The call of the west was carried in promoters’ publications,[10] in private letters, in newspaper reports, and by word of mouth.  A typical communication was sent home in 1817 by a Marylander who had moved to Louisiana:  “In your states a planter with ten negroes with difficulty supports a family genteelly; here well managed they would be a fortune to him.  With you the seasons are so irregular your crops often fail; here the crops are certain, and want of the necessaries of life never for a moment causes the heart to ache—­abundance spreads the table of the poor man, and contentment smiles on every countenance."[11] Other accounts told glowingly of quick fortunes made and to be made by getting lands cheaply in the early stages of settlement and selling them at greatly enhanced prices when the tide of migration arrived in force.[12] Such ebullient expressions were taken at face value by thousands of the unwary; and other thousands of the more cautious followed in the trek when personal inquiries had reinforced the tug of the west.  The larger planters generally removed only after somewhat thorough investigation and after procuring more or less acquiescence from their slaves; the smaller planters and farmers, with lighter stake in their homes and better opportunity to sell them, with lighter impedimenta for the journey, with less to lose by misadventure, and with poorer facilities for inquiry, responded more readily to the enticements.

[Footnote 10:  E. g., the Washington, Ky., Mirror, Sept. 30, 1797.]

[Footnote 11:  Niles’ Register, XIII, 38.]

[Footnote 12:  E. g., Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), March 11, 1836.]

The fever of migration produced in some of the people an unconquerable restlessness.  An extraordinary illustration of this is given in the career of Gideon Lincecum as written by himself.  In 1802, when Gideon was ten years old, his father, after farming successfully for some years in the Georgia uplands was lured by letters from relatives in Tennessee to sell out and remove thither.  Taking the roundabout road through the Carolinas to avoid the Cherokee country, he set forth with a wagon and four horses to carry a bed, four chests, four white and four negro children, and his mother who was eighty-eight years old.  When but a few days on the road an illness of the old woman caused a halt, whereupon Lincecum rented a nearby farm and spent a year on a cotton crop.  The journey was then resumed, but barely had the Savannah River been crossed when another farm was rented and another crop begun.  Next year they returned to Georgia and worked a farm near Athens.  Then they set out again for Tennessee; but on the road in South Carolina the wreck of the wagon and its ancient occupant gave abundant excuse for the purchase of a farm there.  After another crop, successful as usual, the family moved back to Georgia and cropped still another farm.  Young Gideon now attended school until his father moved