he popular notion that it was the
paradise of the world. It was written by Dr. Hand--a talented young
physician of Berlin--who had made a visit to the West about these days.
It consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and
incidents attending this wholesale migration. The roads over the
Alleghanies, between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude, steep,
and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were
consequently strewn with the carcasses of wagons, carts, horses, oxen,
which had made shipwreck in their perilous descents."

But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life the spirit of that
time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and a light-hearted
one.

"Westward the course of empire takes its way,"

runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on America. The New
Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve went there to better
themselves; and their children found themselves the owners of broad
acres of virgin soil in place of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire
and Litchfield. There was an attraction, too, about the wild, free
life of the frontiersman, with all its perils and discomforts. The
life of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky--that "dark and bloody
ground"--is a genuine romance. Hardly less picturesque was the old
river life of the Ohio boatmen, before the coming of steam banished
their queer craft from the water. Between 1810 and 1840 the center of
population in the United States had moved from the Potomac to the
neighborhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the population itself
had increased from seven to seventeen millions. The gain was made
partly in the East and South, but the general drift was westward.
During the years now under review the following new States were
admitted, in the order named: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama,
Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan. Kentucky and Tennessee had been
made States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and
Louisiana--acquired by purchase from France--in 1812.

The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of wilderness
behind them. They took up first the rich bottomlands along the river
courses, the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the valleys of the
Mississippi and Missouri and the shores of the great lakes. But there
still remained backwoods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the
cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than