The Winning of the West, Volume 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 472 pages of information about The Winning of the West, Volume 2.

The Winning of the West, Volume 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 472 pages of information about The Winning of the West, Volume 2.

With the close of the war came an enormous increase in the tide of immigration; and many of the new-comers were of a very different stamp from their predecessors.  The main current flowed towards Kentucky, and gave an entirely different character to its population.  The two typical figures in Kentucky so far had been Clark and Boon, but after the close of the Revolution both of them sank into unimportance, whereas the careers of Sevier and Robertson had only begun.  The disappearance of the two former from active life was partly accidental and partly a resultant of the forces that assimilated Kentucky so much more rapidly than Tennessee to the conditions prevailing in the old States.  Kentucky was the best known and the most accessible of the western regions; within her own borders she was now comparatively safe from serious Indian invasion, and the tide of immigration naturally flowed thither.  So strong was the current that, within a dozen years, it had completely swamped the original settlers, and had changed Kentucky from a peculiar pioneer and backwoods commonwealth into a State differing no more from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina than these differed from one another.

The men who gave the tone to this great flood of new-comers were the gentry from the sea-coast country, the planters, the young lawyers, the men of means who had been impoverished by the long-continued and harassing civil war.  Straitened in circumstances, desirous of winning back wealth and position, they cast longing eyes towards the beautiful and fertile country beyond the mountains, deeming it a place that afforded unusual opportunities to the man with capital, no less than to him whose sole trust was in his own adventurous energy.

Most of the gentle folks in Virginia and the Carolinas, the men who lived in great roomy houses on their well-stocked and slave-tilled plantations, had been forced to struggle hard to keep their heads above water during the Revolution.  They loyally supported the government, with blood and money; and at the same time they endeavored to save some of their property from the general wreck, and to fittingly educate their girls, and those of their boys who were too young to be in the army.  The men of this stamp who now prepared to cast in their lot with the new communities formed an exceptionally valuable class of immigrants; they contributed the very qualities of which the raw settlements stood most in need.  They had suffered for no fault of their own; fate had gone hard with them.  The fathers had been in the Federal or Provincial congresses; the older sons had served in the Continental line or in the militia.  The plantations were occasionally overrun by the enemy; and the general disorder had completed their ruin.  Nevertheless, the heads of the families had striven to send the younger sons to school or college.  For their daughters they did even more; and throughout the contest, even in its darkest hours, they sent them down to receive the

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The Winning of the West, Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.