplined national army, not irregular forays alone, would determine control of the interior.
Kentucky achieved statehood on 1 June 1792 after a decade of conventions wrestling with separation from Virginia and access to the Mississippi. Leaders such as Isaac Shelby and George Nicholas forged a constitution that preserved slavery and empowered a militia culture born in station defenses. Lexington and Louisville grew as entrepôts for hemp, tobacco, and livestock shipped by flatboat to New Orleans. Persistent raids abated after Greenville, but local feuds and land-title disputes continued. Roosevelt uses Kentucky politics to illustrate frontier republicanism, entrepreneurial vigor, and the entrenchment of slaveholding society on the southern border of the antislavery Northwest Ordinance line.
Tennessee entered the Union on 1 June 1796, consolidating settlements along the Holston, Nolichucky, and Cumberland. The 1780 Cumberland Compact had established communal rules at Nashborough, later Nashville, while treaties such as the Treaty of Holston (1791) attempted to fix boundaries with the Cherokee. Militia districts like Mero remained on high alert amid raids and reprisals. Young attorney Andrew Jackson appeared in territorial politics and militia service during the 1790s, emblematic of rising frontier elites. Roosevelt underscores Tennessee’s blend of local compacts, vigilant defense, and ambitious leadership, reading its statehood as both a triumph of settler self-rule and a product of sustained coercion.
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 transformed western geopolitics. Spain had retroceded Louisiana to France by the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800, but Napoleon’s ambitions collapsed amid war with Britain and the Haitian Revolution’s devastation of French dreams in the Caribbean. President Thomas Jefferson seized the chance, buying roughly 828,000 square miles for 15 million dollars. Transfer ceremonies in New Orleans and St Louis in late 1803 shifted sovereignty, though Spanish garrisons and officials lingered on nearby frontiers. Westerners gained secure river access and vast new horizons. Roosevelt treats the purchase as the capstone of a generation’s efforts to free the Mississippi Valley from imperial chokepoints.
Jefferson ordered the Corps of Discovery under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the Missouri River and beyond, departing St Louis in May 1804. Wintering at Fort Mandan (1804–1805), the expedition mapped river courses, recorded flora and fauna, and negotiated with Mandan, Hidatsa, and Teton Lakota leaders. Assisted by Sacagawea and the enslaved York, they crossed the Rockies via Lemhi Pass, reached the Pacific in November 1805, and returned to St Louis in September 1806. Roosevelt valorizes their blend of scientific curiosity and martial resilience, treating the journey as both reconnaissance for future settlement and affirmation of republican capacity on a continental stage.
The book functions as a political argument for national consolidation, professional arms, and coherent frontier policy. By highlighting the failures under the Articles of Confederation, the militia’s limits, and the confusion over land titles, it implicitly endorses Washington, Knox, and Wayne’s reforms as models. Roosevelt critiques British and Spanish meddling and champions treaties, surveys, and forts as instruments of state-building. He presents frontier democracy as energetic yet in need of order, urging central institutions to harness settler zeal. Thus the narrative doubles as a case for executive strength and sustained investment in infrastructure, defense, and law in the interior.
The work exposes major issues of the era even as it often justifies prevailing power. It chronicles the dispossession and violent subjugation of Native nations, reflecting and revealing a racial ideology that equated civilization with Anglo-American settlement. It notes slavery’s entrenchment in Kentucky and Tennessee, contrasting republican rhetoric with coerced labor’s expansion. Land speculation and navigation politics expose class divides between well-connected entrepreneurs and smallholders at risk. Roosevelt’s triumphal tone cannot erase the human costs he records, and his Progressive-era faith in vigorous governance and expansionist destiny reads as both a critique of earlier weakness and a political program for American power.
Author Biography
Introduction
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was an American statesman, naturalist, and prolific author whose vigorous prose matched his public life. Before, during, and after his presidency, he wrote influential histories, biographies, travel narratives, and essays that championed national strength, civic virtue, and conservation. Major works include The Naval War of 1812, The Winning of the West, The Rough Riders, The Strenuous Life, African Game Trails, and Through the Brazilian Wilderness, as well as biographies such as Thomas Hart Benton, Gouverneur Morris, and Oliver Cromwell. With a forceful, plainspoken style, he shaped public debates on war, the frontier, and nature, leaving a durable mark on American letters and political culture.
