McLean of Ohio said in the House of Representatives in 1825:

In a favorable season for emigration, the traveller upon this highway will scarcely lose sight of passengers, of some description. Hundreds of families are seen migrating to the West, with ease and comfort. Drovers from the West, with their cattle, of almost every description, are seen passing eastward, seeking a market on this side of the mountains. Indeed, this road may be compared to a great street, or thoroughfare, through some populous city-travellers on foot, on horseback, and in carriages, are seen mingling on its paved surface.

The Southerners who came by land along the many bad roads through Tennessee and Kentucky usually traveled with heavy, schooner-shaped wagons, drawn by four or six horses. These family groups, crowding roads and fords, marching toward the sunset, with the canvas-covered wagon, ancestor of the prairie-schooner of the later times, were typical of the overland migration. The poorer classes traveled on foot, sometimes carrying their entire effects in a cart drawn by themselves. Those of more means took horses, cattle, and sheep, and sometimes sent their household goods by wagon or by steamboat up the Mississippi. . . .

Arrived at the nearest point to his destination on the Ohio, the emigrant either cut out a road to his new home, or pushed up some tributary of that river in a keel-boat. If he was one of the poorer classes, he became a squatter on the public lands, trusting to find in the profits of his farming the means of paying for his land. Not uncommonly, after clearing the land, he sold his improvements to the actual purchaser, under the customary usage, or by preemption laws. With the money thus secured he would purchase new land in a remoter area, and thus establish himself as an independent landowner. Under the credit system which existed at the opening of the period, the settler purchased his land at two dollars per acre, by a

cash payment of fifty cents and the rest in installments running over a period of four years; but by the new law of 1820 the settler was permitted to buy a tract of eighty acres from the government at a minimum price of a dollar and a quarter per acre, without credit. The price of labor in the towns along the Ohio, coupled with the low cost of provisions, made it possible for even a poor day-laborer from the East to accumulate the necessary amount to make his land-purchase.

Having in this way settled down either as a squatter or as a landowner, the pioneer proceeded to hew out a clearing in the midst of the forest. Commonly he had selected his lands with reference to the value of the soil, as indicated by the character of the hardwoods, but this meant that the labor of clearing was the more severe. Under the sturdy strokes of his ax the light of the day was let into the little circle of cleared ground. With the aid of his neighbors, called together under the social attractions of a raising," with its inevitable accompaniment of whisky and a frolic," he erected his log cabin. If he was too remote from neighbors or too poor to afford a cabin, as in the case of Lincoln's father, a rude half-faced camp served the purpose for the first months of his occupation. America," wrote Birkbeck," was bred in a cabin.”

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Having secured a foothold, the settler next proceeded to "girdle or deaden" an additional forest area, preparatory to his farming operations. This consisted in cutting a ring through the bark around the lower portion of the trunk, to prevent the sap from rising. In a short time the withered branches were ready for burning, and in the midst of the blackened stumps the first crop of corn and vegetables was planted.

In regions nearer to the East, as in western New York, it was sometimes possible to repay a large portion of the cost of clearing by the sale of pot and pearl ashes extracted from the logs, which were brought together for burning into huge piles. This was accomplished by a "log-rolling,"

under the united efforts of the neighbors, as in the case of the raising. More commonly in the West the logs were wasted by burning, except such as were split into rails, which, laid one above another, made the zig zag worm fences" for the protection of the fields of the pioneer. . . .

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The backwoodsman of this type represented the outer edge of the advance of civilization. Where settlement was closer, coöperative activity possible, and little villages, with the mill and retail stores, existed, conditions of life were ameliorated, and a better type of pioneer was found. Into such regions circuit-riders and wandering preachers had carried the beginnings of church organization, and schools were started. But the frontiersmen proper constituted a moving class, ever ready to sell out their clearings in order to press on to a new frontier, where game more abounded, soil was reported to be better, and where the forest furnished a welcome retreat from the uncongenial encroachments of civilization. If, however, he was thrifty, and forehanded, the backwoodsman remained on his clearing, improving his farm and sharing in the change from wilderness life.

