Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[239] size of a country is not a criterion of its productiveness in art, but it is reasonable to suppose that some of the vast energy hitherto employed in the task of opening the West will presently be spared from the toil of practical life, to give a good account of itself in literature.

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Early writers about the West.

The first authors who came from the West to delight our young people at the East were. Audubon, the ornithologist, who had a way of interspersing between his bird sketches certain intermediate chapters called Episodes, usually personal narratives in the woods, beginning in 1831--and Timothy Flint, who wrote Ten years in the Valley of the Mississippi (1826), and also who wrote from Cincinnati to the London Athenaeum and had his books translated into French. These books, with those of Peter Parley (sometimes written by Hawthorne), gave a most vivid charm to the Western wilds and rivers.

In The pioneers Cooper made us already conscious citizens of a great nation, and took our imagination as far as the Mississippi. Lewis and Clark carried us beyond the Mississippi (1814). About 1835 Oregon expeditions