Education and Literary Influences
Roosevelt studied at Harvard College in the late 1870s, immersing himself in history, natural sciences, and languages while building habits of rigorous note‑taking and field observation. Physical frailty in youth led him to embrace strenuous exercise and outdoor study, which later informed both his life and his writing. After graduating, he briefly attended Columbia Law School but left to pursue public service and authorship. His first major book, The Naval War of 1812, written in his early twenties, reflected disciplined research, wide reading in archival sources, and a determination to test patriotic legend against evidence—traits that would characterize much of his later work.
Roosevelt’s literary formation drew from historians who combined narrative sweep with moral judgment. He admired Francis Parkman’s frontier chronicles and Thomas Babington Macaulay’s brisk, confident prose, adopting a similar emphasis on character, action, and cause‑and‑effect. As a naval thinker, he engaged with arguments about sea power that became prominent in the late nineteenth century, and he welcomed scholarship that linked national strength to maritime capability. His scientific turn of mind—shaped by fieldwork in ornithology and mammalogy—also encouraged a fact‑gathering method in his nature writing. These influences helped him blend popular readability with documentary rigor, appealing both to general readers and specialists.
Literary Career
The Naval War of 1812 established Roosevelt’s reputation as a serious historian. He combed American and British sources to produce a balanced appraisal of ship design, crew discipline, and command decisions, challenging myths and praising merit wherever he found it. Naval officers and scholars commended the work’s precision and fairness, and it remained a standard reference for years. Roosevelt’s method—tight argument supported by statistics, logs, and firsthand accounts—signaled his preference for clear, forceful exposition over ornate rhetoric. The book’s success encouraged him to continue writing on public questions, positioning authorship as a parallel career alongside politics and reform.
Roosevelt then turned to the American West, a subject he knew from time spent ranching and hunting on the Great Plains. Ranch Life and the Hunting‑Trail and The Wilderness Hunter blended memoir, natural history, and sporting literature, capturing the rigors and romance of frontier life while cataloging wildlife and landscapes. His multi‑volume The Winning of the West traced migration, conflict, and governance across the trans-Appalachian frontier, celebrating settler initiative while adopting interpretive frameworks common to his era. The series was widely read, though later scholars have scrutinized its assumptions about Native peoples and its celebratory view of expansion.
Roosevelt also wrote biography and political narrative with an eye to character and public virtue. Thomas Hart Benton and Gouverneur Morris examined statesmen whose careers illuminated territorial growth and constitutional development. Oliver Cromwell explored leadership, religion, and nation‑building in seventeenth‑century England. The Rough Riders recounted his volunteer cavalry regiment in the Spanish‑American War, mixing battlefield reportage with organizational detail and becoming a bestseller. The Strenuous Life gathered speeches and essays promoting effort, duty, and national readiness. He also co‑authored Hero Tales from American History, presenting exemplary figures to a broad audience. These works reinforced his reputation as a vigorous moralist in prose.
In the early twentieth century, Roosevelt’s travel and autobiographical writings broadened his readership. African Game Trails described his Smithsonian‑sponsored safari, combining adventure narrative with specimen collection and ethnographic observation. Through the Brazilian Wilderness chronicled a hazardous expedition down an unmapped Amazonian tributary, reflecting on endurance, science, and risk. His Autobiography surveyed a lifetime in public service, including civil service reform, conservation, and foreign policy, written in a direct, unapologetic voice. While critics praised his clarity and narrative drive, they also noted blind spots typical of his time. Nevertheless, these volumes cemented his status as a major American man of letters.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Roosevelt’s core creed, often summarized as the “strenuous life,” valued disciplined effort, civic responsibility, and moral courage. He believed republics thrived when citizens participated energetically in public affairs, cultivated personal rectitude, and balanced liberty with duty. His essays urged readers to confront hardship, reject cynicism, and practice what he called “practical idealism.” In his historical writing, this ethic manifested as attention to character—leaders who acted decisively, soldiers who endured, and citizens who built institutions. He presented history as a school for judgment, arguing that sound policy rests on tested experience rather than abstract theory or passive comfort.
