The Winning of the West Volume IV Part 13

North and South alike, the ways of life were substantially the same; though there were differences, of course, and these differences tended to become accentuated. Thus, in the Mississippi Territory the planters, in the closing years of the century, began to turn their attention to cotton instead of devoting themselves to the crops of their brethren farther north; and cotton soon became their staple product. But as yet the typical settler everywhere was the man of the axe and rifle, the small pioneer farmer who lived by himself, with his wife and his swarming children, on a big tract of wooded land, perhaps three or four hundred acres in extent. Of this three or four hundred acres he rarely cleared more than eight or ten; and these were cleared imperfectly. On this clearing he tilled the soil, and there he lived in his rough log house with but one room, or at most two and a loft. [Footnote: F. A.

Michaux, "Voyages" (in 1802), pp. 132, 214, etc.]

Game Still Abundant.

The man of the Western waters, was essentially a man who dwelt alone in the midst of the forest on his rude little farm, and who eked out his living by hunting. Game still abounded everywhere, save in the immediate neighborhood of the towns; so that many of the inhabitants lived almost exclusively by hunting and fishing, and, with their return to the pursuits of savagery, adopted not a little of the savage idleness and thriftlessness. Bear, deer, and turkey were staple foods. Elk had ceased to be common, though they hung on here and there in out of the way localities for many years; and by the close of the century the herds of bison had been driven west of the Mississippi. [Footnote: Henry Ker, "Travels," p.22.] Smaller forms of wild life swarmed. Gray squirrels existed in such incredible numbers that they caused very serious damage to the crops, and at one time the Kentucky Legislature pa.s.sed a law imposing upon every male over sixteen years of age the duty of killing a certain number of squirrels and crows every year. [Footnote: Michaux, 215, 236; Collins, I., 24.] The settlers possessed horses and horned cattle, but only a few sheep, which were not fitted to fight for their own existence in the woods, as the stock had to. On the other hand, slab-sided, long-legged hogs were the most plentiful of domestic animals, ranging in great, half-wild droves through the forest.

Fondness of the Westerners for the Lonely Life of the Woods.

All observers were struck by the intense fondness of the frontiersmen for the woods and for a restless, lonely life. [Footnote: Crevecoeur, "Voyage dans la Haute Pennsylvanie," etc., p. 265.] They pushed independence to an extreme; they did not wish to work for others or to rent land from others. Each was himself a small landed proprietor, who cleared only the ground that he could himself cultivate. Workmen were scarce and labor dear. It was almost impossible to get men fit to work as mill hands, or to do high-cla.s.s labor in forges even by importing them from Pennsylvania or Maryland. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Letter to George Nicholas, Baltimore, Sept. 3, 1796.] Even in the few towns the inhabitants preferred that their children should follow agriculture rather than become handicraftsmen; and skilled workmen such as carpenters and smiths made a great deal of money, so much so that they could live a week on one day's wage. [Footnote: Michaux, pp. 96, 152.]

The River Trade.

In addition to farming there was a big trade along the river. Land transportation was very difficult indeed, and the frontiersman's whole life was one long struggle with the forest and with poor roads. The waterways were consequently of very great importance, and the flatboatmen on the Mississippi and Ohio became a numerous and noteworthy cla.s.s. The rivers were covered with their craft. There was a driving trade between Pittsburgh and New Orleans, the goods being drawn to Pittsburgh from the seacoast cities by great four-horse wagons, and being exported in ships from New Orleans to all parts of the earth. Not only did the Westerners build river craft, but they even went into shipbuilding; and on the upper Ohio, at Pittsburgh, and near Marietta, at the beginning of the present century, seagoing ships were built and launched to go down the Ohio and Mississippi, and thence across the ocean to any foreign port. [Footnote: Thompson Mason Harris, "Journal of Tour," etc., 1803, p. 140; Michaux, p. 77.] There was, however, much risk in this trade; for the demand for commodities at Natchez and New Orleans was uncertain, while the waters of the Gulf swarmed with British and French cruisers, always ready to pounce like pirates on the ships of neutral powers. [Footnote: Clay MSS., W. H. Turner to Thomas Hart, Natchez, May 27, 1797.]

