In the United States, this curious conjunction of "improvement" and regret gave the national imagination its distinctive flavor and furnished themes to which interpreters of American life returned again and again, with obsessive interest. As the most rapidly developing nation in the world, clearly destined for riches and power, America had the heaviest investment in the ideology of progress. Not only the country's material wealth but its commitment to the democratization of opportunity, required by theories of progress in order to become fully convincing, made it easy not only for Americans themselves but for foreign observers to see America as the wave of the future; yet Americans were notoriously given to recurrent fits of melancholy, evoked by the suggestion that some primal innocence, some "original relation to the universe," in Emerson's phrase, had been lost in the headlong rush for gold. Many observers were struck by a persistent streak of sadness in the American character, immediately recognizable, for example, in Abraham Lincoln, whose saturnine temperament as much as his racy humor, loose-knit frame, and shambling gait seemed to make him a fitting embodiment and symbol of his people.

American nostalgia, like the vision of irresistible and unlimited American expansion, centered on the West, the rapid settlement of which appeared to dramatize the march of civilization. "Westward the course of empire takes its way." According to a widely accepted way of looking at westward expansion, the rapid succession of historical stages, from the most primitive to the most advanced, recapitulated developments that elsewhere took centuries to complete. But the conquest and settlement of the continent made Americans deeply uneasy, even as it made them insufferably boastful and self-satisfied. The legend of Daniel Boone, the first of a series of explorers to be canonized in his own lifetime, illustrates this ambivalence. Timothy Flint, an early biographer, attributed to Boone the recognition that "this great [Ohio] valley must soon become the abode of millions of freemen; and his heart swelled with joy" at the thought, according to Flint. Yet Flint also told how Boone had been driven out of Kentucky "by the restless spirit ... of civilization and physical improvement" and how, even in Missouri, "American enterprise seemed doomed to follow him, and to thwart all his schemes of backwoods retirement."

Evidently Boone had no great love for the civilization that pursued him so relentlessly, the expansion of which his own efforts had done so much to bring about. "I had not been two years [in Missouri] before a d—d

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