Conservation stood at the heart of Roosevelt’s advocacy, linking science, stewardship, and national strength. He helped professionalize federal land management, expanded forest reserves, and used the Antiquities Act to protect culturally and ecologically significant sites. He co‑founded the Boone and Crockett Club to promote fair chase and sustainable wildlife policies grounded in scientific data. His nature books modeled observational rigor and respect for ecosystems, while also reflecting the hunting ethos of his era. By framing conservation as patriotic duty and intergenerational trust, Roosevelt influenced public attitudes and helped build the institutional framework—forests, parks, refuges—that continues to shape environmental policy.
A Progressive reformer, Roosevelt challenged concentrated corporate power, advocated a “Square Deal” for labor and capital, and supported regulatory standards to guard public health and fair competition. He promoted naval preparedness and an assertive foreign policy, seeing great‑power responsibility as inseparable from national honor. These commitments animated his speeches and historical narratives, which praised order, initiative, and public‑spirited leadership. His outlook also contained tensions: imperial ambitions, paternalism, and period‑typical views on race and culture that later generations have criticized. The complexity of his beliefs makes his corpus a document of its time and a stimulus for continuing debate.
Final Years & Legacy
After leaving the presidency, Roosevelt undertook a widely followed African expedition, then reentered politics in the early 1910s, mounting a third‑party presidential campaign that dramatized Progressive reforms. He survived an assassination attempt during that campaign and finished his speech before seeking care, reinforcing his public image of grit. In 1913–1914 he explored the Amazon, an ordeal that damaged his health and produced Through the Brazilian Wilderness. He advocated military preparedness before U.S. entry into World War I and bore the loss of a son in the conflict. He died in early 1919, prompting nationwide tributes to his service and character.
Roosevelt’s legacy spans letters, conservation, and statecraft. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo‑Japanese War and is widely commemorated for enlarging the national parks and monuments system. His phrase “bully pulpit” captures a lasting model of presidential persuasion, while his books remain in print, studied for their narrative power and civic argument. Modern scholarship reassesses his expansionism and racial assumptions even as it credits his administrative innovations and environmental vision. As an author, he helped popularize history and nature writing for mass audiences. As a leader, he shaped institutions that continue to influence public life.
The Winning of the West: A History of the American Frontiers
* * * * *
—LOWELL.
Volume I
Preface
Much of the material on which this work is based is to be found in the archives of the American Government, which date back to 1774, when the first Continental Congress assembled. The earliest sets have been published complete up to 1777, under the title of "American Archives," and will be hereafter designated by this name. These early volumes contain an immense amount of material, because in them are to be found memoranda of private individuals and many of the public papers of the various colonial and State governments, as well as those of the Confederation. The documents from 1789 on—no longer containing any papers of the separate States—have also been gathered and printed under the heading of "American State Papers"; by which term they will be hereafter referred to.
The mass of public papers coming in between these two series, and covering the period extending from 1776 to 1789, have never been published, and in great part have either never been examined or else have been examined in the most cursory manner. The original documents are all in the Department of State at Washington, and for convenience will be referred to as "State Department MSS." They are bound in two or three hundred large volumes; exactly how many I cannot say, because, though they are numbered, yet several of the numbers themselves contain from two or three to ten or fifteen volumes apiece. The volumes to which reference will most often be made are the following:
No. 15. Letters of Huntington. No. 16. Letters of the Presidents of Congress. No. 18. Letter-Book B. No. 20. Vol. 1. Reports of Committees on State Papers. No. 27. Reports of Committees on the War Office. 1776 to 1778. No. 30. Reports of Committees. No. 32. Reports of Committees of the States and of the Week. No. 41. Vol. 3. Memorials E. F. G. 1776-1788. No. 41. Vol. 5. Memorials K. L. 1777-1789. No. 50. Letters and Papers of Oliver Pollock. 1777-1792. No. 51. Vol. 2 Intercepted Letters. 1779-1782. No. 56. Indian Affairs. No. 71. Vol. 1. Virginia State Papers. No. 73. Georgia State Papers. No. 81. Vol. 2. Reports of Secretary John Jay. No. 120. Vol. 2. American Letters. No. 124. Vol. 3. Reports of Jay. No. 125. Negotiation Book. No. 136. Vol. 1. Reports of Board of Treasury. No. 136. Vol. 2. Reports of Board of Treasury. No. 147. Vol. 2. Reports of Board of War. No. 147. Vol. 5. Reports of Board of War. No. 147. Vol. 6. Reports of Board of War. No. 148. Vol. 1. Letters from Board of War. No. 149. Vol. 1. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at War. No. 149. Vol. 2. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at War. No. 149. Vol. 3. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at War. No. 150. Vol. 1. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War. No. 150. Vol. 2. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War. No. 150. Vol. 3. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War. No. 152. Vol. 11. Letters of General Washington. No. 163. Letters of Generals Clinton, Nixon, Nicola, Morgan, Harmar, Muhlenburg. No. 169. Vol. 9. Washington's Letters. No. 180. Reports of Secretary of Congress.
