He Finds That He
Can Sell His Improvements At A Profitable Rate And Takes The Price.
He Is A Preparer Of Farms Rather Than A Farmer.
He has no love for
the soil which his hand has first turned.
He regards it merely as
an investment; and when things about him are beginning to wear an
aspect of comfort, when his property has become valuable, he sells
it, packs up his wife and little ones, and goes again into the
woods. The Western American has no love for his own soil or his
own house. The matter with him is simply one of dollars. To keep
a farm which he could sell at an advantage from any feeling of
affection - from what we should call an association of ideas - would
be to him as ridiculous as the keeping of a family pig would be in
an English farmer's establishment. The pig is a part of the
farmer's stock in trade, and must go the way of all pigs. And so
is it with house and land in the life of the frontier man in the
Western States.
But yet this man has his romance, his high poetic feeling, and
above all his manly dignity. Visit him, and you will find him
without coat or waistcoat, unshorn, in ragged blue trowsers and old
flannel shirt, too often bearing on his lantern jaws the signs of
ague and sickness; but he will stand upright before you and speak
to you with all the ease of a lettered gentleman in his own
library.
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