This was the ancestral fiber of the West. What time had folk like these
for powder-puff or ruffle, for fan or jeweled snuff-box? Their garb
was made from the skin of the deer, the fox, the wolf. Their shoes
were of buffalo-hide, their beds were made of the robes of the bear
and buffalo. They laid the land under tribute. Yet, so far from mere
savagery was the spirit that animated these men that in ten years after
they had first cut away the forest they were founding a college and
establishing a court of law! Read this forgotten history, one chapter,
and a little one, in the history of the West, and then turn, if you
like, to the chapters of fiction in an older world. You have your
choice.
[Illustration: Map of the census of 1790.]
In those early days there were individual opportunities so numerous
in the West that no opportunity had value. A tract of six hundred and
forty acres, which is now within the limits of the city of Nashville,
sold for three axes and two cow-bells. Be sure it was not politics that
made corn worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel, and sold a
mile of ground for the tinkle of a bell. The conditions were born of a
scanty and insufficient transportation.
[Illustration: Map of the census of 1820.]