137. How the Frontiers were Settled (1780)
BY FRANÇOIS JEAN, MARQUIS DE CHASTELLUX (1786)
(Translated by George Greive, 1787)
Chastellux was one of the French officers who served in America under Rochambeau; and his travels, made during the years 1780-1782, give us the impressions of an intelligent and sympathetic foreign observer. — Bibliography: Roosevelt, Winning of the West, II; Channing and Hart, Guide, § 150.
WHILE I was meditating on the great process of Nature, which employs fifty thousand years in rendering the earth habitable, a new spectacle, well calculated as a contrast to those which I had been contemplating, fixed my attention, and excited my curiosity : this was the work of a single man, who in the space of a year had cut down several arpents of wood, and had built himself a house in the middle of a pretty extensive territory he had already cleared. I saw, for the first time, what I have since observed a hundred times ; for, in fact, whatever mountains I have climbed, whatever forests I have traversed, whatever bye-paths I have followed, I have never travelled three miles without meeting with a new settlement, either beginning to take form, or already in cultivation. The following is the manner of proceeding in these improvements, or new settlements. Any man who is able to procure a capital of five or six hundred livres of our money, or about twenty-five pounds sterling, and who has strength and inclination to work, may go into the woods and purchase a portion of one hundred and fifty or two hundred acres of land, which seldom costs him more than a dollar or four shillings and six-pence an acre, a small part of which only he pays in ready money. There he conducts a cow, some pigs, or a full sow, and two indifferent horses which do not cost him more than four guineas each. To these precautions he adds that of having a provision of flour and cyder. Provided with this first capital, he begins by felling all the smaller trees, and some strong branches of the large ones : these he makes use of as fences to the first field he wishes to clear ; he next boldly attacks those immense oaks, or pines, which one would take for the ancient lords of the territory he is usurping ; he strips them of their bark, or lays them open all round with his axe. These trees mortally wounded, are the next spring robbed of their honors ; their leaves no longer spring, their branches fall, and their trunk becomes a hideous skeleton. This trunk still seems to brave the efforts of the new colonist ; but where there are the smallest chinks or crevices, it is sur-