Small Size of the Towns.

Natchez.

Yet the river trade was but the handmaid of frontier agriculture. The Westerners were a farmer folk who lived on the clearings their own hands had made in the great woods, and who owned the land they tilled. Towns were few and small. At the end of the century there were some four hundred thousand people in the West; yet the largest town was Lexington, which contained less than three thousand people. [Footnote: Perrin Du Lac "Voyage," etc., 1801, 1803, p. 153; Michaux, 150.] Lexington was a neatly built little burg, with fine houses and good stores. The leading people lived well and possessed much cultivation. Louisville and Nashville were each about half its size. In Nashville, of the one hundred and twenty houses but eight were of brick, and most of them were mere log huts. Cincinnati was a poor little village. Cleveland consisted of but two or three log cabins, at a time when there were already a thousand settlers in its neighborhood on the Connecticut Reserve, scattered out on their farms. [Footnote: "Historical Collections of Ohio," p. 120.] Natchez was a very important town, nearly as large as Lexington. It derived its importance from the river traffic on the Mississippi. All the boatmen stopped there, and sometimes as many as one hundred and fifty craft were moored to the bank at the same time.

The men who did this laborious river work were rude, powerful, and lawless, and when they halted for a rest their idea of enjoyment was the coa.r.s.est and most savage dissipation. At Natchez there speedily gathered every species of purveyor to their vicious pleasures, and the part of the town known as "Natchez under the Hill" became a by-word for crime and debauchery. [Footnote: Henry Ker, "Travels," p. 41.]

Growth of Kentucky.

Kentucky had grown so in population, possessing over two hundred thousand inhabitants, that she had begun to resemble an Eastern State.

When, in 1796, Benjamin Logan, the representative of the old woodchoppers and Indian fighters, ran for governor and was beaten, it was evident that Kentucky had pa.s.sed out of the mere pioneer days. It was more than a mere coincidence that in the following year Henry Clay should have taken up his residence in Lexington. It showed that the State was already attracting to live within her borders men like those who were fitted for social and political leadership in Virginia.

The Kentucky Gentry.

The Danville Political Club.

Though the typical inhabitant of Kentucky was still the small frontier farmer, the cla.s.s of well-to-do gentry had already attained good proportions. Elsewhere throughout the West, in Tennessee, and even here and there in Ohio and the Territories of Indiana and Mississippi, there were to be found occasional houses that were well built and well finished, and surrounded by pleasant grounds, fairly well kept; houses to which the owners had brought their stores of silver and linen and heavy, old-fashioned furniture from their homes in the Eastern States.

Blount, for instance, had a handsome house in Knoxville, well fitted, as beseemed that of a man one of whose brothers still lived at Blount Hall, in the coast region of North Carolina, the ancestral seat of his forefathers for generations. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, Feb. 9, 1794.] But by far the greatest number of these fine houses, and the largest cla.s.s of gentry to dwell in them, were in Kentucky. Not only were Lexington and Louisville important towns, but Danville, the first capital of Kentucky, also possessed importance, and, indeed, had been the first of the Western towns to develop an active and distinctive social and political life. It was in Danville that, in the years immediately preceding Kentucky's admission as a State, the Political Club met. The membership of this club included many of the leaders Of Kentucky's intellectual life, and the record of its debates shows the keenness with which they watched the course of social and political development not only in Kentucky but in the United States.

They were men of good intelligence and trained minds, and their meetings and debates undoubtedly had a stimulating effect upon Kentucky life, though they were tainted, as were a very large number of the leading men of the same stamp elsewhere throughout the country, with the doctrinaire political notions common among those who followed the French political theorists of the day. [Footnote: "The Political Club," by Thomas Speed, Filson Club Publications.]

The Large Landowners.

Open-air Life.

