220 The Winning of the West 



which they did not have in actual history. They 

 occasionally enriched, and more often impoverished, 

 the individual speculators ; but in the actual peopling 

 of the waste lands they counted for little in compari- 

 son with the steady stream of pioneer farmers who 

 poured in, each to hold and till the ground he in fact 

 occupied. However, the contemporary documents of 

 the day were full of details concerning the com- 

 panies; and they did possess considerable impor- 

 tance at certain times in the settlement of the West, 

 both because they in places stimulated that settle- 

 ment, and because in other places they retarded it, 

 inasmuch as they kept out actual settlers, who could 

 not pre-empt land which had been purchased at low 

 rates from some legislative body by the speculators. 

 The companies were sometimes formed by men who 

 wished themselves to lead emigrants into the longed- 

 for region, but more often they were purely specu- 

 lative in character, and those who founded them 

 wished only to dispose of them at an advantage to 

 third parties. Their history is inextricably mixed 

 with the history of the intrigues with and against 

 the Spaniards and British in the West. The men 

 who organized them wished to make money. Their 

 object was to obtain title to or possession of the 

 lands, and it was quite a secondary matter with them 

 whether their title came from the United States, 

 England, or Spain. They were willing to form col- 

 onies on Spanish or British territory, and they were 

 even willing to work for the dismemberment of the 

 Western Territory from the Union, if by so doing 