Behind the type of the backwoodsman came the type of the pioneer farmer. Equipped with a little capital, he often, as we have seen, purchased the clearing, and thus avoided some of the initial hardships of pioneer life. In the course of a few years, as sawmills were erected, frame houses took the place of the log cabins; the rough clearing, with its stumps, gave way to well tilled fields; orchards were planted; livestock roamed over the enlarged clearing; and an agricultural surplus was ready for export. Soon the adventurous speculator offered corner lots in a new town site, and the rude beginnings of a city were seen.

But the outlet from the West over the roads to the East and South was but a subordinate element in her internal commerce. It was the Father of Waters, with its ramifying tributaries, which gathered the products of the great valley and brought them to New Orleans. Down

the Mississippi floated a multitude of craft: lumber rafts from the Allegheny, the old-time arks, with cattle, flour, and bacon, hay-boats, keel-boats, and skiffs, all mingled with the steamboats which plied the western waters. Flatboatmen, raftsmen, and deckhands constituted a turbulent and reckless population, living on the country through which they passed, fighting and drinking in true "half horse, half alligator" style. Prior to the steamboat, all of the commerce from New Orleans to the upper country was carried on in about twenty barges, averaging a hundred tons each, and making one trip a year. Although the steamboat did not drive out the other craft, it revolutionized the commerce of the river. Whereas it had taken the keel-boats thirty to forty days to descend from Louisville to New Orleans, and about ninety days to ascend the fifteen hundred miles of navigation by poling and warping up stream, the steamboat had shortened the time, by 1822, to seven days down and sixteen days up. As the steamboats ascended the various tributaries of the Mississippi to gather the products of the growing West, the pioneers came more and more to realize the importance of the invention. They resented the idea of the monopoly which Fulton and Livingston wished to enforce prior to the decision of Chief Justice Marshall, in the case of Gibbons v. Ogden - a decision of vital interest to the whole interior.

They saw in the steamboat a symbol of their own development.

An Atlantic cit [boasted a writer in the Western Monthly Review] who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen, would not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and splendor, as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, the Lady of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever existed in the imaginative brain of a romancer, much less that they were actually in existence, rushing down the Mississippi as on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the forests, and walking against the mighty current as things of life,"

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bearing speculators, merchants, dandies, fine ladies, every thing real and every thing affected in the form of humanity, with pianos, and stocks of novels, and cards, and dice, and flirting, and love-making, and drinking, and champaigne, and on the deck, perhaps, three hundred fellows, who have seen alligators, and neither fear whiskey, nor gun-powder. A steam boat coming from New Orleans brings to the remotest villages of our streams and the very doors of the cabins a little Paris, a section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in the minds of our young people the innate propensity for fashions and finery. Within a day's journey of us, three distinct canals are in respectable progress towards completion. . . . Cincinnati will soon be the center of the "celestial empire," as the Chinese say; and instead of encountering the storms, the sea sickness, and dangers of a passage from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic, whenever the Erie Canal shall be completed, the opulent Southern planters will take their families, their dogs. and parrots, through a world of forests, from New Orleans to New York, giving us a call by the way. When they are more acquainted with us, their voyage will often terminate here.

'F. J. Turner: The Colonization of the West, 1820-1830, in The Am. Historical Review, Vol. XI, pp. 303-324, passim.

QUESTIONS

Explain how democracy and the American spirit developed in the men who settled the Mississippi Valley? How did this spirit react on the older settled portions of the country? Give the numbers of the population that was western in spirit in 1830. Was there any difference in the character of the settlements of Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, and Mississippi before 1815? How did the development of cotton-raising tend to make the southern part of the Mississippi Valley different from the northern? What became of the small farmers in the Gulf States? From what sections of the country did a very large number of those who settled in the Valley before 1830 come? Illustrate from the history of the Lincoln and Davis families the manner in which the early settlers of North and South came from the same region. What were the means by which settlers reached the West? How could a pioneer without money acquire a farm? How did he reduce it to cultivation and establish a home? Describe the pioneer farmer; the way a clearing was transformed into a settled village; the importance of the Mississippi;