unshackled, and enjoyed uncontrolled the free blessings of nature.
[Footnote: Francis Bailey's "Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of
North America in 1796 and 1797," p. 234.] The isolation of his life and
the frequency with which he changed his abode brought out the
frontiersman's wonderful capacity to shift for himself, but it hindered
the development of his power of acting in combination with others of his
kind. The first comers to the new country were so restless and so
intolerant of the presence of their kind, that as neighbors came in they
moved ever westward. They could not act with their fellows.

The Permanent Settlers.
Efforts to Provide Schooling.

Of course in the men who succeeded the first pioneers, and who were the
first permanent settlers, the restlessness and the desire for a lonely
life were much less developed. These men wandered only until they found
a good piece of land, and took up claims on this land, not because the
country was lonely, but because it was fertile. They hailed with joy
the advent of new settlers and the upbuilding of a little market town in
the neighborhood. They joined together eagerly in the effort to obtain
schools for their children. As yet there were no public schools
supported by government in any part of the West, but all the settlers of
any pretension to respectability were anxious to give their children a
decent education. Even the poorer people, who were still engaged in the
hardest and roughest struggle for a livelihood, showed appreciation of
the need of schooling for their children; and wherever the clearings of
the settlers were within reasonable distance of one another a log
schoolhouse was sure to spring up. The school-teacher boarded around
among the different families, and was quite as apt to be paid in produce
as in cash. Sometimes he was a teacher by profession; more often he
took up teaching simply as an interlude to some of his other occupations.
Schoolbooks were more common than any others in the scanty libraries of
the pioneers.

The County-System in the West.

The settlers who became firmly established in the land gave definite
shape to its political career. The county was throughout the West the
unit of division, though in the North it became somewhat mixed with the
township system. It is a pity that the township could not have been the
unit, as it would have rendered the social and political development in
many respects easier, b