Louisiana and Aaron Burr 277 



er]. Oak bark, with copperas as a mordant, when 

 father had money to purchase it, supplied the ink 

 with which I learned to write. I drove the horses 

 to and from the range, and salted them. I tended 

 the sheep, and hunted up the cattle in the woods." 41 

 This was the life of the thrifty pioneers, whose chil- 

 dren more than held their own in the world. The 

 shiftless men without ambition and without thrift, 

 lived in laziness and filth; their eating and sleeping 

 arrangements were as unattractive as those of an 

 Indian wigwam. 



The pleasures and the toils of the life were alike 

 peculiar. In the wilder parts the loneliness and the 

 fierce struggle with squalid poverty, and with the 

 tendency to revert to savage conditions, inevitably 

 produced for a generation or two a certain falling 

 off from the standard of civilized communities. It 

 needed peculiar qualities to ensure success, and the 

 pioneers were almost exclusively native Americans. 

 The Germans were more thrifty and prosperous, 

 but they could not go first into the wilderness. 42 

 Men fresh from England rarely succeeded. 43 The 

 most pitiable group of emigrants that reached the 



41 Do., pp. 90, in, etc., condensed. 



49 Michaux, p. 63, etc. 



43 Parkinson's "Tour in America, 1798-1800," pp. 504, 588, 

 etc. Parkinson loathed the Americans. A curious example 

 of how differently the same facts will affect different observ- 

 ers may be gained by contrasting his observations with those 

 of his fellow Englishman, John Davis, whose trip covered pre- 

 cisely the same period; but Parkinson's observations as to 

 the extreme difficulty of an Old Country farmer getting on 

 in the backwoods regions are doubtless mainly true. 



