the
eastern cotton belt. A family arriving perhaps in the early spring with a
few implements and a small supply of food and seed, would build in a few
days a cabin of rough logs with an earthen floor and a roof of bark or of
riven clapboards. To clear a field they would girdle the larger trees and
clear away the underbrush. Corn planted in April would furnish roasting
ears in three months and ripe grain in six weeks more. Game was plenty;
lightwood was a substitute for candles; and housewifely skill furnished
homespun garments. Shelter, food and clothing and possibly a small cotton
crop or other surplus were thus had the first year. Some rested with this;
but the more thrifty would soon replace their cabins with hewn log or frame
houses, plant kitchen gardens and watermelon patches, set out orchards and
increase the cotton acreage. The further earnings of a year or two would
supply window glass, table ware, coffee, tea and sugar, a stock of poultry,
a few hogs and even perhaps a slave or two. The pioneer hardships decreased
and the homely comforts grew with every passing year of thrift. But the
orchard yield of stuff for the still, and the cotton field's furnishing
the wherewithal to buy more slaves, brought temptations. Distilleries and
slaves, a contemporary said, were blessings or curses according as they
were used or abused; for drunkenness and idleness were the gates of the
road to retrogression.[7]

[Footnote 7: David Ramsay _History of South Carolina_, II, pp. 246 ff.]

The pathetic hardships which some of the poorer migrants underwent in their
labors to reach the western opportunity are exemplified in a local item
from an Augusta newspaper in 1819: "Passed through this place from
Greenville District [South Carolina] bound for Chatahouchie, a man and his
wife, his son and his wife, with a cart but no horse. The man had a belt
over his shoulders and he drew in the shafts; the son worked by traces tied
to the end of the shafts and assisted his father to draw the cart; the
son's wife rode in the cart, and the old woman was walking, carrying
a rifle, and driving a cow."[8] This example, while extreme, was not
unique.[9]

[Footnote 8: Augusta, Ga., _Chronicle_, Sept. 24, 1819, reprinted in
_Plantation and Frontier_, II, 196.]

[Footnote 9: _Niles' Register_, XX, 320.]

The call of the west was carried in promoters' publications,[10] in
private letters, in newspaper reports, and by word of mouth. A typical
communi