It crawled across the Alleghanies, down the great river valleys and up them yet again; and at last, in days of new transportation, it leaped across divides, from one river valley to another.

Its history, at first so halting, came to be very swift--so swift that it worked great elisions in its own story.
In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow country of the West--the high plains and the lower foothills running from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary.

The still more ancient cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never come into acceptance as the Old West.

Always, when we use these words, we think of buffalo plains and of Indians, and of their passing before the footmen and riders who carried the phantom flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from the Appalachians to the Rockies--before the men who eventually made good that glorious and vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose party turned back from the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name of King George on all the country lying west of them, as far as the South Sea! The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to itself the title of the real and typical frontier of all the world.

We call the spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it was; but even as the Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact with the Spanish civilization in Europe, on the high seas, and in both the Americas, so the last frontier of the American West also was affected, and largely, deeply, by Spanish influence and Spanish customs.