1. The following quotations, until otherwise noted, are from Franklin, to Collinson, , 05 9, 1753Google Scholar, in Labaree, Leonard W. et al. , eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), IV, pp. 479–86.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., VI, pp. 468–69 (July 2, 1756).

3. See, “A Plan for Settling Two Western Colonies” (1754)Google Scholar, ibid., V, pp. 456–63. Franklin's ideas on industry and the disinclination of people to work were associated with his attitudes toward immigrants. See, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (1751)Google Scholar, ibid., IV, pp. 225–34. See also, ibid., IV, pp. 130–33, 484–85: VI, pp. 38ff, 231–32.

4. The theme of naturalism and the categories of “myth” and “reality” underlie what are generally taken to be the “classics” in the field: Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950)Google Scholar; Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964)Google Scholar: Moore, Arthur K., The Frontier Mind (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Sanford, Charles L., The Quest for Paradise (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961)Google Scholar: Slotkin, Richard, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973).Google Scholar

5. See especially Moore, , Frontier Mind, especially Chaps. 1, 7, 10, and 11.Google Scholar

6. I am using the terms “settlers” and “promoters” interchangeably except where such usage might create confusion. Settlers who, like William Cooper and Harry Toulmin, wrote “guides” or histories used their writings in large measure to attract future settlers, making them both “settlers” and “promoters.”

7. Pomeroy, Earl, “Toward a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and Environment,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 41, No. 4 (03 1955), 579–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoted at pp. 583, 582.

8. [Manasseh Cutler], A Description of the Soil, Production, Etc., of that Portion of the United States Situated Between Pennsylvania, and the Riuers Ohio and Sciato and Lake Erie (Salem, Mass., 1787: rpt. under the title Ohio in 1788, ed., John H. James [Columbus, Ohio, 1888]), p. 16.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., pp. 43–44. Fisher Ames, the sharp-witted Federalist, for example, expressed his fears over the “anarchical notions” of Tennessee's backwoods people, and summarized his disgust with the frontier in general by noting in 1798 that “Kentucky is all alien.” In Ames, Seth, The Works of Fisher Ames (Boston, 1854), I, pp. 233, 248Google Scholar respectively. With the Louisiana Purchase Ames was outraged by what he saw as President Jefferson's naive optimism over the frontier's possibilities. ibid., I, pp. 317, 329.

10. Ibid., p. 54.

11. Ibid., p. 45.

12. Imlay, Gilbert, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (London, 1792)Google Scholar. I have used the Dublin edition of 1793, printed under the title A Description of the Western Territories of North America. See Smith, , Virgin Land, pp. 147–48Google Scholar, and Chap. 11: Moore, , Frontier Mind, pp. 20–24Google Scholar: Slotkin, , Regeneration Through Violence, pp. 317–20, 350Google Scholar; Echeverria, Durand, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 116–18.Google Scholar

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14. Ibid., p. 15.

15. Ibid., p. 14.

16. Cooper, William, A Guide in the Wilderness, or the History of the First Settlements in the Western Counties of New York, with Useful Instructions to Future Settlers. … (Dublin, 1810), pp. 30–31.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 15.

18. Ibid., p. 16. While political economists like Adam Smith made the circulation metaphor a commonplace by the end of the eighteenth century, its roots lay deeper in English thought. Playing on William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651 “Of the Nutrition and Procreation of a Common-wealth,” referred to money as “the Bloud of a Com monwealth.” Money as a measure of value, Hobbes wrote, “goes round about [the Commonwealth], Nourishing (as it passeth) every part thereof. … For naturall Bloud is in like manner made of the fruits of the Earth: and circulating, nourisheth by the way, every Member of the Body of Man.” (Leviathan, Chap. XXIV)

19. Cooper, , Guide, p. 16.Google Scholar

20. Filson, John, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784: facsimile rpt. as Filson's Kentucke, ed., Willard R. Jillson [Louisville, Ky, 1930]), p. 107.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., pp. 107, 46–47.

22. Ibid., p. 29.

23. Cooper, , Guide, p. 5.Google Scholar

24. Jillson, Willard R., ed., A Transylvania Trilogy … Harry Toulmin's 1792 “A History of Kentucky” (Frankfort, Ky, 1932), p. 182Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as Toulmin, History.

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26. Toulmin, , History, pp. 21–22.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., pp. 22–23.

28. Cooper, , Guide, p. 2Google Scholar. (Italics added.)

29. Ibid., p. 6.

30. Toulmin, , History, p. 171.Google Scholar

31. Filson, , Kentucke, p. 49.Google Scholar

32. Imlay, , Topographical Description, p. 97.Google Scholar

33. Cooper, , Guide, pp. 8, 12–24Google Scholar: Smith, James, Tours into Kentucky and the Northwest Territory; Three Journals by the Ren. James Smith of Powhatan County, Virginia, 1783–1795–1797 (n.p, 1907), p. 398Google Scholar. See Labaree, , Papers of Franklin, V, p. 461.Google Scholar

34. Smith, , Tours, p. 382.Google Scholar

35. Imlay, , Topographical Description, pp. 107, 134Google Scholar: see Toulmin, , History, pp. 22–23Google Scholar.

36. Imlay, , Topographical Descriptions, pp. 137–38.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., p. 41.

38. Bliss, Eugene F., ed., Dr. Saugrain's Note-Books, 1788 (n.p., n.d.), p. 8.Google Scholar

39. See, for example, Moore, , Frontier Mind, p. 31Google Scholar, and Smith, , Virgin LandGoogle Scholar, Book Three. By overemphasizing the importance of nature, both authors tend to underestimate the importance of work in the garden, suggesting that one of the principal delights of life in the garden was precisely the absence of the need to work hard. Richard Slotkin, however, is aware of the dialectical relationship between man and nature, a relationship which is founded in labor. See Slotkin, , Regeneration Through Violence, passim; e.g., p. 273Google Scholar. See also Sheehan, Bernard W., Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 26–44.Google Scholar

40. Imlay, , Topographical Description, p. 139.Google Scholar

41. Ibid., p. 151.

42. Toulmin, , History, pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

43. See, e.g., Kuklick, Bruce, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” American Quarterly, 24, No. 4 (10 1972), 435–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I do not, obviously, share Kuklick's apparent aversion to “myth-symbol” studies. But his argument, by illuminating some of the faulty assumptions on which they rest, identifies the limits of such studies, and by doing so indicates the directions in which they might profitably proceed.

