The Forest and Man 53 



under which the woods had existed for countless 

 ages. The change came with the advent of that 

 great revolutionizer of economic and social condi- 

 tions, the railway. 



The steamboats which came several decades 

 before the railroad had not by any means changed 

 the conditions of western settlement to the extent 

 one might expect at first glance. They made mi- 

 gration from the Alleghanies to the remotest por- 

 tions of the Mississippi Valley a great deal more 

 easy, and therefore were an immense stimulus 

 to increase of population. But they were rather 

 calculated to restrict settlement still more to narrow 

 strips along the river valleys than had been the 

 case in the old days of canoes and flatboats. In 

 the prairie regions, of course, locomotion was com- 

 paratively easy. This, together with the easier 

 mode of clearing such lands for agriculture, gave 

 those sections a great advantage over the heavily 

 timbered portions. So it came about that those 

 parts of the Middle West which were continuously 

 wooded, in the same manner as the East had been 

 originally, did not come under the influence of the 

 various waves of settlement until railroads began to 

 be built through them, and here true backwoods 

 conditions lingered long after a new era had begun 

 in the prairie sections. To-day, the last trace of 

 the backwoodsman is found on the mountainous 

 portions of the South, such as Eastern Tennessee 

 and Kentucky, or parts of Arkansas. But like all 

 remnants of the types of former epochs, it is a 



