290 The Winning of the West 



born, on the site of what is now Chicago; but the 

 only fairly well-settled regions were in Kentucky 

 and Tennessee. These two States were the oldest, 

 and long remained the most populous and influen- 

 tial, communities in the West. They shared quali- 

 ties both of the Northerners and of the Southerners, 

 and they gave the tone to the thought and the life 

 in the settlements north of them no less than the 

 settlements south of them. This fact of itself tended 

 to make the West homogeneous and to keep it a 

 unit with a peculiar character of its own, neither 

 Northern or Southern in political and social ten- 

 dency. 



It was the middle West which was first settled, 

 and the middle West stamped its peculiar charac- 

 teristics on all the growing communities beyond the 

 Alleghanies. Inasmuch as west of the mountains 

 the Northern communities were less distinctively 

 Northern and the Southern communities less dis- 

 tinctively Southern than was the case with the East- 

 ern States on the seaboard, it followed naturally 

 that, considered with reference to other sections of 

 the Union, the West formed a unit, possessing 

 marked characteristics of its own. A distinctive 

 type of character was developed west of the Alle- 

 ghanies, and for the first generation the typical rep- 

 resentatives of this Western type were to be found 

 in Kentucky and Tennessee. 



The settlement of the Northwest had been begun 

 under influences which in the end were to separate 

 it radically from the Southwest. It was settled 



