than swarms of that restless
people, which is ever found hovering on the skirts of American society, plunged
into the thickets that fringed the right bank of the Mississippi, with the same
careless hardihood, as had already sustained so many of them in their toilsome
progress from the Atlantic states, to the eastern shores of the Father of
rivers.1
    Time was necessary to blend the numerous and affluent colonists of the lower
province with their new compatriots; but the thinner and more humble population,
above, was almost immediately swallowed in the vortex which attended the tide of
instant emigration. The inroad from the east was a new and sudden out-breaking
of a people, who had endured a momentary restraint, after having been rendered
nearly resistless by success. The toils and hazards of former undertakings were
forgotten, as these endless and unexplored regions, with all their fancied as
well as real advantages, were laid open to their enterprise. The consequences
were such as might easily have been anticipated, from so tempting an offering,
placed as it was before the eyes of a race long trained in adventure and
nurtured in difficulties.
    Thousands of the elders, of what were then called the New-States,2 broke up
from the enjoyment of their hard-earned indulgencies, and were to be seen
leading long files of descendants, born and reared in the forests of Ohio and
Kentucky, deeper into the land, in quest of that which might be termed, without
the aid of poetry, their natural and more congenial atmosphere. The
distinguished and resolute forester, who first penetrated the wilds of the
latter state, was of the number. This adventurous and venerable patriarch was
now seen making his last remove; placing the endless river between him and the
multitude his own success had drawn around him, and seeking for the renewal of
enjoyments which were rendered worthless in his eyes, when trammelled by the
forms of human institutions.3
    In the pursuit of adventures, such as these, men are ordinarily governed by
their habits or deluded by their wishes. A few, led by the phantoms of hope, and
ambitious of sudden affluence, sought the mines of the virgin territory; but by
far the greater portion of the emigrants were satisfied to establish themselves
along the margins of the larger water-courses, content with the rich returns
that the generous alluvial bottoms of the rivers never fail to bestow on the
most desultory industry. In this manner were communities formed with magical
rapidity; and most of those who witnessed the purchase of the empty empire, have
lived to see already a populous and sovereign state, parcelled from its
inhabitants, and