The Westward Movement. Various
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westward, as is supposed to have been the rule, but to the south and southeast, into the valleys of the Appalachians, where the hills would raise corn, and the streams would carry it. The early emigrants learned that a raft would eat nothing, that a boat ran well down-stream. Men still clung to the seaboard region, though even now they exemplified that great law of population which designates the river valleys to be the earliest and most permanent centers of population. The valleys of Virginia and Maryland caught the wealthiest and most aristocratic of the shifting population of that day. Daniel Boone heard the calling of the voices early, but not until long after men had begun to pick out the best of the farming-lands of North and South Carolina and lower Virginia. The first trails of the Appalachians were the waterways, paths which we do not follow or parallel, but intersect in our course when we go by rail from the Mississippi valley to that first abiding-place of the star.
Early Pioneers on the Blue Ridge.
The real mother of the West was the South. It was she who bore this child, and it has been much at her expense that it has grown so large and matured so swiftly. The path of empire had its head on the Chesapeake. But let us at least be fair. New England and New York did not first settle the West, not because the Chesapeake man was some superhuman being, but because the rivers of New England and New York did not run in the right direction. We may find fate, destiny, and geography very closely intermingled in the history of this country, or of any other. Any nation first avails itself of its geography, then at last casts its geography aside; after that, politics.
PORTRAIT OF THE FIRST WEST-BOUND AMERICAN.
Let us picture for ourselves this first restless American, this West-bound man. We must remember that there had been two or three full American generations to produce him, this man who first dared turn away from the seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the sun, toward the dark and mysterious mountains and forests which then encompassed the least remote land fairly to be called the West. Two generations had produced a man different from the Old-World type. Free air and good food had given him abundant brawn. He was tall. Little fat cloyed the free play of his muscles, and there belonged to him the heritage of that courage which comes of good heart and lungs. He was a splendid man to have for an ancestor, this tall and florid athlete who never heard of athletics. His face was thin and aquiline, his look high and confident, his eye blue, his speech reserved. You may see this same man yet in those restricted parts of this country which remain fit to be called America. You may see him sometimes in the mountains of Tennessee, the brakes of Arkansas or Missouri, where the old strain has remained most pure. You might have seen him over all the West in the generation preceding our own.
THE EQUIPMENT OF THE EARLY AMERICAN—HIS SKILL WITH IT.
A Missouri hunter.
This was our American, discontented to dwell longer by the sea. He had two tools, the ax and the rifle. With the one he built, with the other he fought and lived. Early America saw the invention of the small-bore rifle because there was need for that invention. It required no such long range in those forest days, and it gave the greatest possible amount of results for its expenditure. Its charge was tiny, its provender compact and easily carried by the man who must economize in every ounce of transported goods; and yet its powers were wonderful. Our early American could plant that little round pellet in just such a spot as he liked of game-animal or of red-skinned enemy, and the deadly effect of no projectile known to man has ever surpassed this one, if each be weighed by the test of economic expenditure. This long, small-bored tube was one of the early agents of American civilization. The conditions of the daily life of the time demanded great skill in the use of this typical arm, and the accuracy of the early riflemen of the West has probably never been surpassed in popular average by any people of the world. Driving a nail and snuffing a candle with a rifle-bullet were common forms of the amusement which was derived from the practice of arms.
In the Alleghany Mountains: The retreat to the blockhouse.
THIS AMERICAN, SO EQUIPPED, MOVES WESTWARD.
When the American settler had got as far West as the Plains he needed arms of greater range, and then he made them; but the first two generations of the West-bound had the buckskin bandoleer, with its little bullets, its little molds for making them, its little worm which served to clean the interior of the barrel with a wisp of flax, its tiny flask of precious powder, its extra flint or so. The American rifle and the American ax—what a history might be written of these alone! They were the sole warrant for the departure of the outbound man from all those associations which had held him to his home. He took some sweet girl from her own family, some mother or grandmother of you or me, and he took his good ax and rifle, and he put his little store on raft or pack-horse, and so he started out; and God prospered him. In his time he was a stanch, industrious man, a good hunter, a sturdy chopper, a faithful lover of his friends, and a stern hater of his foes.
HOW HE FINDS THE WATERWAYS EASY AS PATHS WESTWARD.
In time this early outbound man learned that there were rivers which ran not to the southeast and into the sea, but outward, across the mountains toward the setting sun. The winding trails of the Alleghanies led one finally to rivers which ran toward Kentucky, Tennessee, even farther out into that unknown, tempting land which still was called the West. Thus it came that the American genius broke entirely away from salt-water traditions, asked no longer "What cheer?" from the ships that came from across the seas, clung no longer to the customs, the costumes, the precedents or standards of the past. There came the day of buckskin and woolsey, of rifle and ax, of men curious for adventures, of homes built of logs and slabs, with puncheons for floors, with little fields about them, and tiny paths that led out into the immeasurable preserves of the primeval forests. A few things held intrinsic value at that time—powder, lead, salt, maize, cow-bells, women who dared. It was a simple but not an ill ancestry, this that turned away from the sea-coast forever and began the making of another world. It was the strong-limbed, the bold-hearted who traveled, the weak who stayed at home.
Westward movement of the center of population from 1790 to 1900, indicated by stars.
OTHER DISTANCES, OTHER CUSTOMS, OTHER VALUES.
This was the ancestral fiber of the West. What time had folk like these for powder-puff or ruffle, for fan or jeweled snuff-box? Their garb was made from the skin of the deer, the fox, the wolf. Their shoes were of buffalo-hide, their beds were made of the robes of the bear and buffalo. They laid the land under tribute. Yet, so far from mere savagery was the spirit that animated these men that in ten years after they had first cut away the forest they were founding a college and establishing a court of law! Read this forgotten history, one chapter, and a little one, in the history of the West, and then turn, if you like, to the chapters of fiction in an older world. You have your choice.
Map of the census of 1790.
In those early days there were individual opportunities so numerous in the West that no opportunity had value. A tract of six hundred and forty acres, which is now within the limits of the city of Nashville, sold for three axes and two cow-bells. Be sure it was not politics that made corn worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel, and sold a mile of ground for the tinkle of a bell. The conditions were born of a scanty and insufficient transportation.
Map of the census of 1820.
THE WEST CONTINUED TO GROW DOWN STREAM, NOT UP.
There was a generation of this down-stream transportation, and it built up the first splendid, aggressive population