But in spite of the hardships of the settler’s life the spirit of that time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and a light-hearted one.

  “Westward the course of empire takes its way,”

runs the famous line from Berkeley’s poem on America.  The New Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve went there to better themselves; and their children found themselves the owners of broad acres of virgin soil in place of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire and Litchfield.  There was an attraction, too, about the wild, free life of the frontiersman, with all its perils and discomforts.  The life of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky—­that “dark and bloody ground”—­is a genuine romance.  Hardly less picturesque was the old river life of the Ohio boatmen, before the coming of steam banished their queer craft from the water.  Between 1810 and 1840 the center of population in the United States had moved from the Potomac to the neighborhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the population itself had increased from seven to seventeen millions.  The gain was made partly in the East and South, but the general drift was westward.  During the years now under review the following new States were admitted, in the order named:  Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan.  Kentucky and Tennessee had been made States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and Louisiana—­acquired by purchase from France—­in 1812.

The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of wilderness behind them.  They took up first the rich bottomlands along the river courses, the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the valleys of the Mississippi and Missouri and the shores of the great lakes.  But there still remained backwoods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than one hundred thousand in 1815.  When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825, it ran through a primitive forest.  N. P. Willis, who went by canal to Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, describes the houses and stores at Rochester as standing among the burnt stumps left by the first settlers.  In the same year that saw the opening of this great water-way, the Indian tribes, numbering now about one hundred and thirty thousand souls, were moved across the Mississippi.  Their power had been broken by General Hamson’s victory over Tecumseh at the battle of Tippecanoe, in 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and fragments of the race which had hung upon the skirts of civilization and disputed the advance of the white man for two centuries.  It was not until some years later than this that railroads began to take an important share in opening up new country.