A few years more and the prairie will be transformed into farms.

The mountain ravines will be the abodes of busy manufacturers, and the gigantic power of American civilization will have taken possession of the land from the great river of the West to the very shores of the Pacific....

The world is fast filling up.
I trust I am not in error when I venture to place some value, however small, on everything which goes to form the truthful history of a condition of men incident to the advances of civilization over the continent--a condition which forms peculiar types of character, breeds remarkable developments of human nature--a condition also which can hardly again exist on this or any other continent, and which has, therefore, a special value in the sum of human history." Such words as the foregoing bespeak a large and dignified point of view.

No one who follows Marcy's pages can close them with anything but respect and admiration.

It is in books such as this, then, that we may find something about the last stages of the clearing of the frontier.
Even in Marcy's times the question of our Government's Indian policy was a mooted one.