Our Foreigners | Page 9

families of fourteen or fifteen did not elicit surprise. It was the father's
ambition to leave a farm to every son and, if the neighborhood was too
densely settled easily to permit this, there was the West--always the
West.
This was a race of nation builders. No sooner had he made the
Declaration of Independence a reality than the eager pathfinder turned
his face towards the setting sun and, prompted by the instincts of
conquest, he plunged into the wilderness. Within a few years western
New York and Pennsylvania were settled; Kentucky achieved
statehood in 1792 and Tennessee four years later, soon to be followed
by Mississippi in 1817 and Alabama in 1819. The great Northwest
Territory yielded Ohio in 1802, Indiana in 1816, Illinois in 1818, and
Michigan in 1837. Beyond the Mississippi the empire of Louisiana

doubled the original area of the Republic; Louisiana came into
statehood in 1812 and Missouri in 1821. Texas, Oregon, and the fruits
of the Mexican War extended its confines to the Western Sea.
Incredibly swift as was this march of the Stars, the American pioneer
was always in advance.
The pathfinders were virtually all of American stock. The States
admitted to the Union prior to 1840 were not only founded by them;
they were almost wholly settled by them. When the influx of foreigners
began in the thirties, they found all the trails already blazed, the trading
posts established, and the first terrors of the wilderness dispelled. They
found territories already metamorphosed into States, counties organized,
cities established. Schools, churches, and colleges preceded the
immigrants who were settlers and not strictly pioneers. The entire
territory ceded by the Treaty of 1783 was appropriated in large measure
by the American before the advent of the European immigrant.
Washington, with a ring of pride, said in 1796 that the native
population of America was "filling the western part of the State of New
York and the country on the Ohio with their own surplusage." And
James Madison in 1821 wrote that New England, "which has sent out
such a continued swarm to other parts of the Union for a number of
years, has continued at the same time, as the census shows, to increase
in population although it is well known that it has received but
comparatively few emigrants from any quarter." Beyond the
Mississippi, Louisiana, with its Creole population, was feeling the
effect of American migration.
A strange restlessness, of the race rather than of the individual,
possessed the American frontiers-man. He moved from one locality to
another, but always westward, like some new migratory species that
had willingly discarded the instinct for returning. He never took the
back trail. A traveler, writing in 1791 from the Ohio Valley, rather
superficially observed that "the Americans are lazy and bored, often
moving from place to place for the sake of change; in the thirty years
that the [western] Pennsylvania neighborhood has been settled, it has
changed owners two or three times. The sight of money will tempt any

American to sell and off he goes to a new country." Foreign observers
of that time constantly allude to this universal and inexplicable
restiveness. It was obviously not laziness, for pioneering was a man's
task; nor boredom, for the frontier was lonely and neighbors were far
apart It was an ever-present dissatisfaction that drove this perpetual
conqueror onward--a mysterious impulse, the urge of vague and
unfulfilled desires. He went forward with a conquering ambition in his
heart; he believed he was the forerunner of a great National Destiny.
Crude rhymes of the day voice this feeling:
So shall the nation's pioneer go joyful on his way, To wed Penobscot
water to San Francisco Bay. The mighty West shall bless the East, and
sea shall answer sea, And mountain unto mountain call, praise God, for
we are free!
Again a popular chorus of the pathfinder rang:
Then o'er the hills in legions, boys; Fair freedom's star Points to the
sunset regions, boys, Ha, Ha, Ha-ha!
Many a New Englander cleared a farm in western New York, Ohio, or
Indiana, before settling finally in Wisconsin, Iowa, or Minnesota,
whence he sent his sons on to Dakota, Montana, Oregon, and California.
From Tennessee and Kentucky large numbers moved into southern
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and across the river into Missouri, Arkansas,
Louisiana, and Texas. Abraham Lincoln's father was one of these
pioneers and tried his luck in various localities in Kentucky, Indiana,
and Illinois.
Nor had the movement ceased after a century of continental
exploitation. Hamlin Garland in his notable autobiography, A Son of the
Middle Border, brings down to our own day the evidence of this native
American restiveness. His parents came of New England extraction, but
settled in Wisconsin. His father, after his return from the Civil War,
moved to