Louisiana and Aaron Burr 269 



blacksmith and carpenter, who did odd jobs for 

 them, and the Eastern merchants from whom they 

 got gloves, bonnets, hats, and shoes, and the cloth 

 which was made into dresses by the womankind on 

 their plantations. But most of their wants were 

 supplied on their own places. Their abundant tables 

 were furnished mainly with what their own farms 

 yielded. When they traveled they went in their 

 own carriages. The rich men, whose wants were 

 comparatively many, usually had on their estates 

 white hired men or black slaves whose labor could 

 gratify them; while the ordinary farmer, of the 

 class that formed the great majority of the popu- 

 lation, was capable of supplying almost all his needs 

 himself, or with the assistance of his family. 



The immense preponderance of the agricultural, 

 land-holding, and land-tilling element, and the com- 

 parative utter insignificance of town development, 

 was highly characteristic of the Western settlement 

 of this time, and offers a very marked contrast to 

 what goes on to-day in the settlement of new 

 countries. At the end of the eighteenth century 

 the population of the Western country was about 

 as great as the population of the State of Washing- 

 ton at the end of the nineteenth, and Washington 

 is distinctly a pastoral and agricultural State, a 

 State of men who chop trees, herd cattle, and till 

 the soil, as well as trade; but in Washington great 

 cities, like Tacoma, Seattle, and Spokane, have 

 sprung up with a rapidity which was utterly un- 

 known in the West a century ago. Nowadays when 



