There was still a West when Kaskaskia was queen. Major Long's
expedition up the Platte brought back the "important fact" that the
"whole division of North America drained by the Missouri and the
Platte, and their tributaries between the meridians of the mouth of the
Platte and the Rockies, is almost entirely unfit for cultivation, and
therefore uninhabitable for an agricultural people." There are many
thousands of farmers to-day who cannot quite agree with Major Long's
dictum, but in that day the dictum was accepted carelessly or eagerly.
No one west of the Mississippi yet cared for farms. There were swifter
ways to wealth than farming, and the wild men of the West of that
day had only scorn and distrust for the whole theory of agriculture.
"As soon as you thrust the plow into the earth," said one adventurer
who had left the East for the wilder lands of the West, "it teems
with worms and useless weeds. Agriculture increases population to an
unnatural extent." For such men there was still a vast world without
weeds, where the soil was virgin, where one might be uncrowded by the
touch of home-building man. Let the farmers have Ohio and Kentucky,
there was still a West.