h hunting and trapping the functions of an
Indian trader, but ordinarily the American, as distinguished from the
French or Spanish frontiersman, treated the Indian trade as something
purely secondary to his more regular pursuits. In Kentucky and Tennessee
the first comers from the East were not traders at all, and were hunters
rather than trappers. Boone was a type of this class, and Boone's
descendants went westward generation by generation until they reached
the Pacific.

Close behind the mere hunter came the rude hunter-settler. He pastured
his stock on the wild range, and lived largely by his skill with the
rifle. He worked with simple tools and he did his work roughly. His
squalid cabin was destitute of the commonest comforts; the blackened
stumps and dead, girdled trees stood thick in his small and badly tilled
field. He was adventurous, restless, shiftless, and he felt ill at ease
and cramped by the presence of more industrious neighbors. As they
pressed in round about him he would sell his claim, gather his cattle
and his scanty store of tools and household goods, and again wander
forth to seek uncleared land. The Lincolns, the forbears of the great
President, were a typical family of this class.

Most of the frontiersmen of these two types moved fitfully westward with
the frontier itself, or near it, but in each place where they halted, or
where the advance of the frontier was for the moment stayed, some of
their people remained to grow up and mix with the rest of the settlers.

The Permanent Settlers.

The third class consisted of the men who were thrifty, as well as
adventurous, the men who were even more industrious than restless. These
were they who entered in to hold the land, and who handed it on as an
inheritance to their children and their children's children. Often, of
course, these settlers of a higher grade found that for some reason they
did not prosper, or heard of better chances still farther in the
wilderness, and so moved onwards, like their less thrifty and more
uneasy brethren, the men who half-cleared their lands and half-built
their cabins. But, as a rule, these better-class settlers were not mere
life-long pioneers. They wished to find good land on which to build, and
plant, and raise their big families of healthy children, and when they
found such land they wished to make thereon their permanent homes. They
did not share the impulse which kept their squalid, roving fellows of
the b