SOLON ROBINSON, 1842 331 



To Western Emigrants. 



[Albany Cultivator, 9:193-94; Dec, 1842] 



[November 1, 1842] 



Readers of the Cultivator — My old Friends — During 

 the last six or eight months you and I have held but little 

 intercourse. To be candid, I did not imagine that my 

 name would have been so much missed, as I am induced 

 to believe it has been by what I am told in a great many 

 letters that I have received. It is true, I had begun a 

 "traveling memorandum," that I intended to have con- 

 tinued throughout all my journey, and brought you with 

 me in imagination over the great northern lakes, and set 

 you quietly down in the chimney corner of a comfortable 

 and happy "log cabin home," where we could have looked 

 back over the varied scene, and called up to view the 

 many new acquaintances, and looked upon their various 

 modes of cultivating the earth, and the many different 

 ways of enjoying the fruits thereof, and then endeavored 

 to find from observation where was the greatest amount 

 of human happiness; for there, be it East or West, is 

 the place to seek a new home. 



Now I should have accomplished all this, and I am well 

 assured should have added a little to your happiness, and 

 thereby to my own; but I undertook to drive too much 

 team. The consequence was, the connecting chains broke, 

 and although I tried to "toggle" the broken links, it 

 would not do, and there I have been stuck fast ever since. 



Reader, let me here inquire whether you have under- 

 taken, during the last summer, "to drive too much 

 team?" Because, if you have, I am pretty sure there is 

 "a link broken" somewhere. This is only another mode 

 of repeating to you what I have often said before about 

 cultivating too much land. I don't mean that, exactly, 

 either; because you cannot cultivate too much. But do 

 you cultivate it, or only own it? A great many of my 

 eastern acquaintances want to emigrate to the West "to 

 get more land." 



