278 The Winning of the West 



West at this time was formed by the French who 

 came to found the town of Gallipolis, on the Ohio. 

 These were mostly refugees from the Revolution, 

 who had been taken in by a swindling land company. 

 They were utterly unsuited to life in the wilderness, 

 being gentlemen, small tradesmen, lawyers, and the 

 like. Unable to grapple with the wild life into 

 which they found themselves plunged, they sank 

 into shiftless poverty, not one in fifty showing in- 

 dustry and capacity to succeed. Congress took pity 

 upon them and granted them twenty-four thousand 

 acres in Scioto County, the tract being known as 

 the French grant; but no gift of wild land was 

 able to ensure their prosperity. By degrees they 

 were absorbed into the neighboring communities, 

 a few succeeding, most ending their lives in abject 

 failure. 44 



The trouble these poor French settlers had with 

 their lands was far from unique. The early system 

 of land sales in the West was most unwise. In 

 Kentucky and Tennessee the grants were made 

 under the laws of Virginia and North Carolina, and 

 each man purchased or pre-empted whatever he 

 could, and surveyed it where he liked, with a con- 

 sequent endless confusion of titles. The National 

 Government possessed the disposal of the land in 

 the Northwest and in Mississippi ; and it avoided the 

 pitfall of unlimited private surveying; but it made 

 little effort to prevent swindling by land companies, 

 and none whatever to people the country with actual 



44 Atwater, p. 159; Michaux, p. 122, etc. 



