horses and cattle, with typical ranch life and customs. Similar conditions existed in other parts of the coast area.1 Travelers of the eighteenth century found the "cow pens" among the canebrakes and pea-vine pastures of the South, and the "cow drivers' took their droves to Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York.2 Travelers at the close of the War of 1812 met droves of more than a thousand cattle and swine from the interior of Ohio going to Pennsylvania to fatten for the Philadelphia market. The ranges of the Great plains, with ranch and cowboy and nomadic life, are things of yesterday and of to-day. The experience of the Carolina cow pens guided the ranchers of Texas. One element favoring the rapid extension of the rancher's frontier is the fact that in a remote country lacking transportation facilities the product must be in small bulk, or must be able to transport itself, and the cattle raiser could easily drive his product to market. The effect of these great ranches on the subsequent agrarian history of the localities in which they existed should be studied.

THE FARMER'S FRONTIER

The maps of the census reports show an uneven advance of the farmer's frontier, with tongues of settlement pushed forward and with indentations of wilderness. In part this is due to Indian resistance, in part to the location of river valleys and passes, in part to the unequal force of the centers of frontier attraction. Among the important centers of attraction may be mentioned the following: fertile and favorably situated soils, salt springs, mines, and army posts.

1 Cf. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, I, 473-477, 540; Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, I, 100, 128; Doyle, Puritan Colonies, II, 19–23, 46–47.

2 Lodge, English Colonies, p. 152 and citations; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina, I, 151.

3 Flint, Recollections, p. 9.

*See Wister, "Evolution of the Cow Puncher," in Harper's Magazine, September, 1895; Hough, Story of the Cow Boy; Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.

ARMY POSTS

The frontier army post, serving to protect the settlers from the Indians, has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian country, and has been a nucleus for settlement. In this connection mention should also be made of the government military and exploring expeditions in determining the lines of settlement. But all the more important expeditions were greatly indebted to the earliest pathmakers, the Indian guides, the traders and trappers, and the French voyageurs, who were inevitable parts of governmental expeditions from the days of Lewis and Clark. Each expedition was an epitome of the previous factors in western advance.

SALT SPRINGS

In an interesting monograph, Victor Hehn 2 has traced the effect of salt upon early European development, and has pointed out how it affected the lines of settlement and the form of administration. A similar study might be made for the salt springs of the United States. The early settlers were tied to the coast by the need of salt, without which they could not preserve their meats or live in comfort. Writing in 1752, Bishop Spangenburg says of a colony for which he was seeking lands in North Carolina: "They will require salt & other necessaries which they can neither manufacture nor raise. Either they must go to Charleston, which is 300 miles distant. . . . Or else they must go to Boling's Point in Va on a branch of the James & is also 300 miles from here... Or else they must go down the Roanoke I know not how many miles where salt is brought up from the Cape Fear." 3 This may serve as a typical illustration. An annual pilgrimage to the coast for salt thus became essential, Taking flocks or furs and ginseng root, the early settlers sent their pack trains after seeding time

1 Cf. Hening's Statutes, II, 433, 448; III, 204; Benton's View, I,,102; II, 70, 167; Monette, Mississippi Valley, I, 344.

2 Hehn, Das Salz [Berlin, 1873].

8 Colonial Records of North Carolina, V, 3.

each year to the coast.1 This proved to be an important educational influence, since it was almost the only way in which the pioneer learned what was going on in the East. But when discovery was made of the salt springs of the Kanawha, and the Holston, and Kentucky,2 and central New York, the West began to be freed from dependence on the coast. It was in part the effect of finding these salt springs that enabled settlement to cross the mountains.

LAND

The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the West, the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher West, and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. Good soils have been the most continuous attraction to the farmer's frontier. When the science of physiography is more completely related to the study of our history it will be seen how dependent that history was upon the forces that carved out the limestone valleys and deposited alluvial soils along the river courses. The land hunger of the Virginians drew. them down the rivers into Carolina, in early colonial days; the pursuit of good soil took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New York. As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed across them to the West. Daniel Boone, the great back- \ woodsman, who combined the occupations of hunter, trader, cattle raiser, farmer, and surveyor-learning, probably from the traders, of the fertility of the lands on the upper Yadkin, where the traders were wont to rest as they took their way to the Indians

left his Pennsylvania home with his father, and passed down the Great Valley road to that stream. Learning from a trader whose posts were on the Red river in Kentucky of its game and rich pastures, he pioneered the way for the farmers to that region. Thence he passed to the frontier of Missouri, where his settlement was long a landmark on the frontier. Here again he

1 Findley, History of the Insurrection in the Four Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Year 1794, p. 35 [Philadelphia, 1796].

2 See also McGee's paper on potable springs, as affecting settlement, in the Fourteenth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, Part II, p. 9.

helped to open the way for civilization, finding salt licks and trails and land. His son was among the earliest trappers in the passes of the Rocky mountains, and his party is said to have been the first to camp on the present site of Denver. His grandson, Colonel A. J. Boone of Colorado, was a power among the Indians of the Rocky mountains, and was appointed an agent by the gov ernment. Kit Carson's mother was a Boone.1 Thus this family epitomizes the backwoodsman's advance across the continent.

The farmer's advance came in a distinct series of waves. In Peck's "New Guide to the West," published in Boston in 1837, occurs this suggestive passage:

Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the "range," and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn and a "truck patch." The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers, and potatoes. A log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and cornerib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or "deadened," and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the "lord of the manor." With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new country, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies until the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he "breaks for the high timber," "clears out for the New Purchase," or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over.

The next class of emigrants purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, schoolhouses, etc., and exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized life.

Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property,

1 Hale, Daniel Boone (pamphlet).

push farther into the interior, and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still further on. A portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general movement, improve their habits and condition, and rise in the scale of society.

The writer has traveled much amongst the first class, the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connection with second grade; and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the West. Hundreds of men can be found, not over fifty years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners.1

Omitting those of the pioneer farmers who move from the love of adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is easy to understand. Obviously the immigrant was attracted by the cheap lands of the frontier, and even the native farmer felt their influence strongly. Year by year the farmers who lived on soil whose returns were diminished by unrotated crops were offered the virgin soil of the frontier at nominal prices. Their growing families demanded more lands, and these were dear. The competition of the unexhausted, cheap, and easily tilled prairie lands compelled the farmer either to go West and continue the exhaustion of the soil on a new frontier, or to adopt intensive culture. Thus the census of 1890 shows, in the Northwest, many counties in which there is an absolute or a relative decrease of population. These states have been sending farmers to advance the frontier on the plains, and have themselves begun to turn to intensive farming and to manufacture. A decade before this, Ohio had shown the same transition stage. The

1 Cf. Baily, Tour in the Unsettled Parts of North America, pp. 217-219 [London, 1856], where a similar analysis is made for 1796. See also Collot, Journey in North America, p. 109 [Paris, 1826]; Observations on the North American Land Company, pp. xv, 144 [London, 1796]; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina; Murat, Moral and Political Sketch of the United States [London, 1833] (also under the title America and Americans [New York, 1849]); Dwight, Travels, II, 459; IV, 32; Roosevelt, Winning of the West, III, v.