Of the gentry many were lawyers, and the law led naturally to political life; but even among the gentry the typical man was still emphatically the big landowner. The leaders of Kentucky were men who owned large estates, on which they lived in their great roomy houses. Even when they practised law they also supervised their estates; and if they were not lawyers, in addition to tilling the land they were always ready to try their hand at some kind of manufacture. They were willing to turn their attention to any new business in which there was a chance to make money, whether it was to put up a mill, to build a forge, to undertake a contract for the delivery of wheat to some big flour merchant, or to build a flotilla of flatboats, and take the produce of a given neighborhood down to New Orleans for shipment to the West Indies.

[Footnote: Clay MSS., Seitz & Lowan to Garret Darling, Lexington, January 23, 1797; agreement of George Nicholas, October 10, 1796, etc.

This was an agreement on the part of Nicholas to furnish Seitz & Lowan with all the flour manufactured at his mill during the season of 1797 for exportation, the flour to be delivered by him in Kentucky. He was to receive $5.50 a barrel up to the receipt of $1500; after that it was to depend upon the price of wheat. Six bushels of wheat were reckoned to a barrel of flour, and the price of a bushel was put at four shillings; in reality it ranged from three to six.] They were also always engaged in efforts to improve the breed of their horses and cattle, and to introduce new kinds of agriculture, notably the culture of the vine.

[Footnote: _Do._, "Minutes of meeting of the Directors of the Vineyard Society," June 27, 1800.] They speedily settled themselves definitely in the new country, and began to make ready for their children to inherit their homes after them; though they retained enough of the restless spirit which had made them cross the Alleghanies to be always on the lookout for any fresh region of exceptional advantages, such as many of them considered the lands along the lower Mississippi. They led a life which appealed to them strongly, for it was pa.s.sed much in the open air, in a beautiful region and lovely climate, with horses and hounds, and the management of their estates and their interest in politics to occupy their time; while their neighbors were men of cultivation, at least by their own standards, so that they had the society for which they most cared. [Footnote: _Do._, James Brown to Thomas Hart, Lexington, April 3, 1804.] In spite of their willingness to embark in commercial ventures and to build mills, rope-walks, and similar manufactures,--for which they had the greatest difficulty in procuring skilled laborers, whether foreign or native, from the Northeastern States [Footnote: _Do._, J.

Brown to Thomas Hart, Philadelphia, February 11, 1797. This letter was brought out to Hart by a workman, David Dodge, whom Brown had at last succeeded in engaging. Dodge had been working in New York at a rope-walk, where he received $500 a year without board. From Hart he bargained to receive $350 with board. It proved impossible to engage other journeymen workers, Brown expressing his belief that any whom he chose would desert a week after they got to Kentucky, and Dodge saying that he would rather take raw hands and train them to the business than take out such hands as offered to go.]--and in spite of their liking for the law, they retained the deep-settled belief that the cultivation of the earth was the best of all possible pursuits for men of every station, high or low. [Footnote _Do._, William Nelson to Col. George Nicholas, Caroline, Va., December 29, 1794.]

Virginia and Kentucky.

In many ways the life of the Kentuckians was most like that of the Virginia gentry, though it had peculiar features of its own. Judged by Puritan standards, it seemed free enough; and it is rather curious to find Virginia fathers anxious to send their sons out to Kentucky so that they could get away from what they termed "the constant round of dissipation, the scenes of idleness, which boys are perpetually engaged in" in Virginia. One Virginia gentleman of note, in writing to a prominent Kentuckian to whom he wished to send his son, dwelt upon his desire to get him away from a place where boys of his age spent most of the time galloping wherever they wished, mounted on blooded horses.

Kentucky hardly seemed a place to which a parent would send a son if he wished him to avoid the temptations of horse flesh; but this particular Virginian at least tried to provide against this, as he informed his correspondent that he should send his son out to Kentucky mounted on an "indifferent Nag," which was to be used only as a means of locomotion for the journey, and was then immediately to be sold. [Footnote: _Do_., William Nelson to Nicholas, November 9, 1792.]

Education.

The gentry strove hard to secure a good education for their children, and in Kentucky, as in Tennessee, made every effort to bring about the building of academies where their boys and girls could be well taught.

