ts from which the game and
the Indians had alike been driven. There was still plenty of room for
the rude cabin and stump-dotted clearing of the ordinary frontier
settler, the wood-chopper and game hunter. Folk of the common backwoods
type were as yet more numerous than any others among the settlers. In
addition there were planters from among the gentry of the sea-coast;
there were men of means who had bought great tracts of wild land; there
were traders with more energy than capital; there were young lawyers;
there were gentlemen with a taste for an unfettered life of great
opportunity; in short there were adventurers of every kind.

All men who deemed that they could swim in troubled waters were drawn
towards the new country. The more turbulent and ambitious spirits saw
roads to distinction in frontier warfare, politics, and diplomacy.
Merchants dreamed of many fortunate ventures, in connection with the
river trade or the overland commerce by packtrain. Lawyers not only
expected to make their living by their proper calling, but also to rise
to the first places in the commonwealths, for in these new communities,
as in the older States, the law was then the most honored of the
professions, and that which most surely led to high social and political
standing. But the one great attraction for all classes was the chance of
procuring large quantities of fertile land at low prices.

Value of the Land.

To the average settler the land was the prime source of livelihood. A
man of hardihood, thrift, perseverance, and bodily strength could surely
make a comfortable living for himself and his family, if only he could
settle on a good tract of rich soil; and this he could do if he went to
the new country. As a matter of course, therefore, vigorous young
frontiersmen swarmed into the region so recently won.

These men merely wanted so much land as they could till. Others,
however, looked at it from a very different standpoint. The land was the
real treasury-chest of the country. It was the one commodity which
appealed to the ambitious and adventurous side of the industrial
character at that time and in that place. It was the one commodity the
management of which opened chances of procuring vast wealth, and
especially vast speculative wealth. To the American of the end of the
eighteenth century the roads leading to great riches were as few as
those leading to a competency were many. He could not prospect for mines
of gold an