Creative Books

The movement was, indeed, but the continuation of the
advance of the frontier which had begun in the earliest days of
American colonization. The existence of a great body of land,
offered at so low a price as to be practically free, inevitably drew
population towards the west. When wild lands sold for two dollars an
acre, and, indeed, could be occupied by squatters almost without
molestation, it was certain that settlers would seek them instead of
paying twenty to fifty dollars an acre for farms that lay not much
farther to the east--particularly when the western lands were more
fertile. The introduction of the steamboat on the western waters in
1811, moreover, soon revolutionized transportation conditions in the
West. [Footnote: Flint, Letters, 260; Monette, in Miss. Hist. Soc.,
Publications, VII., 503; Hall, Statistics of the West, 236, 247;
Lloyd, Steamboat Disasters (1853), 32, 40-45; Preble, Steam
Navigation, 64; McMaster, United States, IV., 402; Chittenden, Early
Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri, chap.


Pages:
103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127