The Winning of the West, Volume Three | Page 4

to purchase
their lands, or even in the shape of a town built under their auspices.
Land speculation was by no means confined to those who went into it
on a large scale. The settler without money might content himself with
staking out an ordinary-sized farm; but the new-comer of any means
was sure not only to try to get a large estate for his own use, but also to
procure land beyond any immediate need, so that he might hold on to it
until it rose in value. He was apt to hold commissions to purchase land
for his friends who remained east of the mountains. The land was
turned to use by private individuals and by corporations; it was held for
speculative purposes; it was used for the liquidation of debts of every
kind. The official surveyors, when created, did most of their work by
deputy; Boone was deputy surveyor of Fayette County, in Kentucky.
[Footnote: Draper MSS.; Boone MSS. Entry of August court for 1783.]
Some men surveyed and staked out their own claims; the others
employed professional surveyors, or else hired old hunters like Boone
and Kenton, whose knowledge of woodcraft and acquaintance with the
most fertile grounds enabled them not only to survey the land, but to
choose the portions best fit for settlement. The lack of proper
government surveys, and the looseness with which the records were
kept in the land office, put a premium on fraud and encouraged

carelessness. People could make and record entries in secret, and have
the land surveyed in secret, if they feared a dispute over a title; no one
save the particular deputy surveyor employed needed to know.
[Footnote: Draper MSS. in Wisconsin State Hist. Ass. Clark papers.
Walter Darrell to Col. William Fleming, St. Asaphs, April 14, 1783.
These valuable Draper MSS, have been opened to me by Mr. Reuben
Gold Thwaites, the State Librarian; I take this opportunity of thanking
him for his generous courtesy, to which I am so greatly indebted.] The
litigation over these confused titles dragged on with interminable
tediousness. Titles were often several deep on one "location," as it was
called; and whoever purchased land too often purchased also an
expensive and uncertain lawsuit.
The two chief topics of thought and conversation, the two subjects
which beyond all others engrossed and absorbed the minds of the
settlers, were the land and the Indians. We have already seen how on
one occasion Clark could raise no men for an expedition against the
Indians until he closed the land offices round which the settlers were
thronging. Every hunter kept a sharp lookout for some fertile bottom on
which to build a cabin. The volunteers who rode against the Indian
towns also spied out the land and chose the best spots whereon to build
their blockhouses and palisaded villages as soon as a truce might be
made, or the foe driven for the moment farther from the border.
Sometimes settlers squatted on land already held but not occupied
under a good title; sometimes a man who claimed the land under a
defective title, or under pretence of original occupation, attempted to
oust or to blackmail him who had cleared and tilled the soil in good
faith; and these were both fruitful causes not only of lawsuits but of
bloody affrays. Among themselves, the settlers' talk ran ever on land
titles and land litigation, and schemes for securing vast tracts of rich
and well watered country. These were the subjects with which they
filled their letters to one another and to their friends at home, and the
subjects upon which these same friends chiefly dwelt when they sent
letters in return. [Footnote: Clay MSS. and Draper MSS., _passim:
e.g._, in former, J. Mercer to George Nicholas, Nov. 28, 1789; J. Ware
to George Nicholas, Nov. 29, 1789; letter to Mrs. Byrd, Jan. 16, 1786,
etc., etc., etc.] Often well-to-do men visited the new country by
themselves first, chose good sites for their farms and plantations,

surveyed and purchased them, and then returned to their old homes,
whence they sent out their field hands to break the soil and put up
buildings before bringing out their families.
Lines Followed in the Western Movement.
The westward movement of settlers took place along several different
lines. The dwellers in what is now eastern Tennessee were in close
touch with the old settled country; their Western farms and little towns
formed part of the chain of forest clearings which stretched unbroken
from the border of Virginia down the valleys of the Watauga and the
Holston. Though they were sundered by mountain ranges from the
peopled regions in the State to which they belonged, North Carolina,
yet these ranges were pierced by many trails, and were no longer
haunted by Indians. There were