Besides these numbered volumes, the State Department contains others, such as Washington's letter-book, marked War Department 1792, '3, '4, '5. There are also a series of numbered volumes of "Letters to Washington," Nos. 33 and 49 containing reports from Geo. Rogers Clark. The Jefferson papers, which are likewise preserved here, are bound in several series, each containing a number of volumes. The Madison and Monroe papers, also kept here, are not yet bound; I quote them as the Madison MSS. and the Monroe MSS.
My thanks are due to Mr. W. C. Hamilton, Asst. Librarian, for giving me every facility to examine the material.
At Nashville, Tennessee, I had access to a mass of original matter in the shape of files of old newspapers, of unpublished letters, diaries, reports, and other manuscripts. I was given every opportunity to examine these at my leisure, and indeed to take such as were most valuable to my own home. For this my thanks are especially due to Judge John M. Lea, to whom, as well as to my many other friends in Nashville, I shall always feel under a debt on account of the unfailing courtesy with which I was treated. I must express my particular acknowledgments to Mr. Lemuel R. Campbell. The Nashville manuscripts, etc. of which I have made most use are the following:
The Robertson MSS., comprising two large volumes, entitled the"Correspondence, etc., of Gen'l James Robertson," from 1781 to 1814.They belong to the library of Nashville University; I had somedifficulty in finding the second volume but finally succeeded.
The Campbell MSS., consisting of letters and memoranda to and from different members of the Campbell family who were prominent in the Revolution; dealing for the most part with Lord Dunmore's war, the Cherokee wars, the battle of King's Mountain, land speculations, etc. They are in the possession of Mr. Lemuel R. Campbell, who most kindly had copies of all the important ones sent me, at great personal trouble.
Some of the Sevier and Jackson papers, the original MS. diaries of Donelson on the famous voyage down the Tennessee and up the Cumberland, and of Benj. Hawkins while surveying the Tennessee boundary, memoranda of Thos. Washington, Overton and Dunham, the earliest files of the Knoxville Gazette, from 1791 to 1795, etc. These are all in the library of the Tennessee Historical Society.
For original matter connected with Kentucky, I am greatly indebted to Col. Reuben T. Durrett, of Louisville, the founder of the "Filson Club," which has done such admirable historical work of late years. He allowed me to work at my leisure in his library, the most complete in the world on all subjects connected with Kentucky history. Among other matter, he possesses the Shelby MSS., containing a number of letters to and from, and a dictated autobiography of, Isaac Shelby; MS. journals of Rev. James Smith, during two tours in the western country in 1785 and '95; early files of the "Kentucke Gazette"; books owned by the early settlers; papers of Boon, and George Rogers Clark; MS. notes on Kentucky by George Bradford, who settled there in 1779; MS. copy of the record book of Col. John Todd, the first governor of the Illinois country after Clark's conquest; the McAfee MSS., consisting of an Account of the First Settlement of Salt River, the Autobiography of Robert McAfee, and a Brief Memorandum of the Civil and Natural History of Kentucky; MS. autobiography of Rev. William Hickman, who visited Kentucky in 1776, etc., etc.
I am also under great obligations to Col. John Mason Brown of Louisville, another member of the Filson Club, for assistance rendered me; particularly for having sent me six bound volumes of MSS., containing the correspondence of the Spanish Minister Gardoqui, copied from the Spanish archives.
At Lexington I had access to the Breckenridge MSS., through the kindness of Mr. Ethelbert D. Warfield; and to the Clay MSS. through the kindness of Miss Lucretia Hart Clay. I am particularly indebted to Miss Clay for her courtesy in sending me many of the most valuable old Hart and Benton letters, depositions, accounts, and the like.
