, only sunk it deeper. The dwellings of
immigrants were springing up in all directions around. Inclosures again
began to surround him on every hand, shutting him out from his
accustomed haunts in the depths of the forest shade. He saw cultivated
fields stretching over large extents of country; and in the distance,
villages and towns; and was made sensible of their train of forms, and
laws, and restrictions, and buts, and bounds, gradually approaching his
habitation. Be determined again to leave them far behind. His resolve
was made, but he had not decided to what point he would turn.
Circumstances soon occurred to terminate his indecision.

As early as 1760, the country west of the Cumberland mountains was
considered by the inhabitants of Carolina and Virginia, as involved in
something of the same obscurity which lay over the American continent,
after its first discovery by Columbus. Those who spread their sails to
cross the sea, and find new skies, a new soil, and men in a new world,
were not deemed more daring by their brethren at home, than the few
hardy adventurers, who struck into the pathless forests stretching along
the frontier settlements of the western country, were estimated by their
friends and neighbors. Even the most informed and intelligent, where
information and intelligence were cultivated, knew so little of the
immense extent of country, now designated as the "Mississippi Valley,"
that a book, published near the year 1800, in Philadelphia or New York,
by a writer of talent and standing, speaks of the _many_ mouths of the
Missouri, as entering the Mississippi _far below the Ohio_.

The simple inmates of cabins, in the remote region bordering on the new
country, knew still less about it; as they had not penetrated its
wilderness, and were destitute of that general knowledge which prevents
the exercise of the exaggerations of vague conjecture. There was,
indeed, ample room for the indulgence of speculation upon the features
which the unexplored land was characterized. Its mountains, plains, and
streams, animals, and men, were yet to be discovered and named. It might
be found the richest land under the sun, exhaustless in fertility,
yielding the most valuable productions, and unfailing in its resources.
It was possible it would prove a sterile desert. Imagination could not
but expatiate in this unbounded field and unexplored wilderness; and
there are few persons entirely secure from the influence of
imagi