Volume IV Part 13 (2/2)
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 s.h.i.+llings, 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 s.h.i.+llings a yard; flannel, four to six s.h.i.+llings; calico and chintz about the same; baize, three s.h.i.+llings and ninepence. A dozen knives and forks were eighteen s.h.i.+llings, and ten pocket handkerchiefs two pounds. Worsted shoes were eight s.h.i.+llings a pair, and b.u.t.tons were a s.h.i.+lling 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 s.h.i.+llings; for black silk gloves, and for one ”Aesop's Fables,” at a cost of three s.h.i.+llings and ninepence.] The blacksmith charged six s.h.i.+llings and ninepence for a new pair of shoes, and a s.h.i.+lling 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 s.h.i.+llings a day for the master and a little over a s.h.i.+lling 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 Was.h.i.+ngton at the end of the nineteenth, and Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 towns.h.i.+p system. It is a pity that the towns.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+re-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.]:
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