the wilderness, and yet its destruction means his own.  He passes away before the coming of the very civilization whose advance guard he has been.  Nevertheless, much of his blood remains, and his striking characteristics have great weight in shaping the development of the land.  The varying peculiarities of the different groups of men who have pushed the frontier westward at different times and places remain stamped with greater or less clearness on the people of the communities that grow up in the frontier’s stead. [Footnote:  Frederick Jackson Turner:  “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”  A suggestive pamphlet, published by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.]

    Succession of Types on Frontier.

In Kentucky, as in Tennessee and the western portions of the seaboard States, and as later in the great West, different types of settlers appeared successively on the frontier.  The hunter or trapper came first.  Sometimes he combined with hunting and trapping the functions of an Indian trader, but ordinarily the American, as distinguished from the French or Spanish frontiersman, treated the Indian trade as something purely secondary to his more regular pursuits.  In Kentucky and Tennessee the first comers from the East were not traders at all, and were hunters rather than trappers.  Boone was a type of this class, and Boone’s descendants went westward generation by generation until they reached the Pacific.

Close behind the mere hunter came the rude hunter-settler.  He pastured his stock on the wild range, and lived largely by his skill with the rifle.  He worked with simple tools and he did his work roughly.  His squalid cabin was destitute of the commonest comforts; the blackened stumps and dead, girdled trees stood thick in his small and badly tilled field.  He was adventurous, restless, shiftless, and he felt ill at ease and cramped by the presence of more industrious neighbors.  As they pressed in round about him he would sell his claim, gather his cattle and his scanty store of tools and household goods, and again wander forth to seek uncleared land.  The Lincolns, the forbears of the great President, were a typical family of this class.

Most of the frontiersmen of these two types moved fitfully westward with the frontier itself, or near it, but in each place where they halted, or where the advance of the frontier was for the moment stayed, some of their people remained to grow up and mix with the rest of the settlers.

    The Permanent Settlers.

The third class consisted of the men who were thrifty, as well as adventurous, the men who were even more industrious than restless.  These were they who entered in to hold the land, and who handed it on as an inheritance to their children and their children’s children.  Often, of course, these settlers of a higher grade found that for some reason they did not prosper, or heard of better chances still farther