The Blount MSS. were sent to me from California by the Hon. W. D. Stephens of Los Angeles, although I was not personally known to him; an instance of courtesy and generosity, in return for which I could do nothing save express my sincere appreciation and gratitude, which I take this opportunity of publicly repeating.
The Gates MSS., from which I drew some important facts not hitherto known concerning the King's Mountain campaign, are in the library of the New York Historical Society.
The Virginia State Papers have recently been published, and are now accessible to all.
Among the most valuable of the hitherto untouched manuscripts which I have obtained are the Haldimand papers[1], preserved in the Canadian archives at Ottawa. They give, for the first time, the British and Indian side of all the northwestern fighting; including Clark's campaigns, the siege of Boonsborough, the battle of the Blue Licks, Crawford's defeat, etc. The Canadian archivist. Mr. Douglass Brymner, furnished me copies of all I needed with a prompt courtesy for which I am more indebted than I can well express.
I have been obliged to rely mainly on these collections of early documents as my authorities, especially for that portion of western history prior to 1783. Excluding the valuable, but very brief, and often very inaccurate, sketch which Filson wrote down as coming from Boon, there are no printed histories of Kentucky earlier than Marshall's, in 1812; while the first Tennessee history was Haywood's, in 1822. Both Marshall and Haywood did excellent work; the former was an able writer, the latter was a student, and (like the Kentucky historian Mann Butler) a sound political thinker, devoted to the Union, and prompt to stand up for the right. But both of them, in dealing with the early history of the country beyond the Alleghanies, wrote about matters that had happened from thirty to fifty years before, and were obliged to base most of their statements on tradition or on what the pioneers remembered in their old age. The later historians, for the most part, merely follow these two. In consequence, the mass of original material, in the shape of official reports and contemporary letters, contained in the Haldimand MSS., the Campbell MSS., the McAfee MSS., the Gardoqui MSS., the State Department MSS., the Virginia State Papers, etc., not only cast a flood of new light upon this early history, but necessitate its being entirely re-written. For instance, they give an absolutely new aspect to, and in many cases completely reverse, the current accounts of all the Indian fighting, both against the Cherokees and the Northwestern tribes; they give for the first time a clear view of frontier diplomacy, of the intrigues with the Spaniards, and even of the mode of life in the backwoods, and of the workings of the civil government. It may be mentioned that the various proper names are spelt in so many different ways that it is difficult to know which to choose. Even Clark is sometimes spelt Clarke, while Boon was apparently indifferent as to whether his name should or should not contain the final silent e. As for the original Indian titles, it is often quite impossible to give them even approximately; the early writers often wrote the same Indian words in such different ways that they bear no resemblance whatever to one another.
In conclusion I would say that it has been to me emphatically a labor of love to write of the great deeds of the border people. I am not blind to their manifold shortcomings, nor yet am I ignorant of their many strong and good qualities. For a number of years I spent most of my time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other frontiersman. The wild country in which we dwelt and across which we wandered was in the far west; and there were of course many features in which the life of a cattleman on the Great Plains and among the Rockies differed from that led by a backwoodsman in the Alleghany forests a century before. Yet the points of resemblance were far more numerous and striking. We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, white and red, on the banks of the Little Missouri and among the wooded, precipitous foot-hills of the Bighorn, exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years previously built their log-cabins beside the Kentucky or in the valleys of the Great Smokies. The men who have shared in the fast vanishing frontier life of the present feel a peculiar sympathy with the already long-vanished frontier life of the past.
SAGAMORE HILL, May, 1889
Foreword
In the year 1898 the United States finished the work begun over a century before by the backwoodsman, and drove the Spaniard outright from the western world. During the march of our people from the crests of the Alleghanies to the Pacific, the Spaniard was for a long period our chief white opponent; and after an interval his place among our antagonists was taken by his Spanish-American heir. Although during the Revolution the Spaniard at one time became America's friend in the sense that he was England's foe, he almost from the outset hated and dreaded his new ally more than his old enemy. In the peace negotiations at the close of the contest he was jealously eager to restrict our boundaries to the line of the Alleghanies; while even during the concluding years of the war the Spanish soldiers on the upper Mississippi were regarded by the Americans in Illinois as a menace no less serious than the British troops at Detroit.
