The road to glory

Foreword

The great painting — it is called "Vers la Gloire," if I remember rightly — reaches from floor to ceiling of the Pantheon in Paris. Across the huge canvas, in a whirlwind of dust and color, sweeps an avalanche of horsemen — cuirassiers, dragoons, lancers, guides, hussars, chasseurs — ^with lances levelled, blades swung high, banners streaming — France's unsung heroes in mad pursuit of Glory.

That picture brings home to the youth of France the fact that the nation owes as great a debt of gratitude to men whose very names have been forgotten as to those whom it has rewarded with titles and decorations; it teaches that a man can be a hero without having his name cut deep in brass or stone; that time and time again history has been made by men whom the historians have overlooked or disregarded.

This is even more true of our own country, for three-fourths of the territory of the United States was won for us by men whose names are without significance to most Americans. Nolan, Bean, Gutierrez, Magee, Kemper, Perry, Toledo, Humbert, Lallemand, De Aury, Mina, Long — these

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names doubtless convey nothing to you, yet it was the persistent and daring assaults made by these men upon the Spanish boundaries which undermined the power of Spain upon this continent and paved the way for Austin, Milam, Travis, Bowie, Crockett, Ward, and Houston to effect the liberation of Texas. On the other side of the Gulf of Mexico the Kempers, McGregor, Hubbard, and Mathews harassed the Spaniards in the Floridas until Andrew Jackson, in an unofficial and almost unrecorded war, forced Spain to cede those rich provinces to the United States. In a desperate battle with savages on the banks of an obscure creek in Indiana, William Henry Harrison broke the power of Tecumseh's Indian confederation, set forward the hands of progress in the West a quarter of a century, and, incidentally, changed the map of Europe. A Missouri militia officer, Alexander Doniphan, without a war-chest, without supports, and without communications, invaded a hostile nation at the head of a thousand volunteers, repeatedly routed forces many times the strength of his own, conquered, subdued, and pacified a territory larger than France and Italy put together; and, after a march equivalent to a fourth of the circumference of the globe, returned to the United States, bringing with

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him battle-flags and cannon captured on fields whose names his country people had never so much as heard before. A missionary named Marcus Whitman, by the most daring and dramatic ride in history, during which he crossed the continent on horseback in the depths of winter, facing death almost every mile from cold, starvation, or Indians, prevented the Pacific Northwest from passing under the rule of England. Matthew Perry, without firing a shot or shedding a drop of blood, opened Japan to commerce, Christianity, and civilization, and made American influence predominant in the Pacific, though, a decade later, David McDougal was compelled to teach the yellow men respect for our citizens and our flag at the mouths of his belching guns.

Certain of these men have been accused of being adventurers, as they unquestionably were — but what, pray, were Hawkins and Raleigh and Drake ? Others have been condemned as being filibusters, an accusation which in some cases was doubtless deserved — but were Jason and his Argonauts anything but filibusters who raided Colchis to loot it of the golden fleece ? Adventurers and fihbusters though some of them may have been, they were brave men (there can

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be no disputing that) and makers of history. But it was their fortune — or misfortune — to have been romantic and picturesque and to have gone ahead without the formahty of obtaining the government's commission or permission, which, in the eyes of the sedate and prosaic historians, has completely damned them. But, as we have not hesitated to benefit from the lands they won for us, it is but doing them the barest justice to listen to their stories. And I think you will agree with me that in their stories there is remarkably little of which we need to feel ashamed and much of which we have reason to be proud.

Devious and dangerous were the roads which these men followed — amid the swamps of Florida, across the sun-baked Texan prairies, down the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the snowbound ridges of the Rockies, into the miasmic jungles of Tabasco, along the pirate-haunted coasts of Malaysia, across the Indian country, through the mined and shot-swept straits of Shimonoseki; but, no matter what perils bordered them, or into what far corner of the earth they led, at the end Glory beckoned and called.

E. Alexander Powell.

Santa Barbara, California.

Contents

PAGE

Foreword vii

I. Adventurers All i