" Beyond the Mississippi,
Louisiana, with its Creole population, was feeling the effect of
American migration.
A strange restlessness, of the race rather than of the individual,
possessed the American frontiers-man. He moved from one locality to
another, but always westward, like some new migratory species that
had willingly discarded the instinct for returning. He never took the
back trail. A traveler, writing in 1791 from the Ohio Valley, rather
superficially observed that "the Americans are lazy and bored, often
moving from place to place for the sake of change; in the thirty years
that the [western] Pennsylvania neighborhood has been settled, it has
changed owners two or three times. The sight of money will tempt any
American to sell and off he goes to a new country." Foreign observers
of that time constantly allude to this universal and inexplicable
restiveness. It was obviously not laziness, for pioneering was a man's
task; nor boredom, for the frontier was lonely and neighbors were far
apart It was an ever-present dissatisfaction that drove this perpetual
conqueror onward--a mysterious impulse, the urge of vague and
unfulfilled desires. He went forward with a conquering ambition in his
heart; he believed he was the forerunner of a great National Destiny.
Crude rhymes of the day voice this feeling:
So shall the nation's pioneer go joyful on his way,
To wed Penobscot water to San Francisco Bay.
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