If this was not possible, they strove to find some teacher capable of taking a cla.s.s to which he could teach Latin and mathematics; a teacher who should also "prepare his pupils for becoming useful members of society and patriotic citizens." [Footnote: Shelby MSS., letter of Toulmin, January 7, 1794; Blount MSS., January 6, 1792, etc.] Where possible the leading families sent their sons to some Eastern college, Princeton being naturally the favorite inst.i.tution of learning with people who dwelt in communities where the Presbyterians took the lead in social standing and cultivation. [Footnote: Clay MSS., _pa.s.sim;_ letter to Thomas Hart, October 19, 1794; October 13, 1797, etc. In the last letter, by the way, written by one John Umstead, occurs the following sentence: "I have lately heard a piece of news, if true, must be a valuable acquisition to the Western World, viz. a boat of a considerable burden making four miles and a half an hour against the strongest current in the Mississippi river, and worked by horses."]

Currency.

Prices of Goods.

All through the West there was much difficulty in getting money. In Tennessee particularly money was so scarce that the only way to get cash in hand was by selling provisions to the few Federal garrisons.

[Footnote: _Do_., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, March 13, 1799.] Credits were long, and payment made largely in kind; and the price at which an article could be sold under such conditions was twice as large as that which it would command for cash down. In the accounts kept by the landowners with the merchants who sold them goods, and the artizans who worked for them, there usually appear credit accounts in which the amounts due on account of produce of various kinds are deducted from the debt, leaving a balance to be settled by cash and by orders. Owing to the fluctuating currency, and to the wide difference in charges when immediate cash payments were received as compared with charges when the payments were made on credit and in kind, it is difficult to know exactly what the prices represent. In Kentucky currency mutton and beef were fourpence a pound, in the summer of 1796, while four beef tongues cost three shillings, and a quarter of lamb three and a sixpence. In 1798, on the same account, beef was down to threepence a pound.

[Footnote: _Do._, Account of James Morrison and Melchia Myer, October 12, 17098.] Linen cost two and fourpence, or three shillings a yard; flannel, four to six shillings; calico and chintz about the same; baize, three shillings and ninepence. A dozen knives and forks were eighteen shillings, and ten pocket handkerchiefs two pounds. Worsted shoes were eight shillings a pair, and b.u.t.tons were a shilling a dozen. A pair of gloves were three and ninepence; a pair of kid slippers, thirteen and sixpence; ribbons were one and sixpence. [Footnote: _Do._, Account of Mrs. Marion Nicholas with Tillford, 1802. On this bill appears also a charge for Hyson tea, for straw bonnets, at eighteen shillings; for black silk gloves, and for one "Aesop's Fables," at a cost of three shillings and ninepence.] The blacksmith charged six shillings and ninepence for a new pair of shoes, and a shilling and sixpence for taking off an old pair; and he did all the iron work for the farm and the house alike, from repairing bridle bits and sharpening coulters to mounting "wafil irons" [Footnote: _Do._, Account of Morrison and Hickey, 1798.]--for the housewives excelled in preparing delicious waffles and hot cakes.

Holidays of the Gentry.

The gentry were fond of taking holidays, going to some mountain resort, where they met friends from other parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, and from Virginia and elsewhere. They carried their negro servants with them, and at a good tavern the board would be three shillings a day for the master and a little over a shilling for the man. They lived in comfort and they enjoyed themselves; but they did not have much ready money. From the sales of their crops and stock and from their mercantile ventures they got enough to pay the blacksmith and carpenter, who did odd jobs for them, and the Eastern merchants from whom they got gloves, bonnets, hats, and shoes, and the cloth which was made into dresses by the womankind on their plantations. But most of their wants were supplied on their own places. Their abundant tables were furnished mainly with, what their own farms yielded. When they travelled they went in their own carriages. The rich men, whose wants were comparatively many, usually had on their estates white hired men or black slaves whose labor could gratify them; while the ordinary farmer, of the cla.s.s that formed the great majority of the population, was capable of supplying almost all his needs himself, or with the a.s.sistance of his family.

