being laid out and towns were growing up among the felled forests from which the game and the Indians had alike been driven.  There was still plenty of room for the rude cabin and stump-dotted clearing of the ordinary frontier settler, the wood-chopper and game hunter.  Folk of the common backwoods type were as yet more numerous than any others among the settlers.  In addition there were planters from among the gentry of the sea-coast; there were men of means who had bought great tracts of wild land; there were traders with more energy than capital; there were young lawyers; there were gentlemen with a taste for an unfettered life of great opportunity; in short there were adventurers of every kind.

All men who deemed that they could swim in troubled waters were drawn towards the new country.  The more turbulent and ambitious spirits saw roads to distinction in frontier warfare, politics, and diplomacy.  Merchants dreamed of many fortunate ventures, in connection with the river trade or the overland commerce by packtrain.  Lawyers not only expected to make their living by their proper calling, but also to rise to the first places in the commonwealths, for in these new communities, as in the older States, the law was then the most honored of the professions, and that which most surely led to high social and political standing.  But the one great attraction for all classes was the chance of procuring large quantities of fertile land at low prices.

    Value of the Land.

To the average settler the land was the prime source of livelihood.  A man of hardihood, thrift, perseverance, and bodily strength could surely make a comfortable living for himself and his family, if only he could settle on a good tract of rich soil; and this he could do if he went to the new country.  As a matter of course, therefore, vigorous young frontiersmen swarmed into the region so recently won.

These men merely wanted so much land as they could till.  Others, however, looked at it from a very different standpoint.  The land was the real treasury-chest of the country.  It was the one commodity which appealed to the ambitious and adventurous side of the industrial character at that time and in that place.  It was the one commodity the management of which opened chances of procuring vast wealth, and especially vast speculative wealth.  To the American of the end of the eighteenth century the roads leading to great riches were as few as those leading to a competency were many.  He could not prospect for mines of gold and of silver, of iron, copper, and coal; he could not discover and work wells of petroleum and natural gas; he could not build up, sell, and speculate in railroad systems and steamship companies; he could not gamble in the stock market; he could not build huge manufactories of steel, of cottons, of woollens; he could not be a banker or a merchant on a scale which is dwarfed when called princely; he could not sit still and see an already great income double and