and there were out-posts
here and there beyond this range, as at Fort Dearborn, on the site of
what is now Chicago; but the only fairly well-settled regions were in
Kentucky and Tennessee. These two States were the oldest, and long
remained the most populous and influential, communities in the West.
They shared qualities both of the Northerners and of the Southerners,
and they gave the tone to the thought and the life in the settlements
north of them no less than the settlements south of them. This fact of
itself tended to make the West homogeneous and to keep it a unit with a
peculiar character of its own, neither Northern nor Southern in
political and social tendency. It was the middle West which was first
settled, and the middle West stamped its peculiar characteristics on all
the growing communities beyond the Alleghanies. Inasmuch as west of the
mountains the Northern communities were less distinctively Northern and
the Southern communities less distinctively Southern than was the case
with the Eastern States on the seaboard, it followed naturally that,
considered with reference to other sections of the Union, the West
formed a unit, possessing marked characteristics of its own. A
distinctive type of character was developed west of the Alleghanies, and
for the first generation the typical representatives of this Western
type were to be found in Kentucky and Tennessee.

The Northwest.

The settlement of the Northwest had been begun under influences which in
the end were to separate it radically from the Southwest. It was settled
under Governmental supervision, and because of and in accordance with
Governmental action; and it was destined ultimately to receive the great
mass of its immigrants from the Northeast; but as yet these two
influences had not become strong enough to sunder the frontiersmen north
of the Ohio by any sharp line from those south of the Ohio. The settlers
on the Western waters were substantially the same in character North and
South.

The Westerners Formed One People.

In sum, the western frontier folk, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, possessed in common marked and peculiar characteristics, which
the people of the rest of the country shared to a much less extent. They
were backwoods farmers, each man preferring to live alone on his own
freehold, which he himself tilled and from which he himself had cleared
the timber. The towns were few and small; the people were poor, and