In the opening years of our national life the Western backwoodsman found the Spanish ownership of the mouth of the Mississippi even more hurtful and irksome than the retention by the British king of the posts on the Great Lakes. After years of tedious public negotiations, under and through which ran a dark woof of private intrigue, the sinewy western hands so loosened the Spanish grip that in despair Spain surrendered to France the mouth of the river and the vast territories stretching thence into the dim Northwest. She hoped thereby to establish a strong barrier between her remaining provinces and her most dreaded foe. But France in her turn grew to understand that America's position as regards Louisiana, thanks to the steady westward movement of the backwoodsman, was such as to render it on the one hand certain that the retention of the province by France would mean an armed clash with the United States, and on the other hand no less certain that in the long run such a conflict would result to France's disadvantage. Louisiana thus passed from the hands of Spain, after a brief interval, into those of the young Republic. There remained to Spain, Mexico and Florida; and forthwith the pressure of the stark forest riflemen began to be felt on the outskirts of these two provinces. Florida was the first to fall. After a portion of it had been forcibly annexed, after Andrew Jackson had marched at will through part of the remainder, and after the increasing difficulty of repressing the American filibustering efforts[2] had shown the imminence of some serious catastrophe, Spain ceded the peninsula to the United States. Texas, New Mexico, and California did not fall into American hands until they had passed from the Spaniard to his half-Indian sons.
Many decades went by after Spain had lost her foothold on the American continent, and she still held her West Indian empire. She misgoverned the islands as she had misgoverned the continent; and in the islands, as once upon the continent, her own children became her deadliest foes. But generation succeeded generation, and the prophecies of those far-seeing statesmen who foretold that she would lose to the northern Republic her West Indian possessions remained unfulfilled. At last, at the close of one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars that even Spain ever waged with her own colonists, the United States intervened, and in a brief summer campaign destroyed the last vestiges of the mediaeval Spanish domain in the tropic seas alike of the West and the remote East.
We of this generation were but carrying to completion the work of our fathers and of our fathers' fathers. It is moreover a matter for just pride that while there was no falling off in the vigor and prowess shown by our fighting men, there was a marked change for the better in the spirit with which the deed was done. The backwoodsmen had pushed the Spaniards from the Mississippi, had set up a slave-holding republic in Texas, and had conquered the Californian gold-fields, in the sheer masterful exercise of might. It is true that they won great triumphs for civilization no less than for their own people; yet they won them unwittingly, for they were merely doing as countless other strong young races had done in the long contest carried on for so many thousands of years between the fit and the unfit. But in 1898 the United States, while having gained in strength, showed that there had likewise been gain in justice, in mercy, in sense of responsibility. Our conquest of the Southwest has been justified by the result. The Latin peoples in the lands we won and settled have prospered like our own stock. The sons and grandsons of those who had been our foes in Louisiana and New Mexico came eagerly forward to serve in the army that was to invade Cuba. Our people as a whole went into the war, primarily, it is true, to drive out the Spaniard once for all from America; but with the fixed determination to replace his rule by a government of justice and orderly liberty.
To use the political terminology of the present day, the whole western movement of our people was simply the most vital part of that great movement of expansion which has been the central and all-important feature of our history—a feature far more important than any other since we became a nation, save only the preservation of the Union itself. It was expansion which made us a great power; and at every stage it has been bitterly antagonized, not only by the short-sighted and the timid, but even by many who were neither one nor the other. There were many men who opposed the movement west of the Alleghanies and the peopling of the lands which now form Kentucky, Tennessee, and the great States lying between the Ohio and the Lakes. Excellent persons then foretold ruin to the country from bringing into it a disorderly population of backwoodsmen, with the same solemnity that has in our own day marked the prophecies of those who have seen similar ruin in the intaking of Hawaii and Porto Rico. The annexation of Louisiana, including the entire territory between the northern Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean, aroused such frantic opposition in the old-settled regions of the country, and especially in the Northeast, as to call forth threats of disunion, the language used by the opponents of our expansion into the Far West being as violent as that sometimes used in denouncing our acquisition of the Philippines. The taking of Texas and of California was complicated by the slave question, but much of the opposition to both was simply the general opposition to expansion—that is, to national growth and national greatness. In our long-settled communities there have always been people who opposed every war which marked the advance of American civilization at the cost of savagery. The opposition was fundamentally the same, whether these wars were campaigns in the old West against the Shawnees and the Miamis, in the new West against the Sioux and the Apaches, or in Luzon against the Tagals. In each case, in the end, the believers in the historic American policy of expansion have triumphed. Hitherto America has gone steadily forward along the path of greatness, and has remained true to the policy of her early leaders who felt within them the lift towards mighty things. Like every really strong people, ours is stirred by the generous ardor for daring strife and mighty deeds, and now with eyes undimmed looks far into the misty future.
