The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 121 



success to the sea. To New England youth the sea was the 

 frontier. It offered a man the hazards and the rewards of des- 

 perate adventure. 



But in the quarter-century since Washington had floated 

 down the Ohio from Pittsburgh and had seen the finest corn- 

 growing land anywhere in the colonies, a new frontier had been 

 opened to the youth of New England; as Kentucky and Ten- 

 nessee held out adventure and fortune to the young men from 

 the southern counties. 



Several hundred acres on the Muskingum River put into 

 corn and groves of sugar maples would make a man rich in a 

 few years. Corn and maple sugar could be rafted down to New 

 Orleans and sold for cash with which to buy more acres from 

 the Ohio Land Company. Farther west stretched a wilderness 

 where furs could be traded for and timber could be cut. And 

 always there was the mighty river running down to the Gulf 

 where the ships waited to buy cargoes to sell again all over 

 the world. 



Out in that new country land meant wealth; as in Boston 

 and Newburyport ships meant wealth. And wealth, wherever 

 a man had it, was power. 



So the young men of New England turned away from the 

 mother and lover who had called their fathers and grandsires, 

 to a new frontier in the west. 



It would seem that there is something in the American 

 temperament which ever and again makes the youth of this 

 continent seek contact with the frontier. Always that contact 

 has had the effect of quickening the American spirit. The 

 movement away from the coasts into the Great Valley re- 

 lighted something in our national thought which was then in 

 danger of growing dim. The great revolutionary struggle for 

 the free expression of a national consciousness which lasted 

 from 1775 until the close of the second war with England 

 was the direct result of that contact with the frontier. Just so 

 the migration of great numbers of Americans into the Ohio 



