A strange restlessness, of the race rather than of the individual, possessed the American frontiers-man.  He moved from one locality to another, but always westward, like some new migratory species that had willingly discarded the instinct for returning.  He never took the back trail.  A traveler, writing in 1791 from the Ohio Valley, rather superficially observed that “the Americans are lazy and bored, often moving from place to place for the sake of change; in the thirty years that the [western] Pennsylvania neighborhood has been settled, it has changed owners two or three times.  The sight of money will tempt any American to sell and off he goes to a new country.”  Foreign observers of that time constantly allude to this universal and inexplicable restiveness.  It was obviously not laziness, for pioneering was a man’s task; nor boredom, for the frontier was lonely and neighbors were far apart It was an ever-present dissatisfaction that drove this perpetual conqueror onward—­a mysterious impulse, the urge of vague and unfulfilled desires.  He went forward with a conquering ambition in his heart; he believed he was the forerunner of a great National Destiny.  Crude rhymes of the day voice this feeling: 

    So shall the nation’s pioneer go joyful on his way,
    To wed Penobscot water to San Francisco Bay. 
    The mighty West shall bless the East, and sea shall answer sea,
    And mountain unto mountain call, praise God, for we are free!

Again a popular chorus of the pathfinder rang: 

    Then o’er the hills in legions, boys;
      Fair freedom’s star
    Points to the sunset regions, boys,
      Ha, Ha, Ha-ha!

Many a New Englander cleared a farm in western New York, Ohio, or Indiana, before settling finally in Wisconsin, Iowa, or Minnesota, whence he sent his sons on to Dakota, Montana, Oregon, and California.  From Tennessee and Kentucky large numbers moved into southern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and across the river into Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas.  Abraham Lincoln’s father was one of these pioneers and tried his luck in various localities in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.

Nor had the movement ceased after a century of continental exploitation.  Hamlin Garland in his notable autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border, brings down to our own day the evidence of this native American restiveness.  His parents came of New England extraction, but settled in Wisconsin.  His father, after his return from the Civil War, moved to Iowa, where he was scarcely ensconced before an opportunity came to sell his place.  The family then pushed out farther upon the Iowa prairie, where they “broke” a farm from the primeval turf.  Again, in his ripe age, the father found the urge revive and under this impulse he moved again, this time to Dakota, where he remained long enough to transform a section of prairie into wheat land before he took the final stage of his western journeyings to southern California.  Here he was surrounded by neighbors whose migration had been not unlike his own, and to the same sunny region another relative found his way “by way of a long trail through Iowa, Dakota, Montana, Oregon, and North California.”