The Winning of the West, Volume Three | Page 3

work, were over; farms were being laid out
and towns were growing up among the felled forests from which the
game and the Indians had alike been driven. There was still plenty of
room for the rude cabin and stump-dotted clearing of the ordinary
frontier settler, the wood-chopper and game hunter. Folk of the
common backwoods type were as yet more numerous than any others
among the settlers. In addition there were planters from among the
gentry of the sea-coast; there were men of means who had bought great
tracts of wild land; there were traders with more energy than capital;
there were young lawyers; there were gentlemen with a taste for an
unfettered life of great opportunity; in short there were adventurers of
every kind.
All men who deemed that they could swim in troubled waters were
drawn towards the new country. The more turbulent and ambitious
spirits saw roads to distinction in frontier warfare, politics, and
diplomacy. Merchants dreamed of many fortunate ventures, in
connection with the river trade or the overland commerce by packtrain.
Lawyers not only expected to make their living by their proper calling,
but also to rise to the first places in the commonwealths, for in these

new communities, as in the older States, the law was then the most
honored of the professions, and that which most surely led to high
social and political standing. But the one great attraction for all classes
was the chance of procuring large quantities of fertile land at low
prices.
Value of the Land.
To the average settler the land was the prime source of livelihood. A
man of hardihood, thrift, perseverance, and bodily strength could surely
make a comfortable living for himself and his family, if only he could
settle on a good tract of rich soil; and this he could do if he went to the
new country. As a matter of course, therefore, vigorous young
frontiersmen swarmed into the region so recently won.
These men merely wanted so much land as they could till. Others,
however, looked at it from a very different standpoint. The land was the
real treasury-chest of the country. It was the one commodity which
appealed to the ambitious and adventurous side of the industrial
character at that time and in that place. It was the one commodity the
management of which opened chances of procuring vast wealth, and
especially vast speculative wealth. To the American of the end of the
eighteenth century the roads leading to great riches were as few as
those leading to a competency were many. He could not prospect for
mines of gold and of silver, of iron, copper, and coal; he could not
discover and work wells of petroleum and natural gas; he could not
build up, sell, and speculate in railroad systems and steamship
companies; he could not gamble in the stock market; he could not build
huge manufactories of steel, of cottons, of woollens; he could not be a
banker or a merchant on a scale which is dwarfed when called princely;
he could not sit still and see an already great income double and
quadruple because of the mere growth in the value of real estate in
some teeming city. The chances offered him by the fur trade were very
uncertain. If he lived in a sea-coast town, he might do something with
the clipper ships that ran to Europe and China. If he lived elsewhere,
his one chance of acquiring great wealth, and his best chance to acquire
even moderate wealth without long and plodding labor, was to
speculate in wild land.
Land Speculators
Accordingly the audacious and enterprising business men who would

nowadays go into speculation in stocks, were then forced into
speculation in land. Sometimes as individuals, sometimes as large
companies, they sought to procure wild lands on the Wabash, the Ohio,
the Cumberland, the Yazoo. In addition to the ordinary methods of
settlement by, or purchase from private persons, they endeavored to
procure grants on favorable terms from the national and State
legislatures, or even from the Spanish government. They often made a
regular practice of buying the land rights which had accrued in lieu of
arrears of pay to different bodies of Continental troops. They even at
times purchased a vague and clouded title from some Indian tribe. As
with most other speculative business investments, the great land
companies rarely realized for the originators and investors anything like
what was expected; and the majority were absolute failures in every
sense. Nevertheless, a number of men made money out of them, often
on quite a large scale; and in many instances, where the people who
planned and carried out the scheme made nothing for themselves, they
yet left their mark in the shape of settlers who had come in