a certain falling off from the standard of
civilized communities. It needed peculiar qualities to insure success,
and the pioneers were almost exclusively native Americans. The Germans
were more thrifty and prosperous, but they could not go first into the
wilderness. [Footnote: Michaux, p. 63, etc.] Men fresh from England
rarely succeeded. [Footnote: Parkinson's "Tour in America, 1798-1800,"
pp. 504, 588, etc. Parkinson loathed the Americans. A curious example
of how differently the same facts will affect different observers may
be gained by contrasting his] The most pitiable group of emigrants that
reached the West at this time was formed by the French [Footnote:
observations with those of his fellow Englishman, John Davis, whose trip
covered precisely the same period; but Parkinson's observations as to
the extreme difficulty of an Old Country farmer getting on in the
backwoods regions are doubtless mainly true.] who came to found the
town of Gallipolis, on the Ohio. These were mostly refugees from the
Revolution, who had been taken in by a swindling land company. They were
utterly unsuited to life in the wilderness, being gentlemen, small
tradesmen, lawyers, and the like. Unable to grapple with the wild life
into which they found themselves plunged, they sank into shiftless
poverty, not one in fifty showing industry and capacity to succeed.
Congress took pity upon them and granted them twenty-four thousand acres
in Scioto County, the tract being known as the French grant; but no gift
of wild land was able to insure their prosperity. By degrees they were
absorbed into the neighboring communities, a few succeeding, most ending
their lives in abject failure. [Footnote: Atwater, p. 159; Michaux,
p. 122, etc.]

Trouble with Land Titles.

The trouble these poor French settlers had with their lands was far from
unique. The early system of land sales in the West was most unwise. In
Kentucky and Tennessee the grants were made under the laws of Virginia
and North Carolina, and each man purchased or preempted whatever he
could, and surveyed it where he liked, with a consequent endless
confusion of titles. The National Government possessed the disposal of
the land in the Northwest and in Mississippi; and it avoided the pitfall
of unlimited private surveying; but it made little effort to prevent
swindling by land companies, and none whatever to people the country
with actual settlers. Congress granted great tracts of lands t