44. Smith, , Tours, p. 357.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., p. 389.

46. Ibid., p. 388.

47. Ibid., pp. 376–77.

48. Cooper, , Guide, p. 30.Google Scholar

49. Toulmin, , History, p. 55.Google Scholar

50. Ibid., p. 55n.

51. See Smith, Dwight, ed. The Western Journals of John May, 1788, 1789 (Cincinnati, 1961), p. 48Google Scholar. Austin, Moses, “A Memorandum of M. Austin's Journey from the Lead Mines in the County of Wythe in the State of Virginia to the Lead Mines in the Province of Louisiana West of the Mississippi,” American Historical Review, 5, (1899–1900), 523–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Belknap, Jeremy, Journal of a Tour from Boston to Oneida, June, 1796, by Jeremy Belknap, ed., Dexter, George (Cambridge, Mass, 1882), p. 28Google Scholar: Smith, , Tours, p. 398Google Scholar; Wade, Richard C., The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 27–29.Google Scholar

52. Quoted in Wade, , Urban Frontier, p. 28.Google Scholar

53. Page Smith has shown that the growth of towns was frequently “not the result of any prior plan”: there were many towns “whose growth was cumulative and often fortuitous.” In As a City Upon a Hill: The Town in American History (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 17Google Scholar. Drake's observation, although histori cally inaccurate, nevertheless demonstrates the great value which he placed on prior planning.

54. Toulmin, , History, p. 183.Google Scholar

55. See, for example, Smith, , Tours, p. 383Google Scholar: Austin, , “Memorandum,” p. 527Google Scholar. During the same period travelers in the most settled parts of America spoke of the same phenomena and in the same terms as did frontier travelers. See, for example, Thomas Chapman, Journal of a Tourist Through the Eastern States (collected from Historical Magazine, n.d. in pamphlet form), p. 17: Dwight, Timothy, Travels; In New England and New York (New Haven, 1821), passim.Google Scholar

56. Hulbert, Archer B., ed., Washington and the West, Being George Washington's Diary of September, 1784 Kept During his Journey into the Ohio Basin in the interest of a commercial union between the Great Lakes and the Potomac River (New York, 1905), p. 99.Google Scholar

57. Toulmin, , History, p. 54.Google Scholar

58. Smith, , Western Journals, p. 97.Google Scholar

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63. Bliss, , Saugrain's Note-Books, pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

64. Wade, , Urban Frontier, pp. 72–100Google Scholar. I am indebted to my colleague, Vernard L. Foley, for pointing out that stagnant water, in addition to being a thorny political problem, was also an acute technological problem on the late eighteenth-century frontier.

65. Quoted in ibid., p. 13.

66. Pope, , A Tour, p. 17.Google Scholar

67. Smith, , Western Journals, p. 37.Google Scholar

68. Ibid., p. 101.

69. The intersecting themes of unsociability, poverty, idleness, and avarice pervaded the literature of travel. See, for example, Smith, , Tours, p. 364Google Scholar; Pope, , A Tour, pp. 12, 43Google Scholar; Perkins, Nathan, A Narrative of a Tour Through the State of Vermont, from April 27 to June 12, 1789 (Woodstock, Vt., 1920), pp. 11–12, 18–19Google Scholar: Bliss, , Saugrain's Note-Books, p. 18Google Scholar; Smith, , Western Journals, pp. 31, 39, 53, 97Google Scholar. May summed up the general feeling of disgust in interesting language when he observed that “the Inhabitants of this Country do not live so rationally as the brute Creation.” In Smith, , Western Journals, p. 105.Google Scholar

70. Pope, , A Tour, p. 70.Google Scholar

71. See, Smith, , Tours, pp. 372, 395Google Scholar: Imlay, , Topographical Description, pp. 33–34, 140Google Scholar: Toulmin, , History, p. 27.Google Scholar

72. Quoted in Wade, , Urban Frontier, p. 13.Google Scholar

73. Austin, , “Memorandum,” p. 527.Google Scholar

74. Belknap, , Journal of a Tour, p. 8.Google Scholar

75. Smith, , Western Journals, p. 61Google Scholar. (Italics added.) See Filson, , Kentucke, p. 27Google Scholar; Bliss, , Saugrain's Note-Books, p. 7.Google Scholar

76. Cooper, , Guide, p. 2Google Scholar. James Fenimore Cooper, the judge's son, seems to have used his father's Guide (for which he wrote an introduction) as the basis for the theme of natural destruction in The Pioneers (see, especially, Chaps, xxii and xxiii). In the novel, however, Judge Temple is accorded the good sense to see the immorality of such destruction when Leatherstocking explains it to him.

77. Imlay, , Topographical Description, p. 54.Google Scholar

78. Moore, , Frontier Mind, p. 238Google Scholar: see Chap. 10.