At bottom the question of expansion in 1898 was but a variant of the problem we had to solve at every stage of the great western movement. Whether the prize of the moment was Louisiana or Florida, Oregon or Alaska, mattered little. The same forces, the same types of men, stood for and against the cause of national growth, of national greatness, at the end of the century as at the beginning.
My non-literary work has been so engrossing during the years that have elapsed since my fourth volume was published, that I have been unable to go on with "The Winning of the West"; but my design is to continue the narrative as soon as I can get leisure, carrying it through the stages which marked the taking of Florida and Oregon, the upbuilding of the republic of Texas, and the acquisition of New Mexico and California as the result of the Mexican war.
Theodore Roosevelt
EXECUTIVE CHAMBER, ALBANY, N. Y. January 1, 1900.
Chapter I. The Spread of the English-Speaking Peoples
During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world's history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance.
The tongue which Bacon[3] feared to use in his writings, lest they should remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimportant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two continents. The Common Law which Coke[4] jealously upheld in the southern half of a single European island, is now the law of the land throughout the vast regions of Australasia, and of America north of the Rio Grande. The names of the plays that Shakespeare wrote are household words in the mouths of mighty nations, whose wide domains were to him more unreal than the realm of Prester John. Over half the descendants of their fellow countrymen of that day now dwell in lands which, when these three Englishmen were born, held not a single white inhabitant; the race which, when they were in their prime, was hemmed in between the North and the Irish seas, to-day holds sway over worlds, whose endless coasts are washed by the waves of the three great oceans.
There have been many other races that at one time or another had their great periods of race expansion—as distinguished from mere conquest,—but there has never been another whose expansion has been either so broad or so rapid.
At one time, many centuries ago, it seemed as if the Germanic peoples, like their Celtic foes and neighbors, would be absorbed into the all-conquering Roman power, and, merging their identity in that of the victors, would accept their law, their speech, and their habits of thought. But this danger vanished forever on the day of the slaughter by the Teutoburger Wald[5], when the legions of Varus were broken by the rush of Hermann's wild warriors.
Two or three hundred years later the Germans, no longer on the defensive, themselves went forth from their marshy forests conquering and to conquer. For century after century they swarmed out of the dark woodland east of the Rhine, and north of the Danube; and as their force spent itself, the movement was taken up by their brethren who dwelt along the coasts of the Baltic and the North Atlantic. From the Volga to the Pillars of Hercules, from Sicily to Britain, every land in turn bowed to the warlike prowess of the stalwart sons of Odin. Rome and Novgorod, the imperial city of Italy as well as the squalid capital of Muscovy, acknowledged the sway of kings of Teutonic or Scandinavian blood.
In most cases, however, the victorious invaders merely intruded themselves among the original and far more numerous owners of the land, ruled over them, and were absorbed by them. This happened to both Teuton and Scandinavian; to the descendants of Alaric, as well as to the children of Rurik. The Dane in Ireland became a Celt; the Goth of the Iberian peninsula became a Spaniard; Frank and Norwegian alike were merged into the mass of Romance-speaking Gauls, who themselves finally grew to be called by the names of their masters. Thus it came about that though the German tribes conquered Europe they did not extend the limits of Germany nor the sway of the German race. On the contrary, they strengthened the hands of the rivals of the people from whom they sprang. They gave rulers—kaisers, kings, barons, and knights—to all the lands they overran; here and there they imposed their own names on kingdoms and principalities—as in France, Normandy, Burgundy, and Lombardy; they grafted the feudal system on the Roman jurisprudence, and interpolated a few Teutonic words in the Latin dialects of the peoples they had conquered; but, hopelessly outnumbered, they were soon lost in the mass of their subjects, and adopted from them their laws, their culture, and their language. As a result, the mixed races of the south—the Latin nations as they are sometimes called—strengthened by the infusion of northern blood, sprang anew into vigorous life, and became for the time being the leaders of the European world.
