North America-1 [81]
to arrange that the districts which are benefited shall themselves pay for the benefit they receive. The government price of land is 125 cents, or about five shillings an acre; and even this need not be paid at once if the settler purchase directly from the government. He must begin by making certain improvements on the selected land--clearing and cultivating some small portion, building a hut, and probably sinking a well. When this has been done--when he has thus given a pledge of his intentions by depositing on the land the value of a certain amount of labor, he cannot be removed. He cannot be removed for a term of years, and then if he pays the price of the land it becomes his own with an indefeasible title. Many such settlements are made on the purchase of warrants for land. Soldiers returning from the Mexican wars were donated with warrants for land--the amount being 160 acres, or the quarter of a section. The localities of such lands were not specified, but the privilege granted was that of occupying any quarter-section not hitherto tenanted. It will, of course, be understood that lands favorably situated would be tenanted. Those contiguous to railways were of course so occupied, seeing that the lines were not made till the lands were in the hands of the companies. It may therefore be understood of what nature would be the traffic in these warrants. The owner of a single warrant might find it of no value to him. To go back utterly into the woods, away from river or road, and there to commence with 160 acres of forest, or even of prairie, would be a hopeless task even to an American settler. Some mode of transport for his produce must be found before his produce would be of value--before, indeed, he could find the means of living. But a company buying up a large aggregate of such warrants would possess the means of making such allotments valuable and of reselling them at greatly increased prices. The primary settler, therefore--who, however, will not usually have been the primary owner--goes to work upon his land amid all the wildness of nature. He levels and burns the first trees, and raises his first crop of corn amid stumps still standing four or five feet above the soil; but he does not do so till some mode of conveyance has been found for him. So much I have said hoping to explain the mode in which the frontier speculator paves the way for the frontier agriculturist. But the permanent farmer very generally comes on the land as the third owner. The first settler is a rough fellow, and seems to be so wedded to his rough life that he leaves his land after his first wild work is done, and goes again farther off to some untouched allotment. He finds that he can sell his improvements at a profitable rate and takes the price. He is a preparer of farms rather than a farmer. He has no love for the soil which his hand has first turned. He regards it merely as an investment; and when things about him are beginning to wear an aspect of comfort, when his property has become valuable, he sells it, packs up his wife and little ones, and goes again into the woods. The Western American has no love for his own soil or his own house. The matter with him is simply one of dollars. To keep a farm which he could sell at an advantage from any feeling of affection--from what we should call an association of ideas--would be to him as ridiculous as the keeping of a family pig would be in an English farmer's establishment. The pig is a part of the farmer's stock in trade, and must go the way of all pigs. And so is it with house and land in the life of the frontier man in the Western States. But yet this man has his romance, his high poetic feeling, and above all his manly dignity. Visit him, and you will find him without coat or waistcoat, unshorn, in ragged blue trowsers and old flannel shirt, too often bearing on his lantern jaws the signs of ague and sickness; but he will stand upright before you and speak to you with all the ease of a lettered gentleman in his own library. All the odious incivility of the republican