Contrast of Old and new Methods of Settlements.

The immense preponderance of the agricultural, land-holding, and land-tilling element, and the comparative utter insignificance of town development was highly characteristic of the Western settlement of this time, and offers a very marked contrast to what goes on to-day, in the settlement of new countries. At the end of the eighteenth century the population of the Western country was about as great as the population of the State of Washington at the end of the nineteenth, and Washington is distinctly a pastoral and agricultural State, a State of men who chop trees, herd cattle, and till the soil, as well as trade; but in Washington great cities, like Tacoma, Seattle, and Spokane, have sprung up with a rapidity which was utterly unknown in the West a century ago.

Nowadays when new States are formed the urban population in them tends to grow as rapidly as in the old. A hundred years ago there was practically no urban population at all in a new country. Colorado even during its first decade of statehood had a third of its population in its capital city. Kentucky during its first decade did not have much more than one per cent of its population in its capital city. Kentucky grew as rapidly as Colorado grew, a hundred years later; but Denver grew thirty or forty times as fast as Lexington had ever grown.

Restlessness of the Frontiersman. Boone's Wanderings.

In the strongly marked frontier character no traits were more p.r.o.nounced than the dislike of crowding and the tendency to roam to and fro, hither and thither, always with a westward trend. Boone, the typical frontiersman, embodied in his own person the spirit of loneliness and restlessness which marked the first venturers into the wilderness. He had wandered in his youth from Pennsylvania to Carolina, and, in the prime of his strength, from North Carolina to Kentucky. When Kentucky became well settled in the closing years of the century, he crossed into Missouri, that he might once more take up his life where he could see the game come out of the woods at nightfall, and could wander among trees untouched by the axe of the pioneer. An English traveller of note who happened to encounter him about this time has left an interesting account of the meeting. It was on the Ohio, and Boone was in a canoe, alone with his dog and gun, setting forth on a solitary trip into the wilderness to trap beaver. He would not even join himself to the other travellers for a night, preferring to plunge at once into the wild, lonely life he so loved. His strong character and keen mind struck the Englishman, who yet saw that the old hunter belonged to the cla.s.s of pioneers who could never themselves civilize the land, because they ever fled from the face of the very civilization for which they had made ready the land. In Boone's soul the fierce impatience of all restraint burned like a fire. He told the Englishman that he no longer cared for Kentucky, because its people had grown too easy of life; and that he wished to move to some place where men still lived untrammelled and unshackled, and enjoyed uncontrolled the free blessings of nature.

[Footnote: Francis Bailey's "Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797," p. 234.] The isolation of his life and the frequency with which he changed his abode brought out the frontiersman's wonderful capacity to shift for himself, but it hindered the development of his power of acting in combination with others of his kind. The first comers to the new country were so restless and so intolerant of the presence of their kind, that as neighbors came in they moved ever westward. They could not act with their fellows.

The Permanent Settlers.

Efforts to Provide Schooling.

Of course in the men who succeeded the first pioneers, and who were the first permanent settlers, the restlessness and the desire for a lonely life were much less developed. These men wandered only until they found a good piece of land, and took up claims on this land, not because the country was lonely, but because it was fertile. They hailed with joy the advent of new settlers and the upbuilding of a little market town in the neighborhood. They joined together eagerly in the effort to obtain schools for their children. As yet there were no public schools supported by government in any part of the West, but all the settlers of any pretension to respectability were anxious to give their children a decent education. Even the poorer people, who were still engaged in the hardest and roughest struggle for a livelihood, showed appreciation of the need of schooling for their children; and wherever the clearings of the settlers were within reasonable distance of one another a log schoolhouse was sure to spring up. The school-teacher boarded around among the different families, and was quite as apt to be paid in produce as in cash. Sometimes he was a teacher by profession; more often he took up teaching simply as an interlude to some of his other occupations.

Schoolbooks were more common than any others in the scanty libraries of the pioneers.

The County-System in the West.

The settlers who became firmly established in the land gave definite shape to its political career. The county was throughout the West the unit of division, though in the North it became somewhat mixed with the township system. It is a pity that the township could not have been the unit, as it would have rendered the social and political development in many respects easier, by giving to each little community responsibility for, and power in, matters concerning its own welfare; but the backwoodsmen lived so scattered out, and the thinly-settled regions covered so large an extent of territory, that the county was at first in some ways more suited to their needs. Moreover, it was the unit of organization in Virginia, to which State more than to any other the pioneers owed their social and governmental system. The people were ordinarily brought but little in contact with the Government. They were exceedingly jealous of their individual liberty, and wished to be interfered with as little as possible. Nevertheless, they were fond of litigation. One observer remarks that horses and lawsuits were their great subjects of conversation. [Footnote: Michaux, p. 240.]

The Lawyers and Clergymen Forced to Much Travel.

The vast extent of the territory and the scantiness of the population forced the men of law, like the religious leaders, to travel about rather than stay permanently fixed in any one place. In a few towns there were lawyers and clergymen who had permanent homes; but as a rule both rode circuits. The judges and the lawyers travelled together on the circuits, to hold court. At the Shire-town all might sleep in one room, or at least under one roof; and it was far from an unusual thing to see both the grand and petty juries sitting under trees in the open. [Footnote: At.w.a.ter, p. 177.]

Power to Combine among the Frontiersmen.

The fact that the Government did so little for the individual and left so much to be done by him rendered it necessary for the individuals voluntarily to combine. Huskings and house-raisings were times when all joined freely to work for the man whose corn men was to be shucked or whose log cabin was to be built, and turned their labor into a frolic and merrymaking, where the men drank much whiskey and the young people danced vigorously to the sound of the fiddle. Such merry-makings were attended from far and near, offering a most welcome break to the dreariness of life on the lonely clearings in the midst of the forest.

Ordinarily the frontiersman at his home only drank milk or water; but at the taverns and social gatherings there was much drunkenness, for the men craved whiskey, drinking the fiery liquor in huge draughts. Often the orgies ended with brutal brawls. To outsiders the craving of the backwoodsman for whiskey was one of his least attractive traits.

[Footnote: Perrin Du Lac, p. 131; Michaux, 95, etc.] It must always be remembered, however, that even the most friendly outsider is apt to apply to others his own standards in matters of judgment. The average traveller overstated the drunkenness of the backwoodsman, exactly as he overstated his misery.

Roughness and Poverty of the Life.

Its Attractiveness.

The frontiersman was very poor. He worked hard and lived roughly, and he and his family had little beyond coa.r.s.e food, coa.r.s.e clothing, and a rude shelter. In the severe winters they suffered both from cold and hunger. In the summers there was sickness everywhere, fevers of various kinds scourging all the new settlements. The difficulty of communication was so great that it took three months for the emigrants to travel from Connecticut to the Western Reserve near Cleveland, and a journey from a clearing, over the forest roads, to a little town not fifty miles off was an affair of moment to be undertaken but once a year. [Footnote: "Historical Collections of Ohio," p. 120; Perrin Du Lac, p. 143.] Yet to the frontiersmen themselves the life was far from unattractive. It gratified their intense love of independence; the lack of refinement did not grate on their rough, bold natures; and they prized the entire equality of a life where there were no social distinctions, and few social restraints. Game was still a staple, being sought after for the flesh and the hide, and of course all the men and boys were enthralled by the delights of the chase. The life was as free as it was rude, and it possessed great fascinations, not only for the wilder spirits, but even for many men who, when they had the chance, showed that they possessed ability to acquire cultivation.

One old pioneer has left a pleasant account of the beginning of an ordinary day's work in a log cabin [Footnote: Drake's "Pioneer Life in Kentucky." This gives an excellent description of life in a family of pioneers, representing what might be called the average frontiersman of the best type. Drake's father and mother were poor and illiterate, but hardworking, honest, G.o.d-fearing folk, with an earnest desire to do their duty by their neighbors and to see their children rise in the world.]: